Magazine
Why the Dust Baby Meme is Harmless but Your Floor is Toxic
I'm currently sitting on the floor at eye level with the baseboards, watching a shaft of afternoon Portland sunlight illuminate roughly ten million floating particles in our living room, while my 11-month-old daughter tries to eat a grey fuzzball she...
Creating A Salt-Free Dry Rub For Baby Back Ribs To Feed My Baby
It was 2:14 PM on a sweltering Sunday in late August, and I was sitting on that one patio chair that always mysteriously pinches the back of my left thigh. I was drinking my third iced coffee of the day...
Dear Past Me: The Dreamland Baby Sleep Sack Is A Terrible Bug Fix
Dear Marcus from exactly six months ago, You're sitting in the glider chair right now, aren't you? It's 3:17 AM in Portland, the rain is aggressively smacking against the nursery window, and you're staring at your phone screen with the...
Why Your Dog Freaks Out When the Kid Screams (A Father's Log)
Dear Marcus from exactly six months ago, You're currently sitting on the hallway floor at 3:14 AM. You have the tracking app open on your phone, verifying that the nursery is exactly 69.5 degrees with 44 percent humidity, and you...
Does the baby die in Squid Game Season 3
I was thirty-eight minutes into episode four, balancing a sleeping infant on my left breast and a bowl of cold dal on my right thigh, when I aggressively hit pause. My husband flinched from the other side of the sofa...
Reality TV Sleep Advice vs. Rural Texas Parenting (62 chars)
I was three hours into a late-night doom scroll, balancing a sour-smelling burp cloth on my shoulder, when I dropped my phone flat on my face. I was reading some pop culture gossip trying to figure out if Sparkle Megan...
Do Babies Cry In The Womb? What Those Ultrasound Scans Really Mean
When my wife was twenty weeks pregnant with our twin girls, we received exactly three pieces of deeply conflicting, entirely unsolicited advice within a forty-eight-hour window. My mother-in-law insisted we needed to play Mozart pressed directly against the bump to...
The Day I Realized My Baby's Nursery Was Basically a Loud Nightclub
I was sitting on the itchy wool rug in our old apartment, wearing my husbandβs college sweatshirt that had a very distinct, crusted-over spit-up stain right on the collarbone. It was raining outside. I was clutching a mug of French...
Divorced With a Secret Baby: Emotional Triage for the Family
My own mother told me to sweep the entire situation under the rug. The therapist assigned to us by the clinic suggested we hold a radical honesty circle with a talking stick. My lawyer advised me to communicate exclusively through...