Once, my neighbor gave me advice; this was like handing down wisdom through oral storytelling, as in the days of ancient Athens.
"I had my first child, and I was drowning," she said, "and I had a friend with a career and a large family. And I said to her, How do you manage? And she said: It's just about being half-assed, in everything you do...."
My neighbor seared me with her eyes; I thought that heavenly choirs might start to sing. And she walked away.
I remember an essay Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote; she was recalling the drafting of her first novel. "I sat on the couch with my child, as he watched Elmo. My warm body seemed to be enough for him; he thought that this was family time. And I pulled out my journal and wrote my novel."
If you hire a teen sitter, you have to do some on-site training. There is a world of difference between calm competence and nervous energy. My new sitter has never yet written a seamless five-paragraph essay, and here I'm asking her to manage two wild animals who both skipped naptime. She says she can do it, but then, within five minutes, a text message arrives: "What kind of water does your daughter drink?"
Then, an apparently intractable puzzle: "Where do humans tend to store clean clothing?"
Then: "Your dog has an item in his mouth, and it could be a stuffed animal, but it could also be the flailing corpus of an actual half-dead beast? What clues should I look for? Please advise...."
This is my weekend.
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