You Get What You Need

Hello! January was 83 days long and then suddenly it was over and here we are, a week into February.

I’ve decided that moving forward with these newsletters, I’ll stick any news, publishing updates, etc. up here at the top and then drop new essays below. That way, if all you care about is a quick update of what I have going on or coming up, you can get that right away and move on with your day. If you only like the essay portion, you can just scroll right past this initial bit and move along to what you came here to see. If you want to take in the whole package, it’s all here for you and you have my eternal gratitude and love for being extra special awesome.

There are two sessions left of my workshop The Written Womb. One this Friday, February 9th at 12:30 and another on March 8th at 12:30. You can sign up for either or both at Yellow Arrow Publishing.

I recently had three micro pieces published at Identity Theory as part of their new Micro Monday series. I’ve got two fiction pieces that were once lengthy, long-winded tales that I cut down to 500 words each, as well as a nonfiction piece. One of the stories is about a mother who’s getting kicked out of her Mommy & Me group for an especially odd reason. Another is about a woman who keeps a weird collection. And the nonfiction piece is about my son’s wild, sometimes disturbing imagination and the intense games he makes me play with him. You can read all three in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee unless you tend to really pound your coffee in which case, calm down.

I hope your February is off to an easy, sunny start, and may the fat ground rat prove right that an early spring is on its way.

As always, thanks for reading and for all your support!

You Get What You Need

on brunch orders, babies & enjoying quiet time

The first apartment my husband and I lived in together was above a laundry mat. We moved to Baltimore for a job he got right out of college, but the office was located outside of the city, so every day he would take the one car we had and leave town. I was initially unemployed and had to find ways to occupy myself. I organized our living space. I wandered around the neighborhood. Occasionally, in an attempt to be productive, I worked on a few short stories I was writing, or searched for jobs that sounded even remotely appealing and that could be reached via Baltimore’s limited public transit. For the most part, I watched a lot of TV and, once we adopted a kitten, I spent many hours dragging a long piece of string back and forth across a floor that vibrated whenever too many industrial-sized washing machines hit their spin cycles all at once. I loved this version of my life.

I loved my twenties. We spent our evenings cooking dinner together and watching movies. We popped up to New York on short notice to meet up with friends from college and stayed out until four in the morning, drinking and laughing, spending more money than any of us had to spare. We went to brunch on Saturday mornings and then spent the afternoon on the couch in a Bottomless Bloody Mary haze, watching college football. On Sundays, we’d go running for two hours straight and then recover by eating a pack of peanut M&Ms and downing Coco Colas we bought at the corner store, the good kind, the Mexican Coke that’s made with real sugar and somehow always tastes colder than every other Coke you’ve had in your life. Sometimes I would take a nap on the floor, my head resting on the fluffy thicket of our dog’s warm barrel chest. I never once worried about how any of these things might affect my back. And I never once thought about how children would fit into this life, not even after we moved into a bigger house with a small yard. The dog will love this yard, I thought, and he did.

I never had strong feelings one way or the other about having children. I figured you could have a very nice life with kids and you could have a very nice life without them. I still feel this way; there are many roads to happiness. I struggled with the initial decision to have a baby not because I was worried about how it would change my life—my life had already changed on its own in my thirties, taking on a slower pace, more time at home, an increase in back pain—but because I simply didn’t know what I wanted. I have never known what I wanted for my life.

The restaurant where we used to go for those bottomless Bloody Marys served an amazing French toast. They also had excellent omelets. Every time we went, I struggled over what to order. If I got the French toast, I was happy and felt I’d had a great meal, but I always wondered if I would have liked an omelet even more. If I got an omelet, I was delighted and sated, but I couldn’t help second-guessing myself—would French toast have been even more satisfying? My whole life is like a brunch decision. I can always go either way and know I’ll be both happy and disappointed. Satisfied with the choices I’ve made but forever wondering how I’d feel if I’d done something different.

I decided to have a baby because why not? Granted, this is not a particularly sound reason to have a baby, but my life had the space and stability to start a family, so we started one. A choice needed to be made and I made it. I don’t regret it for a second. My son is a nonstop source of joy in my life, even in times when parenting has been especially difficult and I find my mind wandering to rest in the corners of the life I didn’t choose: a quiet house, long, lazy mornings sleeping in, easy travel where I don’t need to pack ten thousand extra items or attempt to quietly entertain someone from the confines of my seat like I’m some kind of in-flight Marcel Marceau.

The road to a second baby was a more tortuous one, made all the more twisted and confusing by a global pandemic and a mystery physical condition that left me questioning if getting pregnant again would even be safe for my body. I spent years in conversation with my husband, evenings where I would dissolve into tears certain that I didn’t want another baby but felt I should have one, certain that I did want another baby but was ill-equipped to be the mother of two kids. My life with one child was good and happy despite its difficulties. A delicious brunch where I thoroughly enjoyed my omelet and had no cause for complaint or need for more. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about that French toast and wondering if I might have been more satisfied by a different decision. Or perhaps a more apt way of looking at it is that I could have it both ways, French toast and an omelet served together, like a bougie Hungry Man’s Breakfast, but I wasn’t sure I possessed the appetite for such a feast and feared I would be perpetually overstuffed, ready to burst.

The baby recently entered one of my favorite phases which I like to refer to as The Tiny Inspector. Having mastered mobility to the point of being able to cruise around the room, easily pull up to a stand, and safely return to the ground again, he no longer feels the need to be constantly, chaotically on the move and is content to sit for long stretches of time while investigating shoe laces or the way paper feels when you crumple it in your fist over and over again. Just the other morning, he climbed into my lap and we spent thirty minutes quietly watching the washing machine run its cycle.

I remember this phase with my first son, the long days of quiet contemplation before he got old enough to want to play more imaginatively and I would be instructed to shift back and forth between characters inhabiting a made-up world that only he could see. I found it tedious at first, all this sitting and watching, the quiet that filled my days highlighting the isolation of early motherhood, the lack of adult conversations in my life, a slow, but steady evaporation of my intellect. In time, though, I realized that if I gave myself over to the quiet and thought of these extended periods of observation as a form of meditation, they became quite enjoyable, even stimulating. There are so many sounds on a construction site. There are so many tiny threads in a shoelace. There are so many colors swirling around each other as the washer sloshes.

Having been here before, I knew to give in more quickly this time around. To set aside my phone and my to-do lists, to not bother thinking about the other ways I could be using this time. Instead, I relax into it, welcome the pause and the opportunity to take note of small details, odd sounds, the way my body feels when all I’m asking of it is to be still.

Who knows what my life would look like if I had chosen a different path, or if I had set out down the road toward becoming a parent and found it closed off for any number of reasons. That must be so painful. All of my love and deepest sympathy to anyone who has experienced that.

My first son is turning seven this month and the baby will be a year old in March. How has it only been a year and yet, where did the time go? How is that first little baby now a child whose head reaches my shoulder? A child who just the other day when I told him to please stop growing up so fast wisely said to me, “Isn’t the whole point of having kids so that you can enjoy watching them grow?”

Where would I be if I had not decided to become a mother? Perhaps I would be more successful, though I’m not entirely sure how such a thing is measured these days. I would certainly be better rested. In all likelihood, my back would be in better shape. I think about these other nonexistent versions of myself from time to time, but I don’t linger on them. I let the images pass through my mind and then float away again, and return my focus to the tiny fingers studying the knot in a sneaker’s laces. When the washer shifts into its spin cycle, we watch the drum circle rapidly. We listen to the thump of the machine rocking back and forth. We feel its vibration through the floor.

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.