Wake Up Dead Man was what finally broke me. The water had been pooling against the dam for quite some time, but I had managed to hold firm, smiling while acknowledging that every person can make their own decisions on the matter. But it was during the climax of the movie when Glenn Close had her big, shining moment (if you’ve seen the movie, you know the one) when I felt it snap. Her perfect, glassy skin could barely express emotions. It was simply too frozen. It seemed even this mousy church hermit had a punch card at the medspa in the next city over.

It has always been impossible to exist in the body of a woman. We had the Barbie movie to remind us of this.

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Like many mothers of young children with no free time but a surplus of free thoughts, I (Hillary) have a lot of thoughts about Bluey. Perhaps too many, honestly; talk with me for about five minutes and you’ll probably hear me praise the show enthusiastically but talk to me for fifteen minutes and you’ll hear me criticize it over four or five different reasons and be ready to hash it out right then and there in the grocery aisle.

I love being friends with Amy because she’s right there with me (on both motherhood and Bluey). It’s not even her first time delving into it online! Once upon a time, not long before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter turned it into a complete hellhole, Amy wrote a tweet that garnered a fascinating amount of anger from an unexpected group of people: fans of the Australian children’s cartoon on which this article centers.

The indignant comments came thick and fast.

The Bluey Haters are kind of easy to ignore. They mostly hang out in Facebook mom groups, clucking disapproval over any children’s show that doesn’t whap every viewer over the head with an unambiguous moral conclusion, or that has primary colors, or that appears on any screen whatsoever. These people don’t want to be satisfied and it’s a waste of time to argue with them.

But the Adult Bluey Fans are a more nebulous bunch. Unlike Disney Adults or Bronies, these folks aren’t childless adults finding comfort and nostalgia (or a weird kink) in a program explicitly designed for children; more often than not, these are parents with kids in the right age group for Bluey who have co-opted Bluey for themselves. They won’t brook any disagreement with fundamentals of the show and sometimes seem parasocially connected to the cartoon dogs–while also arguing that since they are cartoon dogs, they cannot be reasonably criticized.

Spend any time in online Bluey spaces, and one thing you’ll notice is that the fandom itself isn’t actually in agreement over who the intended audience even is. I say that with a hint of hyperbole since the show is clearly marketed towards young children, but for every episode imparting a lesson to children there seems to be one targeted towards imparting a similar lesson towards the adults in their lives as well (see: “Unicorse,” episode 3.8). And when it comes down to it, all of our gripes are directed at the adults in the show and not at the children. We don’t expect perfection from growing beings, discovering the world through play. Muffin might be annoying and setting a less-than-ideal example for our kids, but she’s a developmentally-appropriate example of a 3yo toddler too, and we’re not going to hold her to unrealistic standards. We don’t even expect perfection from the adults charged with their care, but that doesn’t mean we approve of the decisions that get made either. With Bluey, the children are simultaneously asked to make decisions that have actual impacts on other people (“The Sleepover,” 1.39) while also being shielded from the natural consequences of their own actions (“Ice Cream,” 2.47, “The Pool,” 1.22).

And look, I feel the need to stop the retort that I can feel coming deep in my bones, borne from the mouth of Bandit Heeler himself in episode 2.28 (“Movies”): “Look, it’s just monkeys singing songs, mate. Don’t think too hard about it.” No. Bandit is wrong (not for the first time), and repeating that line is a lazy, thought-terminating cliche. We do, in fact, want to read stuff into it. It is a meticulously-crafted show made with specificity, care, and attention, and as parents who care specifically about what their children pay attention to, we are here for in-depth Bluey conversation.

I say “we,” because Amy and I have talked so, so much about this show. This is a fairly regular topic of correspondence for us, in fact. We’re reproducing some of our unified impressions here because otherwise the thoughts will have nowhere to go except out through our ears in an explosion of cartoonish rainbow fuzz it is one of the most-streamed shows in the world, and for good reason. Our kids are just the right age1 to be enraptured by Bluey and Bingo, and we’ve enjoyed watching—and dissecting—the show right along with them. We both firmly believe that good storytelling can withstand close reading, and that the lasting meaning of Bluey deserves to be seen through an honest lens.

So let’s get our beef out of the way right now. We have some notes. Our primary issues with the show can be summed up briefly as such:

1. Several of the boundary-setting choices the parents make seem weak and easily downtrodden by the children, who are rarely given a firm “no.”

2. Bluey is often sassy to her parents in ways that are funny to begin with (and maybe a little too quotable) but are very easily imitated by small children who enjoy any excuse to talk back to adults.

3. The Heelers never wear clothes but we see them doing laundry all the time. What gives. (This isn’t really an issue with the show, Amy just likes to point it out to anyone who will listen, which is… not many people.)

4. Most glaringly, the show takes pretend play (a wonderful thing in and of itself) to a point that feels obnoxious at times.

Let’s look at some examples. “Rug Island” (2.10) is, in Amy’s opinion, perhaps the most egregious. Though on the surface it’s a sweet example of totally immersive imaginative play, the game’s all-encompassing nature reinforces children’s natural tendency toward self-absorption and disregard for others’ feelings. Like Muffin’s behavior, this is developmentally normal, but it doesn’t mean that the parents should be encouraging Bluey and Bingo to keep Lucky and Pat’s ball. Bandit even tries to get the girls to return it and then is convinced to stay in character and chase his neighbor away, keeping Lucky’s toy and sitting passively by while his children slobber all over it. Biscuits.

In “Chest” (3.11), Hillary argues that Chilli’s insistence on foregoing the actual rules of the game and setting up head knowledge versus heart emotions is a poor lesson. A seven-year-old absolutely is capable of learning the basic rules of chess, but the larger message is deficient: heads and hearts do not need to be in conflict with one another, and it is often by shaping a child’s mind through learning that the heart is guided too. One does not build upon the other like stairs, but both are vital components from the beginning.

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Amy actually doesn’t like to let her kids watch “Faceytalk” (3.24) or “Tina” (3.21) at all. Listen, Muffin is completely out of control in “Faceytalk,” and even if her behavior is not being portrayed as acceptable, (we appreciate that!) it—and her own parents’ arguments about how to discipline—is still being dramatized for children who aren’t necessarily old enough to grasp the nuances of why a character stealing a phone and throwing it in a pool is actually not a fun game to play. At one point, Hillary’s now-6-year-old started stomping her foot and yelling “Cowboy hat!” when she didn’t get her way. HARD PASS ON THAT ONE, CHICKADEE! And Tina? Ugh, don’t even get me started on Tina. At a certain age, “obey your parents because it’s our job to take care of you and keep you safe” is all that’s required; the role-playing of I’m Bigger And Can Cartoonishly Beat You Up is sending a deeply unnecessary message, even if it is mildly explained away at the end (so mildly in fact that Bluey even says she didn’t remember the point of the message in “Show and Tell,” 3.42).

Hillary has a bone to pick with Bandit’s spousal support in “Sheepdog” (3.12). Though yes, he does take on the job of keeping the girls quiet so Chilli can have 20 minutes where no one comes near her (and every mother says “yes, amen”), he gets far too into the game and doesn’t actually prevent Bluey from going and bothering her mom, thereby failing his one singular task.

Amy is annoyed by “Trampoline” (1.33) and the way that Bandit is constantly being distracted from work (this happens in “Yoga Ball”, 1.16, too!). Yes, flowers may bloom again but a person never has a chance to be young again, as we learned in “Takeaway” (1.14). But Bandit isn’t la-de-da-ing about looking at blooming flowers rather than playing with his kids; he’s trying to leave for work! Parents still have to pay the bills despite the siren call of imagination, and kids need to learn that fact.

“Omelette” (3.5) is an episode that has always bugged Hillary, not just because of the fact that Bingo’s “help” in the kitchen is incredibly wasteful, but because Bandit is being treated really badly on his birthday. It’s great that Bingo gets to feel included, but at the expense of her father getting any breakfast? Sometimes kids just need to learn that a task will be accessible when they’re bigger. (The Heelers actually kind of just suck at caring for the birthday person in general, as evidenced by Bingo being consistently ignored in “Handstand” [2.45].)

We are not-so-hotly divided over “Ice Cream” (2.47); Hillary leans toward the kind-but-strict response of “I’m sorry, but that’s what happens when you don’t eat your ice cream! Next time work out the licking thing or just don’t trade!” while Amy agrees with this theory but knows in her heart of hearts that she would be a pushover like Bandit and hand over her own ice cream. (Although it’s worth pointing out that none of this would have been an issue if Bandit had just stopped the licking dance right at the outset. Nip it in the bud, as Barney Fife would say.)

We could go on. (And we will, in the comments. Join us!)

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One thing we definitely understand is the issue of narrative progress: if Bandit and Chilli always made all the choices that we consider to be developmentally and relationally healthy (a feat we ourselves have yet to achieve) the show would be extremely boring. All stories need conflict and poor decisions to fuel drama, and those can come from all angles—including the parents! After Hillary’s beloathed “it’s just monkeys singing songs, mate,” this is probably the second most common retort to pointing out any problems that we personally have and it’s a far more compelling response. That said, when we tout the show as a “masterclass in parenting” or call Bandit a “transcendent” dad making real fathers feel bad about themselves, we may perhaps have lost the plot just a tiny bit.

The Guardian piece linked above (the one that compares Bandit to Barack Obama) notes how Bluey reversed the TV trend of the hopeless, bumbling father figure found in Peppa Pig and The Simpsons. This is a positive development for sure, but when the bar was set so insanely low for so long, any involved dad is going to look like a candidate for canonization. It’s okay to expect better and to want Bandit to use soap when washing pee off his foot.

We probably seem as though we are coming down really hard on Bluey, especially to those of you who may consider yourselves in the diehard fan camp, and we promise that’s not the intention. There is so much to love about this show. (The mere fact that we could talk about its ins and outs for hours puts it light-years ahead of any other children’s television offering! We can’t imagine feeling this strongly about, say, Blaze and the Monster Machines.) The emotional connection the Heelers share is beautiful to watch; the music is splendid; the animation isn’t frenetic like so many other cartoons; Chattermax is the evil demon antagonist of our nightmares. We’ve never felt more seen by an episode than “Sticky Gecko” (2.12), to the point that it horseshoes around to being almost hard to watch at times. “Sleepytime” (2.27) is legitimately a perfect seven minutes of television, and not only “for a kids’ show.” We’ve been inspired to make chores fun by “Housework” (3.13), and taken solace from “have a little cry, dust myself off, pick myself up, and keep going” a la “The Show.” People come into our lives and then leave again like Jean-Luc; friendships evolve and change as with Mia and Captain; sometimes we have to tolerate kids (and adults!) who are space invaders like Winton. It’s part of being human—no, wait.

Some of the things you might think we’d have a problem with, we actually don’t! For instance, we both love the controversial extended-length episode “The Sign” from season 3. (Amy wrote about “The Sign” in depth here.)

Bluey has infiltrated so much of how we talk and play with our kids: for the better, to be clear. Before we leave the house, we insist on a tactical wee; no one is a bad kid, we sometimes just behave bad; and we now refer to “Lucky’s dad’s rules” without exception when discussing birthday party games. “I’ll always be here for you, no matter what,” we tell our sleep-fighting kids (“Baby Race”). But yes, we do watch TV after you go to bed (“Unicorse”).

Speaking of games, there are arguments to be made against the fact that the parents play so interactively with the children on such a regular basis. Some have pointed out that the episodes are only about seven minutes long, and therefore we shouldn’t extrapolate more than seven minutes of intensive pretend play. But this argument falls apart when you consider the passage of time in most storylines; the seven-minute theory really only applies to episodes like “Takeaway” (1.14), where Bandit and the girls wait for a Chinese food order to be ready, “Blue Mountains” (1.21) which comprises a single pretend game during a picnic, and “Driving” (3.20) where Chilli and Bluey play a game during a 5-minute timer.

To be entirely fair, Joe Brumm, the show creator and writer of nearly every episode, has gone on the record saying that the deeply involved roleplay in which Bandit frequently immerses himself is a choice made to enhance the humor of the show, with the full knowledge that most child development experts recommend parents take a back seat for “pretend games.”

And though we have cried over “Baby Race” (2.50) and “Cricket” (3.47), the humor of the show is what balances the warm and sentimental moments and sticks with us in our daily conversation. (“Out of the way, power bill!”) Bluey isn’t, at its heart, a parenting lesson. Nor is it a morality tale to inspire children to emulate. (Children don’t really like that kind of thing anyway, it’s worth noting.) Ultimately, it is storytelling, and needs to be viewed and absorbed with the nuance that went into creating it. Bandit and Chilli aren’t perfect; Bluey and Bingo aren’t perfect. Joe and Dan Brumm and their co-creators aren’t perfect! The fact that an episode ends should not mean that nirvana has been achieved. Rather, we can learn about ourselves and look inward by enjoying the antics of the Heeler family, while feeling a kinship with the exhaustion and pride that Bandit and Chilli radiate when watching their children play together.

It isn’t perfect, and we don’t really want it to be. We want to see ourselves in the messy, sticky, crumb-ridden-back-of-the-car. We aren’t perfect, and we shouldn’t expect the Heelers to be, either.

Perfect, as Chilli tells Bluey in the episode of that title in season 3, is tough. Being a parent is tough. So is drawing. So is drawing life lessons from a seven-minute cartoon about four Australian dogs. But there’s something you need to know:

You’re doing great.

Anyway. Sleepytime rules and Rug Island drools. You know we’re right.

is a mom of two, a history aficionado, a connoisseur of good lattes and a close reader of every show she watches.

is the senior editor of The Pomegranate.

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On the Thursday night before my daughter’s third birthday, I began to consider that I may have bitten off more gingerbread than I could chew.

I wish the gingerbread in question was purely metaphorical, but alas, it was not. Last Christmas, I was caught up in the magic of the season, and one of the things I did with my then two-year-old daughter (E) was making gingerbread. I have always loved making gingerbread. A few years ago, I was given a set of moulds to make 3D gingerbread Christmas trees. I was never very successful at getting the shapes perfect, so the trees stood up on their own, but we had a lot of fun making a very wonky looking forest of Christmas gingerbread trees. I probably should have taken my limited success—with a very easy piece of gingerbread construction—as a warning.

Fast forward a few months, and I had started thinking about planning E’s third birthday. In her mind, the biggest question was obviously what kind of cake I would make. We regularly attend toddler birthday parties, so we’ve seen our fair share of impressive cakes. Castles, monster trucks, cricket pitches, and even the duck cake from Bluey. So, my daughter had high expectations of what was possible.

When she first requested a gingerbread house cake, I thought it was a passing fancy, but to my dismay, each time I asked, the answer came back the same. E knew what she wanted: it was gingerbread or bust. Eventually, I decided to go with the whimsy, and embrace the gingerbread theme. Being the middle of the year, no convenient gingerbread house kits were on hand. Luckily, my friend owned a set of moulds she willingly lent me. Maybe her eagerness to get them out of her house should have been a sign of things to come.

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I spent a year planning this summer’s trip to Disney World. I had never been to the most magical place on Earth, and neither had my husband. However, thanks to a generous family member, we were able to save money on our accommodations, making it possible for us to take the trip.

Since I had never been before, I didn’t know what to expect when I started researching and planning. I quickly found out that if I wanted to do a good job planning this trip I was going to have to learn another language. Between phrases like lightning lanes and rope dropping and multi-pass, it didn’t take long for me to feel completely out of my element. But that was okay, because we are taking our kids to Disney World! It will be great! I don’t need to actually do anything else! Just going is enough! Right? Right?

Depending on who you talk to, no, it’s not. You need to pay extra to skip the lines, and you need to get your daughter an appointment for a princess makeover at Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique. That will run you $200+. Don’t forget to schedule an appointment for your son to build a light saber and a droid at the Droid Depot. That will be another $500, please. And unless you want your kids to hate you, it’s best that you get a reservation for a $200 character dining experience so they can meet their favorite Disney friends. If you don’t do these things, well, you might as well just stay home.

This isn’t true, of course. You can have a magical time at Disney without doing these things, but that nagging might still sit at the bottom of your stomach telling you, if you could just do a little more, spend a little more money, it would be better, wouldn’t it?

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It was a familiar feeling— to be doing something for our kids and trying to make it as special or as fun as possible, and still be aware of every way that it might not be enough. It doesn’t take planning a day at Disney for this feeling to creep in. It happens all the time. You plan an outing for the nice park in town, and it’s all going well until you’re driving home and the kids want to stop for food and you have to say, “No, we have food at home.” Or you take your kids to the movies to see the one they really want to see, but feel like you’re breaking their spirit when you need to say no to concession stand candy and popcorn. Aren’t all the best moms buying their kids movie theater popcorn? Are all the best moms rich?

I recently learned through a physical therapist on Instagram that the shoes I’ve been buying my kids since they could walk are bad for foot development. She linked some other options that won’t ruin your child’s feet, and the lowest cost one was $75. During the same scroll session, I came across links for the best activities and products to enhance my child’s learning during summer, a toothbrush that helps your kids remember how long to brush, an online course on how to talk to your kids about the birds and the bees, and an alternative to a popular kids snack that won’t rot their brain with red dye 40 but will cost you $20 for a box of 4. If I bought everything that was marketed to me to help me be a good mom, I would end up in a debtors prison. We have not even gotten to the topic of paying for better schools or sports or private lessons for whatever it is that your kids are into.

Most of us know, deep down, that being rich or having a lot of money does not automatically equate to being great, or even good parents. It doesn’t even equate to having happy kids. But, also, doesn’t it? Because it’s not just things kids want, it’s things you are told they need. Things you are told they will suffer without. It is also, quite simply, things that would make your life easier.

I think we’re doing everyone, including parents, a disservice by pretending that money doesn’t make parenting and raising kids easier. All this is doing is perpetuating a world where we don’t have to confront the fact that too many people are living without things they actually need. We can talk all day long about how money doesn’t buy happiness, but to that I say—skill issue.

Money may not buy literal happiness, but it buys a lot of things that help you create it. Financial security is associated with lower stress about housing, food costs, medical bills, and childcare. Money buys resources. Money buys childcare, it buys food, it buys housing and a house cleaner twice a month. It buys toys and tickets to the waterpark. It buys the good shoes and the good books and it buys you the time and energy to read those books to your kids at the end of a long day. Money, in many instances, buys peace. Money, in many instances, buys margin. And I don’t know a parent among us who wouldn’t be a better parent with a little more margin and a little less stress on their plate.

Research shows that the things kids benefit most from are things like warmth and responsiveness, consistent care, feeling safe and loved, being supported emotionally, and healthy boundaries and communication with their parents or guardians. Those things do not require wealth. Yet, wealth often makes those things easier to provide for your kids.

There will always be two sides to the story—grass is always greener and all that. People who do have wealth most certainly face stressors that the rest of us don’t. Parents with high-earning jobs often are unable to spend as much quality time with the kids they are providing for. They often have commitments that keep them tied up with work obligations instead of home with their families. Still, this is a different stressor than the kind where you’re worried about paying your rent or buying your kids shoes that fit because they outgrew their last pair.

My husband and I are very fortunate to be able to do things for our kids that we didn’t get to do as kids, like going to Disney World. I wish this for every parent who desires it. More than a trip to a theme park though, I wish that every parent had a break from worrying and a break from stress. I wish for them a day of a few hours of childcare so that they can relax and come back to their kids ready to provide them with connection, presence, and support.

You can be an excellent mom with whatever you have. You can give your kids a magical childhood with very little. But it isn’t materialistic to say that money makes things easier, and it isn’t incorrect to say you might be a better mom if you had more of it.

But, me? I say there is no better mom than the one fighting every day to do a lot with a little in a world where you are constantly told it’s not enough.

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In 1927, Virginia Woolf published To the Lighthouse, an incredibly successful foray into the stream-of-consciousness genre of modernist literature. I have to admit I suffered through my required reading of TTL in high school, but as a slightly wiser and more seasoned adult, I’d like to revisit it. I’m sure I’d get more out of it this time around. From a purely scholarly perspective, I can appreciate now how it played with narrative and point of view, and its consideration of Mrs. Ramsay’s tenuous place in Edwardian family life and her own inner landscape.

I thought often of TTL as I submerged myself in Lisa Owens’ second novel, Natural Disaster.1 (I am not the only one to compare Natural Disaster with Virginia Woolf’s work. Jessie Thompson’s insightful review, with allusions to Mrs. Dalloway, incorporates Owens’ personal experience with career gaps, stay-at-home-parenting, and creativity, while Owens’ own essay for The Guardian touches on the great importance of domestic literature.)

I had very little idea of what to expect; The Pom received a complimentary advance copy from Little, Brown in exchange for an honest review, and I knew that it was about a mother of small children about to return to work after maternity leave. On this knowledge alone, I snapped the book up. So few contemporary novels, I have lamented often to friends, deal with the nuts and bolts of early motherhood. Those that do so in a modern setting often feature it as a secondary aspect of a larger story, such as Gillian MacAllister’s thriller Famous Last Words. Deeper dives into the psyche of mothering often take place in historical fiction, such as Nancy E. Turner’s award-winning These Is My Words, set in the late-19th-century Arizona territories. But the nitty-gritty everyday of disposable diapers and microplastics and screen time and trying to balance everything that is required of the twenty-first-century mother? That sort of story is harder to come by.

It is into this literary moment that Natural Disaster tumbles, riding full tilt in a double stroller, capturing both heart and neuroticism. I texted friends while I was reading it, that I was caught between feeling unable to put it down while also needing to take breaks: Owens’ central character felt so alive, so real and so connected to my own experience parenting two tiny chaos boys that I had to stop occasionally and remind myself that I was not actually living in her breathless world.

Repair. She has read about repair being the thing, the key, the determining factor in secure attachment, but there is less about how to manage the consistent, low-level rumble of certainty that she’s a monster, a terrible hypocrite, perhaps even the worst mother in the world. How else to explain such wildly negative responses to perfectly quotidian interactions like snack time?2

In the tradition of Daphne du Maurier’s much-beloved Rebecca, the main character is never named. At first, I worried I would not be able to relate to her, or that she would not be a fully formed person. I was glad to be wrong. Her identity has been swallowed up in the meticulous care of her two small sons, but even as her every action is devoted to them, she never quite feels as if she is doing, or being, enough. As the publisher’s blurb summarizes:

The mother of the novel has one more day of maternity leave. She’s determined to make it special. Her husband is out of town, but she won’t be cowed by the prospect of solo-parenting her toddler and infant. The Three Musketeers, as she secretly calls herself and the boys when their dad is away, will make a victory lap of all their favorite destinations–the library, the park, the cafe. She will be present. She will prepare healthy meals, and her sons will eat them. She will enjoy these last precious hours devoted to her children.

Of course, as any parent could predict, nothing goes as planned. The hours pass, small catastrophes accumulate, messages from her husband and ill-fitting work clothes torment her, self-doubt and guilt take hold. Finally, her day of celebration becomes a race to keep her children safe through the night.

The mind of a mother never stops, as I wrote in 2024. It is hard to explain to another person, even harder to replicate on paper, and yet somehow Lisa Owens manages to do it. Even better, she manages to be funny, a trick challenging to attempt and even harder to pull off when one is writing about toddlers and stress. Yet the book is not silly; the humor with which Owens infuses her prose makes the moments of heartbreaking truthfulness stand out in greater relief.

“She grips his hand, wondering, as she does every time the most trifling rebuff happens, whether she has what it takes to see this thing (motherhood) all the way through.”3

It would have been so easy for a novel that grapples honestly with motherly rage, sleep deprivation, and marital tension to be bleak or bitter. I worried, just a bit, as I opened it up, that this would be the case. Again, I was relieved to be wrong. The narrator’s love for her children and courage in the face of fright are heartwarming, not depressing. I won’t spoil the plot for you, but I’ll say this: I was left feeling as though someone had split me open, read the thoughts I did not even have language to express, and wrote them down. I found myself wishing the mother in the novel was a real person whom I could talk to, commiserate with, and perhaps even hug.

Instead, I will send that energy to the mothers around me. Perhaps you, who are reading this. I see you.

Also, I found myself sincerely coveting the U.K. policies on maternity leave, childcare, and emergency health services. As an American reader, the thought of a year of paid time for parental bonding brought a tear to my eye. Maybe public policy that takes care of parents isn’t natural, but perhaps it ought to be.

‘Childbirth is the most natural thing in the world,’ the antenatal class leader had said, reassuringly, but afterwards she understood it was the kind of double-speak she herself had learned to use when answering Felix’s difficult questions, telling part of the truth while using that same truth to mask the whole truth’s brutality: ‘natural’ could mean ‘rainbow’ but it could also mean ‘wildfire.’4

Natural Disaster is on sale July 7th, 2026.

Want to read more novels of motherhood? I recommend Today Will Be Different (another domestic story set over the course of just one day!) and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple, as well as Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby van Pelt, Happy People Don’t Live Here by , Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, and Finlay Donovan is Killing It (first of a series) by Elle Cosimano.

I do not recommend Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, and you can read my further thoughts on that book here.

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Introduction

Taking two small children to Costco is really very easy. Place them (the children) in a shopping cart, choose items from the warehouse, and pay for them (the items). Select dinner options from the food court kiosk, eat, and go home.

Unless, of course, one of the aforementioned small children interrupts the meal with the mighty and determined declaration, “I HAVE TO GO POTTY.”

In that case, gird your loins.

But let’s back up a little. The girl you see wending her feckless way through this story is me. The two children are my preschool-aged sons. We shall refer to the parties involved as Andy and Ben, though these are not actually their names, to protect the guilty. We shall also switch from second-person narrative and a how-to style to a first-person past-tense, because it is easier both to write and read. Also, How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World only goes so far comedically.

The Chronicle

The day? Sultry, hovering above 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The time? Approaching dinner, around 4:30 P.M. The errand? Pick up two prescriptions at the Costco pharmacy, purchase a few groceries, and get dinner at the food court before taking the boys to a friend’s house for the evening. In a blithe spirit of optimism, or perhaps the sin of Pride in my own conceit, I texted my friend, “shall I bring [your kids] some soft serve from Costco when we come?” Tuck this fragment away for later.

“Now, remember the rules,” I instructed my beloved offspring as they parkoured into various illegal crevices of the shopping cart. “Only Mother may push the perambulator; no one is to snatch merchandise from the stacks; anyone howling or brutalizing their brother will forfeit ice cream after our expedition.”

No one listened. We were off to a smashing start. On our way from the entrance to the pharmacy, Ben got in and out of the cart thrice, and Andy hung off the butt end of it and declared himself to be the “crash checker.”

In the line for the pharmacy, the children were aboundingly cheerful to the pharmacy tech, in hopes of obtaining filthy lucre dinosaur stickers. Their efforts were not in vain, but when the stickers were produced, they argued over the options and the queue behind us stacked up six deep.

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Once the medication that keeps me tethered to vestiges of sanity had been obtained, we cruised the aisles. “How many groceries are we getting?” Andy demanded suspiciously.

“About six,” I said, hoping this would throw him off from complaining that we were going to be there foreverrrrrrr, while also giving myself sufficient leeway to impulse purchase as the Spirits of Costco directed me. We avoided other, keener-eyed shoppers, picked up bell peppers and water and two baguettes and strawberries and granola bars and hand soap, sampled some lemonade and some burrata and some popsicles, and stood in silence to watch the rotisserie chickens revolve in their sauna.

By the time we made it to the checkout, with decidedly more than six items in the cart, and a disproportionate amount of filial shoving, my patience (such as it was) had worn thin and given way to Wrath. “SIT DOWN NOW,” I told both children, “or there will be NO ICE CREAM.” Andy’s careful accounting for Number of Items in the Cart did not, fortunately, extend to Number of Times Mother Has Issued an Empty Threat.

At the food court kiosk, we stand at last, overcome by the vast selection. Cheese or pepperoni pizza? Or hot dog? The children settle on pepperoni (Andy) and cheese (Ben) and in a moment of what may be considered the sin of Gluttony, I impulsively order a whole pizza (half pepperoni half cheese). It is a better deal, when you consider leftovers, than purchasing three individual slices. The children select their ice cream (strawberry twist with chocolate sauce) and I remember to order two, so we can take a second cup of ice cream to our friends’ house. Because we will finish our meal so swiftly, so efficiently, and sail to the parking lot with our purchases and our pizza box and our strawberry soft serve which will definitely not melt even a little bit.

The custom-ordered pizza takes a long time. The sailors grow mutinous. I tear off chunks of baguette, but they are not pacified for long. “Here,” I say in desperation, and I connect to the Costco Wi-Fi and pull up a Danny Go pirate video. I avoid eye contact with other, stronger parents who are waiting for the harassed food court employees to deliver their dinners. I am no stranger to screen time, but the passing of the cell phone in a public place feels like an invitation to judgment. Nevertheless, it quiets my cage of apes, and our pizza arrives a few minutes after the ice cream is ready. The children clamor for lemonade. I balance paper cups, plastic cups, straws, lids flimsier than the White House’s grip on sanity, and hustle us to a table. I forgot to get myself a fountain drink, but no matter. I tear open our 40-pack of water bottles like a ravenous beast.

“I Have to Go Potty,” announces Ben, in title case, standing upright on the picnic-style bench, just as we sink our teeth into the first slices.

“You Have Got to Be Kidding Me,” I reply in kind. Is it Greed, as I look down at my barely-touched dinner? Or is it Sloth, as I gaze upon the vast expanse of grocery and grease-stained pizza napkins and a brother with a murderous look upon his countenance at the thought of being dragged to the bathroom?

“I howd it in, Mommy,” says Ben, reassuringly. “I wait.”

Hmmm. This is not promising. But the alternative is chaos, so I mutter “okay good job” and return to arguing with Andy over his swiftly melting frozen dessert. I never thought the words “you MUST eat some of this hot fast food loaded with trans fats before you consume any cold food loaded with trans fats,” or some approximation thereof, would ever come out of my mouth, but here we are.

Nearby, another family placidly consumes their victuals, the two parents alternating between giving loving bites to their solitary toddler (a girl, not that it matters) and maintaining a conversation between themselves. I, the lone stalwart propping up my own army of two, despise the teamwork parents with great loathing, but chastise myself for indulging in Envy, and shove another napkin under Ben’s lemonade cup.

Somehow, we finish. Just as I have stashed the pizza box on top of the water bottle pack on the bottom tray of the cart and load the children in, preparing to join the Nile-long line of customers waiting to have their receipt checked at the exit, Ben pipes up again.

“NOW I go potty, Mommy.”

Biscuits.

It can’t be helped. Off we trundle. The restrooms are clear at the other end of the warehouse, and we have to doggedly fight our way upstream against the flow of foot traffic. “Why can’t we just go hooooooooooooome,” whines Andy, who earlier in the afternoon informed me that we had been running errands for a million years. (He was not terribly far off. Mea culpa.)

“Because your brother has to GO,” I hiss through clenched teeth, “and because we are still going to J and M’s house later, remember?”

At the ladies’ room, I am agog, I am aghast. MERCHANDISE IS NOT PERMITTED IN THE RESTROOMS, intones the sign, or it would if it had an audio component. The cart cannot go in with us.

But what if someone steals our water bottles? Our fruit? Our torn baguette and rapidly liquefying strawberry sludge? “Andy, I want you to stand here,” I direct as I peel Ben’s sticky self out of the cart and loop my purse around my neck. “Hold onto the cart with your hand and DO. NOT. LET. GO. I will be RIGHT HERE.” I thrust Ben into the closest stall—no, that one is disgusting. I thrust Ben into the next closest stall, craning my neck like a giraffe beyond the door so I can still see Andy. I can’t, actually, but I can see the cart. “ARE YOU THERE?” I demand, as Ben disrobes in totality (a choice both unsanitary and unnecessary).

“I’m right here, Mom,” Andy calls back. His hand, emerging into view, jostles the cart back and forth.

“Don’t do that,” I shriek. “You’ll spill the lemonades and the ice cream.”

He gives another shake for good measure.

“YOU GO OUT OF HEWE,” Ben hollers from the commode. “I NEED HAVE PWIVACY.”

“You’re three and can’t wipe and for heaven’s sake, I gave birth to you,” I grouse, but I step out of the stall and hold it shut with my hand. I am closer to Andy now, physically, but I also can’t see him anymore because the darn privacy wall is in the way. If I were a better artist I’d draw you a picture of the Costco restroom layout but you’ll just have to use your imagination.

“ANDY,” I say, and he pops his little head around the corner of the privacy wall and gives me a little wave and the smirk in his big brown eyes makes me almost melt into a puddle, but not quite because I am still holding on to the top of the toilet stall door. “STAND STILL,” I say, and he doesn’t.

Other patrons bustle in and out of the bathroom. Ben makes un-promising noises from within the stall. “Isn’t he done yet?” Andy demands, hopping from one foot to another on a floor tile that is making an ominously sticky sort of sound, and Ben shouts, “NO ANDY! I POOPIN!” and I want to bang my head against the stall door but I am afraid of the germs and nasties.

“Why don’t you go too, since we’re here” I suggest to Andy, but he has hopped back to the cart to prevent petty theft, and another woman has entered the stall next to us and given a loud exclamation of disgust. I want to hope that she does not think we created the sanitation crisis therein but I am honestly too tired to care.

I disassociate for a moment and dream about being a small zoo animal living in a climate-controlled terrarium with nothing to do but eat kibble and exercise and sleep.

“YOU WIPE ME NOW?” Ben demands, shaking me out of my fantasy, and my pen shall draw a veil over the details thereof. Suffice it to say that he was Not Done Yet.

Somehow, we emerge from the stall fully clothed and ready for disinfecting. Andy is blow-drying his head under the blow dryer. I do not ask. The sink is too tall for Ben alone, and only about one out of seven million public restrooms provides a stool for toddlers, so I have to hastily wash my hands while he yodels with impatience and then hoist him onto my knee, purse banging into his bottom, so he can wash his own.

A beautiful Costco employee with completely unsweaty hair, shirt that is not hanging askew and not a purse necklace to be seen, has entered the bathroom to sanitize the toilet beside Ben’s. “Good job, mom,” she says to me, looking amused, as I load the children back into the cart—insisting that they both sit in the child seats this time—and haul our caravan out.

I did a good job. I will cling to this and remember it. Thank you, beautiful Costco lady.

We emerge into the furnace of the parking lot, bedraggled of appearance but staunch in heart. The car is an oasis in the desert, if I can only get there with this cart that weighs eight thousand pounds (crammed as it is with children, groceries, water bottles, and thoroughly melted ice cream).

“Mom, I fink I am too big for this seat now,” Andy confides.

“Probably,” I say. “This is probably the last time you’ll sit in it. On our next trip if we tried it we’d probably have to get the firefighters to cut you out of it.”

Ben is horrified. “FIREFIGHTERS NOT TUT HIM OUT,” he reproaches me.

“I meant they’d cut the seat,” I explain lamely, “not him.”

The car is a billion degrees, and as I tumble the stuff into it, the ice cream which is now a beverage sloshes onto my arm.

“Mom, I think I have to—” Andy begins, as I start up the engine, and I clench the wheel in my distressingly sticky hands and say, “YOU CAN WAIT UNTIL WE GET TO OUR FRIENDS’ HOUSE.”

To his credit, he does. He’s a decent little fellow. In all honesty, they both are.

What This Means For Our Future

I have three options going forward:

1. Pick up my monthly Brain Pills after my husband gets home around 7:30, squeaking to Costco and back before the pharmacy closes at 8:30, and use grocery pickup or whatever the heck normal people do

2. Tell my children we are never going to shop at Costco again, and switch pharmacies and cut up my black Executive Card and change my identity and move to Tuscaloosa

3. Suck it up and keep doing this until the kids are old enough to be left home alone.

I am taking suggestions from all and sundry, but it does not follow that I will be acting in accordance with them.

Conclusion

I believe I have, after all this, earned a slice of apple pie and ice cream, but I am not willing to go out and buy it, nor to globetrot and make it myself, so I shall have to be contented with a popsicle. And some torn baguette.

This post is not in any way sponsored by Costco Wholesale but we are certainly open to the possibility in the future.

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A friend of mine recently reached out to me and another friend about age-appropriate life skills. “My six-year-old is doing Camp Daddy this summer,” she said, referencing the fact that her husband, a teacher, is at home caring for their children until the new school year begins. “We’re working on learning how to call 911 in an emergency, make a sandwich, fold laundry, tie shoes, and take a shower independently. What would you add to the skill list?”

We joked about getting up and getting breakfast independently so mom can sleep in (ha), and I started thinking about the skills my own kids need to learn. We haven't mastered shoe-tying yet, because they don't wear shoes that need to be tied. Eventually I'm sure that will change, but there are so many Velcro and slip-on options that we haven't needed to worry about it. My kids don't know how to dial a number on a phone, or to rewind a tape in a VCR (okay, that one's genuinely obsolete).

What are some of the practical skills you learned as a child that aren't really applicable to your children's lives today?

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A guest post by Anna Brian.

It was during one of many meltdowns outside our daycare, right in the heart of the college district of our city—my two-year-old slamming his tantruming body onto the filthy sidewalk, me screaming at my four-year-old as he streaked toward the cars whipping down the adjacent busy road—that the thought first popped into my head: I should be charging the university for birth control.

I wonder now for how many young people I’ve provided a cautionary tale against parenthood—a horror story they think of as they debate future plans with partners or reach for the condom box in the heat of a one-night-stand—all from our daily walking of the one or two blocks from the car to school in the morning, and back again in the late afternoon.

Certainly, there are the moms who make things look easy—even though I’d argue that it’s NOT easy, for anyone! But there are parents who seem to always know the right, patient, gentle thing to say to keep their toddler from projectiling himself into a pile of cigarette butts in front of a group of 18-year-olds entering a tattoo shop. We’re the family who makes a couple think, “hmmmm, maybe we don’t want to have a second kid.”

Sometimes, I feel designed in a lab to make other moms feel good about their parenting.

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It always surprises people who knew me before. Maybe it’s the former “gifted kid” thing (guilty). The overachiever thing, the perfectionist thing. But the chaos was always there, bubbling just under the surface. It just took motherhood to truly bring it out.

And it’s not cute chaos: the artsy mom with her hair askew. The house cluttered because life is happening all around. A few episodes of Daniel Tiger here or there because “it’s OK in moderation!” A takeout meal or two a week. Oh, no. We’re talking amounts of screen time that would make experts weep. My oldest has never voluntarily eaten a vegetable; meals are the same rotation of nuggets, pizza, MAYBE mac n’ cheese if the big kid is feeling it that day. And forget baths every day; if we can get the children (generally kicking and screaming) into the tub twice a week, I ride that high through all the skipped baths the following one.

A mom friend—a nurse—once casually pointed out that the crackers some parents think are healthy (and that my kids were presently chowing into) don’t actually have any nutritional value and I thought, do you think I don’t know? Do you think I let them binge Blippi for their health? I know these are not great choices. Mistakes are being made.

I also know what you’re probably thinking and trust me—trust me!—the worst thing you can come up with, I’ve already thought it about myself; late at night, when the insecurities suppressed all day seep back in at the edges. Yes, my kids are a little bit wild, but so are a lot of peoples’ kids! I know the problem is (mostly, haha) not the kids’ actions but how I handle them. Why can’t I get through a doctor’s appointment, a grocery store trip, sometimes even a school drop-off without a lollipop or a Hot Wheels bribe? Why can’t I get it together to have family dinner more than once in a blue moon? Why does the inside of my car always look like a Cheerio box and a toy factory had a baby that exploded?

Neurodivergence is definitely a factor here, for both my husband and me. The fact that these conditions are highly hereditary does help explain my children, who never once met a demand they didn’t want to avoid. My oldest recently received no diagnosis after an evaluation, notwithstanding the fact that he only chose beige food even as a baby-led-weaning infant. However, the lack of diagnosis doesn’t change the reality on the ground. Add onto this relatively minor but impactful chronic health issues (me!), sometimes debilitating social anxiety (hubby!), life-threatening food allergies (kids! Both of them!), as well as four therapies for one child (speech, occupational, physical, and feeding), and it does often feel like we’re drowning in it.

All this to say that yes, I have challenges. But I also have a lot of privileges, and many people with these same challenges get through the days without their children mainlining YouTube Kids.

In a different essay, this is where I would share some kind of message that I’ve discovered about parenting this way; some secret I’ve figured out that the type-A mind could never comprehend. If this is what you’re looking for now, 1) Have you even been paying attention AND 2) If you were able to fever-dream some message out of the above, will you please let me know?!

Sometimes, I feel bad that I’m the mom my kids got. A mom who can’t figure out how to executive-function her way through a semi-home-cooked meal at the end of the day even with her children glued to the TV. A mom who gets so overstimulated by the screaming and the touching and the barking dog that she retreats to the kitchen because Mama needs a minute, just one minute, and then yells at the tearful child who follows her in there because even that minute away was just too much. A mom who lets Paw Patrol fruit snacks pass for vegetables.

So yeah, sometimes I regret, for them, that they got a chaos mom. But then I see how they cling to me so fiercely; how they know instinctively in their sensitive little bodies that for all my flaws, I understand them more fully than anyone else ever could. The way I’m so attuned to their triggers that I know how they’ll react before they do. How for all their reactivity—and all of MY reactivity—I’m their safe space in an uncertain world.

Whoops. I guess we got to a message after all.

Not that I’m justifying my approach; I don’t actually recommend YouTube Kids! But maybe as moms our tendency to self-flagellate, to focus on our mistakes (and/or what we view as our mistakes) to the exclusion of all else gets in the way of us seeing the mini parenting miracles we perform every day. Maybe we are all out here just trying to do our best with the various hands we’ve been dealt, frantically comparing ourselves to our neighbors, to our mothers-in-law, to that trad wife on Instagram and just hoping beyond hope, beyond REASON that we are doing a good enough job to not screw up our kids. Maybe some day I will take my own advice and cut myself a break.

And maybe—just maybe—you will, too.

Anna Brian lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, two children, and a cantankerous senior dog. Right at this moment she is either a) being used as a jungle gym b) wiping a butt, probably not her own c) having a conversation with her husband that’s been interrupted 500 times OR d) all of the above! She occasionally putters around Bluesky.

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My younger two children had a sudden urge to tidy up on a recent Saturday morning. Summers come early in central Florida, so I was pleasantly surprised that there was still time left for spring cleaning. And I was completely shocked that my children chose to clean without any prompting. My kids are 10 and 12, so the days when it was fun to clean with a toy feather duster, mop, and broom exist only in my fading memories.

My daughter cleared out and organized a desk where she keeps, for lack of a better term, an assortment of trash. I guess it’s supposed to be her arts-and-crafts area, but it seems to serve mostly as a hangout spot for bits of paper and beads and pieces of cardboard with random items glued on. The locals rave about it. It’s a place you can get lost in and escape the trash bin for months, if not years.

Meanwhile, my son asked for my phone so he could listen to “Orbiter,” a new song by Noah Kahan, and proceeded to clear off and reorganize a couple of shelves cluttered with games and decrepit old books. Inexplicably, we sorted almost everything into the keep pile, but hey, at least the stacks on the shelves became a bit more angular and crisp. We also put the old toy feather duster to use. What can I say: we don’t clean a lot, and we don’t get rid of things often, so the toy duster is still here consistently cluttering up a corner and is also our best cleaning implement.

The cleaning frenzy didn’t last long. Nothing does. Children grow up. The years slip past. Forgotten toys collect dust in bins and on disorganized shelves. Yet here, in a crowded combination dining room/playroom that feels mostly like a museum commemorating a lifetime of my children’s interests, I still sit typing away on my loyal laptop at the end of a paint-splattered table.

I’ve been a stay-at-home parent for over a decade now, and this in-between space where the children are more self-sufficient in many ways, but still reliant on me for transportation and peanut butter jelly sandwich assembly, is rather confusing. Many years ago, I naively assumed my life would change dramatically when all my kids started full-time school. But when the much-anticipated start of school for my youngest came and went (more than five years ago now!), it felt like nothing really changed.

Shockingly, after a decade of fitful self-employment or outright unemployment, I was unable to seamlessly transition into a financially lucrative and emotionally rewarding career between the hours of 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. I wrote some radio ads until AI swept that freelance job into the abyss, I wrote a book that very few people read, and I continued to edit a parenting humor publication. None of these activities paid much, if anything, and they didn’t bring me any sustained level of personal satisfaction.

Now, from the outside, being a full-time parent for more than a decade while maintaining a decent portfolio of side quests might seem like more than enough for one person to do. And objectively, it probably is, but I’ve yet to mention the one major contributor to my ongoing angst about my perceived lack of productivity and the relentless passage of time: mental illness.

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7:20 A.M.

My husband’s alarm wakes me up. I can’t believe I’ve slept in this late. With one bleary eye still closed, I grab my phone and open the Nanit app to check on E, my 2-year-old (! how is she 2!). I don’t even want to say how great she’s been sleeping lately because every parent knows that talking about how well your child is sleeping means it will end. So all I’ll say is: all three of us had a restful night and E is still snoozing away.

I go into the kitchen and start my day by chewing a prenatal gummy and pouring some liquid IV and a ton of ice into my water bottle. I take approximately three sips of cold brew even though I know I’ll throw it up. (I have hyperemesis gravidarum, which in my case, means I throw up 5-7x a day every single day of pregnancy, after every time I eat or drink, and sometimes even when I don’t.) I sit down on the couch and decide to put some make-up on while I wait either for E to wake up or for it to be time for me to wake her up.

I have an appointment today to get the thickness of my C-Section scar checked. As I understand it, second C-Section is scheduled for 39 weeks but if the scar is thinner than the doctors would like it to be, I may need to deliver at 38 weeks in order to avoid an increased possibility of uterine dehiscence or rupture. Now that I’m in the (knock on wood) safe zone of being past 36 weeks, I do hope that I get to have this baby early. I’m so, so ready to not be pregnant anymore.

8 A.M.

I turn off E’s sound machine and she immediately wakes up. It’s kind of crazy how Pavlov-ed she is by that thing. I go into her room and open the blinds and ask her how her night was and all she says is “I want dada” so I call Alex in. He gets her out of bed and we do our morning routine of brushing her teeth and getting her hair done. Alex’s mom, my angel of a mother-in-law who has been trading off with my own mom taking care of us in the last few months of pregnancy while I struggle with HG, a full-time job, and parenting a toddler, comes over. Alex leaves for work with a promise of meeting me at my appointment later and E and my MIL start making breakfast. By 8:20, I’m sitting at my desk starting on my work for the day. I only have another week of work before my nesting time off starts at Yahoo (you can read my work there here) which then rolls into maternity leave.

9:15 A.M.

My MIL makes me a smoothie and I drink it then promptly vomit. I work on some story edits and then log into a work meeting.

10:00 A.M.

E and my MIL leave for the park for the morning. She says “bye, Mom!” and walks outside and I swallow my instinct to chase her and just hold her for hours. The more pregnant I get, the weirder it feels for E to not be constantly by my side. I think it must be hormonal but even when she goes to a park half a mile away with a trusted caregiver, I miss her so much I sometimes cry.

Back inside, I grab a Diet Coke and a pack of crackers for my hour-long meeting. I hope I can wait to vomit until after the meeting is done. I’m so tired I feel like I could fall asleep on top of my keyboard. I’m not sure if this level of exhaustion is an HG thing or a 9-months-pregnant thing but I’m dreaming of my bed.

11:00 A.M.

I vomit again as soon as my meeting ends. My hands are shaky – I think from low blood sugar – so I eat a handful of sour gummies and hope that tides me over slightly. I put in another 45 minutes of work even though I feel like a ghost just tapping on a keyboard.

11:45 A.M.

I curl up on the couch with my book (The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett) and resolve to read and rest until my daughter gets home from the park around 12:30. I fight the urge to ask my MIL to bring her home early. It’s insane how much I miss E when she’s away from me but also, I know that she’s having more fun running around at the park than she would be having hanging with me at home, especially when I’m this tired.

12:15 P.M.

E and my MIL get home from the park, with my FIL who is also visiting for a few days. E snuggles up against me on the couch and tells me all about her day. When my MIL tries to straighten up the living room and touches my book, E says “that’s Mama’s book” and gives it to me. She’s very into rules these days. There is a pillow on the couch that she won’t let anyone but my MIL use.

We hang out for a little while then E tells me she wants milk, which is her way of saying “I want you to give me milk and cuddle me and put me to sleep.” As we walk into her bedroom, she says, “oh! my glasses!” and rips them off and tosses them to the floor. We settle into the chair in her nursery and chat more about her day. She makes a list of people she loves and includes my MIL, my FIL, my sisters, and her dad. It is very sweet. At the end of the list, she just keeps saying “And I love Mama too” and my heart just… almost bursts. I love her so much it hurts.

12:45 P.M.

I lay her down in her crib, where she’ll chat to herself and play with her stuffies for approximately 15 minutes before falling asleep. I vomit again then look for clothes that are vaguely comfortable at 36 weeks pregnant. I end up wearing some stretchy shorts and a bra-less Abercrombie tank that barely covers my belly, figuring I’ll throw my jean jacket on top and it’ll be fine. I gather my supplies (book, wallet, water bottle, barf bag) into a tote bag. I toggle between podcast episodes, wishing I hadn’t already listened to the new This American Life this morning while I was working then remember that Spotify has this new feature where you can scan the page of the book you’re reading and it’ll bring you to that part of the audiobook. I try it and the app perfectly finds my spot. I don’t drive much, so the idea of getting to listen to my book on this 35-minute drive is so nice.

1:15 P.M.

I get in the car and drive to my C-Section scar appointment, listening to my book. On the way, I go through the McDonald’s drive-thru and get a small McFlurry and medium fry. Even though I’ll vomit them up, I get a quick blood sugar boost that makes me feel like I’m at least half-alive.

2:00 P.M.

I’ve checked into the appointment and am waiting to be called back. I take a quick trip to the bathroom to vomit and by the time I get out, my husband is there. He kisses my forehead and gives me the sweet, pitying look he always gives me when he can tell I just threw up.

2:30 P.M.

We’re called back. My blood pressure is taken (it’s fine, thankfully) and we wait for the ultrasound tech to come in and start the scan. I check the Nanit app on my phone and watch E sleeping in her crib. The tech comes in and starts the scan and I alternate between watching the screen where my second daughter is wiggling around and watching my husband watch the screen. I love the look on his face when he looks at his babies. The tech is lovely and warm and asks us if we’re sure about when I got pregnant because the baby is measuring pretty big. This is astonishing to me both because I’ve been literally starving for 9 months (“the baby takes what it needs,” the tech assures me, as my doctor has this entire time) and because babies in my family are uniformly only ever 6 pounds.

The scan takes about 20 minutes and then we wait for the doctor to come in and review the results and check my scar. Because I’m such a miserable pregnant person, I’ve been vaguely hoping that my scar has thinned out enough that they’ll want to reschedule my C-Section for 38 weeks instead of 39 weeks but when the doctor comes in, she says everything looks great and we’re set for the end of June. This is, of course, technically good news but I’m so hungry and so tired and so depressed from being so hungry and so tired that the idea of having to make it through three more weeks in this state makes me feel panicky. I tell myself this is what’s best for the baby and for me. I just hope that I don’t go into labor before my scheduled C-Section.

Alex and I leave the office and drive home separately because he met me there from work. On the drive home, I call my mom and update her and use voice-to-text to do the same with my sisters before listening to my book.

4:00 P.M.

I park outside our house and when I walk into the gate, E is waiting for me. She squeals and hugs me and I melt. I ask her what she’s been doing with her grandparents and she tells me in the toddlerese I love so much. Back in the house, I throw up again and suddenly feel myself drawn to bed as though it’s a magnet. I text Alex and my MIL, “okay if I rest?” and fall asleep before they text me back that of course it’s okay. This is being 36 weeks pregnant.

5:30 P.M.

Alex sits on the edge of our bed and puts his hand on my shoulder to wake me up. I can’t believe I actually fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon but I feel so much better. Our bedroom door opens and E walks in. “Wake up, Mommy!” she yells and I assure her that I am waking up.

Alex, E, my MIL and FIL and I sit down to a dinner of leftover pizza from the night before. E is not at all interested in eating and I’m too tired to fight her so I let her go play while we eat. She had a big lunch and at 2-years-old, she’s kind of an either-or kind of girl. I figure she’ll tell me if she’s hungry later. I eat a piece of pizza and drink a La Croix then excuse myself to the bathroom to throw up.

While Alex and his parents are finishing their dinner, E and I sit on the couch together and read. Although I prefer reading on my Kindle, I always try to make sure that I have a physical book I’m reading at any given time because I have this feeling that E can’t really tell the difference between my phone and my Kindle and I don’t want her looking up at me and seeing me staring into a screen. Right now, my physical book is a galley of the incredible The Parisian Heist by Jo Piazza and I can hardly put it down. E settles into the crook in my arm with her own book and turns the pages, occasionally exclaiming to me about what she’s ‘reading’. Moments like this are a dream come true.

6:00 P.M.

With dinner finished and cleaned up, Alex turns on the NBA Finals. We are a Big Basketball Family, to the point that the other day, E said, apropos of nothing, “I love basketball.” As Alex turns on the game, he asks her who we’re going to watch tonight and she says “Wemby!” The only screentime she gets is when basketball is on and even then, she kind of pays attention for a minute or two and then walks off to play with some toys or chat with us. She wanders off and we hear some splashing and my MIL gets up to find her trying to scrub the toilet with the toilet brush, doubtlessly imitating her dad who scrubs the toilet every day to make sure I have a nice place to vomit. It is both very cute and very sad.

6:45 P.M.

Alex gets E in her pajamas and she gets out the last of her pre-bedtime zoomies. She is twirling in her nightgown and laughing hysterically.

7:00 P.M.

My FIL takes E into her bedroom and reads her a few books. This is something he always dreamt of doing before he became a grandfather and I love that it’s his reality now.

7:15 P.M.

Daddy is requested by E. He sits with her in the rocking chair in her room and they talk about her day. “More talking,” she says when he seems to be slowing down. I listen to them chat from the living room while I watch the basketball game and read my book. Life is really, really good despite how incredibly brutal an HG pregnancy is.

7:30 P.M.

E requests I go in to finish up the bedtime routine. My anxious mind can’t help but count how many days we have left of doing this before our lives change forever when the new baby comes. It’s this weird pre-grief that’s mixed with excitement and it makes my chest hurt. I hold E and we laugh and joke and after about 10 minutes, I tell her it’s time for bed and that I love her and I’ll see her in the morning. I lay her down in her crib with her approximately 35 stuffies and rejoin Alex on the couch, where we watch the rest of the basketball game. The Spurs win. E is asleep. My MIL and FIL have left and it’s just me and Alex, like it was for so many years.

8:15 P.M.

We watch an episode of Widow’s Bay which we’re really enjoying. I love Matthew Rhys from The Americans so it’s really fun to see him in another role. I didn’t expect Widow’s Bay to be laugh-out-loud funny but it is.

9:00 P.M.

I throw up one last time (I’ve lost count but I think it’s been 6 or 7 times today which is par for the course) and get ready for bed. Alex comes in and tucks me in and gives me an ice pack for my aching head. I try to find a comfortable position and settle in with my Kindle to read.

9:20 P.M.

I tuck my Kindle under my pillow and marvel at the fact that, just a few weeks from now, there will be a bassinet next to our bed with a newborn in it. I fall asleep with the distinct feeling of standing on a precipice.

Fortesa Latifi is a journalist and mom based in Los Angeles. She is the author of Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.

You can buy Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online anywhere you get your books, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop, Hudson Booksellers, Target, and Walmart.

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Happy Monday, friends! Today we’re bringing you a link roundup for Media We’ve Been Enjoying Lately.

recommends…

I loved reading Mad Mable. It was excellent storytelling with the perfect amount of mystery and suspense.

I'm also loving Olivia Rodrigo’s new album! Sometimes you just need to dissociate to some teeny bopper bangers.

recommends…

This excellent piece on matrescence by .

Fortesa Latifi

motherhood literally rewires the brain. why don't we know the word for it?

When my daughter was born, it felt like my entire brain reorganized itself. I didn’t recognize the self I had been before I became a mother. The world was changed, and I felt raw inside of it…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · 7 comments · Fortesa Latifi

Audrey Burges is always hilarious and her satirical take on her teen's perception of her typical day had me snort-laughing to the point that my own children wanted to know what was so funny.

This piece by on grief, wisdom and dissonance. Though it touches on a well-known influencer who is currently in the news, I appreciated that it is respectful and gentle, not salacious or trying to capitalize on someone else’s grief.

Andrea Holme Writes

Dear Jen Hamilton

Dear Jen…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Andrea Holme

recommends…

This summer has gotten off to a rocky start in our household. The same week my kids got out for break, we had to put our beloved dog down. When I’m not managing chaos, I’m navigating my own grief. As a result, nearly everything I have consumed has been a form of disassociation.

This week I have finally started to crawl out of my bubble and explore new things, gravitating toward the gentle in all that I seek. Kevin Morby’s album, Little Wide Open, has been exactly what I need. It is a record filled with such warm instrumentals and thoughtful lyrics, you feel as though you might melt into the music. As a fellow Missourian, I resonate heavily with his love letter to the heartlands. “Badlands” has been playing on a near-constant loop, and the mimicked tornado sirens following the second verse is one of my favorite moments in recent releases.

I started slowly pecking away at my library holds pile, starting with the novel If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard. The book itself is…fine. It falls into the same category as Miranda July’s All Fours where an author bases the writerly main character loosely on herself. There are times when I feel as though I want to protect her from the cynics of the world. Most of the time, I feel as though I would like to fight her in a grocery store parking lot. Novels like these always feel like disaster tourism where I get the chance to watch her blow up her life from afar. And unfortunately, that is my favorite category.

Now that the NBA Finals have finished, I also intend to dive back into the novel Three Ring Circus by Jeff Pearlman. I have an entire shelf of nonfictional books based on all the American wars, but this is the most dad-lit book I own. The book tells the story of the Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal years leading the Lakers to victory. If you love explosive inside stories and the chance to finally understand the difference between a Flagrant 1 and a Flagrant 2, it’s the perfect thing.

What have you been enjoying lately?

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Listen. I am not a sociologist. Or an economist. Or a statistician. I am just a millennial mom, a Christian who wants to love her neighbor, not storm the Capitol, trying to help my family thrive in a culture and country that seems, increasingly, to be stacking the odds against us. And I take issue with the idea of having more kids than you can afford.

Recently, Erika Kirk spoke at the Hillsdale College commencement in Michigan. Erika Kirk, for those who aren’t familiar, is a former pageant queen turned right wing influencer. She is also the widow of Charlie Kirk, podcaster and culture war agitator, who was assassinated last September at Utah Valley University. Erika, the mother of two small children, has taken the reins of her late husband’s organization, Turning Point USA, for which she travels the country, schmoozes with top bananas of the Trump administration, and speaks to packed arenas on the importance of preserving Western civilization and traditional gender roles–like being a submissive wife and a stay-at-home mother who is focused on domestic felicity and doesn’t concern herself with matters outside her household.

You’ll have to just imagine me staring into the camera like Jim from The Office. Blink, blink.

For a deeper breakdown of what Erika Kirk had to say at Hillsdale, I recommend Sara Petersen’s excellent essay on Kirk’s speech (and, yes, I did watch the speech in its entirety for research purposes, and then I contemplated a sip of bleach). Today, I want to focus on a single sentence: her injunction to the class of 2026, quoting her late husband. “He [Charlie] would also say to have more kids than you can afford.”

Now you can imagine me grimacing like Michael from The Office. “Nope. Don’t like that.”

(Neither did her audience, by the way. She paused and chuckled after the statement, but no one else did.)

Let me be very clear: I am not against having kids (I have two!), nor against trusting God to take care of your family (in fact, as a Christian I am very much for this!). But I am indubitably against the idea of encouraging young people to make plans they know they have no way of seeing through, in order to fulfill some nebulous idea of “rejecting modernity, embracing tradition,” especially when that encouragement comes from someone who is flying chartered jets around the country.

As I see it, there are two major problems with the idea of having more kids than you can afford:

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Recently, a mom of boys wrote the post above, and it went viral. Some said it was satire, pointing out the problems with emotionally enmeshed “boy moms.” Others maintain it never claims to be satire and that the photos Jenny Mollen posted on Instagram (of herself tussling with/embracing her 12yo son) were inappropriate. On Threads, a few users threatened to report Mollen to CPS.

What do you think? Is Jenny Mollen using cringe humor and absurdity to highlight some real feelings mixed with a larger societal problem? And what is it about self-proclaimed “boy moms” that so quickly ventures into uncomfortable territory? Where do we draw the line between goofy jokes and being creepy about children?

Leave a comment

P.S. wrote about one particular aspect of being a mom of boys (not a #boymom) earlier this year, and you might find it interesting in light of this topic.

5:52 am: Woken by my 4-year-old, in bed beside me, whose first words of the day are “Egypt is really hot because Africa is there.” I guess that’s right…almost. Good morning to you too.

6:00: I count the number of children coming to the party (18).

6:01: The 4-year-old asks me if the candy I ordered for the pinata arrived last night (yes it did).

6:10: We are still in bed. The questions from the 4-year-old are coming thick and fast. “When is my birthday gonna be? One day?” She has vetoed Rice Krispie buns and reminds me once again how she DOES NOT want Rice Krispie buns. I tell her I’m gonna make them for the grown ups because I’d like one with my tea. 4yo: “Nope. If you make them, I’ll CRUSH them.” Bit aggressive but okaaaaaay.

6:25: The 6-year-old, who is also in bed beside us, wakes up and tells us she was making a dream out of our voices.

6:30: I get up, make coffee, make the kids’ breakfast. Referee a fight between them. Broker peace.

6:50: Do the laundry while noting I’m particularly irritated by the constant “Moooom” requests today. Pour my own coffee and have breakfast. Tidy our bedroom. Continue with laundry.

7:50: shower

8:05: As I’m making the lunches, the 6-year-old asks us to guess her charade. She claps her hands over her head and between us, my husband and I guess “Jumping jacks! Waving at a concert! Drowning!” She tells us she was a scissors.

At 8:15, we leave the apartment. “Enjoy the day,” the doorman says to us, “It’s gonna be a comfortable one.”

The three of us walk to school with the 4-year-old in the stroller and the 6 year old scooting along beside us. I drop one kid off at Pre-K (8:30) and then the other at first grade in another school (8:45). Between the two schools, the 6-year-old and I discuss topics ranging from her tooth coming out to colonialism.

This sounds unlikely but it’s come up a lot over the past few weeks, ever since they asked why there’s so many Irish people in America and then why Ireland was so poor for so long and then why Irish people don’t speak Irish. I’ve responded with what I hope are age appropriate (but truthful) answers (i.e. just say: ‘England’). It means my kids seriously hate on England now but if you can’t pass on your prejudices to the next generation, what’s the point in having kids?

8:50 With both kids deposited at school, I see a text from my husband to call him. It sounds urgent but when I call him he suggests we get coffee and also asks me what the weather is like and what he should wear. I look around and summarise the outfits of everyone around me: shorts, t-shirts and Birkenstocks and we agree to meet in Tartinery at Columbus Circle. We are there for 9:05 and both have juice.

At 9:40, we walk together down Broadway and part at Times Square - me, for a hair appointment and David to go buy jeans. I arrive at 10:06, 6 minutes late for my 10am appointment but it’s OK because my stylist is coming in behind me. A friend put me onto this hairdresser last year. It is low-cost, low-frills. No frills, I dare say. Forget your free champagne, coffee or even a glass of water. You’ll be lucky to get a smile in here…and it suits me down to the ground.

Today’s hair stylist didn’t get the memo that the place is to be deathly silent. She chats away and asks what I’m doing for the day, asks about the theme of the birthday party (KPop Demon Hunters), asks to see a picture of the kids, tells me they are adorable and that they clearly get it from me. She looks exactly like a blond version of the Nanny from the 1990s sitcom of the same name and she is really nice.

10:25: My colour is in and I’m stewing under the heater when I suddenly wonder if my scalp is burning? Definitely tingling.. is that a burn? (This is the price you pay for low cost hairdressers. I say nothing). In the chair, I check my email. There’s an invitation to a Knicks game next week which I gladly accept and there’s an email from yet another Dublin school to say they are full up for September. A family of 3 kids has also confirmed their attendance at the party since this morning, bringing the kid total up to 21. I remember a kid in our building I forgot to ask and I text his parents, hoping it doesn’t sound too much like an afterthought.

10:38: The kid in our building accepts so we are up to 22.

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11:02: The blond Nanny asks how much I want off and I say to my shoulder. She is shocked and asks in disbelief “Are you sure you want THAT much off, coming into summer?”. I know the reason she can’t picture anyone having hair that short is because she is in her twenties... but the level of her shock influenced me sufficiently that I agree to her suggestion of “Okay, let’s just do two inches”. She holds up what she thinks is two inches but which is definitely only one inch and I say “Actually, three inches” (hoping she’ll cut two).

I kind of love this Nanny lookalike. Her name is Jennifer.

I bumped into a woman I know at the salon! A mom of a friend of my 6-year-old. She didn’t recognise me straight away, which was very gratifying as I said hello to her while I had the hairdresser cape on and colour in my hair aka the ugliest you will ever look in your life. I contemplate inviting her boys to the party too and try to figure out if I could manage that without it seeming like an afterthought. It would bring us up to 24 kids but feck it, I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb at this stage. And they did invite us to their 5-year-old’s party. (I often feel like my role since I gave up my job and moved to America to support my husband’s career has been “diplomat’s spouse.” As you can see, I am not very good at it.)

I decide I will ask her but when I go to leave, she is inside the fumigation room and it looks like I’d be taking my life in my hands to enter it. (This place is just so cheap you seriously don’t ask any questions). Instead I text her as soon as I leave and she responds immediately that they would love to come. We are now up to 24 children and as many adults.

11:42: I’m feeling peckish and decide I’ll get lunch even though it is not yet noon. I head for the Halal Guys cart on 53rd, which I’ve never had before because there is always an insane line but surely in the AM I will beat the line. There is no line! I order a chicken platter (11:53) and walked toward Bryant Park to meet David for lunch.

12pm My Fitbit buzzes to let me know I’ve done 10 thousand steps. I will miss all this walking when we leave NYC.

12:05: I’m starting to get a bit stressed about the number of kids coming to the party now. 24. Shiiiit. The only entertainment I have is 40 colouring pages of KPop Demon Hunters, some tattoo transfers and a toy tunnel for kids to crawl through (which I’m hoping will do some seriously heavy lifting on the entertainment front on the day). After that, we have a pin the tail on the Derpy game and Pass The Parcel. I was going to leave out Pass The Parcel as it is just a LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARE ever since they introduced a present into every layer. The stress of organising it simply cannot be overstated. But the 7 year old down the hall told me she is really looking forward to the party “especially the pass game” and that one comment alone has pressured me into keeping it in my party games repertoire.

At 12:19 I arrive at Bryant Park. It is so pretty! David already has a poké bowl and he admires my chicken platter but suggests pork would have been a better option. I tell him there was no pork option at the Halal cart.

When we’re finished around 12:50, we wander up 5th Avenue and part ways outside Aritzia (1:01). David never noticed my hair. Good thing it didn’t cost a lot. (It still cost $200). Aritzia’s new shop is so nice! I must leave the house to shop more. I buy this shirt which I love.

At 1:26 I leave Aritzia and get the D train home. Pour myself a big glass of Robinsons, crack a can of Diet Coke, crank the aircon and jump into bed for 45 minutes before I have to collect the kids. (I’m not explaining British cultural references to American readers. You have to figure it out yourself like we spent our whole lives doing. Here is a picture as a context clue for Robinsons):

1:40: I needed some downtime before the afternoon ahead of me because I know it is a busy one. “Downtime from what? You didn’t do a single thing to progress the party one bit,” you might say, and you would be correct. But constantly counting up kids and wondering if we have enough cake (which I also haven’t bought) to go round...it’s exhausting.

2:34 I leave on foot for the ten minute walk to collect one kid from school and then the other. The 4-year-old and I stop into Duane Reade between schools to buy some small toys for Pass the Parcel.

The kids have activities after school every day of the week and today it is speech therapy and fashion/sewing class! There was only one day this year I wasn’t able to do the school pick-up and a babysitter had to step in. I wrote a detailed set of instructions for school collection for her and right as I typed out the line “then get a cab to the Upper East Side and drop the 6-year-old at her fashion class,” I had an out-of-body experience where I realised our lives are ridiculous.

3:15: We hail a cab, as per my instructions, to the Upper East Side. At 3:50, the 6-year-old jumps out for her sewing class where she is making a skirt (with pockets!) and the 4-year-old and I continue on to her 4pm speech appointment. At 4:30, we are all finished and have an hour to kill before collection at fashion school. We call into a toy shop to buy more gifts for Pass the Parcel. The 4-year-old asks me for a Labubu while we’re there and I say no but when she’s not looking, I secretly buy it to add to the present we got her for tomorrow (a bubble gun). We stroll towards the sewing class and kill more time waiting at reception there where I do the same (secretly buy a sequinned hairband she admired). At 5:30, the 6-year-old appears and the 3 of us Subway down to 57th street and then walk home. In the subway elevator out of the station, the 4-year-old petted a dog while the 6-year-old told me about a parent who came to school today to share with the class their family tradition (Shabbat).

At 6:15, we’re walking in the apartment door and I start on the kids’ dinner (pasta and meatballs). Now the party prep begins in earnest. I start to wrap the gifts for Pass the Parcel but the kids want to help me and not just help me but actually wrap the presents themselves. The thing is though, they are APPALLING at wrapping and refuse to accept the role I keep trying to give them: simply passing me the sellotape. It was disastrous. In the end they stress me out so much, I put them in front of the TV with their (now made) dinner.

At 7:10 Dave got home and I asked him to fill the pinata with candy with the kids. I asked the 6-year-old to pick a card from the birthday card box for her sister and to put bun cases on a tray while I melted chocolate for rice krispie buns. I asked the 4 year old to put out the toy microphones I bought and she said: “Actually, I don’t have time. I have to hop.” (This is not a colloquialism, she literally had to go hop on one foot).

At 8 o’clock, David put the kids to bed while I arranged a colouring station, hung up the pin the tail on the Derpy and searched Netflix for KPop singalong songs. I prepared the party bags and realised I managed to buy 30 party bags but contents for only 12. I raided the pinata to pad them out, adding unblown balloons I decided we no longer needed at the party too.

At 9:05, I popped out to Whole Foods, bringing the stroller for storage, to buy a birthday cake, berries and wrapping paper for Pass the Parcel because the three rolls I bought were not enough!! I pick up a prepared birthday cake but worry it is not big enough so buy a few dozen cupcakes too. I pick up some sugar-free lollies at the till to go into the party bags which are still a bit light. I call in to Target on the way home because Whole Foods had no wrapping paper but Target doesn’t either!!! I decide I’m calling it a night. I’m dead on my feet. I’ll go get it in the morning.

I get home at 9:47 but the takeout David had ordered still hasn’t arrived so I continue tidying up and preparing for the party until it does. David declares the place is “in pretty good shape” and plonks himself on the couch. I point out plenty of things still to be done and any time his arse gets anywhere near the couch, I give him another specific job. At 10:32, while he is washing the dishes that I told him to, I plonk MY arse on the couch.

I write a list of things I have to do tomorrow which is very little: wash the fruit, set the table, finish Pass the Parcel… aaand I’m done. 23,128 steps taken today. At 10:40pm, our takeout arrives and we split a Thai curry for dinner on the couch before bed.

When I first heard the price of the standard 90-minute birthday party at the local soft play centre where we spend most weekends at other kids birthdays ($1,500 and you have to bring your own cake), my soul near left my body.

But you know, I spent a good chunk of this day thinking how I would happily pay $1,500 if it meant I never had to organise a game of Pass the Parcel again. I wouldn’t have to do a thing (except order the cake).

This is a note to self that I am NOT hosting a home birthday party next year. But then, I say that every year....

Aisling Marron is a SAHM as well as writer of bestselling weekly newsletter, “Notes from New York“, where she writes about bringing up kids and day-to-day life in NYC.

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A follow-up to this holiday piece.

Hey mama, looks like we’re having a little bit of a meltdown over here. Have you tried some deep breathing with your kiddo? How about you sit down with them and help them co-regulate. Not over there, though, you’re disturbing other people. Remember that your child shouldn’t be disruptive in a public place—the world doesn’t revolve around them and their needs! Obviously don’t say that to your child, though. An offhand remark like that could create a wound that EMDR can never heal.

Whoa, okay, we’re not going to touch things in this store, friend! We’re going to keep our hands to ourselves. Mama, have you ever heard of saying no? Don’t say it too much, of course, that’s not supportive or nurturing. Consider guiding your kiddo’s consciousness to a different activity, through the power of your own calm demeanor. Definitely do not force your child to sit and stay buckled into the shopping cart! That is restraint, which is essentially abuse. Educate yourself.

You know, when I was that age, I obeyed my mother without question. Her word was law! I wouldn’t dream of acting like an entitled brat the way kids these days do. All my mother had to do was LOOK at me and I snapped to attention. Your children simply don’t know who’s boss. Be firm! Stop trying to be your child’s friend.

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Okay, leading with fear is never the answer, so I’m really concerned that you’re telling your little one not to run into traffic because they might get killed. You are the parent and it’s your responsibility to hold onto them and keep them from running! Excuse me, is that a LEASH? Do you view your child as an animal who needs to be choked into obedience? Interesting.

Hey, mama, let’s try to move our language to a positivity-based approach! I’m hearing a lot of negativity coming from you and that’s not helpful to our friend’s development. Have you tried reinforcing the behavior you want to see rather than cruelly deriding the behavior you don’t want to see? Don’t say “good job” or “I’m proud of you” though. That puts the focus on you, and nothing is less important in the parent-child relationship than you. Be sure to sign up for my course on how to navigate this crucial relationship—only you can authentically shape your child’s future emotional, mental, spiritual, and digestive health.

Excuse me? EXCUSE ME? Did I hear you tell this precious little bean that they would not get candy after dinner if they hit their sibling again? I can’t believe you would engage with such a regressive and harmful practice as withholding food. Genuinely contemplating a call to CPS right now. Kind of concerning that you’re allowing this child candy at all, however. Red Dye #40 is the leading cause of aggressive behavior in kids this age. Have you considered making healthier choices?

What? You’re considering not bringing your child to this big church service/family dinner/marriage celebration/holiday event? How are they ever going to learn to interact with people if you keep them in your house seeing no one but you all day? Wow, that’s not how we behave in public, friend! You’re at a 10 and I need you to be at a 0. Maybe your mom needs to teach you how to behave at home before you come to an important day like this. Kids really shouldn’t be allowed in restaurants with expensive glassware and frail elderly patrons. If they must be in the restaurant, can’t you entertain them somehow? Not with an iPad—are you insane? When I was their age I was content with half a broken crayon and a dirty Subway napkin, and I was thankful.

Hey there, are we having some trouble sharing? Mama, why on earth would you let our friend here bring their own toy to the park? That’s just asking for a tantrum. You can’t expect other children to not want to touch it. But just so you know, you really do need to give them agency in choosing small stuff like taking toys to the park, because otherwise they will feel smothered by your coercive control. Don’t make them share with other children! Would you like it if some strange adult came up and wanted a drink of your coffee? I didn’t think so. Children are people, in case you didn’t know.

Speaking of which, I don’t think you’d tell your spouse to go sit in their room alone if they were having a bad day. Solitary confinement is NEVER the answer to big feelings. You’ve probably already started a volcano of shame in their impressionable little brain. But you’re the parent—you can’t be a pushover wuss who allows your kid to continue throwing a fit and hurting other people! Get them out of this space right now. Stay with them while they calm down. Stay with your other children at the same time! Answer that work call. Keep dinner from burning. You’ve got this, mama. No, actually you definitely don’t. That’s the smoke alarm. Could you turn that off, please? The level of noise in here right now is overstimulating me.

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Our subscriber chat on Substack is for paid members only, but these sometimes-weekly open discussion forums are for everyone.

As a mom of kids under 6, this graphic caught my eye on Instagram. My boys share a room, and though we try to get them to sleep by 8 pm, this usually doesn't happen. They're in bed between 7:30 and 8, but the actual falling asleep often doesn'thappen until 8:30. I've debated trying to push this earlier in the evening (I'd certainly relish the opportunity for a little more time to myself at night!), but my husband doesn't usually get home from work until 7 or 7:30, and they would risk not seeing him at all. Plus, as a decidedly not-morning person, the thought of them potentially waking up earlier than 6 or 6:30 fills me with a cold and sinister dread.

Once again, I'm reminded that best practices are just that—an ideal, created in a vacuum, that may or may not be accessible to the average family.

What do you think? Do your kids follow the bedtime guidelines outlined here? How have you made that happen—and if not, why not?

—Amy

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Today I saw an Instagram Reel from a local real estate agent advertising a home for sale. The main selling point? “A Backyard Built for a 90s Childhood.”

Spend any amount of time on social media these days and you’ll probably be hit with no less than 37 posts about “being a 90s mom” or “giving your child a 90s childhood.” It has quickly become a popular content strategy for moms who publicly say they aim to give their kids a simpler, slower, less screen-y childhood (like the one they had) and now apparently one for realtors as well.

One notable theme I see is this idea that motherhood was easier in the 90s. I can see where they are coming from. I’ve thought this many times myself. Moms in the 90s didn’t have to worry about iPads, internet gaming, or pervs trying to befriend their teenagers on snapchat.

I was born in 1990 and feel like I grew up in the sweet spot of having a 90s childhood and an early 2000s adolescence. I had the sleepovers, the nights picking out movies at Blockbuster, and I played outside for hours with my friends in our neighborhood without ever checking in with my parents. I didn’t have a sip of water during the summers that didn’t come from a sort of rusty garden hose in someone’s backyard. My bike tires wore out faster than my dad could replace them. My sister and I watched whatever was on TV, racing to grab snacks during commercial breaks and get back in time for the show. It was not perfect, except it was a little perfect.

When I was a kid and my mom needed a break, she could sit us down in front of the TV and put a VHS tape in the VCR. For a run time of 93 minutes, she knew exactly what we were watching. We couldn’t switch it to a movie she had never heard of on another streaming platform without her knowing. She didn’t have to keep coming back to make sure we were watching what we were supposed to. Now, when I want to let my 7-year-old watch a show so I can fold some laundry or get dinner started, I would only be a responsible parent if I checked back every so often between folding t-shirts to make sure he hadn’t navigated over to a show I didn’t know about. And that’s in addition to the 2-3 hours researching and setting up parental controls before we even turned the TV on. Being able to pop in a VHS tape and forget about it? Dare I say, the 90s beckon me.

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When I became a mom in 2018, I did what every mom-to-be does: I went to the internet to learn what I should buy and what I should do and what is the best car-seat-stroller-combo in my budget? I found answers to questions I never knew to ask. This led to years of taking any question I had to the internet, looking for another mom who was smarter and wiser than me and would help me know what to do to prevent the inevitable traumatization of my children due to giving them red dye 40, or whatever. This is when I realized I could know what other moms were doing all the time, and what their houses looked like, and see the perfectly nutritious meals they were feeding their kids. This is also when I discovered we aren’t supposed to be saying “Good job!” to our kids anymore. It’s going to destroy their intrinsic motivation to complete tasks, or something. Anyway, my mom didn’t have any of that in the 90s.

My mom couldn’t scroll TikTok for 20 minutes and within that time frame discover 16 new fatal diseases or accidents from which her children could die, leading to uncontrollable anxiety about every potential danger, even the ones that she didn’t know existed until that second. She could let us play outside for hours alone without worrying if Debbi down the street was going to call the police and report her for negligence.

But she also didn’t have grocery pickup or the ability to check my location on a cell phone to make sure I was safe. She couldn’t use the GPS on her phone to get us to a friend’s house and if we took a wrong turn, well, guess we’re spending the night there. My mom couldn’t pop in AirPods and inconspicuously listen to an audiobook while doing menial tasks or to tune out another episode of Paw Patrol. No one had the ability to set up a meal train for her and quickly send the link to her family and friends when she was freshly postpartum. And when she was up alone in the middle of the night with one of us screaming children, she couldn’t send a text reaching out for support to a friend who she knew was probably also up in the middle of the night. She couldn’t do a quick internet search for a picky-eater-friendly recipe when she didn’t know what to make for dinner, or google dosage for a medicine when she lost the packaging.

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You won’t miss the middle of the night feedings and diaper changes, the unsolicited advice, the comments on the name you chose. You won’t miss “oh, so cute, is it a boy or a girl?” You won’t miss the confusion that has replaced all your instincts to understand human nonverbal communication once you are left alone with a tiny person whose only word is a guttural WAAAAAAAAH.

You’re not going to miss cluster feedings or sleep regressions. You won’t miss the times when you thought you’d be fine without the extra outfit and were very, very wrong. You won’t miss monitoring milestones and comparing your child’s progress as if the date of their first step is a competition to be won. You won’t miss the days of following your suddenly mobile person around, asking, “what is in your mouth/hand/onesie?”

You won’t miss the loneliness you experience when your world shrinks to encompass their needs. You won’t miss the arguments with a co-parent over discipline issues or budget (or the spectacular grief of having no input on your decisions at all).

You won’t miss wondering when your world will expand again to include YOUR needs.

You won’t miss potty training or staying in their rooms (or beds!) until they fall asleep, and you absolutely won’t miss the neck and back aches that come from bending your body into positions to accommodate their tiny mattresses or ultra short potty chairs.

You won’t miss the internal battle between reality and your ideals of what life would look like, meals would look like, home and rest and going out in public would look like. You won’t miss offering foods and insisting they take xx number of bites before yielding to this week’s Top Three Foods Precious Will Eat.

You won’t miss sight words or math problems that are definitely being taught very differently from the way you learned. You won’t miss parent-teacher conferences or class Valentine’s Day parties or Spirit Weeks. You won’t miss all the phone calls and emails it takes just to get an appointment to try to get ANSWERS.

You won’t miss the mad dash to sign up for a summer program, nor will you miss “we’ll figure out how to pay for it later.”

You won’t miss the worries that grow with your child, exceeding their height, exceeding your own. You won’t miss sending multiple texts just to get an annoyed “k.” in response. You won’t miss sitting up late, waiting for a return, dreading a call, deciding whether to be angry if curfew is missed or relieved that they made it home safely. You won’t miss the arguments over showers or laundry or what on earth happened to all of our forks (a mystery that will never be solved, I’m afraid). You won’t miss calculating the number of places to go divided by the number of available drivers on any given weekend.

Older moms often say, “You’ll miss this when they’re older,” and we mean well. We’ve forgotten what it’s like for miniscule moments to dominate our days, how easily real frustrations can be minimized with a thoughtless phrase. We don’t mean to do that; we’re just repeating what other experienced moms said to us. It felt off to us at the time, but we didn’t have the nervous system regulation tools to push back on it yet. Good for you, keep building that toolbox.

When we say, “You’ll miss this when they’re older,” we mean you’ll miss the nostalgic things we miss – the smell of baby shampoo and gentle laundry soap, the sweet sound and feel of a sleeping baby’s breath on your cheek, the new discoveries every day of the toddler and preschool years. We miss knock-knock jokes, dinosaur books, and tea parties and the first time meeting Anne Shirley and Diana Barry. We miss being the first person they tell all their important news to, all the time. We miss being the last person they want to speak to every night.

And if pressed, we, the older moms in my middle-ish forties age range, may be willing to admit that not all of motherhood was what we expected. Life doesn’t deliver on every dream. And every parent has a stretch where they feel like they might need someone else to sub in for a bit. Parenting feels like a bait-and-switch – with no refund.

For me, it was in the middle school to early high school years, for both of my daughters. From about 13 and a half to 16, neither of them liked me very much, and neither was shy about letting me know. I was tired and angry and trying to be polite and brave-faced in public. I felt like I couldn’t talk about the reality of my at-home life.

My children slammed doors, lied to me, stared at me defiantly without saying a word, told me very true things about myself that I didn’t like hearing. I don’t miss those days.

On the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t miss those days. We built trust between the three of us, even in our conflicts. We learned to tease apart which parts of our arguments were driven by being a teenager and a tired mom, and which parts were real issues to be resolved. It took time to learn how to relate to each other.

Life brought us changes we couldn’t predict. Those changes didn’t cause these conflicts, but they limited my time and energy to deal with them. As I look back, I can see that even though I couldn’t be there every second the way I hoped I would when I brought them home from the hospital, as far as they’re concerned, I didn’t miss anything. None of the time I spent fighting for their growth and their good was wasted.

I didn’t miss the glimpses of who my little girls used to be; of the women they ‘re becoming.

I didn’t miss the times when they saw through MY pain and said exactly the words I needed to hear. I didn’t miss when they said, “Mom, it’s okay for you to cry. You don’t have to be strong for us all the time.”

I didn’t miss when they transitioned through their own hard times and let me start comforting, coaching, counseling them again.

As they transitioned out of their own difficult years, I didn’t miss the spa nights with foaming cloud masks and picking out fun nail polish colors and dancing in the living room to the music that used to make them cringe. I didn’t miss the spots of joy, slowly growing in the space left by those hard times.

And you won’t miss the joys, either. Unless you are living in a 1980s movie where your career focus is a major plot device creating the conflict that can only be resolved by finally going to your child’s baseball game, you won’t miss it.

You won’t miss wondering if you could have done things differently, and you won’t miss their assurances of, “No, Mom, we know you did the best you could.” “Mom, we always knew you loved us.” “Mom, I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

You won’t miss graduations or proms, helping them study for tests, dreaming about what they want to be when they grow up. You won’t miss the first tooth or the first lost tooth, the first tricycle ride and scraped knee. You won’t miss the first toddling steps or the moment they reach out their hands to mimic you as you say, “SOOOOOO BIG.”

You won’t miss it.

No matter what, I believe you will be there for as many of those big little moments as you can. You will make every effort to be present, and you will show what it looks like to reach your limit and still be loving. You will find yourself again and let the people you love most know who YOU are. You will see your children growing into the people they are destined to become – and discover again how much you truly like them.

And one day you will look back and know that what you witnessed was enough.

Andrea Holme is a mom of two young adults who keep her cool-adjacent. Avidly indoorsy, she can be found crafting with words or yarn, with an audiobook in her ears. She writes to remind herself and her friends that life is more than what we see, every day contains beauty, and hope is God’s most gracious gift. You can read her Substack at and follow her on Instagram.

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This review contains spoilers, both for the plot of Yesteryear and the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy it.

I opened Yesteryear thinking I was diving into a time-travel novel that would deliver some biting wit about the hypocrisy inherent in tradwife social media content. The premise on which I had been sold involved a woman who broadcast her picture-perfect, old-fashioned, “traditional values” life on Instagram to millions of followers, but woke up one day in 1855 (or was it 1805? Publicity material couldn’t seem to make up its mind) and had to figure out what happened to her real life and how to get it back.

I’m fascinated by this topic, because to a certain extent I have lived it. I grew up in a home-church, nondenominational, evangelical Protestant environment. That mouthful basically just means I was homeschooled, very sheltered from the outside world, and we had church in our kitchen—sometimes with other families, sometimes not. As a teenager, figuring out my own path, I leaned very hard into the precursor to tradwife content: the Stay-At-Home-Daughter movement, an offshoot of the conservative homeschooling world which preached that a girl’s purpose was to grow up to be a godly, feminine, submissive wife and mother. She would not be over-educated in a liberal college environment, nor would she work outside the home. Her place was one of domestic bliss, freed from the chains of modern feminism, and thriving as the gentle guide of her household (but deferring always to her husband, of course). I thought it was the closest path to God. I ate it up. This was before Instagram, so I read every blog I could follow, completed the Bible studies, devoured all the books on courtship instead of dating and why higher education is a scam. Wanting only to be a better Christian, I failed to see how so much of this ideology was crafted to keep women in their place, to twist faith into a cage. (That realization would come later, but it’s not the focus of this piece today.)

And, as an adult who had slowly shed these beliefs as she matured, I thought this was what Yesteryear was all about.

I thought I was going to read about the hypocrisy that dogs so much of viral “homesteading mama” content; the marketing behind the dreamy captions about living life slowly and feeding your children organically; the way that so many young women in high-control religious groups have been sold a diabolical lie about the path to happiness.

I think perhaps, at one point, Caro Claire Burke thought she was writing that book.

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Sold as a satirical thriller, at first blush the book seems to do all of those things. Natalie Heller Mills, the main character of Yesteryear (based not-so-subtly on Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm) is a somehow-Harvard-educated1 Christian woman who has married the son of a conservative politician and started a lifestyle brand on Yesteryear Ranch. Nannies take care of her children behind the scenes while she films motherhood content; the organic produce the farm sells is riddled with pesticide; Caleb, her wannabe cowboy husband, is a blithering idiot diving down the internet rabbit hole into the online manosphere. Natalie, the book’s narrator, divides her inner monologue into Real Life Natalie and Online Natalie, holding herself together—just barely—with the reminder that her audience is always watching. Her millions of followers, that is. And the Lord, of course. But not her church family—not her pastor or bishop or elder—because she doesn’t have one.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that a novel about a tradwife influencer would never once bring a church into the equation?

Once I saw this gap, I couldn’t unsee it. The other little details (I’ll get to some of those) paled in comparison to the glaring lack of any spiritual force tying Natalie to her rigid expectations for herself. The greatest hint we ever get about Natalie’s religious community is the Bible study group she reluctantly attends at Harvard (where she considers the other Harvard students “stupid” with no further substance). There is no older woman mentoring her and urging her to joyfully submit to her husband; no fire-and-brimstone preacher threatening hell in her dreams; no stacks of marriage books dictating her relationship with—her servility to—her weak-willed husband. There is no religious oversight in Natalie’s hyper-conservative bubble, one that—in the real world—is defined by religious oversight, only King James Bible verses plucked out of context and an occasional silent appeal to God.

Who, exactly, is Natalie’s God? What kind of theology did her college self want to study? What religion is driving the nebulous convictions her family adheres to?

Is Natalie Pentecostal, with her long uncut hair? Is she Catholic, “blessing herself” before prayer and refusing to use birth control and watching her mother chug hard liquor (??) at church functions? (And if so, why is she so confused by the college drinking culture, since she is clearly no stranger to her mother’s binges?) Is she Baptist, with a total-immersion adult baptism that somehow bizarrely happened just before she went to college despite having been raised in this nebulous unnamed faith? Is she Anglican, since she references a priest and not a pastor? Is she Mormon, living with her handsome blond husband from a political family, in a region of Idaho that does not actually exist? (Geographically, Yesteryear Ranch is impossible. A nitpick, certainly, but worth adding to the bonfire.) What Christian denomination believes that denying your child siblings is child abuse?2 The girls in her Harvard dorm are unsure of Natalie’s exact beliefs. Caro Claire Burke isn’t—she planned it this way. Started writing, stopped researching, as she said to Kirkus Reviews. Because she doesn’t care.

“I spoke to a lot of Mormon and evangelical women to get a baseline understanding of the requirements in a fundamentalist Christian community. But I didn’t want Natalie to be a specific religion. It’s meant to be a little vague. Once I started writing, I stopped researching.”

All of those fundie denominations, she breezily told The Rumpus, are basically the same.

“I realized very quickly that whether it’s Mormonism or evangelicalism or Jehovah’s Witness, it’s really all the same in terms of how women are treated and what the expectations are for them. There are, of course, minor differences, but the more you learn about it, and the more you interview women, and listen to podcasts—I was even lurking on Reddit threads of women who had left these communities—and you hear the same story again and again about what the expectations are.”

Except, of course, they aren’t. And the people who have emerged from life under FLDS control, or Bill Gothard’s Baptist clutches, or the cult-like Reformed intensity of Christ Kirk in Moscow, Idaho (!), the Vision Forums and Advanced Training Institutes and Institutes for Basic Life Principles and Ladies Against Feminism—they all have a story to tell that is clearer and more deeply personal than Natalie’s vague appeals to “the Lord” to forgive her for saying “fuck” when she just took His name in vain three times in the last chapter.

“That isn’t an unreliable narrator,” writes in Yesteryear is Not a Novel. “That’s a narrator with zero continuity of consciousness.”

It is obvious that Burke had an axe to grind against Christian fundamentalist tradwives, but by skipping over the fertilizer that grew their beliefs, she erased the object of her parody. You cannot satirize a shadow-thing. You cannot reverse-engineer a spiritual scrupulosity starting with the outcome you need for the plot.

A reader who knows nothing about conservative Christianity could be forgiven for thinking that maybe Caro Claire Burke just could not write about this unless she lived it. I don’t actually believe that. I think she was quite capable of writing this story in a way that made sense; the problem is that she did not choose to. There is an abundance of books out there that do catalog the intricacies of growing up in this kind of lifestyle: memoirs by Jill Duggar, Shari Franke, Tia Levings and Tara Westover all explore, in great detail, the kind of rules and restrictions that accompany high-control religious living– and it does not seem that Burke drew on any of those to write this novel. In attempting to satirize #EveryChristianWoman, she painted a portrait of no one.

It all could have been explained so easily, by the way. To do away with the details of a specific religious sect would have been as simple as a passage that mentioned how the Mills family worshiped at home, because the nearby churches were too liberal or too conservative or too whatever-you-like. Starting one’s own system of leadership because the available options are perceived to be not good enough is a valid case for critique and I would have been interested to see that explored. As it is, the total lack of any regularity in worship, any family prayer or marital fight ended by a simple “God says you have to obey me” makes Natalie and Caleb read like a sloppy caricature rather than a well-honed satire.

“Oh, but that’s the point,” some readers have said. “Natalie’s a hypocritical and unreliable narrator, so of course she doesn’t really believe any of this stuff.” But that’s just it. Natalie does believe. She believes… something. What Natalie believes is the train that carries the story to its disappointing end: every twist and turn of the plot is based on the world Natalie perceives. And that world is riddled with references to God; at one point she hallucinates Him in Mary’s face on the steps of the 1855 farmhouse. Once she determines that her apparent dive into the past is not actually a reality show, she becomes convinced that this experience is a test from the Lord. But of course, we know better, at the end. The whole experience was borne out of Natalie’s extreme mental illness, and the fact that her family was drugging her without her knowledge for fifteen years.

For the reader who thought they were going to sink their teeth into schadenfreude, it’s a slap in the face that gets more comical with every outlandish choice. Natalie’s narcissism is brushed under the rug along with her family’s culpability in disabling her. The older sister shows up with a warrant, but no cops, and takes the kids! No one ever tries to look for the Mills family, who disappeared from modern life but are still living at the exact same address! Natalie receives a thirty-year prison sentence for child abuse3 carried out under the influence of drugs she didn’t choose to take! Caleb, who has always known what year they are living in, is… never heard from again!

“Who cares?” some might say. “It’s a thriller. We don’t need character development.” Laying aside the irrefutable fact that this book is making waves in the literary world, and being interrogated against the zeitgeist as few genre novels could ever hope to be, I would argue that character development always matters. It is on character development that fiction hinges!

I know we are supposed to hate Natalie. She’s an awful person. She is self-obsessed. She is not kind. But if Christian fundamentalism is truly what she was born and bred into, then she has also been manipulated, lied to, and let down by the people around her—and that includes an author who failed to give her a believable interiority. If her story were more realistic, she would be at the beck and call of a patriarchal system that gives women a platform if and only if they “keep sweet, pray and obey.” If her course had run true to life, it would have been flagged at every turn by men assuring her they were her authority, reminding her that she was created to serve them, silencing her questions and sending her back to the kitchen. But instead, we are left with a hint that it’s all in her head, which sells short the very real legalistic and high-control nature of fundamentalism.

Jerusalem Demsas and Maibritt Hinkel wrote an excellent takedown of this at :

“In a few short pages, Burke undermines her novel’s fundamental purpose. Most tradwives are not suffering from psychotic breaks; they are promoting a new social conservatism compatible with just enough female empowerment to allow them to pursue commercial success but not enough to cast off their central purpose as submissive wives and mothers. But if Natalie is just a crazy woman disconnected from her religious community, then what can she reveal or say about any of this?”

Ultimately, Burke’s not-so-carefully crafted narrative falls apart—not because of an unreliable narrator, but because of a story that doesn’t know what it’s saying. Having Natalie end up clinically insane, drugged out of her mind in a freezing farmhouse may seem like her just deserts, but this ending crosses from Angry Women territory– mean-spirited glee at a well-deserved comeuppance—into a shoddy deus ex machina riddled with ableism.

“The novel wants us to be proud of her mother and Abigail for breaking free from the toxic mindset they were in while Natalie never does,” Hillary Moyer wrote to me in a text she has permitted me to share, “but if Natalie’s literally insane then expecting her to have an epiphany and do the actual work is actually impossible.”4

To make Natalie crazy is to remove her from agency in the world she built and then demolished. “This lets tradwife influencers off the hook, almost,” two more of my friends noted. “As if white supremacy and eugenics could be fixed with meds.” It would be painting with too broad a brush to conclude that Burke is trying to say all tradwives are clinically insane or on pills. Clearly, Burke knows that this ideology stretches much farther than a single woman whose mind has snapped. The people who are propelling the tradwife movement to a world where Doug Wilson dictates national policy (I wish that were an exaggeration) are unfortunately mostly sane. They know what they are doing. And they don’t intend to stop.

If everything in the world of influencer content were truly a lie, known to be a lie by the people advocating it, then it shouldn’t worry us. If every Ballerina Farm is really a Yesteryear, then it doesn’t affect society at large. But we know—and Burke knows—that the woman baking sourdough and gently crooning a canned script about sinking into the slow moments of this little life (and making sure you have lots of babies to preserve the white race!), while millions of people watch and envy, is wielding an outsize influence.

As I finished Yesteryear— read in great gulps over a very short span of time (and then re-read, to make sense of it all) —I was left both gobsmacked and dissatisfied. The longer I thought about it, the less I liked it. And yet it had gripped me so deeply, because Burke is a talented writer. As the initial, highly favorable reviews came in, I began to think that maybe I was missing something. But as I spoke with friends with a similar background to mine, who also clocked the conspicuous lack of any religious conviction in Natalie’s world, I was grateful to see I was not the only one who had been disappointed. Though most of us had read it quickly, unable to put it down, the appeal faded the longer we sat with it. Like the Instagram life it mocked, the story is an infinite scroll you cannot look away from, but when you stop to actually consider what you’ve just absorbed, you realize there was nothing there.

So many of us feel let down by this novel because we thought we were getting something stunning. Burke is clearly a skilled writer. Natalie as a character had potential. And yet Yesteryear doesn’t have a single pillar of faith— or fantasy—to stand on.

“Every reader will have an experience with the novel that has nothing to do with me,” Burke told Kirkus Reviews. But in a Note published to this very platform, she complained about “how she is being treated culturally” in the wake of the novel’s release, hinting at doing a “very meta podcast episode” about the experience.

“Yes please!” one of her fans urged in the replies. “Research not needed. Just rant!”

I can see why the deep dives that some readers are giving to the novel might feel foreign to Burke. But if she had given her admittedly intriguing concept the level of attention that her critics are giving the novel; if a close reading of Natalie’s motivations, or lack thereof, had been applied to the early drafts, perhaps this and many other readers’ experience would have been a kinder one.

Also? You simply cannot convince me that a breastfeeding mother, who researches everything, would hear about a sick cow and inquire, “What’s mastitis?”

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I have a confession. When my three-year-old started preschool, I was relieved. I was the kind of mom who was excited to have part of her day child-free. I wanted a few hours to get caught up on work, go grocery shopping, manage doctors’ appointments, or even just watch a show that wasn’t the umpteenth viewing of Cars on the Road. The idea of someone else caring for my child seemed wonderful.

However, even as I let a professional care for my son, I still wanted to hold onto a little control. That’s why my husband and I opted out of the free school bus and chose to spend at least an hour idling in a sea of SUVs every day. We’re small-business owners and I work remotely, so our schedules were flexible enough to allow this time sink. I didn’t mind it so much, as I got in some great audiobook listening. And it gave me a sense of security, however misplaced it may have been. My husband and I, not a random bus driver, were responsible for our little guy’s safety for a portion of the day.

But when we went to kindergarten orientation at our son’s new school last August, we quickly saw how difficult it would be to keep up our chauffeur system. Cars spilled out of the school grounds and down the street, around the corner, and into a nearby church’s parking lot. Admin told us the street becomes one-way during pick-up and drop-off hours, like a parade with less confetti and more cold coffee. The principal didn’t quite beg parents to choose the school bus, but her “please consider” reminded me of my son’s desperately hopeful pleas for a Popsicle.

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