Dispatch #22: The Knocking

I'm scared...I'm SCARED...!

Imagine a a styrofoam container of bad (good) take-out Chinese food, left out in a hot parking lot in the middle of summer. Give it a couple of days. Now open it up, dress up that furry, ant-ridden orange chicken in some short blonde-ish hair and wrestle it into a T-shirt and Levi’s.

And there I am!

That’s to say, I look and feel like garbage!

If that image is unnecessarily gross and also nonsensical, apologies, I haven’t slept through the night in days and days. Mickey has been waking up multiple times at night, terrified of either zombies or what he calls “the knocking” (a not-bad title for a horror movie franchise) and he will not go back to sleep…or, he will, only to wake an hour or twenty minutes later, screaming. No more Scooby-Doo for you, Mickey! I pray his sleeping goes back to normal after all the Halloween decorations (our own included) are put back in storage. Until then, he is obsessed with spooky skeletons by day, and scared of them by night.

Is it a developmental thing? Patrick and I ask each other.

If he doesn’t come out of this sleep strike knowing how to read French, then, well, I want my money back.

Today I imagined I’d be finishing edits on the newly revised Part 5 of my book. But I finished a day early, and although I have notes on Part 6 from my editor Dan waiting in my in-box, my brain is at half-mast. There’s no way I can take apart another section and figure out how to put it back together—not with what I’m working with.

Instead, I had a phone call with my best friend Diana, who is serving as an unpaid consultant on my novel (AKA, Time’s Mouth, out 8/1/23!) I’ve sent her paragraphs about Santa Cruz, California, where she went to college, and today we discussed what therapy sessions for my main character, Cherry, might look like. Diana is a therapist.

My question for her was, basically: Imagine you have a client who was an abandoned by her mom to be raised in an all-female cult and then, later, she left her own daughter in LA because she thought she was being possessed by an evil spirit. How would those sessions go?

Diana is a good friend and a good sport.

Two weekends ago I flew up to Oakland to see her. I went for a single night, Saturday morning until Sunday evening, which is a heavenly little trip, I highly recommend it. Diana is married and has one daughter, age 9, and going to her house is like going to a spa. (We also went to an actual spa, in the Marin Headlands, for the day, which was blissful.) To be honest, being in her calm and quiet house, drinking tea and eating some charcuterie on her deck, I kept wondering: Why is my own house such a fucking nightmare? This is a spa whereas I live in a zoo.

We are all having a tough time over here. Patrick and I have major work deadlines. Bean has a lot of homework, and he can’t stand the idea of anyone watching TV when he can’t, so on weekdays the other two kids agree to that no-screen-life while he toils. And then, when he is done and they can finally watch TV and play Nintendo Switch, it’s so late, and everyone is frazzled, and dinner must be prepared and there are toys everywhere due to the no-screen rule. Ginger’s anxieties went away (for the most part) over the summer, but, wow baby, are they back. She is nervous about a lot of stuff, especially about going to bed. At night, after we read together, she is struck by sudden nausea. She can’t relax. She has a fear that she won’t wake up if she falls asleep, that I won’t either, and she senses that pall of wrongness that I know all too well. As a fellow anxious person, especially related to sleep stuff, her fears and panic make me feel guilty (for passing on the anxiety trait, and also for not being able to help her, to solve it for her). I try my best to calm her down, to tell her it’s okay, that it’ll be okay. We do some breathing exercises, we talk to her, we give her a bowl in case she vomits (she never does).

I feel like, if she were an only child, we could help her through these moments.

Instead, this nightly troubleshooting is typically accompanied by Mickey screaming from his room, “I’m scared!!! I’m scared!!!” and Bean, emerging still-soaked from his bath, to writhe across his bed naked while Ginger whimpers. I would think an eleven-year-old would be shy about flashing his PENIS and BALLS and BUTTHOLE for anyone to see, but no, he needs the sensory input of the sheets on his wet nude body, and he doesn’t care who might be nearby. (Sending love to all the parents of neurotypical kids who feel sad about their kids’ growing independence—but also, maybe I want to say…fuck off…?!)

The two older kids, who share a room, inevitably start fighting because Ginger is trying to calm down and her brother is wired and hyper, naked and writhing. We finally get Ginger to calm down and Bean to dress and read for thirty minutes…and then he needs to brush his teeth, and come downstairs to get his back and toes cracked (I know, I know, why are we doing THAT), and then he must bounce on his giant ball while we tell him to knock it off, and then he must be taken to bed to recite 3-5 quotes from The Simpsons as a final bedtime prayer. Lately, Ginger is still awake and nervous, and upset by these interruptions. And they start fighting again, which reminds Mickey, in the bedtime next door, that he is SCARED.

This goes on and on, every night. Last week I burst into tears twice, and one night I had to have my own temper tantrum while these bedtime ministrations went on because, swear to god, I was going to lose my mind. I did my own (clothed) writhing on our shag rug downstairs as Patrick went upstairs for the thousandth time to make everyone shut up. Not my finest moment.

These last couple of evenings, Bean has fallen asleep without the cracks and the quotes because he’s taken nighttime cough medicine (he had a cold). Ginger and Mickey have been taking children’s melatonin, which has helped, too. It is so strange and peaceful to have quiet at 9:15 pm. Patrick and I watch a show, we go read (for a minute there, it was disgustingly cute how I was re-reading Less and he was reading the sequel, Less is Lost), and marvel at how peaceful it feels. Finally! We get to be adults! Finally, some time off from the labor of work followed by the labor of parenting!

A few times, when the kids were up past ten, weeping and writhing and panicking and fighting, Patrick and I ended up fucking at midnight in a sort of crazed and deranged Hail-Mary-we-are-adults-and-this-is-OUR-TIME-damnit way. But these last two nights, we’re just chilled out.

Until, of course, we were woken up a couple of hours later with a three-year-old yelling, “MOMMY! DADDY! I’M SCARED,” our dream of sleep: ruined.

Lord, I am sick of lying on the floor next to Mickey’s toddler bed until he passes out. (We refuse to let him into the bed unless it’s after five AM.)

We are doing things to fix these problems. Today, Mickey and I will make a book about sleep issues and nightmares and how to fall back asleep after we wake up. We will read it together at bedtime to emotionally prepare for the night ahead.

I’ll call Kaiser and get Ginger an appointment with a shrink.

(And for me too because, yep, still haven’t handled my own mental health.)

We are also going to move Ginger back into her own room soon, and Mickey will move into Bean’s room. Hopefully, that will give Ginger the peace and quiet she needs. We may invest in some sleep headphones for her, too, so that she can use a meditation or story app to calm her down and shut out the chaos. Mickey, we hope, will be happy to have his big brother in the room to protect him from any and all zombies. We’re under discussions about changing Bean’s nighttime rituals so that he does all his annoying stuff before his bath. We’ll see if that takes: the twice-exceptional child suffers from rigid thinking, and it’s very hard to get him to make changes to routine.

But…someday, Bean will, at least, be shy about his balls. Right?!

Anyway, this is all to say that’s how my life is going. A glamorous life! Somehow I revised a 70 page section, which had like 40 new pages in it—and in two and a half weeks! Somehow I also read and critiqued my brilliant student and friend Neela’s novel for the manuscript workshop I lead. Somehow I’ve read four other books this month. Somehow I exercised. Somehow I didn’t drive my car off a cliff.

Here are things that have been getting me through—maybe you need something to help you through, too?

First, crazy pants. The love affair began with these Maeve pants from Anthropologie, which are no longer for sale, but which you can see here.

They’re thick, and leopard-print, and go so well with pink heels (and chocolate cake).

Then, I got these over the summer:

I know this is a blurry picture, it’s a screenshot from my phone, but you get the idea. Patrick calls these my Pickle Pants and I love them so much—the bright green color, how comfortable they are, and their slurpy feeling: they make a big butt bigger. (These are also by Maeve, also from Anthropologie; search “Maeve wide-legged cropped pant” if you want the cut in other available colors and prints…)

My other new crazy pants are a touch too big, but they make me look like a cowgirl dressed as a candy cane so I got a belt and I’m dealing with it. They’re these Wranglers. Right now it looks like they only have size 26 available which is actually size 23 in normal jeans, but check back if you like them because they’re regularly restocked. Size up by two sizes or learn the hard way.

Here are some other delightfully crazy pants:

Black-and-white squiggles!

A floral. Another floral.

These shape (?) ones.

What fun. What chaos. My life, as pants.

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Something else getting me through this season—

The album “I Walked with You a Ways” from Plains, a side project by Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and a singer named Jess Williamson, whom I’d never heard of until now. It’s nouveau alt-country, it’s country-country, and I love the song “Hurricane.” Here’s the video, directed by Aidy Bryant, of all people.

(I turned off the new Taylor Swift to go back to it, just saying.)

(Also Patrick can’t stand Katie Crutchfield’s voice; he calls it “fake country.” Well, Patrick, I can’t stand Father John Misty’s voice, so WE ARE EVEN.)

Hmmm, what else?

For someone who doesn’t have an interest in romance novels and hates scary movies, it’s been a little rough for me, culturally-speaking, this October.

I have been listening to Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath as I walk the hills in my neighborhood. The biography is over a thousand pages, I believe, and the audio book is about 45 hours long…so I’ll be here a while. I don’t like the narrator, who sounds like Holly Hunter cosplaying an ASMR YouTuber, but I’m getting used to her. What I do love is the seriousness with which biographer Heather Clark takes Plath, how Plath’s genius as a writer is a given, and how Clark doesn’t give Plath a narrow story of mental illness but paints a complex portrait of a gifted, startlingly smart woman confined by her historical era. I’m in her Smith College years and am riveted. Also, when it’s done, I’m re-reading The Bell Jar; I’ve already been going back to her poems since I started the biography.

(And now I know that Sylvia Plath and I had nearly identical SAT scores!)

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Patrick made Alison Roman’s Spicy, Garlicky White Beans (from Dining In), and we both loved them. And, as you know, I have issues with beans. These are easy to make (says Patrick), flavorful, spicy, and resulted in minimal farts!

Here’s the recipe:

1/4 cup olive oil
6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 can cannellini beans
Kosher salt and pepper

Heat the oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, fennel seed and beans in a medium pot over medium heat. Season w/ salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally (careful not to break up beans), until sizzling and fragrant. Five minutes.

Reduce heat to medium-low, cook until garlic is browned and beans begin to fry up. 15-20 minutes.

We served them on toast, with burrata on another toast, and a big salad, and it was a gorgeous weekday vegetarian dinner.

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Okay, that’s what I’ve got. I’m planning a BIG writing post once my novel is once and for all behind me. Which is maybe soon, maybe never? If if any of the lovely paid subscribers among you have any topic requests for the paid-only missives, give me a holler. I love an assignment.

xoxo

Edan