Hello from the library of a community college in downtown Manhattan. I’ve been taking an anatomy class this semester, which feels like an insane thing to write, but life has a way of keeping you on your toes.

Last semester I took a chemistry class (also insane), and during our lab, I was sitting with my group and said something along the lines of, “The last time I took a Chemistry class it was 2003,” and my Gen Z classmate replied, “That’s the year I was born!”

Yes, I did immediately question time and space in that moment. Woof.

Anyways, I’m here in this library, which means I’m missing Zora’s bedtime, which means I feel like a terrible mother. And I know that I’m not, and that I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do.

I have class on Tuesday and Thursday nights. When I leave for class, I have to say goodbye with a tight hug and a quick kiss, and get out of the house as fast as possible. I’ve tricked my mind into thinking that if I stay in constant motion, I somehow won’t have to grapple with the reality that this stage of parenthood requires me to do a lot of negotiating with my time.

It’s kind of a mind fuck. I love my kid, I love spending time with her.

But, I also love myself, and I love using my time for the things that are important to me. Like slowly chipping away at a meaningful career transition, or just having some time alone just to be.

These two ideas are constantly in competition. I know as a mother to a small child I’m not alone in this feeling. It’s relieving to know that this is not a uniquely me problem, but I hate that it is a problem that too many mothers face. 1

Anyways, back to the library. A few minutes ago I asked a group of young women, who cannot be older than 19, if they could lower their voices as they rocked up to the table I was studying at and proceeded to talk about their weekends and watch TikToks at full blast2. One of the girls apologized and told her friends to move to a different table, but one of them lingered and stared me down!

I looked right back at her, smiled, and kind of awkwardly laughed as we played some weird game of chicken until she rolled her eyes and walked away. The fact that I’m technically old enough to be this person’s mother brought out some real IDGAF energy. 19 year old me would probably sit there and just deal with the distraction, 39 year old me certainly could not.

Since the beginning of January, I have studied every single day. The first three weeks of the month I took an accelerated math class, and then as soon as that ended, I jumped into anatomy. Every single day has required me to study in some capacity, which means other things that I enjoy doing with my time have taken a back seat.

Underlying all of this studying is the anxious feeling that time for anything that brings me joy, pleasure, and a recharge, is slipping out of my hands like sand. Last month I wrote in my journal that I’m scared about what five years in the future will look like: all work, no play, and not a lot of rest.

I have no qualms about getting older3, but I’m fearful of not bathing myself in the experience of living while I trudge through the essential responsibilities on my plate as a mother, wife, part-time student, and full time employee.

My therapist told me to reclaim my womanhood4. My executive coach told me to drop a few non-essential balls to prioritize things that bring me joy. Claude helped me “see” pockets of me time among all the things I do everyday. Conceptually I understand these recommendations, but it’s hard to make happen. Easier to just tick the boxes of the to-do list than deal with the anxiety of letting it linger, ya know?

However, in the last few weeks, I’ve really started to make super tiny baby steps in the direction of finding more spacious time for myself. What spurred this is the fact that Zora is starting to pick up on how I spend my time. She knows that every night when I walk out of her room at bedtime, I go to my room study. She knows that when she goes to school, I “go” to work. On the nights that I go to campus, she knows that I get to go see my teacher.

But the big red flag is this: I don’t think she knows when I’m doing something purely for my own enjoyment. And I’ve decided I’m unwilling to let that be the narrative she grows up with -- that her mom was too busy to have fun5. I want her to see a woman who lived a lot of life for herself and in service to herself.6

Here’s a few other ways I’ve been giving myself some time and a little joy back.

• started their annual project last month, and while I’m not publicly sharing, I’ve been taking 5 minutes a day to write one line of prose or a poem. It feels cringe7 and it also feels so creatively satisfying to do something pretty far out of my wheelhouse.

• I know no one wants to hear about the Brick, but I swear it’s been key to slowing my phone rot and doom scrolling. I find that the automatic scheduling feature is absolutely the key to success. At 9pm, nothing fun happens on my phone until the next day.

• Similarly, Instagram has not been on my phone since the end of 2025 and don’t plan on bringing it back. I catch up on IG every few days the old fashioned way on my laptop.

• In January I DEVOURED the podcast series Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. I was struck by the way this podcast (unintentionally) threaded the needle of oppressive governments, citizen uprising, and the power of music as a message to what’s happening in the US (Trump/ICE, protesters, Bad Bunny, etc). It’s a story unlike something I’ve ever listened to before - informative, funny, nuanced. It inspired me to unsubscribe from a lot of the news podcasts I listen to. My ears need more interesting stories, not more doomy updates.

• Being intentional about getting outside everyday separately from school drop off or pick up. Since becoming fully remote in November, I leave the house waaaay less and I find that if I even just go on a 5 min walk, I feel like I’ve reclaimed a bit of agency over my time. The vitamin D (even when the sun is hiding) gives me the zing I need to start the day.

• I found this newly launched meditation app called Home and I’ve loved the personalization. I do have a lot of feelings about it essentially being a chatbot that gives you a custom mediation based on what you say, but it has really helped me feel settled and grounded when I’m wading through the intensity of my days. The founder’s story about how she built the app from the POV of an art director and entrepreneur in the age of AI and vibe coding is an interesting read.

• Smashing shit at a rage cage in bushwick which touched upon here (scroll for pics of our cool ass headgear). I was fully planning on just going here solo after a week that almost broke me, and was so thrilled when Jen was down to join in on my silly idea. I need to tell you that you’ll feel alive in a very giddy way after you’ve smashed a few Ikea plates and a computer monitor.

• Last Monday right at 5pm, I left my house and walked straight into the Italian restaurant across the street. I was the first guest of the evening and I got to read for pleasure (Everyday Intuition, 10/10 recommend) and participate in a happy hour deal: wine and cicchetti for $16. I think this might become a semi-regular ritual. I was home 40 minutes later, in time for dinner with my family. Win win.

So with all the time that I don’t have, I felt compelled to jump back into my little corner of the Internet. I’ve written Magic on Sunday for almost ten years and it’s something I hope that exists in ten more. This revisit is just what I needed, so thank you for letting me back into your inbox.

Instead of the usual ending with a playlist, I have an album recommendation. Last month I revisited my tumblr (which is 17 years old lol) and upon exploring my archive, I stumbled across something I wrote about Chet Faker’s album, Built on Glass in 2015.

It’s far from the genre of music I tend to gravitate towards these days, but it was exactly the listen I needed - a little sexy, a little whimsical, a little fresh. We’re almost out of the gray winter here on the east coast, and this album is a good one to pull us over the line.

Hope to see you again soon <3

Meghan

My daughter moves with a knowing that every surface she jumps, runs, or twirls across is sure.

There is no caution in her body.

She goes at full speed, not yet having lived the consequences of moving too fast.

Energy moves up, down, and side to side through her tiny frame with power and heart, and most importantly, a self assuredness.

People fascinate her. Her curiosity about humanity, even at barely two years old, signals a depth and connectedness to the people in her orbit.

She’s never met a stranger.

Words fall out of her mouth at a surprising rate for her age, giving way to a degree of self expression that is beyond her years. Sometimes the words are in a beautiful melody, other times they’re laced in a tone of toddler frustration. In all instances through, these words are spoken with an imperative to be heard.

Her personality is fun-loving, hardly ever serious, and magnetic.

What I’m trying to say, is that my sweet child is confident, curious, and free.

I’ve been thinking about who my child is recently, because last week while having pizza with some friends in our courtyard, I was observing her and her friend. My girl was running around with boundless energy, giggling nonstop, and looking over her shoulder with a mischievous grin when she’d wander off into an area that she knew was off limits. Her friend was playful, but more reserved. Not cautious, but didn’t move with the same liveliness.

In that moment, all I could focus on was wanting her to eat some of her dinner. She’s not generally a big dinner eater, but I was hoping that she’d at least take a few bites of pizza. Sitting with my husband and the other parents, I sighed, “I wish she had a little bit more chill.” Meaning, I wanted her to be less absorbed in her surroundings so that she’d be mildly interested in filling her little tummy.

And then my husband said something that’s changed how I’ll look at my child forever.

“You know that she gets all of that from you.”

Suddenly I was flooded with memories of my early childhood. A free spirit of a young child, I could be found running around barefoot more often than not, I didn’t know what an inside voice was so I was always singing loud with abandon, and I made best friends with anyone (or dog) that crossed my path. There wasn’t an ounce of self consciousness or self-censorship in my being for most of my budding childhood.

In those 10 little words, my husband reminded me of my earliest and purest form. It was a reflection into the little girl who didn’t yet know the family betrayal that was around the corner and the way that the people who were supposed to take care of her would manipulate and dim her light.

I’ve spent the last five years really sitting in the dissolvement of my relationship with my parents, who adopted me and my twin straight out of the hospital, trying to make sense and understand just how we got here. The simplest, and most generalized answer is that I was never the child they wanted. Who I came into the world as would never fit the picture of the child that they hoped to have. So they, consciously and unconsciously, molded, manipulated, and threatened me into version of myself that facilitated their needs, forcing me to forgo my own.

It wasn’t until my early 30’s, and in a secure relationship with my now husband, that the fog began to clear from my eyes and I fully understood the depths of what my parents had denied me. Glaringly, they denied me ownership of my racial identity, but more broadly, they denied me the freedom to show up as myself for myself. Fast forward a few years, and I’ve finally started seeing a therapist who specializes in family systems and we’ve landed on the notion that my job in my family was to keep the harmony in balance.

I was the peacemaker.

In a family laced with unresolved trauma, the peacemaker leaves her body. Her needs cease to exist, and she learns that her behavior must contort to the needs and hopes of everyone around her, while she pushes her own needs, desires, and namely, her identity down. Her spirit goes blank so that there’s room to absorb and manage everyone else’s.

That evening in the courtyard, I found myself wanting my daughter to move through the world differently. Sure, my child will need to learn how to maneuver through life in a way that is safe and respectful, and yes, should attempt to eat dinner. But catching myself in these little moments where I want her to behave differently to quell my fear or anxiety (will she starve??) is where healing happens, not just for me, but for this generation of my family and the future legacy of our story.

I’ve come to contend that I will always hold two truths: I'm incredibly grateful for the awareness1 of how my family history could impact my parenting if not seriously considered every single day, and I deeply grieve what I was denied by my parents.

In the last five years of our estrangement, this grief has only ever manifested in one way: Anytime I’m comforting my daughter when she’s crying or sick and her little body is entwined with mine, silent tears run down my face. I’m reminded that I’ll never have the arms of a parent to fall into or call or to be there for me in moments of need that only a parent can provide2.

My therapist calls this awareness and the intentionality of how I’m raising my daughter a gift, and I agree. It’s my deepest hope is that this family heirloom never gets passed down to her own child, because she won’t have to acquire it the way that I did.

Sometimes writing about dramatic family stuff on the internet feels vulnerable and weird, but our society has a deep imbalance when it comes to the narrative of adoption. More often than not, the story is told through the adoptive parent’s point of view, leaving little space for the story of the child at the center of it all. In writing about my experience as a transracial adoptee, I hope that more people come to see adoption for what it is: messy, traumatic, sometimes wonderful, but always complicated.

Thanks for listening. <3 Meghan

Get this week’s playlist here.

Both my husband and I have found ourselves much busier than normal at work for the past month and a half, and it makes this trip feel even more urgent. I hate that I’m showing up for it basically feeling like a shell of a person, but I’m hopeful that some sunshine, no agenda, a chance to sleep through the night and wake up after 7 am, brings me back to New York feeling a little bit more human.

Typically, my job is relatively straightforward and keeps me in the usual realms of an eight hour workday. For the three days a week that I have to be in the office, I leave between 4:45 pm and 5 pm to relieve our nanny, so I usually log on after Zora goes to bed to play catch up. That’s the dance I know that a lot of working parents do and I’m fine to join them. Bill’s job is similarly pretty straightforward and I consider us lucky to have jobs and careers that are hardly high pressure all the time.

But when we find ourselves in busy work periods that deviate from the norm, the ebb and flow of our day-to-day life clashes hard against the cold reality that modern society isn’t sustainable for two full-time working parents.

When work is less hectic, we can find and sneak pockets of time from the workweek to support the ongoing maintenance of our family life. That looks like running a load of laundry during a lunch break, keeping the dishes moving during a WFH day, getting started on dinner in-between calls at 4 pm so that by the time the other parent is home from the office and Zora is back from being out with our nanny, we can all eat together at a reasonable time.

There's been a lot of pressure on the work that I'm doing right now and for the last month, I've probably worked until 10pm or 11pm most nights. I've been sending emails at 9 pm on Fridays trying to play catch up.

Working like this is soul sucking and zaps me of energy. My husband and I walk around our house like ships passing in the night, zombies who don't really have a conscious connection other than the shared mission of keeping the household running and our child alive. I feel very resentful for the way that being a parent1 in this type of capitalism robs me of time, personal space, and mental energy.

But this newsletter isn’t a critique of our country’s fragile family and social support system, I very much do not have the emotional energy to go there.

In the midst of this insane work period, it became abundantly clear that I’ve failed to establish real ways to take care of myself in this phase of life - motherhood.

The two years I spent trying and getting pregnant required a lot of intentional care for my body and spirit, and that wasn’t for my needs alone, it was for the greater good of building our family. So when I subtract that time from the time that I’ve been a mother, I’m going on almost four years of more consistently putting the needs and wellbeing of others above my own.

This realization recently came to me as I felt my mind short circuiting and my eyes struggling to see the words on the screen of my laptop, which was precariously balancing on my knees while I laid horizontal on the couch clicking away at 11 pm on a Tuesday evening. There was no ease in any part of my body, and I honestly felt scared at the level of disorientation I felt.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the next evening I went to the gym at 8:00 pm. I was so burnt out, I felt like my body was going to explode. In the book Burnout, the authors talk about needing to complete a stress cycle, and I knew that nothing would shake the cycle that I've been in for the past few weeks better2 than some loud music in my ears and moving my body at the overpriced gym that I haven’t been able to go to enough lately.

That night at the gym gave me a good mental reset, and I tried to spend the rest of the week working within my normal hours. I told my husband that I needed a chunk of time during the weekend to think about how to take care of myself and catch up on life admin, and he happily told me to get lost. I got a facial, and then camped out at one of my favorite spots for writing and literally just thought about how to take care of myself.

I started tackling the life admin that’s been swirling in my head, because getting shit done is 100% a big part of how I take care of myself. Things like making a dentist appointment, following up on some personal emails that I’ve let linger too long, and oddly-specific-to-me things like putting my hair care routine in my calendar. Being able to have the mental energy and the time to do these little life admin things makes me feel like my headspace isn’t solely dedicated to my corporate job. It’s low hanging fruit, but it feels like a win. Later that night, I spent alone time curled up in bed, listing out all the things that I need and want regularly in life to feel like I’m taking care of myself. My list didn’t include anything extravagant, which I hope means that it won’t be too hard to incorporate or reincorporate into my life.

Little things like:

• Time in the morning to get ready and feel put together. Shower, enough time to tackle my curly hair, and put minimal makeup on. None of it is complicated, but having the 30-40 minutes to get that all in makes me feel like a real person.

• Spending time outside most days, for at least 20 minutes. Ideally when the sun is still up, but I’ll take an evening walk around the neighborhood just to get it in.

• Being social and seeing friends regularly, and ideally a few times a week instead the once a month meet ups that’s I’ve been barely able to achieve.

• Having time to take care of myself through food. I’m a three-meals-a-day kinda girl who generally eats pretty nutritiously because it makes me feel good and for health reasons. When my personal time is swallowed up by work, this is usually the first thing to go and I find myself either skipping meals or eating food that doesn’t fuel me and it further exacerbates the spiral.

• Getting quality time with my kid. Fast moving mornings and rushed evenings aren’t enough. I need deep, intentional time to play and be together without the distractions of tying to multitask through a moment of connection.

• A solid chunk of time every few weeks where I can just be an adult out in the world only responsible for myself. My husband and I try to trade off weekend where each parent gets 4-5 hours of uninterrupted personal time and I always come back feeling refreshed and reconnected to myself.

• Making time to unwind before bed, versus my current habit of slamming my laptop shut, washing my face, brushing my teeth, and dropping into bed. Ideally, I have a slow-paced wind down that allows me to ease into bed, with enough time to read for about 15 minutes and fall asleep by 10:30 pm.

These are all ideal scenarios, and I’m realistic enough to know that I’m in the season of life where getting all of these all of the time is near impossible. But, naming my needs feels important. Taking the time to visualize, articulate, and remind myself that taking care is important is a form of care in itself.

External factors will always be out of my control, but besides doing this for myself, I’m doing it to show my daughter that it’s okay to make space for your needs. I want her to be able to say one day, “My mom was really good at taking care of herself and watching her taught me how to take care of myself, too.”

It’s nice to be back in the Substack world after a brief hiatus (see above lol), and I hope to see you again next week. Instead of a playlist this week, I’m recommending Bon Iver’s recently released album, SABLE fABLE. It’s nostalgic and fresh and moody all at the same time, and it’s been on repeat for me ever since it dropped last month.

Curious to know how you might be finding ways to take care when you’re deep in parenthood or a busy period. Feel free to share below.

Happy week, friends. I hope that you’re finding ease in all the little spaces.

Meghan

My throat always tightened up when any family tree or family history project was assigned in school. Kids around me could spout off personal genealogical facts like, “I’m 25% scandinavian, 50% Welsh, and 25% Greek!” while I stood there frozen with a giant lump in my throat. These type of assignments were like asking me to bear my biggest vulnerability in front of a whole room of people who assumed I was grateful for my situation.

In fourth grade, we had a family tree assignment where each student put trees on a bulletin board and everyone’s parents came in to see them. I wrote on mine, “I don’t know because I’m adopted” but accidentally spelled it “adopeted.” When my parents saw my tree in the classroom, my dad joked on me for spelling adopted wrong. No one acknowledged that I was the only kid who didn’t have evidence or insight into the people who came before me. For most of my life, I was taught directly (“We don’t see your skin color”) and indirectly to ignore my curiosity and need to understand my ancestry. In a family full of white people, it was inferred that I should do my best to blend in.

My full name is purely Irish-America. I remember showing up for a job interview about 10 years ago and when I walked into the room where the interviewer was sitting, he looked at my resume and then looked at me and said, “Huh, you’re Meghan McCormick?” Or oftentimes when I’ve sat in a doctor’s waiting room and the nurse calls my name, they always glance at a white woman first. I’ve learned to kind of joke along the lines of, “I know, you’re surprised that’s actually me!”

I’ve never been at home in my name. It has always felt like a band-aid to retrofit me into a family that I didn’t come from1. And more so, that it was covering up the glaring fact that I wasn’t biologically related to anyone in my family. Maybe for some people who are adopted this is a comforting thing, but for me, it felt like being thrust into a false identity that I was forced to play.

It’s a an unsettling feeling to walk through the world and not know how you got here.

Two years before I had my daughter, at the age of 34, I finally learned that the reason my skin is Black was because I am Haitian.

Finally, I had an anchor.

An answer to “What are you mixed with?”

My ancestral picture felt complete.

And still complicated.

It’s bittersweet to have gone through so much of my life not knowing the full picture of my racial identity and the first gift that I wanted to give my daughter from the day that she came earthside was a name that rooted her in all the aspects of her heritage.

Being multiracial myself, I knew some of the situations that my daughter might encounter. In naming her, I wanted to lay a foundation that would guide and empower her as she inevitably explores all the parts of her identity2.

Her first name, Zora, is inspired by the renowned and deeply under-recognized Black American writer, Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston was a prolific writer and anthropologist, whose work ranged from novels to short stories and plays that depicted Black life in the South and examined Black folklore. She was unafraid to immerse herself in different cultures, was quick to befriend strangers, and seemed to have a lot of fun along the way. Hurston’s official website describes her as having “a fiery intellect, an infectious sense of humor,” and “the gift of walking into hearts.” Naming my daughter after Zora Neale Hurston makes me smile, envisioning her living her own rewarding and adventurous life.

Zora’s middle name, Nicola, is the feminization of her paternal great-great-grandfather, Nicolo. He arrived in New York from Sicily in the 1920s to start a new life, and helped initiate the generational journey that continues through Zora today. We came up with this part of her name on a bus ride from Clinton HIll to Ridgewood sometime during my third trimester. Still unsure about a middle name, we used the 40 minute ride to brainstorm ideas. I suddenly remembered that a few years prior, Bill’s aunt had sent us copies of an Italian family member’s U.S. immigration and Italian Army discharge papers. Scouring my phone, I found the photocopies and after a few minutes of noodling, we landed on Nicola. It felt like we had struck gold.

Finally, Jean-Felix. When I discovered my biological family and had talked to them a few times, I decided to change my last name to theirs. I didn’t even think to ask them, it was more so a reclamation of my birthright and a connection to the place that my ancestors originated. Thankfully, none of them blinked when I told them my plans, their reactions inferring that it made sense because of course I was a part of the family.

It was important for me to have a name that would externally place me - when someone sees me and learns my last name, I want them to be able to say, “Oh are you Haitian?” versus someone wondering why this Black person has an extremely Irish last name3. It’s also why I knew I wasn’t going to take Bill’s name when we got married - I didn’t want another last name that would further misplace me.

While Bill is close with his family, it was important to him that we all have the same last name. So when I started thinking about changing my last name and told him that I wanted Zora to have the same last name as me, he hopped on board and became a Jean-Felix too4.

Zora Nicola Jean-Felix - this name holds the truth of her entire heritage. In being intentional about her name, I've discovered that I wasn't just building her identity, but cementing my own. And maybe most importantly, creating a tangible connection that extends backward to our ancestors and forward to those who will come after us.

I’m sure many people do not think this deeply about their child’s name, and I’m mindful about not trying to heal my childhood trauma via my child. But, I know that she’ll be able to walk through the world proudly knowing her identity, ancestry, and won’t ever have to waver when someone ask, “What are you?”

Wishing you a peaceful new week, friends.

Get this week’s playlist here.

<3 Meghan

My birthday came and went this week without a ton of fanfare, which is generally how I like it these days.

Bill got me a book and a promise to buy me a bracelet of my choosing from Susan Alexandra.

He brought home two slices of cake, lit candles, and led Zora in singing Happy Birthday to me while we were snuggled up on the couch.

We spent the weekend ahead of my birthday at my twin sister’s house, and she and I had a “moms night out” with fancy cocktails and lots of time to catch up.

With some dear friends, we dined at Gage & Tollner, a place I’ve had my eye on for the past few years. The food was good? Fine? It wasn’t terrible but it was not worth the $800 price tag. BUT, the experience of being in a bit of a vibey restaurant where the murmur of other diners kept the energy of the space bright and engaging, was the birthday dinner energy that I was hoping for.

Someone asked me how I felt about my birthday and generally getting older, and as I thought about how to respond, I kept coming back to this one word:

Content.

Of course everything is not perfect. There are things that I’d like to tweak and to be different in a lot of aspects in my life, but when I step back and look at where my life is at right now, I feel so much peace1.

Thinking about it more, I think that this might be the first time that I’ve felt this type of contentment, maybe ever?

Being 21 months postpartum definitely plays a role in it. I have a lot more mental space and clarity than I’ve ever had in this parenting chapter. Our family life has a rhythm that feels so much more stable than the early months of parenthood where everything changes constantly. Importantly, this somewhat predictable rhythm and mental clarity2 have given me space to really center my needs and take care of myself in a way that I haven’t been able to do in a long time.

But there’s also the notion that for the first time in my life, I’m not striving for some sort of achievement or working towards a big end goal.

I’m not in high school spending a lot of my energy attempting to be a well-rounded student so I can get into a good college.

College has come and gone and I’m no longer stressed out about what I’m going to do with my life.

My 20’s are over and I’m done figuring out ~who I am~ in toxic and stressful ways.

I crossed getting married off my list at 34, and meeting Bill allowed me to stop spending absurd amounts of energy dating stupid boys, hoping to find someone to love and be loved by.

Careerwise, I’ve learned the delicate balance of how to care about your work while not allowing it to consume your life. I was only able to achieve this by transitioning into a role that took me out of the leadership positions that I’d spent the first 12 years of my career climbing towards. I would make this decision again in a heartbeat.

No longer am I going through the process of trying to get pregnant, doing IVF, being pregnant, or newly postpartum. I am blessed to say I came out on the other end of all of this with a child that I love so incredibly deeply.

I guess you could say my striving era is over—which gives me a lot more time, space, and energy to just be.

Or to think about what I’d like my next era to be about.

How lucky am I to essentially have everything I’ve ever worked towards?

To sit back and realize where I’ve been and where I am is the best birthday present that the universe could send my way.

I’m hoping and wishing for this type of contentment for you all someday too, friends.

Get this week’s playlist here.

Meghan

Can you believe that March is over? Here in Brooklyn, every few days the Spring sunshine peeks its head through the lingering gray winter clouds and my heart beats faster with anticipation - the best part of the year is nearly here.

As a parent, I’ve learned to lean into the hibernative nature of winter. For the past few months, our weekends have been slower activity-wise, we’ve stayed in more, and generally have not over-exhausted ourselves in any real aspect of life.

But now, as the sun stays out longer and the nicer weather compels us outside, our rhythm has changed. We’ve spent recent evenings playing in our building’s courtyard with chalk and bubbles, we’ve squeezed in trips to the playground between the end of childcare and before dinner, and last week we even walked with our nearly 21 month old to an ice cream shop a half-mile away - the longest she’s ever walked in one stretch (we definitely took the bus back).

Despite the tickle in my nose and my itching eyes, my soul is so ready for all of the blooming flowers and living that’s to be had in the Springtime.

Read on for this month’s round up of writing from some of the talented folks I’ve been inspired by on Substack.

I’ve followed for years — at least 7, I think. Some of her yoga videos got me through the early days of lockdown, and I just generally appreciate the way in which she tends to mindfully move through the world. For that reason, I especially love this piece from her — even someone who has what looks to be an easeful life outside of the US can’t escape our larger society’s breakdown of real community.

Your Exhaustion Is Not Your Fault

But even in the sweetness of my bond with my little one, there are moments when the overwhelm of parenting catches up to me—after a night of cluster feeding or when her nap I’d counted on shifts into her needing to sleep on me, taking with it my prospective “free time.”

Like right now as she snuggles in to sleep, breastfeeding in my left arm while I type this with the fingers of my right. At times I feel helpless, and then I remember to surrender. I remind myself that it’s all fleeting and actually quite beautiful; a prayer answered to get to hold the human I carried in the comfort of my arms. And perhaps it’s also my baby telling me to go slow today, mama.

And. I still feel the ache of what’s missing. The absence of an aunt, a cousin, a grandparent—someone close by and trusted, someone I could call without hesitation. Someone who isn’t also lacking community; consumed by the demands of capitalism, too busy with too little time to spare. Someone who already loves her. Someone who already loves me. That kind of sacred support. I grieve the idea of it.

I texted this next post to my girlfriends Adrianne and Rae in the group chat that we’ve had since the three of us were newly pregnant in late 2022. I love that we are walking through parenthood on the same timeline, it’s like a phone-a-friend when something inevitably changes with one of our kids. Is your kid doing this? What are you feeding your kid this week? I originally texted them ’s piece because the idea of Schemas—the mental frameworks we use to understand the world around us—was fascinating to me. This post felt like it answered a lot of the questions and thoughts we share about our toddlers. But then, as I kept reading, the post went on to talk about what Schemas look like in adults and it was like a lightbulb went off in my mind, giving me a tangible way to describe the constant change that are the early years of parenthood. I walked away from reading this post with a better sense of how to navigate and bring some grounding to this life stage, not just for my tiny human, but for myself, too (“tiny anchors in the upheaval” - so good!).

Schemas, Routines, & Finding Meaning in Transitions

There’s always shifting data as the baby grows, as the weather changes, as my own needs and plans and goals begin to take shape.

Just like my son, I’m experimenting, tossing things over the edge and seeing what sticks.

And slowly, little pieces of structure are starting to emerge—tiny anchors in the upheaval. Maybe they’ll hold. Maybe they won’t. But for now, they’re forming the framework of my days. Until the next update, at least!

Sharing a TW for miscarriage/pregnancy, for this next one.

Reading ’ post about wanting a baby, conceiving a baby, losing said baby, and everything that comes before, during, and after, felt like I the most human thing I’ve ever read. I sobbed through it, knowing the pain of not having an easy time getting pregnant (including an early loss), especially when you’ve moved through life generally being able to figure out how to achieve anything you want. The way that women have been talking more openly in the past few years about pregnancy, miscarriage, infertility, etc. gives me a lot of hope that these “taboo” topics will become less and less isolating.

One year and no baby later.

I start keeping a mental list of who didn’t check-in. I tell my therapist about this, but I’m “going through a lot” right now, so it’s okay. No one says “miscarriage” to me, but rather “how are you doing” or “how is everything.” I guess that’s a nicer way of putting it, but it irks me that people are afraid of what just happened to me. I felt really close to everyone and now there’s distance and no one can even say what happened. I’m reminded that people are uncomfortable and scared and don’t want to say the wrong thing. I call people names and say they’re cowards to Rip. I’m being unnecessarily mean. I take it back. We’re both hurting. More sushi.

’s 35th life lesson of the 40 that she’s writing ahead of her birthday touched on something I’ve been thinking about a lot - time. Recently, I’ve been overwhelmed with the feeling that all the time I have in any day belongs to someone or something else. My job that requires me to commute into the office 3 days a week, my child who needs my time to survive, the daily management of the household, and all the time that gets sucked away and into my phone - via news, text messages to return, work slacks, Instagram, etc. I knew that I had more time than I felt like I had, so I did two things. First, I timeblocked my ideal morning and evening.

The second thing I did was buy a Brick, which locks down the apps of your choosing on your phone, and they can only be accessed by physically tapping your phone to the Brick. It creates an important physical barrier that makes me feel silly getting up from whatever I’m doing to go look at something distracting on my phone. At first I felt…pathetic? for needing something like this, but then I reminded myself that our phones and the apps on them are made to be addictive. Our time is valuable currency that companies use to make money off of us, afterall. It’s not my fault for not being “more disciplined.” Katie’s post only made me feel better for implementing these intentional behavior changes to allow myself the full access to the time that I actually do have. I’m not perfect in sticking to my calendar or always locking down my phone when I should, but the effort is there.

The life you want won’t schedule itself

Because here’s what I know — what we all know: The life you want won’t schedule itself. There’s never enough time for everything, but we can reclaim some of our time by deliberately making space for what matters. When I prioritize walks, friend dates, and even 15-minute stretch breaks, I remind myself that I am more than my work. That life is about more than productivity. Creating space for rest and joy is a tiny, lovely act of rebellion — one I have to remind myself to keep up.

Okay, happy Springtime friends. 🌸

Get this week’s playlist here.

Meghan

Yesterday morning on my way to get a haircut, I texted my husband telling him how free I felt being in the city alone, just responsible for myself. He was at SXSW two weeks prior for five days, and I asked him if that’s how he felt when he was away.

“Yup lol”

I survived solo parenting for the time he was gone better than I expected. Using some of my “work from away” days to forgo my company’s hybrid schedule helped so I didn’t have to rush home from the office, to child care pick up, to making dinner all in the span of 90 minutes. Having childcare obviously helped, something I’m thankful to be able to pay for every day—even though it’s basically as much as our rent. And finally, knowing that there are single moms who do this 24/7 kept me from wallowing too deep into a personal pity-party.

Leading up to his departure, Bill encouraged me to take time for myself and to go see some friends and be social. I appreciated this, because I’m learning that as a parent, I really, really, really need time out in the world where I’m not responsible for anyone else but my own needs to recharge and reset. But, while I was in the thick of running solo for the week, I wish I had used some of that off duty time setting myself up better for success. I could have more extensively meal prepped, gotten ahead on some work, etc., but using my free time for those purposes would completely negate the point of free time.

That’s the push and pull of managing your time as a parent. There’s of course never enough of it, and what’s there moves as fast as quicksand. It often feels more convenient to pour all of my time into the family and household to keep things running, even when I know that pouring some of that time into myself is actually what’s beneficial for all of us.

What this really boils down to is the fact that our society now requires two adults to collect a paycheck to keep things afloat if you want to at least tread water as middle class. When my grandparents and parents were raising kids, you could generally be a middle class family with only one working parent. These days, unless one of the parents is pulling in a mid-to-high 6 figure salary on their own, both parents have to work1. And if both parents are working, there’s no one left to manage the household the way that non-working parents of the past could. I’m sure it was not a walk in the park by any means, but I bet that only having to focus on that—instead of having to juggle a 40 hour work week and put in the hours to keep the family functioning—was far easier.

When I tell people about my frustrations of working and parenting and the lack of time to do as much as we need around the house, I’ll often get something along the lines of:

~wElL nYc Is So ExPeNsIvE yOu ShOuLd MoVe~

To which I like to remind people that I’ve lived here for 15 years, which is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere in my life. Bill has lived here for 18 years. This is our home.

Living in a diverse community is important to me. Especially a place where I can walk down the street and see Black people and other racial minorities as much as I see white people. My neighborhood, while still quite gentrified, has the best array of diversity of any place I’ve ever lived.

The lower cost of living cities in the US are mostly red states. States where religion is being forced into schools (but only Christian religion. It doesn’t count if you’re Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim, of course), where some curriculums are teaching students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills (wtffff), where members of the LGBTQ+ community are having their rights stripped away, and where women don’t have autonomy over their own bodies. I don’t care to raise my daughter in any of those environments. Of course I’ll acknowledge that while NYC isn’t perfect, it’s still incredibly more progressive than a red state.

And practically, both Bill and I have to be able to go into the office to keep our jobs.

I realize the impossibility of actually making more time. I am truly trying to do and care less about certain things.

I’ve accepted the fact that this is a season where I’m always going to feel a little behind at work because leaving the office at 6 pm versus 4:45 pm or 5 pm—when I need to leave for childcare pick up and to get to see my child before they go to bed at 7 pm—makes a world of difference.

That low-effort meals, despite the joy I feel when indulging my time into a dimensional recipe, is what’s for dinner.

And in my idealized world, we’d have more structural social support for families and a government who put their money where their mouth is when they talk about taking care of families.

There’s a big gap between the mom that I want to be and the mom that I actually am. And while I know that I am a good mom, I wish I had the ability to close that gap a bit.

This will all be fine, and I will survive.

All the moms I know do.

But I think it’s important to put this side of motherhood out there too.

The hard parts matter, and it’s okay to shout into the void of your own little corner of the Internet if you want to.

Thanks for listening, I feel better already.

Get this week’s playlist here. <3

Meghan

A few weeks ago I read ’s a week in the life post and thought it would be fun to similarly document one of our weekends as a family in our little slice of Brooklyn. Jennifer writes about a whole week, which is wildly impressive to me - I don’t think that my brain has the capacity to remember and articulate the details of my last three days, let alone a whole week. But, I was inspired and made notes about how my family and I moved through Saturday and Sunday last weekend. When you’re not just on autopilot and/or swirling in the land of toddler chaos, it’s really delightful to take note of all the people, places, and things that make up the daily rhythm of your life.

So, here’s a peek into our last weekend. It was a busy one full of more social plans that usual, but I loved (almost) every minute of it. Read on.

Saturday, March 1st

Though I started the weekend sleeping in until 9 am, it was not entirely restful because Zora was up at 3 am? 4:30 am? It’s a blur and I have to look at my Apple Watch sleep tracker to know exactly, but it truly doesn’t matter🤪. We took her into our bed where she stayed until about 6:20 am before she started randomly just singing baby songs at the top of her lungs. “Baby Bumblebee” is in heavy rotation these days and as cute as it is when her voice cracks on the high note, I had to put her back into her crib for everyone’s sake. Her inconsistent sleep has been some form of torture, like I wrote about last week.

Bill and I switch off who gets up with Zora on the weekends, which has been one of the best parent hacks we’ve discovered. Sleeping in as a parent is one of the purest forms of bliss. If I could go back in time, I would remind my past self how much of a luxury it is to just laze about in bed all day. When my alarm went off at 9 am, I crawled out of bed and took a speedy shower, because we were hosting friends for pancakes1.

Before preparing any food, I bopped over to my local coffee shop, Prima. I can walk out my door and be inside of Prima in less than 90 seconds, so I’m here a lot (and once calculated that I spent $200 in there in one month. I am a millennial who will never own a home). It was Prima’s 3rd birthday, but before it was Prima, it was called Primrose Cafe, and based upon my Yelp investigations, it was a different cafe that was poorly managed and the staff was rude. The staff at Prima are all seemingly cool Gen Z people who I just assume are Pratt students.

I began coming here in my third trimester, then took Zora when she was 8 days old and the staff was so happy, like, “She’s here!” when I walked in with her. There used to be a real grumpy guy who worked here, and literally seeing Zora is the only time I saw him smile. He gave her a teddy-bear-shaped madeleine treat that is popular with the neighborhood kids, and I took it without explaining to him that there’s no way a week-old infant would be able to eat it. A lot about my neighborhood feels this way - a sweet little pocket in Brooklyn with a lot of familiarity among neighbors and businesses. Bury me here, I never want to leave.

On the way home I popped into the grocery store next to our apartment, which is actually more like a fancy overpriced bodega where you have to be vigilant about checking expiration dates. I bought some frozen parmesan and garlic potatoes to go with our pancakes, truly unsure how they’d mesh, but this morning’s breakfast was more about the company than the food.

Despite the proximity of so many of our friends, it’s hard to get together often in this stage of our life. I didn’t want to let having a kid be something that slowed the nurturing of these friendships, so we’ve found that having people come by in the morning up until about nap time is the perfect low-key hang. Around 10:45 am, our friends Tim and Cora who live just down the block came over for our Pancake party. I met Tim almost 10 years ago because I dated his roommate and while that romantic relationship didn’t last, this friendship did. Zora is enamored with Tim and Cora and we passed the time eating pancakes, jamming with baby instruments, and reading books. When I think about living in community, it’s little things like this - being in each other’s home, sharing a meal, and integrating our child into it.

We put Zora down for a nap and she cried, not wanting to part from her adult bffs Tim and Cora. They left shortly after, our groceries were delivered, and we did the all too familiar Saturday naptime dance. When Zora is sleeping, it’s a mad dash to clean out old leftovers from the fridge, put new groceries away, tidy up real quick, and find a little time to rest or do something for ourselves. Naptime always feels like a ticking time bomb, because Zora could sleep for 1.5 hours or 3 hours. Whenever she goes down, I make sure to do the one thing that I absolutely have to do first and I count anything else as gravy. She gave us the gift of sleeping for 2 hours, which gave me time to work on my newsletter too.

The cries for momma started around 2:45 pm from her room. As much as I relish a little nap time break, there’s an indescribable joy about walking into your kid’s room and seeing their face light at your presence. There was still laundry to be dealt with, so Bill took care of it while I took Zora to the playground to kill some time before a birthday party we were going to later.

It’s been so cold and snowy that we haven’t had many playground hangs, but it’s a nice day, the sun is out in full force, and the neighborhood feels alive. Zora and I swing for a bit, before seeing our friends enter the gates. As the weather gets nicer there’s more and more spontaneous run ins with our neighborhood faves and again I’m reminded that the community vibe of my neighborhood is so special. Zora and her friend, who is 4 days older than her, swing side by side while his parents and I sing Wheels on the Bus and Itsy Bitsy Spider over and over and no one around us bats an eye. I laugh at the person I’ve become, while deeply relishing in it.

Bill texts me that he’s done dropping off the laundry, so Zora and I head home to collect him and walk to Nina’s house for her birthday party. The party starts at 4 pm and we’re leaving our house at 4:15 pm. Being late used to stress me the fuck out, but now that I have a kid, it’s something I’ve learned to (mostly) just let go. Time has nothing on a child who refuses to put on their shoes or jacket.

We power walk the 20 minutes to get to the party, and Zora is probably the most excited. She’s been saying “Aunty Nina birthday” all day, and the minute we get to their apartment, Zora attempts to run up the stairs, eager to get into the mix. Zora is obsessed with Nina’s daughter, especially because we get a lot of her hand me downs and Zora loves to tell me when something that she’s wearing is from her cool, older toddler bff. The party is a family friendly gathering with a few kids, which means all of the adults know how to have a conversation with each other while simultaneously preventing their kid (read: mine) from slamming their head on a coffee table.

We leave around 6:15 pm, which means we will definitely miss her 7 pm bedtime, but sometimes on the weekend you just have to yolo. Zora is with our nanny for 45 hours a week while we’re working and I always remind myself that those 45 hours are dedicated to and centered around her pure enjoyment. It makes me feel better on the weekends when we center our own needs and hope that Zora likes it too.

We get home at 7 pm, speed feed Zora a plate of random leftovers, including rice and peas, some sweet potatoes, a meatball, and chickpeas and feta (a dish I know she’ll always eat). Dinner is followed by milk and stories - Goodnight Moon and Giraffes Can’t Dance are in heavy rotation these days. Storytime is followed by our goodnight melody: a song I made up in the tune of We Love you Conrad from Bye Bye Birdie, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and Zoom Zoom We’re Going to the Moon (of course). Mid-way through our last song, Zora says, “Bed!” and I slow my singing, put her down in her crib, and she passes out. We cross our fingers that she sleeps through the night.

Bill and I eat pizza and finally finish organizing our Fair Play cards, which we’ve been hacking away at since the week of Christmas. While we have a very equitable split of the household tasks, there really isn’t a system to it, and I constantly feel we’re making the same decision or trying to solve the same problem every week, and I’m starting to feel crazy. We finalize the details in a Google Doc (based upon this template I found) and a shared calendar, and I hope that having an agreed upon routine gives us some mental space back. We’ll see.

We read in bed for a little bit and pass out by 11 pm. I find that on the weekends I am often falling asleep earlier than I am on the weekdays - I should probably figure out how to fix that.

Sunday, March 2nd

It’s my turn to get up with Zora. She sleeps until about 6:50 am, when I hear her doing a passive little cry on the monitor. I walk to her door and it’s quiet again, so I take the next 10 mins to lie alone on the couch, savoring the last moment that I’ll have to myself in awhile.

I go in at 7 am and she’s standing up in her crib waiting for me. I scoop her up and we open the curtains. Our building looks out onto another building separated by a courtyard and we have a little ritual where we look out the window and say “Hi everybody!” I change her diaper and bring her into the kitchen with me while I make her breakfast and warm up her milk. She stands in her toddler tower eating leftover macerated strawberries from our pancake party while I make myself a quick breakfast of plain yogurt, honey, and baked cinnamon apple cubes that we make nearly every week for the whole family to enjoy.

I pull out her breakfast from the fridge that’s basically half chia pudding, half overnight oats. I was experimenting when I made it in an effort to switch up our breakfast routine. I ask Zora if she wants it warmed up and she says no, which personally would not be my choice, but I roll with it and take her to her high chair where she eats at least 10 bites, which is a huge win in my book. There’s a little bag of Cheddar Chickens (the generic Whole Foods brand of goldfish) on the table from the day before, so of course she has that for breakfast, too.

It’s 7:50 am and we get dressed and head to Target for diapers because we’re nearly out and it feels like a good way to kill time. She brings her Black Bear from Cora and Tim and when we go into Thea for our weekend croissant (I swear it’s the best in the neighborhood), Zora excitedly shows the person working behind the counter the bear. Last weekend Zora had a different stuffed animal, and the counter person remembers that this stuffed animal is different than last week’s. It makes me feel like we’re regulars here, even if only because of Zora’s outgoing personality. While we wait for my cappuccino to be made, I break the croissant in half and we dig in.

Target is empty, and I make a note that this is a good time to always go to Target, especially because I’m usually up at this time. We get what we need, plus a cute dress that I just can’t help myself with - I didn’t think I’d be the kind of mom who gets excited about cute, frilly clothes for their kid, but I am. It’s 3T and Zora is barely 2T, but the only other option was 18 months and we’ve sailed past that size! I think Zora has only ever worn one dress and it was a gift from her Nanny, so I decided we should have a few more in her wardrobe.

We’re speed walking home at 8:50 am because we have breakfast plans at a restaurant at 10 am with some friends and their kids. I text Bill to tell him that as soon as I walk in the door I need to shower. I’m stressed about being late to breakfast, but again, life with kids kind of means you’re hardly on time. I shower, do my hair in two braids - my weekend hairstyle more often than not - and we bolt out the door. Bill is pushing the stroller and I ask him if I can push because I’m anxious about being late and I’m definitely the faster walker between the two of us. He knows me well enough now to just say, “Sure…” I laugh at how ridiculous I am being, but we arrive only 6 minutes late and that feels like a win.

Breakfast is a blast, I love hanging out with other families because it means we’ll all just accept the chaos of whatever happens. We order fries and pancakes for the table immediately, a parenting pro-tip: always order something for the kids the second you’re seated. This is a super family friendly restaurant, so when we take the kids up and down the restaurant to get some wiggles out, no one bats an eye.

After breakfast, Bill heads to band practice and my friend Mariel and I take our kids to her building’s playroom. We catch up while doing the parent dance of fragmented conversations, caring for each other’s kids, and making sure our kids are sharing and getting along with the other kids we don’t know. Mariel and I met in a prenatal yoga class and it feels so special to go from strangers, to pregnant friends, to our kids being friends. Our kids are on the same nap schedule, so we leave the playroom at 12:30 pm and Zora and I zip home for nap time. On the way, we stop for another coffee because I’m exhausted. Our nanny taught Zora my and Bill’s names, so when I pick up my coffee at the counter, Zora points and says “Mah-ghens coffee.”

The minute we got home Zora says, “Bed!” (this girl loves her sleep) so I change her diaper real quick and put her in her crib. I lay down on the couch again, debate whether to take a nap, but need to make some progress on my newsletter so I do that until Zora wakes up an hour and a half later.

We snuggle on the couch for a little bit while she comes out of her nap daze. I had gotten a cookie earlier and promised Zora I’d give her a little piece when she woke up from her nap. It’s tiny moments like this that I find so fun in parenting, like saving something for her and knowing she’ll be so excited about it.

We read some books and play with a few toys (the Melissa and Doug wooden cutting fruit is a big hit - satisfying for me to cut tbh), but to be honest I’m barely hanging on - my energy is zapped. I text Bill to see when he’ll be home from practice and he says 4 pm, and tells me to take some time for myself when he returns. 90 minutes have never felt longer.

We’re not a screen time family, which makes the rare occasion that we watch something on TV extra special. I pop on Elmo’s World on MAX and Zora is mildly interested, but totally freaked out by Ilana Glazer’s character Mrs. Noodle. “No Mrs. Noodle!” she cries as she turns her back to the TV and buries her head into my shoulder. “That’s our neighbor!” I tell her, which is true-ish, I see Ilana all over the neighborhood, especially in the summertime.

My sister FaceTimes us and it’s like a gift from the Universe - another way to pass the time. Zora sings all her favorite songs to her aunt, uncle, and cousins and I remember that I’ll never have a shy child. I love seeing her unabashed confidence.

A little bit later at 4:15 pm Bill gets home and I immediately get into bed. It’s like the changing of the guards. He takes Zora to a friend’s house down the street to hang out with her and her parents. I text them to say that I wish I could make it, but that I desperately need to nap. They get it and tell me to enjoy. I set my alarm for 20 minutes, but end up sleeping for a little bit over an hour. Bless.

I wake up with the hint of a second wind, and start making Zora dinner. It’s 6 pm and I know that we’re going to miss our 7 pm bedtime again, but roll with it. Dinner is leftover pizza (she doesn’t touch it), 2 fish sticks (licks one that has some bbq sauce on it but doesn’t take bite, but proceeds to eat spoonfuls of the sauce on their own), and Annie’s white cheddar mac and cheese. She’s only had mac and cheese once or twice before and she devours it. I refill her little bowl 3 times.

I take Zora to bathe while Bill cleans up and makes her evening milk. When bathtime is over, we lotion, change her diaper, and put PJs on. As we’re reading Giraffes Can’t Dance (again, of course), out of nowhere, Zora declares, “Night night!” I look at the clock and it’s 7:28 pm, we sing our songs and she’s down by 7:32 pm. We hope that she sleeps through the night again, and tell ourselves if she does, maybe shifting her bedtime from 7 pm to 7:30 pm is the move. We’ll see. Like so many parts of parenting, it’s all an experiment and we’ll just have to find out.

I go into the kitchen and start doing the dishes, before I remember that according to our new Fair Play schedule, it’s Bill’s turn to do the dishes. He’s cleaning the living room, so I tell him not to worry about it and do most of the dishes, but force myself to be done by 8 pm so I can finish my newsletter and playlist. It gets out the door at 10 pm. I should be going to bed now that that’s sent, but I still have to make Zora’s lunch for the next day, and I have to fill out some forms for my doctor’s appointment at 9:30 am. If I don’t do it now, there’s no way it’ll happen in the morning. I reassure myself that the little cat nap I took earlier gives me a little extra umph to power through.

My head hits the pillow at 11:45 pm, much later than I’d hoped for a Sunday evening. I’m exhausted, but feel grateful for a full, fun weekend. We don’t usually have this many social plans, and the tiredness I feel reminds me why, but, that aside, I’d be happy to relive this weekend many times over.

Enjoy this week’s playlist, friends. It’s got some bright and soulful vibes and it’s definitely something I’d listen to walking around Brooklyn on a sunny Saturday morning.

<3 Meghan

Sleep has been a disaster in our household. Maybe for a week, maybe two—I’ve lost track, as the days have all blurred together. The culprit? A fussy toddler in the throes of teething, which I naïvely thought was behind us. I really am a first-time parent, and it shows.

Most nights, we’ve been up 3-5 times, usually beginning just as my head hits the pillow. Bill and I sometimes take turns, but we usually shuffle through the dark to Zora’s room together like exhausted battle buddies carrying each other onwards. There’s a shared sense of dread, knowing that this broken sleep will spill over into the morning and avalanche like a snowball through the day, derailing our plans before they begin. Going to the gym, tackling life admin, and keeping up with social plans have all gone out the window lately due to exhaustion.

Motrin, cold teethers, some singing, rocking, and swaying haven’t been enough to soothe her. Most nights, Zora ends up inconsolable, crying in a way that signifies real pain and discomfort. Through sobs and glossy tears running down her red cheeks, she pleads, “Momma dada bed!”

We always comply.

It breaks the cycle of us constantly getting out of bed to soothe her, but it creates another tricky scenario - if Zora is in our bed, she has to physically be on me. She can’t peacefully drift away to sleep between us, rather, she must practically cement her body to mine, demanding, “Momma hold you!!!1”

I twist and contort my body to find a modicum of personal comfort with very little success. My body, like it was when I was pregnant, is no longer mine. At night, it is Zora’s anchor to comfort and the vessel for everyone to get a little bit of sleep. My sleep isn’t what I would consider entirely restful, but I prefer it to the alternative of being jolted awake by her painful wails on the monitor.

We’ve been blessed with a fairly easy sleeper from the start, and therefore never really sleep trained. If she’s tired (which, by the end of the day, she always is), the minute she’s lowered into her crib, she’s in dreamland. This has made our recent nights of disrupted sleep so terrible - we’re not used to dealing with a child who doesn’t sleep through the night.

Bill and I talked about how we’ve been letting her into our bed so often and if it’s creating a bad habit. Because again, we’re used to getting great sleep, and when Zora’s in our bed, no one is getting the best sleep, even if it’s better than getting up multiple times in the night. When she’s teething, should we let her cry it out once we re-upped her children’s motrin, checked her diaper, and given her a cold teether and some snuggles? Something about it just didn’t sit right with us, and especially me.

As a baby myself, the story goes that I cried a lot for hours on end. It wasn’t colic or the normal culprits, I was apparently “just a crier.” But, having spent the last few years exploring the impact of being adopted, I think my cries were a response to being separated from my mother at birth, whose body carried me into the world - my first safe space. In adoption circles, this is known as the Primal Wound2. While just a theory, it describes the life-long psychological trauma that can occur when an infant is separated from their biological mother. Essentially, I was crying for the mother that I never got to have.

So when Zora cries, I feel a compulsive need to be there for her. I want her to know that when she’s in pain and needs the comfort of her mother, I will always be available. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, and how many parents in the millennial generation talk about doing things differently than the generation of parents that we were raised by. We talk a lot about breaking and healing generational trauma, myself included.

But it was a bit of a light bulb moment for me to realize that breaking and healing generational trauma is a verb. It requires us to act. Logically, and perhaps subconsciously, I understood this, but this week it dawned on me that this action is not always comfortable. If I want to show up as an emotionally safe space for Zora, and if what she needs right now is to be a barnacle on my body when she’s experiencing excruciating discomfort, then I might just have to deal with it. And I’m not saying this in a way that makes me a martyr to motherhood or suggests that my child’s needs supplant my own.

Rather, I’m coming to terms with the work, discomfort, and inconvenience of parenting and loving differently, especially when it doesn’t feel easy.

Please send all your good sleep vibes and tips for teething (molars!), friends. Here’s this week’s playlist and to hoping for a more restful week.

<3

Meghan

I know that I’m a true (elder) millennial because I have more nostalgia than ever for the ~simpler~ days of the Internet. Instagram already feels boring, like I’ve told you before. Facebook exists in the event that I need to use Marketplace. And the only other “social media” platforms I spend time on are places with a finite scroll - my social Slack group and my neighborhood WhatsApp chat.

I’ve been spending more time on the Substack platform these days (while also not letting it drag me into a scroll hole…) and it gives me tumblr of 10+ years ago vibes. A place without a lot of pressure to perform and a come as you are mentality. It might be one of the last places that I actually enjoy on the Internet and don’t feel bad after being on.1

So in the spirit of scratching the nostalgia itch, I’m sharing - reblogging if you will - a roundup of a few things I’ve loved reading here on Substack this month. I hope that you enjoy these pieces as much as I did.

This line from ’s post made my heart stop. An observation on how we show up to care for our children around the clock, despite the incongruent sense of time between an adult and a newborn. Those 13 words are the embodiment of unconditional love.

Issue #4: Night Feeds, Midnight Thoughts, and the Lessons I Didn't Expect to Learn

Because I don’t want her to think that comfort has hours of operation.

My birthday is at the end of March and I’ll be rounding the final bend of my 30s. Somehow ’s post made it on to my Substack home page and the timing couldn’t be better. I really want 2025 to be the year of fun and freedom and this felt like the pep talk I needed to carve out that space in this final chapter.

My Manifesto for Turning 40

This week, I realized that my secret weapon to this lightness is Life Skill #3: Fuck It and Be Happy. I focus on what I have, the great abundance in my life, and I willfully ignore the rest. This isn’t to say that I don’t acknowledge what’s messy, embarrassing, or imperfect about my life, but I intentionally place multiples more attention on the good stuff than the bad. I’m alive and free, and while I’m no longer young, I am younger than I’ll ever be again.

I know from my social Slack group where the #parenting channel is always my first stop when I need a sounding board about anything related to parenting, postpartum, etc. Allyson’s post reflecting on her first year as a mother gave me chills - where many first year of motherhood reflections center the milestones of the child, she unapologetically explores what it’s like to be the mother at the center of it all

The truth about becoming a mom

It’s why moms feel exhausted and resentful, especially while watching their partners make space for their baby without dismantling and rebuilding their world entirely around them.

It’s not about being a martyr, though. It’s such a natural intuition that it doesn’t even feel like a choice, as frustrating as that often feels when trying to disconnect or take breaks or carve out time for me.

It’s maybe why so many moms want to—no, need to—reflect on the first year with themselves centered in the narrative. We have to come to terms with what we’ve just experienced because while those first few weeks feel unending, the months that follow blur into a montage of milestones and sleep regressions and (let’s be honest) monotony until BOOM. We’re spat out at the year mark, a little disoriented, a little disbelieving that so much time has passed. And really, a footnote to the story that is our incredible baby.

And finally, I went back and forth about including this all day because the Internet truly lacks nuance, BUT I have faith in the few hundred people who read this newsletter2. It’s categorically true that the conflict in Gaza has been particularly deadly for Palestinian children (over 13,000 children murdered and at least 25,000 injured via the AP). It’s also true that what Hamas has done to the Israeli and Jewish hostages is equally devastating.

This week I have not been able to stop thinking of Kfir and Ariel Bibas and their mother Shiri. As a mother myself, how this family’s story ended makes me absolutely sick to my stomach and I think it’s important for people, no matter your views, to be outraged by it. I’m not Jewish, but it’s been important for me to read these perspectives, especially as someone who has Jewish friends (many whom are mothers). Read ’s post from this week. I’m not going to pull a quote because it just doesn’t feel right to break it up.

Alright!

It’s the end of February and I’m finally seeing the light at the end of this cold tunnel. Thank goodness that spring in less than a month away.

This week’s playlist is mostly comprised of SXSW 2025 artists. My husband’s band will be playing, and for a hot second I toyed with the idea of tagging along with Zora. I came to my senses when I realized that my time in Austin would be a lot of solo parenting while Bill was off doing music stuff and that sounded like a nightmare.

All that to say, I’ve been to SXSW five times and planning my list of must-see bands was always a ritual that I deeply cherished. It was fun to dive back into that headspace again this week. This is an energetic playlist because I need something to drag me (and you?) out of these last few days of February.

Thanks for being here, friends. <3

Meghan

Let me set the scene.

It's the year 2000, I'm in middle school, and it's Valentine's Day.

As my mother once remarked, I was in my awkward phase. You know, those emerging teenage years where your body and soul feel out of sync. Acne is flaring (no thanks to the Stridex Acne Pads), hair is frizzy despite how hot my flat iron is, changing hormones make feelings so BIG, and my personal style is defined by the fact that I had just bought my first piece of clothing with my own money and it was an Old Navy Tech Vest.

I swear I wasn't a dork, though. I wasn't a popular pretty girl - largely because I was in Nebraska and that title was reserved for white girls with perfectly straight hair - but I was socially flexible. I was on the basketball and track team, in show choir, I had a good group of friends, and was a straight-A student. I didn't suffer from a debilitating lack of confidence, but as a Black kid adopted by white parents, who grew up in largely white-only environments, I was always aware of the double consciousness in which I moved through the world. As a result, I had a very loosely formed sense of self, which resulted in self-esteem that could best be described as flimsy.

But back to Valentine's Day.

I'm hanging out at my locker with some friends before classes start for the day, and like a teenage rom-com, my crush, a very cool, athletic, "traditionally midwestern hot" blonde-hair, blue-eyed guy named David Arden walks up to our group. We had some classes together, and our middle school was relatively small, so we all knew each other. I would say that he and I fell somewhere between good acquaintances and friends. Looking at me, he says, "Hey, this is for you," and passes a rose wrapped in pink tissue paper my way.

My brain short circuits and the world stops turning. I feel my cheeks burning and I want to throw up, cry, and squeal with glee at the same time. "Oh, that's...nice. Why are you giving me these?" I blurt out like this is no big deal. Popular cute guys give me roses all the time.

All chill-like, he says, "You're just really cool and nice to me."

Swoon.

That night, I went home and pressed the petals atop the pink tissue paper and the note, with David's decidedly middle school boy handwriting, into my scrapbook. I marked the moment on a piece of notebook paper: "These petals are from flowers that David Arden gave me on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2000."

Writing about this now, I can still feel that dizzying high of teenage feelings - a sweetly chaotic buzz of joy, nerves, and the exciting possibility of a crush! And I think the reason that this 25-year-old memory (I refuse to believe the reality of time) still feels so visceral is because it strikes at the core of something I've always believed: Love gives you the power to believe in the beauty of being seen, deeply, for who you really are and it reminds us that the goodness of others is only visible through the lens of love. Love is not cheesy or cringe, rather, love gives you the chance to experience the depth of the human experience - to be open, brave, and vulnerable.

In my teen years and my 20's, I wanted to be loved so badly. To be seen in the way that David saw me, but to actually believe that I deserved it. Maybe that's why I spent so much of my early adult years chasing that same feeling—the giddy magic of being seen, of being chosen. What I didn't understand was that being chosen by someone else wouldn't feel good if I couldn't see and choose myself and my needs first.

For me, those years were spent searching for connection, meaning, and trying to make sense of how I fit into the world. Being loved by someone else felt like a compass. And not to say that I went "looking for love in all the wrong places" but I certainly put myself in situations that created more heartache than it was worth. It wasn't until my early 30's that I was able to have an about-face with my relationship to love. If I wanted to be loved in the way that was good for me, I would have to first understand what was good for the version of myself that was buried inside of my body waiting to be uncovered. Being adopted, I had learned early on how to exist in service to others above any of my own needs. I carried that same shape-shifting into relationships, molding myself into what I thought would make someone see the version of me that they wanted to see. But being chosen for a version of me that wasn't fully me never felt right or good, and it was a pattern I knew I needed to break.

I remember, almost as visceral as my Valentine's Day with David, being at my friend's apartment in 2017 and crying about someone who I was on and off again with. I felt out of control, silly for crying about a stupid boy, and heartbroken. Sitting on their roof on a bright summer day, talking through sobs with my friend and her boyfriend, they reminded me that this wasn't what love was supposed to feel like. Desperate to stop feeling those same bad feelings over and over again, I went home that night, made a list of everything I needed in a partner to feel loved in the truest sense, and made a promise to myself to stick to it. Six months later I met my now husband.

Of course this was bigger than just making a list, it was really about deciding to discover and center my own needs. To say no to tempting ideas of love and to wait for what actually felt right for me. During this time I did a lot of activities by myself. I went to movies and concerts solo. I walked into restaurants at dinner time and awkwardly said, "Just one!" I meandered through Prospect Park on Saturday mornings with just me, myself, and I. Taking the time to be alone and in my own company was a practice in learning about the type of love that I wanted from someone else.

Like the beginning of a new relationship, there were lots of moments when this time by myself felt awkward. Creating the space to discover and reconnect with the core of my being without the distractions of others was like training a muscle that I hadn't worked in a long time. And as that muscle strengthened, so did the love and respect that I had for myself. I started caring less about what people thought, especially men who I was going on dates with. I felt, for the first time, okay with someone not liking or loving me—because the person who mattered most, me, did.

Spending time alone helped me learn to get to know my needs, but going to therapy during this chapter taught me that the only validation I truly needed was my own. I realized how much of my life had been spent waiting—waiting for acceptance, for permission, for someone else to tell me I was enough. But when I shifted to a place where my own acceptance mattered most, something visceral changed within me. Doing "the work" gave me a gift of unearthing the parts of myself that I felt that I had to tuck away to be palatable (and dare I say, interesting?). Even stupid things like loving a Top 40 bop and reality TV. Or being a hopeful optimist. I let go of the need to put on an air of nonchalance in most aspects of life, because the core of who I am is a wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve kind of girl and being that kind of person is very chalant.

Reflecting on all of this while celebrating Valentine's Day with a young daughter brings a lot of desire (and pressure!) to continue to live these lessons out loud. To model what it looks like to love myself first, even in the context of a family. To feel confident in my needs and unabashed about the things I like. I want her to have memories of be being a peaceful, free, loving, and happy woman.

I watch my daughter bang on her xylophone while belting out "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" from the top of her lungs with zero hint of self-consciousness. I see her run into a crowd of kids at a playspace and dive right into the mix. I desperately hope that the freedom that she feels in her body and soul stays with her forever; that it is always her guide to inner and outer love.


Sending all the inner and out love your way, friends. Happy Valentine’s Day. Here’s a playlist that I hope makes you feel loved.

<3 Meghan

This week was one of those weeks in parenthood that can only be described bluntly—it was a shitshow.

I probably should have seen it coming when Zora slept in until 7:20 am on Monday when she’s normally a 6:50–7:00 am girlie. She seemed fine, save for the runny nose that she and all the other toddlers in Brooklyn seem to have right now, so we sent her to our nanny share family’s house. By the end of the day, she was running a fever, her eyes were glossy, and she barely wanted to eat. I hated that my baby girl wasn’t feeling well, and I started spiraling at the derailment of my week that I could see coming now that we’d have to keep her out of childcare. I booked a sick visit the next morning, where the pediatrician suspected that Zora had the flu but reassured us that she was probably at the tail end of it. The rest of the week was a chaotic game of tag between my husband and me, trying to juggle working at home and taking care of our sick patient.

“Can you take her? I have a Zoom call at 3 pm.”
“Sure, I have a meeting I can probably skip.”
“I’ll have to work after she goes to bed to play catch-up.”
“Let me cancel plans I had with a friend—I don’t want to get her and her family sick.”

At work, my team was supportive and understanding, but I still felt the pressure to show up like it was a normal day while also feeling guilty that my husband was taking on what felt like a bigger share of childcare. I felt like a coward for not just taking a few sick days and logging off to fully tend to the child who relies on me to keep her alive and well.

My past self actually saw this situation unfolding, and I deliberately made a career move to make it less painful. In my early days in advertising, I would see female leaders do the dance that I’m all too familiar with now:

“Hey team, I’m heading out for daycare pickup and bedtime, but don’t worry, I’ll be online tonight to pick up where I left off! Call or text me if it’s an emergency!!”

Even as a 20-something at the beginning of my career, with zero thoughts of motherhood on my mind, I knew that those women were being put in an impossible and unfair position.

As my career evolved, I found myself in leadership roles with more responsibility and more pressure. I wasn’t raring to have a child, but I knew that I wanted one someday, and I dreaded finding myself in the same position as the leaders I once observed, in an industry as unforgiving as advertising. I was increasingly disillusioned with trying to sell people shit they didn’t need and spending my time developing strategies for how to be a snarky brand on Twitter. After 4.5 years of leading creative strategy teams, I took a $40,000 pay cut and became a creative recruiter.

This, of course, didn’t solve all my problems, but it released a lot of pressure. I was no longer responsible for managing a department full of people, and I wasn’t on the hook for multi-million-dollar scopes of work that my team had to deliver. If I had stayed on that path, I would likely be striving for Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Marketing, or Chief Strategy Officer roles. There was absolutely no bone in my body that ever wanted to have any of those titles, but it was kind of the only way up. I’m a recovering Type-A-Honor-Roll-Perfectionist, so even though these destinations weren’t my heart’s desire, I know that I would have felt like a failure if I didn’t get there.

Instead, my new path gave me somewhat of a flat footing. Sure, there’s opportunity to grow in some ways, but now I can make decent money without having to be client-facing, responsible for making money for the company, or managing a whole department of people. And most of all, I don’t feel the amount of pressure that I know I would feel as a senior leader who also happens to be a mother. Even now as an individual contributor, I still feel pressure, and while I don’t want to generalize that every working mother feels this too, the working culture in the U.S. has a certain set of unfair expectations for us. Shanna Hocking summed up almost my exact feelings about it in this 2019 Motherly piece:

Being a working mother required a dual identity I hadn’t been prepared for. I felt the need to take on the extra assignment at work to show I could—to prove that I and every other working mother could work overtime. I was determined to make homemade cupcakes for the birthday party. And I talked about neither of these experiences at work or home, except with my husband and closest friends. It seemed like everyone else had this all figured out, while I was the one missing work deadlines, missing school programs, missing my family, missing myself.

I made a whole-ass career pivot because I was scared of being a working mother in a leadership role, and I’m still struggling to make it all work. The pressure is far less, but it’s still not a walk in the park.

On Friday, Bill had to go into the studio, so I was solo parenting while Zora was still sick. I had a quick meeting at 1:45 pm and a meeting at 2 pm, and between the two, Zora woke up from her nap screaming. I hopped off my first call a few minutes early so I could do my best to settle her before the next meeting that I was expected to lead. She did generally okay for the first few minutes, sitting on my lap, fascinated by the four other faces on the screen, but soon she was wiggling out of my lap, crying, “Momma up! Momma up!” and attempting to get me out of the chair to play on the floor with her. While someone else was talking, I quickly muted my camera and audio, ran to the kitchen to grab a popsicle, and got her to settle back into my lap while purple-colored ice melted all over my hand.

Despite the popsicle, Zora cried throughout the rest of the meeting, with me strategically muting and unmuting my audio to attempt to lead the call like everything was fine. Once the call ended, I canceled the rest of my meetings, sat Zora next to me on the couch to watch some cartoons, and hoped to fire off a few emails. She wasn’t into the TV at all and kept trying to close my laptop. After the third attempt, I took it as a sign. I powered it down, put on her shoes and jacket, and we spent the next hour walking around the neighborhood, taking in the fresh air. As we walked, I tried to be present in the moment—what truly could be more important than taking care of my sick child? But in the back of my mind, I was calculating how late I’d have to stay up to make up for the work I didn’t get done.

I know that lots of parents have experienced these types of weeks and wish I had a solution for how to make it easier to navigate. I wish our country’s culture of work centered the humanity of workers. That it understood that we’re people first, with families, friends, and children who we want to be able to drop everything for when they need us. If we had a better social safety net with people-focused policies, we might not all feel beholden to put work above all, knowing without it, we don’t have health insurance or a way to keep the lights on and our kids fed.

I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t think I’ll ever get this working mother balance right. But I know that Zora won’t remember how well I led a meeting or if I missed a few emails. I hope that she remembers that when she didn’t feel well and needed me, I always chose her over work. And I don’t take for granted that I have a job that allows me the flexibility I never would have had in my former career, even if the balance isn’t perfect. I still wish our culture valued people over productivity, but until then, I’ll keep doing my best.

Anyways friends, here’s a playlist to shake off a long week.

<3 Meghan

Two months before I became a mom, I joined my neighborhood parents’ WhatsApp chat. Like walking through the wardrobe in Narnia, I entered a world that had always existed around me without ever knowing about it. There I encountered hundreds of parents ready to pass on old toys and clothes, recommend a toddler-friendly restaurant that still makes you feel cool, and answer panicked questions from soon-to-be parents like myself.

My first question in the group was something like, I DON’T KNOW IF I HAVE ENOUGH NEWBORN-SIZED CLOTHES AND I’M PANICKING!!! I had ‘she’s such a first-time mom’ written all over me. The moms in my chat shared their experience with newborn clothes, some saying their kid never fit into them, and others saying that their kid lived in them for 6 weeks. But the one thing they all assured me of was that if I needed more newborn clothes, the group would make sure I got them.

I knew that becoming a mother would open me up to a whole new group of people to build friendships with, and honestly, I was deeply looking forward to it. I’ve been in New York for nearly 15 years — which is at least five lifetimes — and some of my oldest and closest friends have left the city. Many of my local friends don’t have kids and I’ve mourned the loosening of our connections. It’s not like there’s less love between us, it’s just that we’re in a chapter where our lives don’t allow for a lot of natural overlap (hi! I miss and love you guys).

Luckily, this new chapter has opened me up to a world of new friends, ones who are similarly seeking relationships with people who understand the nuances of life with a small child. I met one of my closest mom friends on the app Peanut, which is essentially a dating app for moms. We connected at a Bed-Stuy coffee shop when we were both pregnant and it had all the electric energy of a really good first date. After we both arrived home, we texted each other that we giddily told our husbands, “She’s really cool!!” I met another through the WhatsApp group and whenever we end our hangs she always says, “love you!” which makes me, a wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve kind of girl, feel seen. Others I’ve met through my apartment complex, where we regularly cross the courtyard for post-nap hangs or to swap hand-me-downs. Kind of like a group of kids starting school together at the same time, I’m eager to see these friendships deepen as our kids grow up together. And while I don’t have a full-on “mom crew”, I feel grateful for the individual relationships that I’m building.

Not every potential mom friend is created equal. As my friend Nina has written, just because we both have kids of a similar age doesn’t guarantee a real connection. The moms I tend to gravitate toward are kind of like this:

• DMs you memes that make you feel seen

• can spontaneously hang more often than not

• would not be weirded out if I was like, “wanna go to yoga together?”

• understands the importance of the nap schedule but isn’t too precious about it

• is always happy to commiserate about a terrible sleep night

• checks in when they know that things are tough

• wants to hear all about your birth story

• doesn’t give unsolicited advice unless they know you want it

• won’t bat an eye at your messy house

• respectfully talks shit about our loving husbands

• always has a good babysitter to recommend

• will share the holy grail recipe that’s enjoyed by parents and a picky toddler

• parents differently than you but doesn’t judge your parenting approach

• loves my kid like their own

• has an identity beyond just being a mom

• gets what you mean when you say you need a break from your life

• will traipse across the city for something fun even though it’s a mission

• facetimes with our little ones to kill time between post-nap and bedtime

• does not expect a timely text back

• has snacks in her bag and always enough to share with my kid

• understands the moments of postpartum complexity like no one else does

• reminds you that you’re doing a great job

Most importantly, I guess my favorite type of mom friends are the ones who keep it real. The ones who don’t superficially make it look effortless. And that’s the mom friend I hope to be.

Here’s a playlist to get your week started. Send it to your favorite (mom) friend. <3

Meghan

A few weeks ago, I posted a note reveling in the joy of having a solo day with my baby girl and just deeply delighting in it. It’s like a light bulb switched on for the first time in my motherhood chapter that said, “Oh, we’re finally having fun together!”

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had fun with her since the beginning, but this is a different type of fun. I’m in a metal and emotional state that allows me the space to notice it. I mentioned in my last post, but this current chapter is providing the most breathing room I’ve had postpartum. There isn’t breastfeeding, erratic sleep schedules, major transitions like returning to work, or starting solids swirling around in my brain and feeding my anxiety. For the first time, everything is feeling a bit more settled and grounded. Without all that noise, it’s been easier to notice the delights of parenthood, like the one I mentioned in my note.

But what I think might be most significant is the gem that replied with:

When I read Julie’s reply, I think I short circuited for a moment as I tried to process the significance of what she was saying.

My kid and I have a relationship.

Like, we have inside jokes! One of which I’m going to attempt to explain, and it is going to sound absolutely banal to many, but those who know a child at 18 months will get it.

Zora is sitting at her highchair, sipping water from her Funtainer (yes that’s the actual brand name of her water bottle). I have an empty water glass.

Zora looks at me and says, “Momma water??”

Being the silly momma I am, I reply in a crying voice, “Momma doesn’t have any water!”

She burst out laughing like I’ve just closed down the house at a Madison Square Garden comedy show.

“Momma water!?!?!” she asks again laughing and taking it up a notch.

I happily repeat my line, really wanting to deliver. “Momma doesn’t have any water!”

We laugh and clumsily clank our cups together.

Now, every few days when we’re sitting down for a meal, whether I have a glass in front of me or not, she’ll look at me with a slight smile and eyes that are already in on the joke, and we make ourselves laugh about my unfortunate water situation.

Now at 18 months, Zora can help me make a smoothie in the mornings and we’ve got a whole shared ritual around it. She stands in her kitchen tower, I measure out the frozen fruit and the oat milk, she very clumsily and haphazardly dumps it into the blender. I add the protein powder, yogurt, and peanut butter, and always give her the spoon to lick afterwards. It’s a mess and it’s not perfect, but it’s setting the foundation of the ways in which I hope we can continue to act as a team as she grows up.

When it’s time to blend the ingredients, I hold her in my arms, she counts down from three, and we watch our shared concoction turn into a “smooodie.” Once it’s ready, I stick a straw in it and we sit together, either on the kitchen floor or the couch. Zora has somehow come to think that all smoothies in the household are hers, so I have to slip in a few “Momma’s turn?” requests. She always generously thrusts her smoothie my way.

For an 18 month old, Zora is wildly verbal. Like a parrot, she will repeat any word or phrase she hears, she can sing her ABCs, and knows how to ask us to request a song on the Alexa. This week she picked up the phrase, “Absolutely not!” which I’m certain came straight from my mouth. The fact that her and I can have actual conversations, sing songs together, she can ask me to play with her, and can tell me what book she wants to read (always I Met a Moose in Maine One Day) has brought reciprocity into our dynamic for the first time.

While I didn’t hate the newborn phase, and every phase since then has had its own slice of wonder, I wish someone had told me that around 18 months things would get extra special. That my daughter and I would begin to form a new bond, with it’s own language, rituals, and rhythm. And perhaps even more gratifying, at a year and a half in, a lot of the “fun” parts about being a mom - dance parties in the living room, art class on the weekends, hanging out with mom friends while our kids play together - would start to really shine through.

Life with a toddler isn’t all sunshine and roses, but I’m soaking this moment up for as long as I can.

Get this week’s playlist here. <3

Sending you all a ton of love this week,

Meghan

When I time travel back to this time last year, I’m a completely different being.

I’m six months postpartum and my hair is at the height of falling out. This takes me by surprise, but also not really, because so much of postpartum is an unexpected mystery.

Every morning I exit the shower with a clump of wet hair in my hand, feeling both horrified and fascinated that there is any hair left on my head. I examine it carefully, taking note as to whether today’s clump is bigger than the last, and mourn my changing curl pattern. I ball up the tangled mass and drop it into the toilet, wondering1 if my hair will ever bounce back to the springy coils that have been a part of my identity for as long as I can remember.

It’s a metaphor of sorts for what I was experiencing internally: a shedding of self, unsure and worried about who I’d be on the other side.

Even before my child was born, I began mourning my sense of self. I thought that once she arrived, I’d just be a mom. There would be no becoming, or a Princess Diaries-like journey, but rather, I’d seamlessly transform like Cinderella. My new motherhood identity would be downloaded into my consciousness and that would be that.

What actually happened when I gave birth is that my body and soul broke into a million pieces and scattered throughout the universe, transforming, rearranging, and now awkwardly resettling in ways I’m still learning to understand.

When I look back at photos of my daughter at this time last year, I see a baby on her back learning to roll over. A precious being who couldn’t sit upright without support. Someone who tasted her first bite of solid food—a mushed-up banana!

But most of all, what I see is my blob of a baby becoming a brand new, fully formed, human. And if I’m kind to myself, and allow all the grace and compassion that people tell new mothers to give to themselves, I can see myself becoming a new one too.

When kids enter puberty, there’s a societal understanding of the hormonal, social, and physical changes taking place within them. We forgive them for their moody outbursts, we understand their bodily changes as a natural occurrence, and we’re endeared by the way that they awkwardly transform from child to teen.

Most people don’t realize that becoming a mother is as pivotal as puberty, and that this transformation has its own name - Matrescence. Coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970’s, Matrescence refers to the physical, emotional, social, and psychological changes that a woman experiences as she transitions into motherhood.

In her book Matrescence, Lucy Jones describes it as a profound rewiring of the brain and body. She writes:

During pregnancy and the early weeks and months of motherhood a blitz of birth and death was taking place within my brain. Cells were being born and cells were dying. Areas of the brain were shrinking and others were growing. Juiced with a multitude of hormones, I was being newly sculpted.

Matrescence is not just a biological process; it’s an emotional tug-of-war.

Between your needs and your baby’s needs

Between your intuition and anxiety

Between ideal expectations and bumpy realities

Between grief and bliss, oppression and ecstasy

And what’s been surprising to me is that navigating this tug-of-war is actually what transformed me into a mother.

You see, if there are aspects of your life that you cared about before you had a baby, motherhood often requires that you sacrifice them - this is what worried me the most about becoming a mother. Some people sacrifice them forever and some people sacrifice them until they come up for air.

Over the last 9 months I’ve been reading Jones’ Matrescence in 10 and 15 page spurts because the topic is so visceral for me - I can only take so much in during one sitting. Understanding the concept of Matresence has given me permission to fight for the things I’ve felt the need to sacrifice. To be reminded that becoming a mother is a rewiring of self, not just a transition into caregiver. That there are parts of me worth fighting for that are for me alone. That being a mother doesn’t require that I fully submit to pulls of the tug-of-war, but that I allow myself to win a few rounds.

These days, that means missing a morning with my daughter to go to yoga. Occasionally missing bedtime so I can reconnect with friends. Not planning every waking moment of a weekend around her enrichment. And maybe even bigger, it means finding more spaciousness in the everyday to keep becoming a fuller version of myself. This time last year, when my baby was just six months old and we were in the thick of it, I could have never envisioned a life where there was space for me alone.

But last Sunday, she turned 18 months, and in a way, so did I. Everyday I marvel in awe at how she’s blossomed from a sweet baby into a silly, talkative, curious child, who dances and jumps and loves so freely. And now, I’m finding space to feel that way about myself, too.

Here’s a playlist to help you find some spaciousness this week.

<3, Meghan

Something I’m probably most proud of accomplishing in 2024, and admittedly it’s a little sad, is that I was completely off of Instagram for half of the year. I deactivated my account in the spring and reactivated it in October only to message some of my husband’s friends for a birthday surprise I was planning.

As a kid who moved countries or states every three years, I developed an intentional nature for keeping in touch with friends. In my early years, that looked like sending letters on Little Mermaid stationery sealed with an abundance of stickers. Later, it was late-night AIM conversations, Gchat messaging during class or work, and group email chains with some of my closest friends. After college in the mid-aughts, a few girlfriends and I created a group blog (which is shockingly still live???) to stay connected, racking up almost 300 posts in a few years. These early online experiences were defined by authentic, low-pressure connections with people I cared about. When Instagram came along, it felt like a natural extension of that—a way to stay connected to important people and share what mattered to me. But over time, Instagram, and how we as a society engaged with the Internet, became something different.

I’ve always been enamoured with the possibility of connection facilitated via the Internet. It’s delivered me everything from IRL best friends (thank you Twitter) to a husband (thank you Tinder). And I’ve stayed on Instagram for almost 14 years to keep in touch with both close and fond loose connections. A few years ago I would probably consider Instagram a semi-vital aspect of my life. I used to work in Marketing, making it an essential platform to understand the ins and outs of. And when I was single, there was an element of interestingness that felt annoyingly important to project, even subtly, so that when someone asked, “What’s your IG?” I had something to show for myself.

But now I’m married, I have a baby, and Instagram makes me feel like a loser and a bad mom. A few weeks before Zora was born, I deactivated my Instagram account. I was getting inundated with typical mommy influencer content and it only added to the impending unknown of having a newborn for the first time. When I finally brought her home, I was surprised at how instinctual being a mother felt. While exhausting and intense, I rarely experienced doubt in my ability to know how to care for her - I felt really tuned-in with what she needed. If I was on Instagram in those early days, I’m curious how much of that intuition I would still feel with the deluge of parenting content being blasted my way.

Eventually, I reactivated instagram and never felt good after being on the app for more than a few minutes. My heart would race and I would feel an overwhelming sense of unease that manifested in a way that made my face feel numb. There was nothing interesting about seeing people living their seeming extra fun lives while I was (and still am) caught up in the chaotic swirl of adjusting to life with a baby, working full time, trying to keep some semblance of order in the house, and attempting to carve out a morsel of time for myself.

Then there was the algorithmic targeting. Content about having a second kid (Um, already??), contentious and contradicting POVs on sleep training (Was I or wasn’t I destroying my attachment with my child??), Tradwives who made motherhood look beautifully effortless (How do you always look so put together??), and Reels about how to get my pre-baby body back (RUDE!) were jarring. Instagram knew my life-stage anxieties and was coming straight for them.

I’m not sure what the actual catalyst was, but after a family vacation out to LA about 9 months postpartum, I deactivated my account. I missed casually knowing what my friends were up to and getting glimpses of their day to day life, but didn’t miss the firehose of random content that invaded my (limited) brainspace and robbed me of my time.

Of course, I found other ways to get caught up in my phone (aka the Internet), mostly via my social Slack group and my neighborhood WhatsApp chat, two environments that were more personally relevant to my day-to-day life. And the biggest difference was that they both had natural end points. Neither have an infinite scroll, ads, or suggested content to lose an hour of my life to.

When I returned to Instagram in late October to message my husband’s friends about his Birthday, it was like showing up to a party where everyone was a few drinks in and I was stone cold sober. I immediately muted suggested posts, I didn’t send a lot of Story replies so I wouldn’t get caught up in conversations that required me to keep coming back into the app, and maybe most importantly, I culled my following list from 900-something to just under 300. Brands out of my price-range, trendy restaurants, cute hotels upstate that I’ll never visit, ex-flings, old coworkers, acquaintances from college, and celebrities who don’t care about me, all got the boot.

Despite curating my following list to people that I want to remain connected to, I’ve found myself with a very anti-climatic Instagram account. I can spend 10 minutes in the app and see every story posted from everyone I follow, and I regularly run out of content to see.

Even with these changes, it still doesn’t feel good being on Instagram.

It’s…fine.

Boring, if anything.

I’ve reduced a lot of the dopamine inducing aspects of the app, which is probably why I find myself feeling mostly detached from the space. And it’s actually motivated me to more regularly text or call people who I was using Instagram to keep tabs on.

The early aughts Internet that I fell in love with was a bit more ambivalent - we weren’t virtually keeping up with the Jones so to speak. You could have a Livejournal, a Xanga, or even a tumblr and it didn’t matter how many people read it for you to keep sharing whatever you wanted. It was a space for you to express yourself, find other people who liked what you liked (or a place to figure out what you liked), and there weren’t reactions, likes, shares, or views to optimize for. And maybe most importantly, there wasn’t an algorithm to hack.

Today this space feels like a performance in the name of hitting the virality jackpot. Doing so garners more reach, more perceived relevance, and probably most importantly - monetization. Which I guess is unsurprising because more than 50% of Gen Z aspire to become a professional influencer. And outside of the rise of wanna-be influencers, Meta is looking to add thousands of AI generated users in the name of “entertainment” and to keep us human users more engaged in the app, which they need us to do so they can sell more ads.

Because of these shifts, these platforms have become a noisy place to exist if you’re just there to peer into the day-to-day lives of your friends. Yes, I don’t have to be a Content Creator or act like an Influencer, but the space keeps trying to push users in that direction, like Instagram trying to make you turn anything into a Reel. And I’m certainly not on Instagram to interact with creepy robot AI accounts.

I think this is why I was able to stay off of Instagram for such a long - relative to me - stretch of time this past year: What I want from the platform and what it wants from me are in opposition and neither of us are changing our minds.

My time away wasn’t actually about rejecting the platform, but rather about reclaiming my time, having control over the type of information I let have my attention, and recentering what staying connected to people that I value looks like.

Will I be on Instagram in 2025? Sure, here and there, when I have something to share. But now it’s just a tool — not a destination or a place to give my time — and that feels pretty freeing in a digital landscape that feels less and less about authentic connection.

Happy New Year, loves. <3 Hit play on this week’s playlist here.

Meghan

Two Saturday nights ago, I found myself in a foreign place:

Alone and out of the house at 7 p.m.!

I’ve often described my home and my little family of three as my emotional support blanket. Since becoming a parent, I’ve found it easier to default my time in service to my family. Not because I’m on the way to becoming a Tradwife, but because there’s always something to do in a household with a toddler, two adults, and no additional help.

Carving out even an ounce of space to be without responsibilities often feels like a Herculean effort—not because my husband can’t handle solo parenting (I had zero hesitation leaving for a work trip to Dubai when our baby was 9 months old).

It’s because, like I said above, there’s always something to fucking do! Meal prep, clean something, spend quality time with my child, chip away at the endless life admin list—or just…rest.

But that Saturday night, I had a good excuse.

Some friends from my early New York days were in town, and we got together like we used to 10+ years ago. Time traveling back to those friendships, and the carefreeness of being out and about felt so good. Even though I dipped at 10:30 p.m., it was like a visit from my past self saying, “Hey, we used to do this a lot, and it was fun. Maybe it’s time to start doing more of this.”

When you’re in the mire of raising a kid who needs near-constant care, working 40+ hours a week, and managing a household, it feels impossible to consistently carve out time to be away from it all. But that night made me reflect on what I like doing, not just now, but back when my days lacked this level of responsibility.

It got me inspired to lean into the playfulness of my youth as a way to nudge me toward discovering what my current self needs more of. In no particular order, here are a few things I’m hoping to embrace:

Playing dress-up
As a kid, my sister and I loved dress-up. I have fond memories a gold princess crown and a plastic scepter that made me feel extra fancy. I’m hoping could channel that by being more intentional about how I get ready for the day—styling my hair differently, zhuzhing up my makeup routine, or breaking out of my uniform of jeans and a black or gray top.

Singing and performing
I was a choir and theater kid who loved memorizing monologues just for fun (I promise I was not a loser…). I should really be attending more live performances and concerts when I have an evening to get out. Music and the arts have always put me closer in tune with myself and others, and I need that outlet now more than ever.

Moving my body
Don’t worry, as a kid, I played sports too. Basketball and volleyball are activities that weaved in and out of my musical extracurriculars. In my 20s, I found a lot of solace in running and liked playing pick up soccer (until I tore my ACL). Postpartum, I’ve found working out oppressive (lol), but I’ve recently started going to a yoga studio in my neighborhood and have loved every class - and as a former teacher, I’m picky about sequencing. Falling back into yoga has been magical for my body and soul, and I’m committed to keeping up my weekly streak.

Crafting something
We had a craft bin growing up, and I loved creating anything. Next week, I’m making a felt Christmas tree with ornaments for Zora to decorate, and I know it’ll scratch that creative itch. There’s something so satisfying about making something with my hands.

Being outside
The outdoors have always a playground for me. When my family lived in a small German town, my sister and I would haul pogo sticks, jump ropes, and hula hoops via bike to the grassy lawn at city hall. The local kids would stare at us from afar (it was the 90s, we were the only Black and American kids in town—I get it), but eventually, we all warmed up to each other. These days, most of my outdoor time is spent at playgrounds, or walking to the subway for 3 minutes during the work week, but I’m craving the solo walks I used to take during the early pandemic. Wandering my neighborhood with a podcast or playlist in my ears without a time crunch, feels so simple, but it’s something I know I’ll have to really make an effort to follow through on.

If I can keep even one of these up, I’ll call it a win.

This week’s playlist is the perfect companion to any of these activities—but especially for getting ready for a night out, alone, after 7 p.m. 😘

See you soon,

Meghan

I’ve been floating through the week in a numb haze and I’m sure many of you have been, too. Like most Americans who didn’t vote for a fascist, maybe you’ve spent a lot of this week wondering how we got here. Perhaps you’ve felt silly for feeling hopeful. You might just be fed up with our political system in general and are burnt out on living in a two-party system that rarely gets it right.

Like me, you’re probably feeling a mix of all three, and if that’s the case, now might be a good moment to exhale. You’ve probably been holding your breath in a post-election anxiety spiral where everything feels bottle-necked between your racing heart and your throat with a lump in it. Conceivably, this might the first time you’ve contemplated giving yourself a bit of ease in the last few days.

Take it.

Because if the election results have had your cortisol through the roof, it’s time to figure out how to channel that energy. First, because no one can live in fight or flight for a prolonged period of time, and second, that energy needs to go towards however you’re going to survive and impact the next four years.

This isn’t 2016 - pink pussy hats, nasty women stickers, and marching through the streets to look good on Instagram isn’t going to cut it. The algorithms are going to serve you a menu of atrocities (as they currently are) and you will be paralyzed to act when faced with one terrible thing after another. It will continue to feel all consuming and like too much to bear.

I won’t sit here and claim to know any or all of the answers, but I’m happy to share with you how I’m quelling and channeling my post-election worry and fear.

I’m laser focusing on causes I care about and that I can see myself working towards for the rest of my life.

Unlike modern “activism” which often unfolds by way of sharing a social media post that 50-90% of your followers have already seen because we all live in digital echo-chambers, it’s time to think about the long-term, enduring, action-oriented change that you can create.

For me, it’s reproductive health, specifically maternal health. The U.S. has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among developed countries, and the postpartum period is the most dangerous time for new mothers. With the new administration’s obsession with women’s bodies, Project 2025 could significantly diminish maternal healthcare access, increasing risks for maternal and infant mortality, especially among already vulnerable groups. This would only deepen existing health inequities and could prevent new and expecting mothers from receiving critical postpartum care necessary for their well-being and recovery.

Last year I did training to become a postpartum doula and have supported a few families in the early postpartum period, a moment when hormonal fluctuations and sleepless nights deeply impact a mother’s mental health. I’m in the middle of becoming an international board certified lactation consultant, because I have first hand experience with the impact breastfeeding has on your mental health and anxiety and want to help women on that journey. And finally, I’m considering eventually transitioning fully into a healthcare career in women’s health, because I fully believe that individuals in this field can make a huge impact on patients, even when the systems miss the mark.

There will be countless other critical issues demanding attention, and I’m trusting that many of you reading this are already committed to tackling them. While our focuses may be different, I know that it will be equally essential. Here’s a few long-term causes to consider:

• gun violence

• LGBTQ+ rights

• climate change

• racial justice

• policing reform

• education access and equality

• immigration

• democratic reform

• food insecurity

These aren’t small endeavors or easy solutions, but if we can each find a place to dig in and make a difference— slowly and imperfectly — perhaps our collective efforts will move us forward in big ways.

With everything feeling urgent and overwhelming, maybe this is exactly what we need: many of us, committed to something, willing to chip away at it for the long haul.

Take a walk, throw on this playlist, and have a think about where you’ll invest your time.

<3

Meghan

I’ve been writing this note in my head for over a year, trying to capture who I am these days. Well, I actually started writing it back in October 2023:

Hello, I know it’s been sometime. I had a baby in July, so I’m a mom now. A few people have been surprised when they find out that I have a baby, and rightfully so. I think I posted about having a baby once or twice on Instagram stories and there was a photo of me pregnant buried in a carousel post.

The truth is, miscarriage anxiety fueled a lot of my pregnancy after experiencing a previous loss around 6 weeks. It took more effort than I hoped to get pregnant again and the idea of announcing this joyous life event and then having to un-announce it felt too heavy.

So, I kept my pregnancy mostly a secret.

Or rather, I didn’t intentionally make it a part of what was going on with me externally. I had a lot of other things going on, like navigating a layoff and trying to find an apartment and settle into it just weeks before becoming a parent. I guess you could say I tried really hard to float through the world as my old self who just happened to be pregnant.

Now, here I am, a year and change later, picking up this letter where I left off. It’s safe to say that I’m very much a mom. It’s also safe to say that I don’t know what I am outside of that.I guess the person that I was before I became a parent and the person I am now are still trying to figure out who we’ve become.

Like so many people who become mothers, I’m carrying a lot of shame (is that the right word?) for not having an interesting identity outside of it. Before my body and identity transformed, before I was ever growing a human inside of my womb, I spent too much money paying my therapist to confess my worst fear: that someone would buy me a mug that said “momma” and I’d be doomed to a life of sweatpants, messy hair, and not remembering when I last showered.

Now on the other side, I don’t so much mind that “mama” paraphernalia, some of which I’ve self-inflicted. I haven’t become a sweatpants person (which I attribute to my parents never letting me leave the house in them as a kid), and the messy hair and showering part is still debatable. Postpartum has destroyed the version of my hair that I liked, so I don’t have a lot of incentive, time, or energy to do much about it right now.

Before becoming a mother, I was in the midst of an identity journey, weaving through the estrangement of my adopted parents, the reunion with my biological father’s family, the grief of my biological mother’s passing before I got to know her, and the undoing of the internalized racism I inherited growing up in a white family.

The truth is, I’ve never allowed myself to lean into an identity that felt like home in my body, afraid that it might ostracise me from my family and the people who were supposed to unconditionally love and protect me. I wasn’t willing to risk abandonment. This fear kept me from deeply claiming any real interests, leaving me to shapeshift into spaces, and always opting to dull the fullest expression of my being, knowing full well that dissent from the norm, even when the norm was actively harmful, had real consequences. Where I find myself now forces me to revisit these feelings and specifically, this fear, so that the overpowering motherhood identity doesn’t swallow me whole.

I once read a substack post where the author noted something along the lines of “No one can ever write anything about motherhood that hasn’t already been said” and that thought has paralyzed me every time I’ve tried to get back into writing. Because, like anything you’ll find in any piece on motherhood: yes, I too feel a loss of self, my priorities are wildly different, I’ve mourned the friendships I haven’t been able to be more present for, society’s expectations for mothers feels like a trap, and I’m constantly lost in Groundhog’s Day.

So now, here I am, fully steeped into motherhood, feeling like a cursor blinking on a blank page, wanting to share something that I hope resonates. I’m not sure that this forum will be a pure outlet for all things identify, but I do know that this newsletter, going all the way back to 2016, has always felt like the warmest, safest place, and I’m happy to be back.

Here’s a fresh playlist just for you. 😘

I’ve lived in my new place for a little over 40 days now and it feels like ground zero of all my anxiety. I have some upcoming events happening in a few weeks and having my apartment feel put together and settled sooner rather than later is of the utmost importance.

The only problem with accomplishing this is the fact that I am paralyzed by making interior design decisions. Hours are spent scrolling home design focused Instagram accounts, Pinterest, Apartment Therapy, and house tours on blogs like Cup of Joe for glimpses of inspiration. What I’m really looking for is a “plan.” Something that says, “Do x, y, and z, and you’ll have a beautiful, perfectly organized, and comfortable space.”

Given the crunch time I found myself in, I hired my friend Gunnar, an interior designer, to give me the elusive plan that I was searching for. He came over and we spent three hours talking about how the space should function, what we wanted to spend money on, what of our existing stuff we wanted to utilize, and what felt like nice-to-haves if we could swing it in our budget. The next day he sent me a powerpoint with mood boards reflecting what we talked about and an excel doc with products, links, and prices. All I had to do was click “buy” to bring this apartment to life in the way that we discussed. Well, that’s not all that I had to do, but it was the biggest mental and emotional hurdle that I had to cross.

Our space is coming together and it’s nothing like I imagined it would look like when I was scouring the internet for inspiration. It’s colorful, practical, cozy, cohesive, and above all, it feels like a home that reflects a lived life. That was the biggest thing I kept coming back to when I searched home inspiration - none of what’s popular or rises to the top in search results feel like anyone lives there. It all very curated and made for viewing, and really, made to make you buy shit you don’t need.

I realize that some people don’t think about how their house looks as much as it seems like I do, but the way Instagram makes people feel bad about their bodies is how it makes me feel about my home: it should be beautiful, appear effortless, and be in the perfect form. Essentially, it’s unattainable. wrote a post about this a few weeks ago called The Optimization Sinkhole, and a quote she included from keeps ringing in my ear:

“One under-appreciated consequence of believing there is such a thing as the ‘one best way’ in every aspect of life is subsequently living with the unyielding pressure to discover it and the inevitable and perpetual frustration of failing to achieve it,” Sacacas writes. “And not only frustration. It produces anxiety, fear, compulsiveness, resignation, and, ultimately, self-loathing. If there is “one best way,” how will I know it? If I have not found it, have I failed? And is it my fault?”

This is exactly how I felt trying to make our space come together. I would source ideas and attempt to conceive a plan, but I was paralyzed with asking myself, “Is this the best approach? Could it be better somehow?” and then I’d close my laptop in defeat.

And then shortly after reading Anne’s piece, I read ’s piece called Instagram Store Core which really articulated the problem I was running into when looking for design inspiration:

You know what it looks like, even if you don’t know what it is: bright yet non-aggressive colors, shiny plastics, checkerboard rugs, wannabe-Matisse prints. It’s playful without being childish, loud without being offensive, mismatched while being unified. It’s avant-basic mixed with Scandinavian design mixed with a touch of the Memphis School, and it’s the interior decorating style-du-jour of the internet.

Most of the individual items that fill these rooms are nice and well-designed. They aren’t garish or even in particularly bad taste. But there is something, some aura evoked when this specific combination of products and styles fills a room, that can only be considered in its entirety. Perhaps the best word is soulless—the same type of soullessness of Blank Street coffee and Florence Given and university mental health awareness posters—or better yet, impotent.

Today’s popular interior design styles lack an element of aliveness, as if generated by AI (and honestly, some of it probably is). Most of what I came across felt unattainable and mostly, unlived in. And maybe I’m so tangled in it because my external presentation of self has always had an underlying need to project a put together, sanitized, and respectable front (As fucked up as that is, it’s my reality and trauma, and if I could send white supremacy my therapy bill, I WOULD).

So maybe that’s really what’s at work here. An invitation to let my surroundings show up in a way that represents the fullness of my life, my shared life with my husband, and all the intricacies of making a blank space a home that can’t be captured via some images on the Internet. Something like that.

Maybe there’s a home tour in an upcoming letter to keep myself accountable.
Hold me to it.

Get this week’s playlist here.

Have a great week, friends. If you feel inclined to share, I’d love to know what the most “you” part of your home is - reply and let me know. <3

Meghan