.SOMETIMES RAW.

Despite near-constant whining about how impossible it is to be a mother, really, it’s simple: you just have to be perfect. No, not like that. Not annoyingly perfect, like a show-off or something. You need to be effortless and self-deprecating in your perfection. Not that self-deprecating—is this a joke to you? Are you mocking the moms out there who are struggling? Honestly, how hard is it to be perfect in a precise, scientifically calibrated way designed to be 100 percent infallible without ever being exhausted, needing a break, or losing your cool for a single second from the time your children are born until each one goes to college?

Fine, if you, for whatever reason, cannot do that, if you insist upon having an off day or a tough moment and you feel overwhelmed and need to vent: no. I mean, did you not know what you were getting into having children? Did you not accurately, to the point of clairvoyance, anticipate every single twist and turn of the nearly two-decade-long journey of helping a tiny lump of a baby grow into a fully functional adult? Obviously, you should have figured it all out in advance, like how giving birth would go and any complications you’d have, the specific personalities of your children and how they’d interact, what life-altering historical events you might live through—you know, the basics.

But even if you didn’t make the effort to Nostradamus your way through parenting life, you had to at least understand the unspoken rule that, yes, while it’s normal for everyone else to vent about their days, or jobs, or experiences, if you complain, as a mother, that means either you’re bad at it or you hate your children—right?

It may seem counterintuitive, but you can’t share good things either. No one likes bragging. Or baby photos. Or babies. God, is motherhood your whole personality? You’re boring everyone! Unless, of course, you’re making us laugh, which is also a problem because why are you making up funny things your kids say? Okay, hypothetically, children still figuring out how words work could say weird and silly things, but isn’t it more likely that you spend every spare moment of your time hunched over a desk writing jokes for your kid like your toddler’s the host of a late-night talk show?

Oh, and, small detail: don’t go out in public. We in the extremely progressive and advanced twenty-first century have improved upon the old saying that “children should be seen but not heard”—we’d actually love it if we didn’t see or hear kids. So, just keep your offspring sequestered in some hermetically sealed environment so no one is bothered by any child-related noise, or tears, or happiness, or breathing until your kids reach the notably not annoying age of eighteen. Shouldn’t be a problem—really, I mean, why did you even have kids if you didn’t want to live with them as pariahs in walled-off isolation for the entirety of their childhood? What, did you expect to still be a part of society after having kids? Wait, oh my god, did you think society included children? Yikes. Obviously, no.

But if you must venture into the world of adults, who were never once themselves small or loud or learning, at least make sure your children behave. And by “behave” I mean conform to the standards of adult behavior or conduct themselves in the manner of children from 1950s TV shows. And if they don’t, just, you know, make them. Definitely not with gentle parenting, which is turning this generation of kids into soft, self-centered monsters, but FYI, if you raise your voice to your children by even one decibel, whether in a moment of frustration or to keep them from the path of an oncoming car, it is literally the exact same thing as child abuse, based on what I’ve read (in the captions of some lady’s TikTok). But you shouldn’t need to yell or be a pushover if your child is making a scene. Simply kneel down to eye level and tell your one-year-old in a calm, firm voice: “Stop crying.” Boom. Problem solved.

Now that we’re onto obvious stuff, never go on an airplane, no matter the circumstances, not even if you’re a pilot. Stop being an annoying helicopter parent, selfishly denying your children freedom and fun, but also, if you are ever even eighteen inches away from your kid for a fraction of a second, I will take a photo to shame you on social media and also call 911. Do not send your children to daycare (you want strangers raising your kids?) or stay at home with them (betraying feminism with your tradwife ways much?) and, never, ever, eat with your children at a restaurant. I mean, a restaurant, my god, why would you, as a parent of a growing child, go into a place that serves food? You’re not allowed to enter the hallowed halls of any restaurant unless your kids are endowed with the official How to Act Nicely at Restaurants knowledge, which will be, to my understanding, inserted seamlessly into their psyches at the moment they reach adulthood without any prior restaurant-going experience.

But more than anything you do as a mother, more than preventing your kids from choking or drowning or operating a forklift, never allow them to have even a sideways glance at a screen, or it will ruin their brains forever. Yes, even though plenty of today’s adults watched television as children. Yes, even if you are trying to cook dinner, do homework with your other kids, or are recovering from major abdominal surgery—or all three of those things at once, which is something mothers sometimes have to do. And yes, even if you only need a two-and-a-half-minute distraction so you can quickly use the bathroom in peace. Why would you need to use the bathroom alone anyway? Can you not simply hold your children aloft on your shoulders or back like an orangutan while shitting?

In fact, as a mammal (I can refer to you as a mammal, right?), human mothers could stand to take a page from the moms of the animal kingdom. They live far away in forests or jungles, and you never hear them grumbling about “me time” or “the invisible load”—you don’t hear them complaining at all. True, they don’t speak a language we can understand, but I bet if they could communicate and had access to the human internet, an elephant would type stuff like, “This is fine! I enjoyed all twenty-two months of my pregnancy, and I would never take my calf to a brewery!”

But if this all seems too tough, contradictory, or overwhelming, there’s an easy solution: wait twenty years or so until you seem comparatively better than the mothers and children of the future, who will be screwing things up so much worse than you are now.

It seems impossible to imagine, but somehow, they will.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there. Together we mother.

Going to the gyno is a necessary part of staying on top of your health…but it’s not exactly what I’d call fun. Besides the obvious, “Wow, I really don’t wanna be here,” there are so many things buzzing through my head on a trip to the torture chamber gynecologist’s office. In addition to the stream-of-consciousness above, here are some of the most common thoughts I’ve had before, during, and after getting spread eagle in the name of modern preventative care. I bet you can relate. Please share your comments below.

1. ‘This waiting room needs a serious upgrade.’
With Parents and Good Housekeeping being the only reading material lying around the ob-gyn’s office, it always feels like you’ve slipped into a time warp. What year is it, and do they realize women can vote now? Also, we’re about to strip and have a foreign object placed between our legs; perhaps they could spring for some comfier chairs? And post-appointment lollipops, please—we earned at least one.

2. ‘I’ve never felt so cold or so vulnerable (except last year when I was here).’
That moment when you’re pants-less waiting on the doctor, staring down the straps of the stirrups you’re about to prop your feet in? That’s real womanhood right there. Also, can they maybe keep the temp at a comfortable 28 to 30 degrees? We’re half-naked up in here. 

3. ‘I don’t want that thing anywhere near my va-jay-jay.’
One look at that IUD applicator will send a shiver up your spine. Getting an eyeful of various other metal and/or plastic instruments while waiting for the doctor to arrive is very, very anxiety-provoking, to say the least. 

4. ‘Why are there so, so many questions?’
What was the date of your last period? How many drinks do you have a week? Do you smoke? How many sexual partners have you had last year? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood? It’s like meeting with the damn Spanish Inquisition once a year.

5. ‘Please keep the small talk to before and after insertion.’
We don’t mind giving you an update on our families, jobs, pets, and love lives, but we’d rather not do that sort of chatting when you’ve got a special vagina tool and a flashlight halfway up our cervix. In terms of verbal communication during this time, just an update on when it will all be over will suffice.

6. ‘How’s my scent?’
Admit it: You know they’re probably immune to every possible funky lady fume at this point but you still want to, you know, keep it fresh, if at all possible. You showered prior to the appointment, but anything can happen between home and this ovary inspection.

7. ‘What if my butt crack is hiding one of these weird stray hairs that get trapped there during the shower?’
This pretty much speaks for itself. Same worry goes for a lint ball from our pants or a piece of toilet paper still hanging on for dear life. We don’t want anyone to actually know that happens…even though it can happen to anyone.

8. ‘I vow, yet again, to start doing breast self-exams at home.’
As the physician gropes your boobs to make sure everything’s all clear, you remember that you learned how to check your own breasts in middle school health class. You should know every lump, bump, freckle and dent by now. You promise to start feeling yourself up at least once a week from here on out. (Do you know what type of boobs you have?) 

9. ‘You want me to take my urine sample where?’
Doctors who don’t have a cabinet in the bathroom for you to deposit a urine sample but instead make you walk down a public hallway CARRYING YOUR OWN PEE really need to get their sh*t together. What are we, cavewomen?

More terrifying gyno-office-thoughts:

Please don’t make me go on the scale!

Is there anything more mortifying than stirrups? You know, those thingies you put your feet on on a gyno chair!! Who invented these things? Probably some old guy who hates women.

Relax? He wants me to relax! Take my clothes off behind the curtains to be completely naked with legs spread wide open in front of him! Relax???

And this speculum… it is always so cold. I hate this part. It will all be over soon. Let’s count the tiles on the ceiling. Let’s count anything. Don’t even think what is happening right now. Is it me or is it really hot in here?

I wonder how many vaginas he has seen this year.

Men have no idea what we need to go through!

And, run, if these songs are playing in your gyno’s office waiting room:

Sum 41: “In Too Deep”

Madonna: “Into the Groove”

Tom Jones: “What’s New Pussycat?”

Salt-N-Pepa: “Push It”

No Doubt: “Spiderwebs”

Van Halen: “Fire in the Hole”

MC Hammer: “Can’t Touch This”

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: “Into the Great Wide Open”

Guns N’ Roses: “Welcome to the Jungle”

John Mayer: “Your Body Is a Wonderland”

Weird Al Yankovic: “Eat It”

The Rolling Stones: “Under My Thumb”

The Police: “Wrapped Around Your Finger”

Petula Clark: “Downtown”

Sean Mendes: “Stitches”

Taylor Swift: “Bad Blood”

Anything by The Flaming Lips

‘Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.’

Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman is a darkly comic look at the life of a 36-year-old woman working in a convenience store and the many ways she is looked down upon by ‘normal society’. Having surpassed a socially acceptable age for the job and still being single, Keiko is relegated to the fringes of society despite being a model employee. As someone who is also on the autism spectrum, she often has difficulties navigating what is considered normal, wishing there was a manual to life she could study and master the way she has the store manual. In this slim novel, Murata humorously and effectively skewers society for the inherently ableist and often misogynist undercurrents in socially enforced hierarchies and questions perspectives of normality all while also crafting a touching ode to essential employees who are doing their best despite our lack of care and attention for them.

This book really hit me. Keiko instinctively knows exactly how to organize a display for optimal sales, chart your day around busy periods, picking up difficult hours when others leave. A simple and pretty thankless job and something where being good and reliable at it usually becomes a sort of self-punishment when you get tasked with the more difficult shifts and added responsibilities and the verbal thank you’s are never echoed in your paycheck. Each scene in the store breathed with life and felt true, an authenticity she was able to capture as Murata was working in a convenience store while writing the book. I could place myself in those back offices and feel deep in my heart the various employee reactions to corporate mottos and extreme instances of greeting each customer. While I’ve never shouted ‘Irasshaimase’, which becomes almost a mantra in the novel, the scenes around its use in the novel really rang true within me. So I felt it when Keiko comments:

‘When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that’s what a human is.’

This is a novel for the retail clerk, the essential workers, and anyone who has ever been made to feel less simply for working a job. Shoutout to you.

‘So the manual for life already existed. It was just that it was already ingrained in everyone’s heads, and there wasn’t any need to put it in writing.’

Keiko is a really empathetic character. When she turns 18, she gets a job at the convenience store where she still works 18 years later. The symmetry of 18 years is a nice metaphor for the dichotomy of Keiko as an employee and Keiko as a social being. Outside the store, she is an outsider, while inside she is the star employee. The store does, however, give her an opportunity to observe how the “normal” people act and dress, with Keiko often adopting the mannerisms and clothing styles of coworkers she enjoys best. ‘After all, I absorb the world around me,’ she thinks, ‘and that’s changing all the time.’ As employees come and go, so too does Keiko’s mannerisms, which she is embarrassed by when it is pointed out to her.

The store starts to appear as a microcosm of the world for her. When new employee, Shiraha, shrugs off work, refuses to listen to his female coworkers and complains constantly (we all know this guy), Keiko asks him ‘Um, you do realize you’ll be fixed?’ Keiko sees employees all as cells in the body of the store, and the defective or sickly ones are discarded and replaced. Such is the way of a store. She accepts that her pay is solely to keep her alive enough to keep working and is constantly aware of her need to stay healthy ‘for the store.’ While this subtly points to how jobs don’t provide a living wage and keep employees trapped in the lower classes, it also makes her realize that she too will eventually be replaced.

When you do physical labor, you end up being no longer useful when your physical condition deteriorates. However hard I work, however dependable I am, when my body grows old then no doubt I too will be a worn-out part, ready to be replaced, no longer of any use to the convenience store.

The extreme ableism in a work culture such as this is perpetuating a class of ‘undesirables’ and outsiders. Keiko notes that this is how social life is too, and while she may still be a star employee, in her social life she is constantly exposed as ‘not normal’ and criticized openly for it. Keiko has no interest in sexual relations–shoutout to anyone who is ace, you are valid and I support you–yet constantly told ‘deep down you must be getting desperate.’ To be an outsider, Keiko finds, is also to be bombarded with opinions on how you should live your life and to be always making excuses for yourself instead of able to just embrace your own being. ‘The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects,’ she thinks, despairing, ‘anyone who is lacking is disposed of.’ This is, understandably, a difficult impasse of an existential crisis, particularly for one who wants to just be themself and work their job with pride.

‘The specific form of what is considered an “ordinary person” had been there all along, unchanged since prehistoric times I finally realized.’ 

This perspective is only amplified when Keiko converses with Shiraha who spends all his time ranting about how society discards the outsiders. Shiraha is obsessed with his theory of tribalism and that humans haven’t changed ‘since the Stone Age’ of discarding the weak and outsiders. While he isn’t exactly wrong about society being oppressive, Keiko concedes, he himself is part of the problem (one of my favorite scenes in The Big Lebowski is Jeff Bridges saying ‘You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole”) as he reinforces misogyny and he doesn’t want to dismantle the oppressive structures but instead climb them to be an oppressor. Shiraha is essentially an Incel with his combination of sexual predator nature combined with a massive victim complex and is fired after harassing woman employees and then stalking a woman customer.

Despite Shiraha’s completely repulsive behavior and personality, Keiko sees how he may be useful. She can keep him ‘hidden from society’ in her apartment because having a man live there will raise her ‘normalcy’ in other’s eyes. ‘It appears that if a man and a woman are alone in an apartment together, people’s imaginations run wild and they’re satisfied regardless of the reality,’ she says.

‘She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.’

Here we see how social norms are a frail playacting. ‘I was beginning to lose track of what “society” actually was,’ she thinks, ‘ I even had the feeling it was all an illusion.’ What is sad is how once she has penetrated the illusion, her perceptions of everyone around her crumble as does her world. The people she respects at work are revealed as gossips more interested in social interaction than doing a job, which is devastating to her, and her plans go inevitably awry. However, I found the conclusion of the novel to be hopeful and empowering, especially as it validates essential workers as being something to be proud of.

All in all, Sayaka Murata has crafted a brilliant little gem that quickly cuts to the heart of society and exposes normality and social hierarchy as a mere facade for oppression. This is one for the outsiders, the “losers” (as Shiraha is quick to call people), those making ends meet while rightfully believing they are still dignified. It is deeply and darkly comical but is written with such an earnest and light touch that it reverberates in your soul like the sun breaking through the clouds as you step out of work.

Poignant, hopeful and empowering, Convenience Store Woman is a winner.