.SOMETIMES RAW.

Welcome to motherhood. It’s the hardest job on earth but also FUN and not hard. It’s the longest, shortest time. It’s organic but also Doritos. The rules are simple, not contradictory, but also not rules, because we are play-based.

1. You must never be boring, but also don’t be fun, or else they won’t respect you as a parent.

2. You must curate a schedule of sports, academics, and whimsy, but don’t curate it so it will be child-led.


3. Infants must learn to swim with you holding them, or they could drown in a bucket, but also not rely on you to swim.

4. Cribs should contain one twenty-thread count sheet and be free of comfort items in a way only monastic monks could understand, but also make it cozy.

5. You must sleep-train your baby before the four-month regression, the six-month regression, and learning leaps.
 But also don’t pressure them or they will have abandonment issues and form a goth band.

6. You must create a curriculum of brain-stimulating activities—a box of old-timey keys, brick bits from a pueblo in New Mexico, or rain in a jar.
 But also don’t focus on academics.

7. You must make organic meals but also not be a snob, so let them eat cupcakes made from Blue No. 5 and petroleum at birthday parties.

8. You must pretend-play and create scenes with your child about a no-eyed cat and her toilet-paper-roll friend Roger in outer space. But also don’t be your child’s playmate.

9. You must get them into an Ivy league school, but also send them to public school to help sustain community.


10. You must support school lunches but also pack a back-up healthy lunch of cucumbers wrapped in seaweed pants.

11. You must be safety conscious but also not hover or be a helicopter mom.


12. You must teach them to be socially independent but also curate playdates for them.


13. You must teach them stranger danger but also to be friendly to strangers.


14. You must allow only the appropriate amount of screen time, which is zero.

15. You must learn how to make a DIY kite out of old newspapers but also buy a store-bought one when the lumbering piece of sky garbage won’t fly in wind that doesn’t give a shit about decorative pom-poms.

16. You must get your baby to latch correctly so they get enough milk for a healthy weight, but also not so much that they become an obese baby or a body-conscious baby. A baby who is happy with their weight, not skinny, but also zaftig in the way that still looks sexy in clothes.


17. You must enjoy this time but also don’t enjoy it, because it will be your fault if your child isn’t a success and takes naps at McDonald’s. But also that’s honest work.

18. You must know how to survive a fire, hurricane, pandemic, or alien invasion. You must be able to make a spreadsheet, fold a fitted sheet, sheet cake, lullaby, and a leprechaun trap. You should be an expert at getting stains out, finding stars, telling jokes, home-cooking, hosting dance parties, playing dead, riding escalators, watching “this,” diving for Barbies, finding schools with chickens, and getting good GPAs. You must also be good at teaching how to tie shoelaces, learning stages of development, gentle parenting, not gentle parenting, free-range parenting, parenting without borders, time-outs, consent, talent shows, ghost stories, growing pains, the alphabet, volcanoes, and middle school. But also don’t be a know-it-all parent.

If you follow these simple, not contradictory rules, you will be a good mom, but also not a mom, because we are also stardust persons with decision fatigue.

We are writing to inform you that Your Body (“you,” “yourself,” “your aging body”) has updated its terms of service, which apply to the use of all your Parts and Areas.

We encourage you to review the updated Terms before you attempt any dangerous activity, such as playing with your dog or walking uphill. Our other legal policies are available in our Depressing Policy Center.

The Updated Terms

I. Food and Beverage

a. Alcohol No alcohol at all. The best choice ever.

b. Caffeine is one of three good things that exist. The others are love and the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours. However, like the relationship between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, your body’s relationship to caffeine is a productive yet fraught dance. If you consume any caffeine after 1 p.m., you won’t get any sleep and will wake up hating the world. Other People’s Bodies can consume caffeine until 3 or 4 p.m. or even have an espresso after dinner. You aren’t them and never will be. Also, if you have more than two (2) cups in a day, you will become convinced that there must be some kind of “demon” inside your chest and you will never be normal again.

c. Despite your many lobbying efforts, chocolate is still not considered their own food group on the pyramid and should not be treated as such.

d. Drinking prodigious amounts of water won’t solve any of your problems, but not drinking prodigious amounts of water can certainly make a few of them worse.

II. Exercise
a. Your Body and Mind require 4–6 days of exercise per week, unless you want to go to sleep hating the world. Unfortunately, every kind of exercise that you enjoy causes Your Body’s back, knees, or ankles to enter “The Zone of Desolation.” Ashtanga Yoga works best for your body.

b. If any physical pain ever starts to feel depressing, it could help to look on the bright side: if you were a hunter-gatherer, you’d probably be dead by now.

III. The Life of the Mind
a. In college, you would read one hundred pages per day and write an essay every week. Now, any paragraph of any news article that “seems long” gets skimmed, and you frequently question the names of your friends’ children. For this reason, you are encouraged to skip all news and reread the entire works of Virginia Woolf and stick with it even if a character is described with avian features, like having a “beak of a nose” or “the broad face and intense glare of an owl,” which you really hate for some reason.

b. Saying Italian place or food names with an Italian accent doesn’t count as “practicing your Italian,” so you are encouraged to stop believing that saying “alooooora” with a long o is doing anything, mentally-wise. Learn another language. French, Japanese, anything that makes you happy.

IV. Which Organs Still Work

a. Your kidneys seem fine.

b. Your pancreas hasn’t set off any alarms (yet).

c. Liver is in very good shape. Thank you for not drinking.

V. Which Organs Are Touch-and-Go

a. Brain.

b. Eyes.

c. Ears.

d. Skin.

e. Lungs.

f. Stomach.

g. All the other ones.

VI. Psychology

a. Abundant studies demonstrate that staying optimistic about the future helps one remain active and engaged in one’s community, family, and personal wellness. If you ever start to believe that life is a one-way escalator moving downward, ever downward, it is recommended that you stop thinking that somehow.

b. It is crucial to cultivate one’s mind-body connection. Reading a study about the benefits of meditation and saying, “I should keep doing that,” is an important first step in realizing that you have no follow-through.

VII. Service

a. As you mature and move forward in life, you ought to give more of yourself to your community. Since you have so much to offer in terms of physical abilities, wisdom, charm, or general usefulness, consider opening a tiny bookstore.

b. You aren’t old enough for people to feel like they should serve you by mowing your lawn or bringing you food that is easy to reheat, but if you keep making intensely mediocre decisions, those days will arrive very soon.

VIII. Benefits

a. Your age has earned you the right to be cranky. You are allowed, whenever you wish, to say things like “All leaf blowers must die” and “As far as I’m concerned, any grocery store that forces you to use self-checkout machines should be considered a terrorist organization.”

b. Once per week, you are allowed to shudder when thinking about what high school would have been like if social media had been around then.

c. If you ever end up having the feeling that you cannot take it anymore, take a deep breath and tell yourself that this too shall pass.

Moving Forward

You need not take any action regarding this alarming notice. By continuing to utilize your Parts and Movements on or after today, you agree to the updated Terms. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact your Prefrontal Cortex or your Limbic System.

I yawn awake at the painfully early hour of noon o’clock to the pinging of 1,005 unread emails. A voicemail from my boss leaps to the top of my mountain of notifications: “PLEASE LOG INTO TEAMS NOW!!” I take a deep breath and realize it’s the perfect time to grab a cup of coffee and a croissant from the café around the corner.

At the coffee shop, I join a group of working-from-home guys typing away on their laptops. They inspire me to work on my pressing daily tasks: New Yorker or Wordle. Fortunately, I expensed my subscription this month as “emotional support software.” I consider checking my work messages while on my laptop, but I hesitate. My company uses Slack (a communication software), and I understand that as a directive, not a software.

The unbearable stress of upcoming Teams meetings has pushed me to take my first break of the day, but certainly not the last. As a WFH (“work from home” or “will fire her”) employee, I prioritize my mental health. My mind is a temple.

Out of my never-ending pile of notifications, one catches my eye: a new Spotify playlist. It begins with “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton. Her lyrics convey an understanding of the grind of my job, even if I’m only working twelve to four. I desperately need her inspiration to power through.

After my brief two-hour break, I head home to dive back into work. The jumbled, incorrect spreadsheets whose numbers dictate the future of this company were due three weeks ago. Attempting to cope with the strain, I bring my focus to my favorite job responsibilities: walking around the house without pants on, binging a new show, and writing meal-prep ideas that will never come to fruition.

Before turning to WFH, my boss was worried we’d miss the office’s social festivities. He was totally wrong, though, because I attended an ice-cream-tasting event and a public reading from my favourite author last week while working. My boss loves that I’m always working, no matter what I do.

Soon after transitioning to WFH, the five-day workweek turned into a two-day workweek. We call it the “reverse weekend.” The eight-hour workday is a curse from the distant past. Now, I work in five-minute increments and break when my chakras are misaligned. I can also take care of laundry, groceries, and anything involving child care. Picking them up from basketball lessons? No problem, bad reception on the computer. No more milk in the fridge? Bad reception and off to the store I go. Easy.

I do miss a few elements of working in-office while being remote, such as profound conversations (gossip mostly) with my coworkers in the cafeteria. I long for the human connection of “Hey,” “How’s it going?” and “Can you please stop taking seventeen bathroom breaks a day to avoid work?” and “Have you heard that they caught A with S in the car the other day? NAKED! Oh, and he has a new BMW!!”

Usually, bosses always believe that nothing makes employees more productive like being chained to a desk in an office that looks like a hospital. They are wrong, of course, because now my working attitude and loyalty are at an all-time high. I’m loyal to all ten hours of actual work I have done this week.

Speaking of which—this internet is down again. Time to sign off for today.