Long live the socks!

Melodrama in the details, God in the hamper.

Let me begin by saying: I have been unfaithful.

I’ve been writing something else.

Something different.

Not the usual circular lament.

Not a delicate unraveling of self.

Not even a softly woven fragment, half gauze, half elegy.

I’ve been writing a piece on motherhood, that is not—my dear friends—fatalistic but instead: funny.

Or, at least, funny-adjacent.

It is darkly comedic or lightly humorous or really, some nuanced version of melodrama in that thought-spilling, verbal-diarrhea, “I’m-living-through-End-Times-but-am-wildly-self-aware-buying-this-matcha-latte-as-an-act-of consumerism-disguised-as-self-care-disguised-as-aesthetic-minimalism-oh!-the-spiritual-decay” way, but don’t quote me.

It’s not my usual schtick, and I’m not fully committed.

What I guess I’m saying is I’m not sure I can pull it off.

But, I think I can.

Maybe.

That is—(God, did I really write That Is?), I think I can be funny. Not in the burst-aloud-break-character-on-SNL-cry-laughing vein, but in the neurotic, mind-looping sense.

The thoughts that go through my mind are none a normal person should endure—they are weird and wild and ever-aware of all immediate, near, ambient, theoretical, and far-off danger. And yet endure these thoughts I do: “Have I recently eaten salmon? How recently? And when does recent become classified as recent? Can I eat this lox here—now? Or, will I die of an allergic reaction? Have I developed a sudden, severe allergy to fish and will now fall, asphyxiating on the floor of this sprout-loving, prebiotic-worshipping cafe? Is this how I go—leaving my child to smearing Nutella over her face, licking her fingers like they are mini eclairs, and trying to Free Solo herself off the chair like it’s fucking El Capitan? Yes, this is my end. RIP Stevie, who will die among ten-year-old macramé and pots of clay housing green, indeterminable plants likely bought off Amazon. Here she lies: a once millennial, now in millennial hereafter, one rustic coffee shop in Chattanooga filled with hikers and Yuppie families. Flat white heaven. Nitro brew nirvana. The pour-over of all promise lands. Her last sight: not the daffodils, heather, or freesias, but ten sets of Tevas, one terrible ingrown nail.”

And, these rainbow-and-butterfly-and-unicorn-and-a-tiny-baby-kitten-in-a-tiny-baby-teacup thoughts? I thought they, too, deserved a day in the sun.

When I applied for Granta’s six-month Memoir Workshop, I submitted a serious essay. It was deep, it was felt, it had paragraphs that curled softly at the edges. Lyrical, poetic, written in the Stevie ‘I’ voice.

I wonder if I were to ask M to sketch me, what might come through. The face of a shared room and also a poem about a poem and also the end of Tuesday. The eyes like those of a crushed sparrow and a nose so black and gaseous and distant. The mouth—my mouth—shivering across too many parts, spread thinly, skimpily across a desktop, lamp, ergonomic chair.

But, when asked to introduce my idea on the first day, I had a change of heart. I wanted this thing I was trying to do to be different. Heavy and light, true yet sardonic. Something that made space for acuity—and absurdity, and the strange juxtaposition of motherhood (a traditional role) in Columbus (a traditional city) as lived by me (a working, writing, living, breathing person ambivalent about motherhood).

For me, motherhood—and life—hasn’t been a walk in the park. Prior to getting pregnant, I suffered from a longstanding chronic illness that has made eating difficult and reflux pain intractable. I have had two surgeries and am scheduled for a third. I also have generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and an unspecified mood disorder. In 2023, I had my first and only child, and for 10 months prior I suffered agoraphobia, nausea, and dysgeusia. Ten months later, I was still suffering, this time from severe intrusive thoughts, medication-induced memory loss and aphasia, and maternal rage.

Still, through it all, I’ve worked, I’ve written, I’ve edited, I’ve cooked, I’ve cleaned, I’ve played with, fed, and rocked my daughter. I’ve woken up every day and pulled on my big girl pants and got “on with it”—this last year trading in my favored Madewell skinny jeans for more mommy-appropriate barrel legs. It’s taken me weeks since having a baby to feel once more comfortable in my literal pants, so it’s not a shock that it’s taken weeks to feel figuratively comfortable in my funny big girl pants.

The me I am writing to at the moment—away from this Substack—I’ve told people is the me I know best. The thoughts and obsessions and compulsions. The over- and ever- and deep-analyses. The many and varied contingencies, forethoughts, projections, speculations, and premonitions. And, yet, to write myself and them—to get it all down on the page, I have fought an internal battle, a battle of ego, a battle of “I,” eventually writing myself out of the first person and into the second, “you.”

I found the “you” created enough distance from the me that I could actually write like—well, her. This discovery of this felt a little like the exact moment when Michelle Williams-as-Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn is spotted by the students on the stairs in Eton College after escaping to the English countryside with Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), and she whispers ever-so-softly, “Shall I be her?”—tucking chin down, throwing an arm up, leaning white blouse and brown pencil skirt against the stone wall, her bleach-blonde hair catching the light to a round of cheers.

In effect, that’s what the shift to “you” gave me: the ability to perform.

To find the humor and high drama without losing perspective, truth.

To create a barrier between the exaggerated self and the deeply reflective self, the masked self and then the self with the mask slips. And does it slip!

What follows is a piece I wrote early in the memoir workshop—when I was still pulling on my funny girl pants, one leg at a time. It’s—fittingly (pun intended!)—about socks. Yes, socks. And, also, penchants, which in turn, really is about peculiarities, which is the basis of personality.

While it’s not stated directly, I think it’s clear. This piece delights in my baby finding her personality. What’s not clear: that my baby found her personality just as I regained mine.

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The socks. The socks, you lament to your friend L. You can’t get rid of the socks.

They are your baby’s pièce de résistance: bright neon pink, each bearing a little brown monkey at the base of the shin. On their soles are dozens of PVC beads—nubby bits of plastic that give the socks their stick, tooth, grit. Nubby bits that—for whatever reason—make your child squeal in glee.

You send L proof of your baby's latest obsession.

In the quickly snapped photo, Aoife stands tall in a new blue-and-white matching set with frilled pantaloons and little blue buttons that makes this the high/low moment to end all high/low moments: her questionable pink gym socks, proudly yanked mid-calf.

Anything-but-athleisure chic, the socks were purchased at My Gym—Columbus' sole children's fitness center (and a national chain)—for the cost of a just-launched, proprietary skincare serum, and then they became the cruelest nonstop subscription to, of all things, cotton. The socks needing replacing, according to My Gym Law, which is law of all of Toddlerland, when they are lost.

Each time of purchase: the pink color demanded. Each time of purchase: the magic of pink seemingly unchanged.

In her socks, anything and everything is possible for your baby.

In her socks, she can walk basilisk-like across the balance beam that’s one inch off the ground.

In her socks, she can swing absently from a black rubber swing hanging from the ceiling, sit bouncing her diapered-bum on a low-lying stability pod with real zeal, vault over a two-foot ladder into a pit of yellow and green, blue and purple balls.

In her socks, your baby can scale the mini foam hill, grunting like a tiny mountain goat with a mild case of constipation.

In her socks, she can lie flat on the ground while swinging her legs left and right with the force of a defeated pinwheel on a windless day.

In her socks, she cries at the door of the play gym, desperate to get out, go home, nap.

At home, the socks aren’t just this season’s staple or the cornerstone of the latest, must-have capsule collection.

No, they take on a holy status. Sent by Jesus. Or perhaps Jesus in sock form.

You throw the dirty socks into the hamper, only to find them resurrected—not three days later, but three hours. Damp and soil-streaked, or marinara sauce-stained and vaguely moist.

When you take them off to put on her little white sandals, your baby wails, then balls them up into futuristic-looking fruit and gnaws on them like a winter-starved squirrel.

When it’s time to go to a restaurant, the socks tag along like a second child—taking a seat not at the table but on the table, nestled between the salt and pepper shakers, a plate of in-bone pork chop, a Cosmopolitan pink in its coupe.

At the library, she totes them around like Little Rabbit, Baby Doll, Mr. Joseph the Giraffe, except the socks--wound tightly together--exist as eyeless, headless, limbless beings.

A clot of fabric. A bolus of pink. Material and material’s final form.

Before bed, she holds them up like a recently forged ring to the light, as if she were Gollum and Gollum was prostrate. On a rock. Near Mordor. Her two front teeth: gapped and shining. She—a little Joe Pesci as Tommy Devito in Goodfellas, a child-turned-small man and that small man now possessed. You think you can almost hear her creak over her cribs bars and jeer, "Funny how?"

And, when she spies them in someone else’s hands, she can’t help but make little squishing motions with her fingers.

"Mi, mi, mi," she chants, which is Aoife for "Mine, mine, mine."

Oh, the need. How great the need.

She—a little troll. Her short life—one very small bridge. And what does she demand? Not bones or riddles or gold. Not a secret or a name.

One month: it was a crinkled receipt from your thoracic surgeon’s office. Another: a suspect piece of chalk. Still another: Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story and a two-pound barbell she lifted overhead like a bodybuilder-in-training and a rubbery purple menstrual cup.

Now: the socks.

The forever-great, always-smelly pink socks.