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 Illustration by Meghan Murphy | Imagine bathing in a source of unwavering loyalty. That’s what it was like to date a younger guy who was desperately in need of love and stability. A guy who was sleeping on his friend’s couch and working the cash register at a corner market and the reception at some three-star hotel above San Francisco’s Chinatown. He was also a self-described “deadbeat dad.” At 23. I was an overeducated black woman with good credit, no kids, who was 20 years his senior — I should have known better. But I was suffering through the disability I call “middle life” and needed comfort. Turning 42 brought on self-criticism and disappointment that flowered like a bruise. There was a gray hair invading my afro-pompadour, sneering, Girl, you’ll die before you do anything great, or pay off those student loans. I had a “survival job” in government communications where getting boss approval on anything was like facing the powerful final opponent in a martial-arts movie. Worst of all: the age-appropriate men I had dated. “Senior”-titled Elon Musk admirers who wanted to be treated like heads of state. They wanted a full program of cock-centric sex, custody days with their soccer-loving kids, and Guitar Hero nights with their power-nerd friends who would not let me play the tortured Amy Winehouse songs. I had started my 40s dating a 50-something white dad — that romance was so unequal, it was an endless episode of “White Boyfriend Knows Best,” and it upheld white-male privilege and the patriarchy at a time when Donald Trump was running on the exact same ticket. “Don’t ever tell me again how men oppress women,” this boyfriend lectured, “when you women couldn’t even get together for Hillary.” “That was white women,” I lobbed back. By Valentine’s Day, the current of political resistance had pushed me to the edge. After that breakup, I vowed to never make a submissive deal for love again. The forces of solitude were crushing me when the damp-sky summer began. I was haunting a corner market designed to look like a Gold Rush general store, buying the cheapest bottle of Pinot Noir and a sushi platter for one, when out of nowhere the bearded guy working the register asked me to dinner. He looked about 30, and if you’re into Jeffrey Wright or Drake, this man would have definitely caught your eye. On our first date, I brought out the “36 Questions to Fall in Love With Anyone” app. Around the tenth question, when I asked him to describe his ideal day, thinking he might say “Bike through Golden Gate Park, then do a beer-and-painting-class,” this 23-year-old stranger said it would be waking up with me, making me breakfast, then watching movies all day. I’d like to say I jumped up to leave, said “That’s weird, dude,” and grabbed my purse. What I did was relax, letting myself simply be worshipped. Then he told me that his worst day had been when his mother sexually abused him. She was an addict and pretty much my contemporary. So Oedipus had been introduced in Act One. What was even more revealing was when he shared his history with older women: his last serious girlfriend was almost my age. She had three strokes while carrying his child. He left her during a tense recovery, when the healthy baby and the infirm mother both needed someone to wipe their tushies. Hopelessness set in. Tempers flared. And when this stroke survivor lashed out and said he should just leave, he was too green to realize that she didn’t really mean it. Instead, he took the infant to live with an attractive rural woman he had met on Facebook, somehow got kicked out of there, lost custody of the kid to his half-sister, and six months later escorted me to a near-empty gastropub that charged $15 for Brussels sprouts. As Nietzsche said, sometimes we show compassion to the unlucky because we are just glad it is not us. So I kept ordering Pinots, observing this tragic man, slightly buoyed by how I was faring much better than him and the women who had encountered him. Soon, I was drunk. And as I made out with him while waiting for my Lyft Line to arrive, my brain suddenly snapped awake to this blunder. I opened my eyes and was confronted by his placid face, so like a baby camel’s. When I got home, I texted to say there would be no second date. A few days later, at work, a black female executive yelled at me for following my white female manager’s orders. It felt like some meerkat, dominant-female bullshit — my manager was also in the room, but I got all the abuse. Suddenly, I needed glorifying. I texted the 23-year-old. He met me at an Ethiopian lounge near my house. “I told my roommate I know you’ll dump me,” he said later that night. “I just hope you take your time.” For the next two months, he would greet me outside my office, tell me I looked cute, take my hand, and guide me through grimy streets like a crossing guard does a school child. By date five, he had said he loved me. If a stress pimple exploded on my temple and bled, he would fit a tiny Band-Aid over it and coo at me. If I couldn’t face an email about a potential writing gig, he’d review it first, giggle strangely, then shorthand what it said as I stood paralyzed in the kitchen expecting rejection. In bed, he was as careful and attentive as someone preparing a body for burial. Why did I join up with this guy? Maybe there was so much postelection dread that I would have huddled around anyone’s fire. Maybe I wanted to be the self-centered asshole in a relationship. Either way, I behaved like a cranky senior who didn’t get any visitors except this one junior orderly. I crabbed at him all the time. “Your pits stink like an alley during a garbage strike,” I said, presenting him with a tube of Kiehl’s deodorant that seems medical-grade because it’s sold by people in white lab coats. “You look like The Pirates of Penzance in that billowy shirt,” I said, leading him through the mall to remake him in some better clothes. As the relationship captain, I steered the ship. I counseled him into community college. I also underwrote our meals. We lived in the most expensive city in America; carrying us both made me feel superior. “Babe,” he once called to ask, “is it OK if I go out tonight with my coworkers?” “Fine, but don’t spend too much. And be here in the morning.” When he showed up at my house — still bleary from tequila shots, explaining that he had lost his cell phone at a bar and blacked out — I launched into a matronly reprimand about his bad choices and how he couldn’t afford to replace his phone with the child support he owed. “And don’t think I’m going to buy you a phone and reward your dumb behavior.” He glared at me, quivering like that kid from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and said, “I’m sorry. I’ll go straight to the bar when it opens and see if it’s there.” He gave me a beaten-animal look as I shut the door. Secretly, I wished for an equal. With his funky armpits, youthful mistakes, and boring retellings of ’90s Disney movies, I was reminded of how mismatched we were. It made me even more despondent about my life. “So she dresses up like a male soldier named Ping …” he’d jabber on. “You ever see Sunset Boulevard?” I’d interrupt. “It’s this Hollywood classic where a faded actress keeps a younger man. Then she kills him.” *** That fall, as I was leaving for a trip, he said he couldn’t cat-sit for me as planned. Or see me anymore. He just couldn’t constantly improve. He bowed out the door peacefully, and I chased him barefoot down Fillmore Street, feeling mean-spirited and craven. He turned around and listened wearily as I made a pessimistic gesture about my future, saying I wanted another chance. I also said something I didn’t mean about love. “OK, babe. One more try,” he said. But I’d have to face our relationship’s inequality soon enough. We were at a bar in the Mission District (the shantytown part of the hood where people pitch tents on the sidewalk) and I was perched contentedly in his lap when a drunken woman paused her winning streak at the pool table, telling us, “I want what you have, guys.” And to him, “You treat this woman right; she’s beautiful.” He ignored the flattery and after a few minutes turned to me, saying, “The only time you’ve said you loved me was the time I tried to break up with you.” I gave a tight smile and continued our pose as the enviable couple. Later, holding hands on the walk home, he attacked something I had said that was ungrammatical. I replied with a comeback that barely makes sense now. “Rude. They treated me like Beyoncé at the bar. So that makes you the unfaithful Jay-Z!” “No, I’m Obama,” he said, and shook loose from my hand. He strode off at double the pace and disappeared, leaving me alone in a Hooverville along Seventeenth Street. I called and I texted and I spiraled until he blocked me — even on Facebook. I’d been sure that this guy was SO incredibly fucked up, that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. What I neglected to see was that I identified with him. Deeply. As a sorrowful figure who woke up into a mess with no clear solution, my drifting midlife crisis yoked well with his whole-life crisis. It was like that Disney movie where a disgraced lion is incapable of facing responsibility, so he leaves home and wallows with some idlers, trying to drown the anguish of not living up to his true purpose by singing “Hakuna matata! ... It means no worries!” I realized that I was sloshing around in too much resentment. I started therapy. I got a very tiny grant to support my writing. I fessed up to wishing bitterly for ethical partnership and creative success and a different president. Then I decided to accept that my desires could remain like a thousand-piece puzzle still in the box, unassembled. But there was no use beating anybody up about it, not even myself. Keli Dailey is a writer, performer, and spectacle in San Francisco. | | | | |
 Illustration by Lauren Cierzan | In this column, Alexis Coe, Lenny’s historian at large, conducts Q&As with authors and specialists in archives across the country, focusing on one primary source. For this post, Alexis spoke with Laura Shapiro, author of What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women & the Food that Tells Their Stories. Alexis and Laura discuss Dorothy Wordsworth — sister, muse, and companion to the Romantic poet William Wordsworth — in whose diaries Laura found a quiet revelation. (Read Alexis’s previous columns here and here. Read Laura’s piece for Lenny about America’s first celebrity dieter, Fannie Hurst, here.) Alexis Coe: “Food talks — but somebody has to hear it,” you write in the introduction to What She Ate, and that’s just what happened to you one sleepless night. Hoping it would lull you to sleep, you revisited a Dorothy Wordsworth biography, but had quite the opposite effect! A seemingly mundane note about black pudding, “that stodgy mess of blood and oatmeal,” completely energized you. Why do you think you were ready, at that moment, to hear it? Laura Shapiro: I’ve been thinking about food my whole life and writing about it practically that long, so there’s pretty much always a corner of my imagination that’s busy wondering about what people are eating and why. It’s like the security system on my computer, performing “background tasks” while I’m working on whatever I’m working on. And then on top of this, the night I was reading the Dorothy biography, I happened to be in that kind of altered state that comes with insomnia. As I sat there with the book, I felt as though all the ecstasy of her life in Dove Cottage was just pouring out of those pages and flooding into me. She was in paradise, plain and simple. And paradise was full of food, lovely and heartrending food — a rhubarb tart baked for William, his bowl of broth, his bitten apple. So when that mention of black pudding came along, it was a real shock. It landed, splat, in front of me like a big nasty blot from a leaky pen. AC: Dorothy Wordsworth, like too many women in history with proximity to “Great Men,” is generally studied because she served as an eyewitness, not as a being worthy of her own study. Dorothy was valuable because she was close to her brother, William, who wrote “The Prelude,” widely considered to be the greatest poem in English romanticism; she often lived with him, serving as a sounding board as much as a housekeeper, and they corresponded when she didn’t. But (mostly) male historians consider the kind of primary sources Dorothy left behind to be about “women’s work,” like cooking, housekeeping, and child care, and they peruse pages for nothing more than a passing reference to her famous brother. The rest is edited out and generally overlooked. And “women’s work” is what you were after when you sought out Dorothy’s “black pudding” journal entry at the Wordsworth library at Grasmere. What did you find? LS: What I found, and this was both frustrating and fascinating, was exactly what had been quoted in the biography — “Dined on black puddings.” What I had been hoping for, of course, was much more. I wanted her to tell me everything she was thinking when she looked down at that plate, and I wanted a detailed description of the black pudding, too. Instead, Dorothy simply dropped that brief mention onto the page, along with a couple of other notes on what she did that day. It was utterly impersonal, not a trace of emotion or introspection or beautiful writing. In other words, it was the opposite of The Grasmere Journals, and as soon as I realized that, I knew I had the key to understanding it. AC: Wait, that’s fascinating! Go on! How was it the key? What happened after? LS: We need the context. So here is Dorothy in Dove Cottage, young and ardent and the handmaiden to William and his poetry, filling her journal with loving references to this very simple and immediate food she was putting on the table each day. Then William marries and has a family. Dorothy helps out in the time-honored fashion of the unmarried sister, but 25 years later, she’s redundant. So she volunteers to spend the winter in Whitwick, a poor, ugly village where her nephew has gotten a job as a curate [a member of the clergy, like a parish priest] — she’ll keep him company, she’ll re-create Dove Cottage, she’ll be “useful,” as she puts it, which has always been the whole point of her life. Does it work? Is this paradise all over again? The black pudding says, no way. It says, basically, you can’t go home again. AC: I’m sorry to inflict this on our readers, but I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you to describe black pudding. LS: I based my description on the recipe that appeared in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by Hannah Glasse, first published in 1747 but reprinted and plagiarized a million times after that. You’ve slaughtered your hog, so you collect the warm blood, stir it until it cools so it doesn’t coagulate, add “groats,” or crushed oats, and a few spices, and then stuff the intestines of the hog with the mixture plus a lot of chopped fat. You’ve got sausages, essentially, which you then boil. The important thing is that there is no margin for error — if the blood coagulates, if the intestines aren’t scrubbed perfectly, if they’re overboiled or underboiled, you get something disgusting. And even if they’re perfect, black puddings were famously indigestible. What’s more, they had an unsavory cultural reputation. They were cheap and phallic-looking, which made them stock icons in comic anecdotes about rascals and criminals and “wenches.” AC: Why did she eat it? LS: The housekeeper in Whitwick came from Grasmere, where she had tried out as a cook for the Wordsworth family. She couldn’t do the dainty and refined cooking they wanted, so they fired her, but they decided she would be perfect for Whitwick. Curates didn’t make much money, and she was known as very “frugal.” In her view, black pudding would have been a good, cheap, appropriate dinner. Back home in Grasmere, by contrast, it would have been inconceivable to serve black pudding for dinner. Possibly for breakfast, as one of several dishes on the sideboard, but only the poor and working classes dined on such a thing. Why didn’t Dorothy fend this off when the cook presented her with the menu that morning, as cooks typically did? I think she wanted Whitwick to be her new paradise, and she refused to believe any evidence to the contrary. AC: When did you know you’d write a book on, or one that included, Wordsworth? How did you end up choosing the rest of the women in the book? LS: I came away from that night of insomnia with a new but very fuzzy image of Dorothy in my mind. I could see Dove Cottage, I could see the daffodils, I knew Wordsworth and Coleridge and all the rest of them were hovering in the background, but when I tried to put Dorothy in the picture, she kept fading away. That plate of black pudding was getting in the way. I didn’t know what to do with her — how could I write about her without being some kind of ordained Wordsworth expert? But I couldn’t shake her, either. So I did what I often do when I encounter a woman who’s fascinating, usually for reasons to do with food: I scribbled a few notes and put them in a filing cabinet. Years later, as the idea of doing culinary biographies started to take shape in my imagination, I went to the filing cabinet and pulled her out. Barbara Pym, the British novelist whose wonderful and hilarious books are full of food, was in there too. One of the enormous thrills of doing this project was that finally it made perfect sense to think about these women in the context of the food in their lives. Alexis Coe is the author of Alice+Freda Forever and the forthcoming biography You Never Forget Your First. Follow her. | | | | |  Illustration by Joan LeMay | Ibeyi, a reference to the Yoruba word for twins, is the name of the diaphanous electronic soul act of twin sisters Naomi Diaz and Lisa-Kaindé Diaz. The sisters were born in Cuba and raised in Paris; now Lisa lives in London, and Naomi lives in Paris. Their music features a fluid interchange of language that evokes their background: French, English, Spanish, and Yoruba all appear on their September 2017 album Ash. After releasing this deeply textured album, the pair are spending the summer pursuing collaborative projects with other artists; last month, they collaborated with Brazilian rapper Emicida on the song “Hacia El Amor.” Their musical world is lit by Ibeyi’s sense of collage, of language, styles, and voices. Particularly on their song “Transmission/Michaelion,” the twins interweave audio clips, like Claudia Rankine reading from Citizen: An American Lyric and their mother reading passages from Frida Kahlo’s diary. Their sense of collaboration is rich, and their collaborators are peerless: Meshell Ndegeocello plays bass on “Transmission/Michaelion”; Kasami Washington lends his saxophone on the ghostly “Deathless.” Their work is explicitly about resilience, and they are singing with resistance. The twins are continuing to bolster their work with new musical styles — on their song with Emicida, they added Portuguese to their flow. These combinations inform Ibeyi’s music with a sense of futuristic expression that pulls from their past and reimagines something more Utopian. “Transmission/Michaelion” is the centerpiece of Ash, and the brand-new music video crystallizes the ambitious poetic history in Ibeyi’s project. Images of the twins appear as transparent layers on top of a landscape that shifts from desert to stars in washes of blue and purple. The video is subtitled with passages that fuse ecological history and legend. There are so many elements to attend to that as soon as you start to watch the video, you’re filled with the impulse to immediately watch it again. For Lenny Letter, I talked with the sisters about their influences while cozy inside their tour bus, a few hours before their show with Red Bull’s 30 Days in Chicago this past winter. Now, two seasons later, they have released the music video for “Transmission/Michaelion,” premiering below. Maggie Lange: One of my favorite things about your work is your incorporation of many different languages. When you’re singing something in a certain language, in French or English or Spanish or Yoruba, does that change the content of the song for you? Lisa-Kaindé Diaz: Yeah, it does. But it’s really natural. It’s rare that we go to the piano and we’re like, I’m gonna write a Spanish song. We feel like thinking about it will take out the spontaneity. And so we don’t force it. That’s our one rule. For example, “Me Voy” couldn’t have been in English. Naomi Diaz: It was meant to be in Spanish. And there’s some songs that even now, like when we perform “Oya,” the slate will be (sings in French). I feel like it couldn’t have been in English, or in Spanish either. There’s some really special moments that happen. ML: Can I ask a question that I feel like is maybe too simplistic? I know lots of twins, and I read “I Wanna Be Like You” as being about a twin relationship. Is it? LKD: It was not about that at first. It was about a little girl that I used to babysit. And she was incredible. When we went to the studio, Richard, our producer, also said, “Oh, I love that song you wrote about Naomi.” I didn’t understand what song he was talking about. And then I was like, “Oh, that is way better. Of course!” It needed to be about Naomi. And so I tweaked it. ND: Well … you didn’t change a lot. LKD: No. It was just, like, two sentences. You’re kind of the same character as this little girl. You know, really free and wild. Sometimes songs are like that; you realize what they mean in the studio. ML: Art changes over time! LKD: And sometimes it means different things at different moments. But I remember after one of the Bataclan terrorism attacks, in France, you know? It was in a venue, in a music venue, and we learned that ten minutes before going onstage in a festival. It was the weirdest show we’ve ever performed. Because suddenly, we were texting all our friends, “Are you OK? Are you OK? Are you OK? Are you OK?” And so, in our ears, our mother was getting the responses and saying, “Oh, this person says she’s OK.” And like, during the whole show: “This person says she’s OK; this person says she’s OK.” What was weird is, suddenly all the songs had a different meaning. Then we played “Ghosts.” And everything made sense. “Now come to our world, it's a crying shame. We have built a foolish world.” Every lyric was perfectly fitting with the moment, and that’s when I realized songs that had meant so much to you one day can mean something really important and totally different another, and that’s kind of the magic of it. ND: Art doesn’t ask you who you are, where you’re from, in order to touch you. It does, or it doesn’t. And it’s something that I really like. It doesn’t discriminate. It’s one of the few things that doesn’t discriminate. You feel, or you don’t feel. It has nothing to do with where you’re from. I think that’s why good music or good paintings will talk to you differently through the years. In my family, people read books three times. In their early teen years, and then when they’re young women, and then when they’re advanced in their lives. I like that, the idea of watching movies like that. Several times, and then just seeing how the meaning changes for you. ML: What are some books or movies or art that you’ve revisited that have grown with you? LKD: I was making a list of movies I’d like to pass on to my children, in the future. And 70 percent of those movies had strong female characters. And that was a shock! I didn’t realize that. I looked out for those women so much, and that was the kind of woman I wanted to look like. I think A Woman Under the Influence, by Cassavetes, is probably one of my favorite movies of all time. Frida, and she’s in the album [the twins’ mother, Maya Dagnino, reads passages of Frida Kahlo’s diary in “Transmission/Michaelion”]. I think that her ability to transform ugliness and pain into something beautiful is quite striking. And it’s what we really try to do with our music, and I think really unconsciously. Meshell Ndegeocello. Something that I absolutely love about her, and you will agree, is her freedom. Every album is different. She has no boundaries, she has no limits. She has this confidence that, wherever she goes, she will find herself. And Citizen [Claudia Rankine] was one of those. And it just made sense. There's something absolutely incredible, this oxymoron ... talking about something so dirty, but with poetry, making it again, making it beautiful. ML: Yes, tell me more about selecting a passage from Rankine for “Transmission/Michaelion”? The day I read the one about Katrina, “I Didn’t Know What the Water Wanted,” is the day we were doing “Transmission/Michaelion,” which was saying, “Suddenly, strange and quiet, like underwater,” and I was reading that, and I was like, My God. This is meant to be. ML: With this song and “Rivers,” water seems like an element you’re attuned to. Do you think about elements as themes as artists? LKD: Yeah, that’s not something I control. It’s just an obsession of mine. I’m deeply touched by water, and I deeply respect it, and I think it shows. It’s just everywhere. And it’s on my mind all the time. ML: Do you have an element? LKD: Thunder. ND: Yeah, the thunder. ML: You’re both thunder! So do you guys fight a lot? ND: Do we fight? We do as normal people, normal sisters. LKD: No, I think that’s the opposite. We were the opposite. Like, she’s the thunder, and I’m the water, but there’s electricity in between. It can … it goes full circle, I think. We’re actually better when we interact. ND: Yeah. LKD: It makes sense when we interact. But we have to find the good way to. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Maggie Lange lives in Los Angeles but is still on East Coast time. | | | | |  Illustration by Jesse Zhang | Not long ago, my kindergarten-age son revealed that he doesn’t think I have a job. “You don’t work,” he said. “You take care of the house.” I was pretty sure he was just saying that to make me mad (he succeeded), but I kind of understood where he got the impression. As a producer and director, my husband takes business trips, has a work van and camera equipment. As a freelance writer, I rarely travel, I drive the family car, and my equipment is the same machine the boys watch Peppa Pig videos on. My husband has his own home office that he leaves at the end of the day; I work in the kitchen, where I probably spend 80 percent of my waking life. When we bought our suburban house, we did so when I was still commuting to an office job in the city, so I didn’t need my own office. Once I quit that job and began working for myself, I decided to set down my laptop in the brightest room in the house. For ten years, I had worked in an office with no external windows, so I had to get up and walk down a hall if I wanted to get a feel for whether it was sunny or thunder-storming. Now while I work, I watch the weather and the bunnies that dart around in the backyard. I never need to go far for some coffee or LaCroix. It’s not so bad. But I think it’s time for a workspace of my own. For my entire working life, I held down a day job in an office while I freelanced on the side. The day jobs were safety nets that provided a salary, benefits, office supplies, and a reason to turn down freelance assignments that seemed too boring or daunting. But I dreamed of quitting and becoming a writer, full stop. I went for it after I had my second kid but felt less than triumphant about the choice. I worried that I would flop, costing us money and ending up looking like a privileged, uninterested mother who paid others to watch her kids while she dinked around with a “hobby” in her kitchen. Turns out, the white-marble counter has done me well. There, while I dribbled lunch crumbs onto my laptop, I’ve made a salary comparable to that at my last day job, interviewed MacArthur “genius grant” winners, written up magazine cover stories, negotiated higher fees, and penned award-winning stories from a hard white Ikea stool that hurts my butt if I don’t get up and periodically walk around. However, working at the island all day every day, I’m like the unpaid receptionist for the house. I keep the fridge stocked and sign for packages. My husband comes by and eats his lunch behind me — in my office — while I eat my Amy’s frozen meals and read Ohnotheydidnt and yearn for solitude. There is a plastic potty, sometimes full of forgotten urine, on the floor less than five feet away. I’ve never resented my husband’s space. He started his own company right before we had kids, and since day one, he has been on his grind, working hard at his job and also being a good husband and dad at the same time. I may quietly judge the way he lets papers and mail and recycling pile up in his office, but he needs the square footage. In fact, he needs more space than he currently has — our living room often houses an overflow of the black plastic cases that hold his equipment. So this spring, he’s having our garage remodeled into a larger space for his company. I was generally supportive of this professional upgrade until it dawned on me that I would get his office, a quiet, carpeted room tucked under the eaves of the house. And then I went from supportive to elated. As a woman living with three guys, I’m excited about the opportunities for personalization, decoration, and privacy with this new office. I might do one of those things that always catches my eye in the House Beautifuls my mom gives me, like paint the walls deep, glossy eggplant or paper one wall a bold, colorful print. Right now, the room is dark all the time, with creepy overgrown plants crowding the window. It’s furnished with a clunky desk my husband built for himself and a black leather couch that looks like it came from a 1980s lawyer’s office, because it did (it was my dad’s). Even if all I do is take those plants out and remove that couch, the decisions are mine, all mine to make. I won’t need to share my bulletin board with takeout menus or my pens with the children’s medicine or my desk with a bowl of cold, congealed oatmeal. I will finally have a dedicated shelf for my books, and not just a huge Tupperware in the basement, where all the bugs live. I will get to start my day without feeling that if I don’t empty the dishwasher first, I will go insane. I will get to close my door if I want to call my gynecologist, my friends, my mom without the threat of some penis-haver drifting through. Sometimes I have a hard time taking myself seriously as a professional and even as a human being. While there are downsides to freelancing, like cash flow and loneliness, otherwise it’s a pretty perfect life. I see my kids in the morning. I get to work out when I want to. Once in a while, I’ll even go see a movie by myself during the day. But the rest of the time, I work hard, for the money, to further establish myself professionally, and to quiet the voice that says Look at her life — she’s just a stay-at-home mom who pays to keep her kids out of the house. It’s worth noting that I have never wondered whether my husband seemed like he was just a stay-at-home dad who paid to keep his kids out of the house. But he has an office. So maybe once I get the office, I will see myself the same way I see him. Legit. I realize how much I want, need, and deserve a space that does not straddle a line between mom and professional. It’s time for me to move away from my concerns about my legitimacy and trust that I have figured out what works for us and for me. Besides, with my new workspace, my kids will finally get what I do. My son is home sick as I type this, and he has watched me work on this piece all morning. I asked him, “What do you think I’ll do in my new office?” He pondered for a moment. “Cook, I think?” Claire Zulkey is a professional writer with no day job. You can learn much more about her at zulkey.com. | | | | | | | | |
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