Hello, how was your winter break? Were you too busy, too isolated or just right? For me, between various illnesses, my husband’s rude early-January birthday, over-correcting from the pre-holiday shuffle, my desire to avoid most news (or reactions to the news), and my friends being in the same boat, I ended up digging in too hard. I spent too much cozy time around my family.

Yeah, I finished some books and watched a lot of movies and TV and played plenty of games, but also, by late last week, I found myself depressed, lethargic, lonely, uninspired, feeling sorry for my children that their memories of their mom would be this resentful, run-down woman.

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Was this what Ali Sheedy warned us about in The Breakfast Club?

Fortunately, a very old mom-friend came through town. We have been witches together since we both got pregnant, so we have been comparing notes for about 13 years.

Now, I do often suspect she is a kinder, happier mom than I am based on her social media feed, but I knew I could be real with her.

“Do you ever feel like it was pointless for your parents to raise you to think you could be as successful woman who could strive to do what you want?” I asked her over arancini. “Like why did we bother working hard at school and getting degrees and going for the career we wanted only to have kids and you’re constantly doing laundry and emptying the dishwasher and cooking for these assholes and driving them around and either letting them be slobs or nagging them constantly?”

“Oh my god!” she said and started describing the frantic sort of anger that builds in her when she cleans up her house, the buildup to the dramatic putting-away, the threats of throwing people’s shit away. This woman is a tenured professor at a university and sits on the board of an academic journal. I also think of her as being a much nicer person at bedtime than I am, so it made me scream with laughter to commiserate with her as we talked about the Dr. Jekyll-to-Mr.-Hyde transformation we go through between putting our kid to bed and them not staying there. I felt so much better afterward.

Talking to other mom friends to remember your feelings are a feature, not a bug is not a new sentiment; this is what the newsletter is about! But I still need reminders sometimes.

In high school, a good friend and I, who were on the school newspaper together, used to say, “Don’t forget your home keys,” which is a typing reference but also meant, don’t forget your buddies.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately and will probably write more about the role the internet/social media, and constant contact play in relationships. I struggle with threading the needle when it comes to over-analyzing friendships, being too online, and empathetic distress vs unhelpful isolation. However, to this day, I still need to remember the good medicine that comes with interacting with the people who will remind me that it is not weird to feel those resentments or second guesses or post-bedtime rage flares.

I hope you could get some time with yours over break or have some scheduled.

A diagnosis for being such a miserable b

The friend mentioned above, and I have been pals since our early 20s, so we were commiserating over our perimenopause brain fog over dinner. Why could I remember the actor Bridget Everett’s full name but not summon the word “bulletin”?

Anyway the next day I felt extra funky after a workout and since it’s going around, took a COVID test. Jackpot! (It’s fine; I feel loads better than my kid, who barfed all Christmas Eve, that’s for sure.)

I used to feel relief when my kid would be diagnosed with an ear infection as a toddler. I’d think, “Well I’m glad he’s not just like this,” I similarly perhaps had a reason behind my extra feelings of sadness, low energy, lack of ambition and ability to recall, what’s the word, oh god, you know... oh yeah: words. Maybe this is not how I’ll always feel.

Plus, I felt a certain lightness over having an “official” reason to cancel the week’s obligations. And it meant that it was the COVID speaking, not me, when I told my son, who kept popping out of his bed, “I’m sick and if you get out again, that shows me that you officially don’t care how I feel.”

Don’t look it up, but being that kind of bitch is an official symptom of COVID. (And it worked! This time…)

End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Here’s what the newsletter is all about if you’re new to it. The archives live here. If you want a random old one, here’s a post on wedding registry items that stood the test of time.

The newsletter comes out roughly every other week for free subscribers; paid subscribers get additional content, including access to personal, helpful, funny and fun posts and threads, plus preferred placement in our classifieds issues. Last week we had a really funny discussion about our kids misunderstanding/misusing dirty-ish words after my kid told us he was referring to his Lego bags as “My douche bags.” Sufficed to say I lol’ed over some kids’ hilarious new definitions of boners, P&V and BJs. Sign up to get that good stuff here:

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One witchy thing

Evil Witches Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.