Very good things to read & listen to & do

For when your mind says "feeeeeed meeee" & honestly the last thing you need to do is read "The Anxious Generation"

Life has felt full lately. (Yours too?) My imaginary superpower would be to be able to cry on command to efficiently release some of the pressure. So, a short & hopefully useful dispatch today of

A few things that have kept me afloat:

• Why children’s books? by Katherine Rundell (London Review of Books) My mom got me a subscription to the LRB, and even though the pile-up is a little stressful, when I actually get to sit down and read pieces like this, it’s worth the clutter. Rundell says many fascinating things about children’s lit, but I keep thinking about her call-out of the descriptions of food in Redwall, and why the best writing for kids so often includes wonderful, vivid food; “You might, were you a Redwall mouse, have a feast of ‘tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream and rose leaves, devilled barley pearls in acorn purée, apple and carrot chews, marinated cabbage stalks steeped in creamed white turnip with nutmeg’.” Should I wait for the kids to be ready or should I just start re-reading the Redwall books alone?

• Becky Barnicoat’s fantastic graphic memoir, Cry When The Baby Cries. It’s one of the best, fullest storytellings of matrescence (weirdly worded, sorry this newsletter is free!) I’ve seen in ages.

• Protesting with my kids and my mom at the April 5th ‘Hands Off’ event in Portland! It was Griffin’s second protest and Nellie’s first and it was a total joy even though Griffin let me know he hated every minute of it and wore his headphones the whole time (you get it). I was so proud of them. A lot of the signs said stuff like “I hate crowds but I hate what’s happening here more,” which I told Griffin meant that a lot of people out there kind of hated the loud-crowd thing, too. I don’t know what I’m getting at, except that I guess that it takes all kinds, and all kinds came out in all their many shades of joyful, colorful, energetic resistance. I saw a lot of older protesters clutch their hearts or their eyes well up when they saw Griffin’s self-made “Trump Busters” sign (get it, like Ghostbusters) or heard Nellie’s enthusiastic and LOUD “Fight Back!!” contribution to the “stand up / fight back” call-and-response thing that was happening.

  

  That's my mom in blue, and those are the kids with their amazing signage.

• Amanda Hess’s new book, Second Life: Having A Child In The Digital Age . She’ll be on our podcast,

  The Mother Of It All
  next week! It’s a great conversation and the book is so good and rigorous and smart and full of empathy and sharp critique, which seems like a tough chord to strike.

• An 11-minute guided meditation for when you’re sick. I like to listen to this after putting the kids to bed, which is usually when I stop moving long enough to realize how crummy I actually feel. I lay down on the couch and prop my legs up on pillows, and it gets me where I need to go. 11 minutes later, I’m ready for the real medicine: tea & grown up TV.

• Join My Matreon! (New Yorker) Ha + also a little too close to the bone, but it stayed with me.

• There’s a new baby elephant at our local zoo, and whatever your feelings are about zoos (mine are complicated!) it was downright sacred and lovely to visit Tula-Tu and her mom Rose-Tu in a big hushed room full of wonderstruck kids and their wonderstruck adults.

• Night Lights : Bedtime Stories For Parents In The Dark by Phyllis Theroux. A book of essays about raising kids that I stumbled across ages ago and am finally reading. It’s old, short, tidy and really beautiful. I was reading it in a bar the other night (our favorite ‘date night’ activity is to go to this one little pub close to our house and read) and was moved to tears by this one lovely little part. Awkward but worth it!

• Long spring walks in Forest Park.

• Making my phone dumber by spending too much time in the Dumb Phones reddit (really funny to do this on my phone in bed for like 2 hours with the blue light like 1.5 inches from my eyeballs) and then deleting all my apps and making my screen dim as well as black and white expecting this rather minor lifestyle change to solve everything that is undesirable in my mind.

• Gardening* and reading about gardening, and adjacent reco: That New Yorker Ruth Stout article! Apparently she gardened naked? Oddly tempting! (*impulsively buying plants without a plan.)

TBR list just got longer b/c I set foot in a book store so here’s that:

I’m almost late for pick up, so I’ll just do it as a bunch of pictures (again this work is pro bono so I know you don’t mind, right?).

Tell me what you’re reading (and what I should be reading next) if you’re so inclined!