This week, a friend of mine went into hospice care. She'd been diagnosed a little over a year ago with stage four colon cancer that had spread to her liver. She was in her late forties. A month earlier, she’d been telling me she was in the best shape of her life. Losing weight (irony). Feeling good (irony). My friend was a single mother by choice (like me) of a boy, now nine, who is my daughter’s half-sibling—or dibling, we say, for donor sibling. There’s a portmanteau for everything, turns out. So: our kids are related because they share the same anonymous donor.
I met T. (I’m not sharing her name, just out of respect for her privacy, though I am certain she would not care—she’s not half as private as I am, and I’ll pretty much share anything)—right, so I met T. because she’d posted her email address on the “sibling registry board” of our sperm bank, and because the address was an unusual first name.last name combination, I Googled her and then began to stalk her, of course. Turned out she lived 20 minutes away—creepy—and that we were already both on the same single mom listservs. I decided to write her because I was starting to freak myself out with all the stalking—even I have a threshold, apparently—and figured she’d be equally freaked out. But no. She found nothing strange about me or my stalking or that our kids were related—why would she, she was already part of a Facebook group for families with kids from this same donor—gah! They’d already had one retreat in South Carolina or something. They’d baked a cake with our donor’s number scrawled across the top in icing.
I found all of this super weird and droll and just…weird. Because getting stabbed 600,000 times in the ass with hormones and mixing your eggs in a dish with stranger sperm isn’t weird at all…
(I just dug up this photo from January 2014, appropriately titled: fertility hell.)
T. and I became friends. We went camping together with other single moms. Had Friendsgivings. Went on adventures in the city with our kids—museums, parks, climbing gyms, playgrounds. I studied the way she parented. I liked it. She was always calm. She spoke to her son like an equal. She always explained why she wanted him to do, or not do, something. She helped me coddle my kid less. I remember my daughter once asking me for a glass of water and me robotically getting up, only to have T. say to her in that classic South African drawl, “Missy, you can get it yourself.” She’d said it kindly but firmly. It was a revelation. My kid *can* get a glass of water herself. It sounds like a small thing, but there’s no manual for how to raise a child, you just go on instinct and if your instincts are bad or just off, it certainly helps to have other people around who can set you right. T. was very good at setting people right.
Our kids were growing up together. They are nearly two years apart, which is significant at this age, so they aren’t that close. But they understand how they are connected and it means something to them. Now he’s moved halfway across the country so that his aunt can help raise him. Meantime, his mother is dying, all but gone, and with her an incredibly feisty, funny, welcoming, and lovely spirit.
And so this week I am sad for losing my friend and heartbroken for a little boy who is losing his only parent. Do I have nightmares about orphaning my own child in similar fashion? I sure do. I’ve been having this nightmare for years.
Segue to death number two: BookForum. Not saying the death of yet another venue for thoughtful discourse on letters compares to losing a friend, but it is another blow—just a different kind. I could eulogize BookForum in detail but I bet there will be a lot of other folks doing that over the next few days and so I will just mourn, in broad strokes, what already felt like a last bastion of critical thought. The pieces in BookForum were smart and bold. They covered books from small presses. They covered books that themselves covered some rough and fraught terrain. They gave a platform to really smart writers and thinkers. I know it’s a hallmark of middle age to bemoan the culture and yearn for the heydays, even if the heydays for literature in America were, you know, rank with misogyny and racism. But I’m still doin’ it, Monty Python style. Because I like the company I’m in.
And now for my weekly installment of: Name Your Shame, in which I list out what was new news to me this week but old news for everyone else:
Tory Burch. Someone I know sat next to her at a party and was telling me how cool this was. Unfortunately, I had to stop her and ask who the heck Tory Burch is. I was relieved to find out she wasn’t, like, up there with Nelson Mandela. But apparently I still need to be embarrassed because she’s a famous fashion designer.
Goblin mode. This is the Oxford dictionary’s 2022 word of the year (it’s two words, people) and yet I never heard of it. Apparently it means: “a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” Are these the words we typically associate with a goblin? Regardless, this pairing of words is hopelessly inelegant (snob alert!) and so I’m not apologizing for being clueless about its social currency.
Julia Fox. Apparently goblin mode got popular because of some tweet having to do with this actress.
White Lotus. Seems like everyone is talking about the season finale. So maybe now is the time to go watch this thing I’ve never heard of. Know what I watch these days? Dog shows with Cesar Milan. Holiday cookie bakeoff. And Buffy reruns. Maybe this is why dating is so hard. All these people have these dating litmus tests like: “Bonus if you can recite the first line of “Last Year at Marienbad.” But I’ll leave that discussion to another stack.
Anyway, be well, folks. And, um, PSA: if you’re over 45 (or anytime, really, the guidelines are nonsense), please get your colonoscopies! Or ask about cologuard, which isn’t invasive, but could save your life.
Until next week, when I will write about tulips and, oh, Pantone’s new color for 2023! (Spoiler alert: I will be writing about none of these things).
FM
I think it’d be cool to start growing my readership more, so if you know someone you think might be into my stack, please share it! Thanks.