You think you know what kind of parent someone will be, but you really don’t. My friend S. has always been a person of style whose couches and tables and cushions seemed to predict the culture and presented a unified design at a time when my sister and I had filled our share flat with second-hand furniture and IKEA cutlery so cheaply stamped out of aluminium that it cut your mouth if you ate too fast.
S. designed a new house from scratch with her builder husband B., and the house is, predictably, a feat of style. It angles out at the road from between its neighbors like a superyacht moving through narrow strait, and on the inside feels like the Whitney, all-white levels and cutouts and negative spaces. The floor in the upstairs bathrooms was done in penny tiles—a choice I saw and thought, yeah I’d do penny tiles! until I saw how much they cost. S.’s house is nice, and big enough for her three kids, who top out at age 7 right now. There is a place for everything, white hideyholes for the detritus of life; it’s a manifestation of S.’s hyperorganized, aesthetically gorgeous mode.
Noodles and I were visiting S. when the house was in the final stages of completion. We hadn’t been there since her husband began turning the downstairs from a construction zone into a skatepark. That’s right—it backs onto the backyard Ninja Warrior course he built out of scaffolding. The skatepark consists of a curved lip running along two walls, and a quarter pipe at the far end, where the tools and workbench are. The kids—5, 6, and 7—are pretty good already. So when you’re upstairs on the ground floor, it’s the Whitney … then you go beyond the false floor, down a side staircase, and find yourself in the bowels of an adventure park strewn with sawdust.
One night we were staying there, all five kids had torn off from the dinner table, leaving Noodles, S., B., and I chilling at an all-white dinner table strewn with pizza boxes and flutes of Prosecco. We were all doing our best to pretend we didn’t have kids when one of S.’s kids came up the stairs and screeched “L. has an axe!!!”
S. sprang up and transitioned to Mum Voice. “L.! PUT DOWN THE AXE!” she yelled stomping down the stairs to the subterranean chaos zone while we looked at each other to confirm we weren’t going to bother going down ourselves.
She marched back up the stairs a minute later, slapping a rudimentary axe made of two pieces of plywood onto the poured-concrete kitchen island and returning to her drink. “It wasn’t an actual axe,” she said.
This is the thing: no matter who you are or who you think you’ll be as a parent, you will at some point find yourself screaming PUT DOWN THE AXE. Sensible parents find themselves ensconced in ridiculous bedtime routines that they know are excessive, but they can’t fight. I was obsessive about logging breastfeeding sessions to the minute on my phone and kept the data for years, to the point I had to delete other apps to keep it (why?). We are all in hock to absurd parenting practices because it isn’t about what the best advice is, or what the research says; parenting necessarily turns you into a bizarro version of yourself. This is why old friends are so important.
S. and I go back to year 7, have been tight through several haircut disasters—her year 8 Chris Klein hairdo and my year 11 “Meg Ryan in French Kiss” atrocity—have traveled and lived together, and once spent a drunk night piled into a Canyonero with some Utah lads at the foot of a ski mountain. A lot of shit has gone down since those days, but S. feels reliably like someone who will find something funny with you. That’s important when you are deep into an obsession over whether your 2-year-old has enough “best friends” or you’re living on boiled chicken breast due to allergies or you’ve lined your entire house, including the Christmas tree, in babygates, effectively fencing yourself out. There was a point where the only way I could get Japhy to put on pants was to have him climb halfway up his bunkbed ladder, and step into them in the air. He wouldn’t do it any other way.
None of us gets through without some wildly maladaptive parenting behaviors. Someone who meets you in the thick of it has no reason to believe you’re not simply a lunatic, but old old friends know who you were before. That’s why they’re gold, Jerry.
What summer is it?
It’s, uh, dead-salmon-as-orca-hat summer:
Let me try to render this
Two idiots discussing their new basement dehumifier, which collects an astonishing amount of water and needs constant emptying:
NOODLES: Do you think it’s working?
KAFKA: Yeah, the number’s going down right?
NOODLES: Yeah. Do you think it’s pulling water out of the wood though, or just the air?
KAFKA: (already starting a laugh she can’t stop) ARE YOU ASKING IF WE’RE JUST SUCKING ALL THE WATER OUT OF THE ATMOSPHERE LIKE SOMEONE IN WATERWORLD. WHAT IF A BILLIONAIRE DID THAT AND STOLE ALL THE WATER WITH A GIANT DEHUMIDIFIER.
NOODLES: What if we are, and we’re just going to spend the rest of our lives carting water outside onto the plants. Forever.
KAFKA: I’m sorry, this is too funny. Just harvesting the water out of the air. Moisture farmers.
NOODLES: Well how do you think a dehumidifer works?
KAFKA: I mean I guess it—
NOODLES: STOP! WE HAVE TO STOP, WE’RE TWO IDIOTS WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS. I HEAR THAT NOW.
Parental music for you
“You can’t fool me, I saw you when you came out.” —Dad man Ben Folds
“We never got to experiment with psychedelics before you knocked me up”—Goodnight Moonshine
Goodies
This Interview Magazine chat between Arnie and Danny Devito about death (h/t
for surfacing it):SCHWARZENEGGER: … When people talk about, “I will see them again in heaven,” it sounds so good, but the reality is that we won’t see each other again after we’re gone. That’s the sad part. I know people feel comfortable with death, but I don’t.
DEVITO: No.
SCHWARZENEGGER: Because I will fucking miss the shit out of everything. To sit with you here, that will one day be gone?
DEVITO: No!
SCHWARZENEGGER: And to have fun and to go to the gym and to pump up, to ride my bike on the beach, to travel around, to see interesting things all over the world. What the fuck?
I have been cramming down a lot of good stuff, partly for Lit Hub’s big second half of 2023 books preview, and who knows where to start, but Vauhini Vara’s This Is Salvaged: Stories needs a pre-order, as does Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams.
The Glow is OUT NOW from my friend Jessie Gaynor, who is brilliant. Here’s what I wrote about it a bit ago:
Probably my favorite decoy book cover of all time, The Glow is out this June from Lit Hub’s own Jessie Gaynor, and absolutely roasts anyone you’re likely to run into on a beach, by a pool, or at an upstate wellness retreat, while looking plausibly like an earnest novel about the quest for wetter-looking skin. In fact, it follows Jane, a 25-year-old whose chief skill is “publicity,” as she attempts to infiltrate a wellness retreat out of financial desperation (at least at first).
If you’ve ever had to stifle a laugh at the noises coming out of a yoga class, you will absolutely cackle when you get to a certain scene by a tree. But also, crucial critiques are made about Our Society. An exquisite beach read on all levels.
Lastly, a squirrel got stuck in our birdseed container.
Loved! So many things happen when you are a parent .
You have to laugh .
best.