What about your life scares you?
What would you do if you were unafraid?
Life moves on, like a river. You can go stand in different parts of a river, of course, you can go further downstream or try to slog your way back up. But you will never stand in that river in exactly the same way again. The water is not the same water, the fish already on their way, the leaf that was just there is now gone. And did you even notice any of it while you stood there? Did any of it hold your attention?
Over the past 18 years I’ve stood in many spots in that river, trying to move forward, trying to paddle back, sometimes too dazed or numb or busy to feel the sensation of the water washing over my feet. I’ve spent two summers with newborns, sweating and sleepless, in some version or another of a breast milk-stained tank top. Stripping our bed (again and again) from projectile spit-up. I remember how it felt to be nursing my daughter in a sheet-tangled bed, too hot already as the sun began to rise, watching the curtains lift slightly with the breeze. Trapped. Happy. Some of those moments were sublime. Some of those moments were spent thinking about my friends who were getting drunk at weddings, who were sleeping in, who were still free. I often felt satiated with that new life of mine. I often didn’t have the mental space to reflect on how I felt at all. But sometimes I felt panicked.
In the past 18 years I’ve spent a handful of summers with two little kids under the age of five, sometimes trying to work, often not even trying and just hoping the money lasted until Labor Day. In the chunk of years immediately after that, I spent what were some of the greatest summers I had as a mother. In Maine for two then, later, three weeks each summer. It was so nice while it lasted. We sunscreened and curled up under towels and blankets on the warm sand and swam in the salty ocean. We walked back to our cottage, tracing the edge of the water, slightly sunburned, licking ice cream cones. We made new friends and we watched fireworks right from our window. We slogged and we were rewarded. We were a family and we were rewarded.
In the past 18 years I’ve gone on multiple road trips with my kids, dropped them off and picked them up from dozens of camps hundreds of times, threw birthday parties for my two summer babies, willed myself to make a couple mildly complicated birthday cakes to prove I could do it, that I wasn’t a total loser in the Mom Department™. We spent scorching afternoons and orange-glow evenings swimming in the lake and watching the sun set, dodging bees and the sun to pick strawberries and raspberries, dragged ourselves to watch fireworks, live music, small theater troupes, and whatever else might be outside and require an absurd amount of planning, sweating, arguing, and/or crying then a sweeping sense of relief it was over and we could all go to bed already. Those were great, vivid, non-stop summers. But, again, holy shit were they exhausting. But-but-but we did it, we did the summers, we did them.
It’s helpful for me to remember that I experienced these summers before I started writing. Normal People Summers. Because the past six summers have been consumed by my writing (or the writing I should've been doing) in one way or another, owing to some bizarrely consistent timing. I spent two of those summers writing book proposals. I spent one summer writing AMATEUR HOUR from start to finish during my kids’ summer vacation then the following summer promoting it. I spent one summer knowing I should start writing BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY but didn’t so it just loomed over me like a big divorced ghost. I spent last summer gearing up for my book launch and felt like I would barf every time I thought about it.
Summers, perhaps more than any other season, gather themselves into chapters like these. Until this particular summer, a summer that has been a complete anomaly in my life, I’m not sure I ever quite grasped that.
My son just turned 18 and his sister is not far behind. Parents always say it goes fast but — as I have often joked — it has certainly felt like 18 years to me. A family’s life is long, it is forever of course. But the active phase of raising kids has also stunned me with its stages, its seasons. Now I’m beginning to enter a new season, one where I feel the most free I’ve felt since way before having kids, really, since I was in my early twenties.
This summer has actually been an anomaly across the board. I’m watching my kids, my teenagers, finally experience a true teenage summer after 2-1/2 years of a pandemic. Working, sleepovers, parties, concerts, going to movies, driving away in their friends’ cars, now driving away in my car with a fresh new license. Their friends lounging around in our house playing Xbox or laughing and screeching and whispering. Our home feels permeated by freedom of all stripes, a tender and hard-won coming apart that feels exciting, at least it does to me.
It is indescribable to feel free at my age. I understand the fear women have, I have felt it myself so frequently over the past decade when I thought about my marriage then my separation and now divorce. I consider myself pretty fearless about these things generally speaking so you can imagine how disorienting it was to discover that even I felt afraid. In the moments when life and the what-ifs were the most painful they had ever been, I remember thinking oh this is definitely why people stay married, what the fuck.
But now I cannot fathom it. I cannot fathom staying in a relationship that is fundamentally over or so emotionally and intimately dead it might as well be. I cannot fathom giving up one’s freedom in general, the possibility of creating a new life — a life that is completely your own — out of fear. Of course, it’s a privileged point of view to feel like you can go without fear for your physical or mental safety or in fear of devastating financial consequences. I get that. But the women who reach out to me the most about this aren’t in those positions of genuine jeopardy. What they’re afraid of is … judgment. Being socially set aside. Falling off the acceptable path. Being seen as “not good”. The kids, always and understandably and of course the kids. But even more than all of this, it’s The Unknown.
Over the past couple of months I’ve been the happiest I’ve been in a very, very long time. Not happier than when my kids were little (or teenagers or at any of those sweet spots in between) or when my marriage was good or when I loved any of my jobs or got my first book deal or a number of other moments I could pluck from my personal timeline, it’s just that this is different and it’s new. It’s a way I’ve never felt before, or at least not in exactly the same way I’m feeling and experiencing it now.
Whenever someone older than 40 is happy again, especially after a long stretch of being unhappy, it seems to me they’re described (or describe themselves) as “feeling young again”. But that hasn’t been my experience, not completely. First of all, I might’ve been free in my early twenties but I wouldn’t characterize it as a super happy time. I wanted someone to love me, to marry me, I wanted what everyone else had. I wanted to know I was on a path. Now there isn’t a single path I want. I’ve traveled the paths. Truly, fuck the paths. I want nothing that anyone else has, least of all a relationship. I want to get out there and kick ass and never be the regular +1 at dinner parties exclusively populated by married couples. Sorry, I just do not. Our society is organized like one boring-ass human Noah’s Ark and I am overrrrr itttttttt.
As I move through this transitional phase, as I accept that my life will change in substantial ways over the next two years, I’ve looked back over my habits and behavior since moving to Vermont almost 20 years ago. I’ve thought about all the thrifting and collecting, the dressing up, the house projects and what has felt like the endless sorting of boxes. All things designed to make me feel something, to fill my time, to give me something to look forward to, to distract me from the fact that maybe sometimes I was living a life that couldn’t hold my real attention, my real imagination. There are so many times I couldn’t feel the sensation of the river, the water rushing over my feet.
When you finally accept that you’ll (eventually) be selling your house and downsizing drastically, that you’ll be getting rid of a lot of shit you’ve poured so many hours of your life into (not to mention cash), endless projects you’ve generated for your house or your dumb yard or whatever, life tends to open up. I’ve started to wonder if hobbies and house projects and all the little ant-like busywork we invent for ourselves isn’t just a way of avoiding facing up to what we wish our lives were actually like, what they could feel like. If it isn’t all just a way of forcing ourselves to feel rooted, like we owe it to our houses and yards to stay put. Anyway, I think some of it was a way of avoiding the realities of my life.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be moving to a place that will be my own. I will likely not be writing this newsletter again until the fall. I’m taking half the summer off and spending some of that time working on a novel, a novel that I had an idea for in the deepest, darkest moments of April. But it will not overtake nor define my summer. It’s just a starting point, a place to focus my writing energy which will be there regardless.
I’m going to sit in the sun and swim in the lake, drink ice cold beer and see my friends. I’ll be checking out from a lot of things I used to cared about. I feel like I spent years, almost two decades, under the influence of How To Be A Good Mother or How To Be A Good Family and I am just completely over that shit too. This is what I would like to do with all of the arbitrary rules, the no-how no-way no-winning bind that women end up in and feel responsible for seeing through to the bitter end:
I don’t know what’s next, but for once I’m choosing to trust it’ll be good instead of fearing the absolute worst. And you know what? If I’m wrong I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. It’s time to step into a new river. It’s time to pay attention to the water washing over my feet and be curious about where it might lead. And, sure, maybe this phase of fearless freedom won’t last forever, but these weeks and months have made every ounce of pain I’ve experienced all along the way worth it. All the years. All the tears. No regrets. No looking back. Carpe dum-dum forever, bitch.
NEW FROM ME
Because I am a child all I do now is work on playlists?? Here’s an update to HERE’S TO FEELING GOOD ALL THE TIME!
I also realized that listening to, say, “Fuck the Pain Away” while having my first sip of coffee was A BIT MUCH, so I created MORNING AFTER 😏
THINGS FROM ELSEWHERE
• FUCK THE SUPREME COURT DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN
• I loved, loved, loved this quick interview with artist Storm Tharp. What he said about his mom is particularly touching.
• You must go watch GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE right now and also read Emma Thompson: “Does Anyone Know or Care if Middle-Aged Women Are Getting Any Sexual Satisfaction?” in Vogue and “Emma Thompson and the Challenge of Baring All Onscreen at 63” in The New York Times.
• I am on a no-holds-barred, go-for-absolute-broke Cusk binge so I thought this interview from 2019 was just fantastic: “Rachel Cusk Interview: You Can Live the Wrong Life”
• I don’t care if he spits and drools all over the mic, I’ll watch this a hundred times every time I come across it: The Daily Mail by Radiohead
• Uh this is one of hottest/holy shit/most exquisite things I’ve ever read 🔥🔥
JUST BECAUSE
Can you even believe these incredible vintage paper dresses BECAUSE I SIMPLY CANNOT.
You can find my books here. You can find my writing here. You can find my copywriting and creative direction work here. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Instagram. Please do not find me in real life, I’m busy checking outtttttt from it.
Kimberly - your writing speaks to the raw and honest truth within the hidden places in my experienced skin. Here is to a GRAND adventure and a lifetime of summers! Thank you. xx, Anna
As a mom of young twins about to move into my first home of my own, separate from my former partner, this was just the post I needed. Thank you for articulating all the things so beautifully. Here’s to being fearless!