My Dear Friend,
My husband, my daughter, and I live in Chicago, which is 930 miles from Beaufort, South Carolina; 1,002 miles from Beverly, Massachusetts; and 2,121 miles from Portland, Oregon. These are the cities where our parents live. I just want you to know that it’s logistically difficult for any of them to come over on a Saturday night so Luke and I can go see a movie.
We have friends with kids whose parents live closer, and their lives are different. One night I was at a comedy show with a group, but without Luke (because Luke and I usually go to things alone now, so the other one can stay home with T), and I witnessed two parents (TWO!) in our group, attending the same show. We showed each other phone pictures of our respective children. (This is a horrible thing I hoped I would never do, but having a child is like having a weird disease that makes you reflexively pull out whatever electronic device is on your person to show anyone you’re talking to barely relevant photos of your offspring. You can try to fight this, but there’s no known cure.) Their child was just a few weeks older than my child. So… how were they BOTH here? Where was their child?
“Oh, his grandparents are watching him,” came the reply. The child was going to spend the night with the grandparents! The two (TWO!) parents were going to get very drunk tonight, stay out very late, and then sleep in the next day.
Maybe you are going, “Yeah, Sophie, everyone understands this.” Sure, but there is a new level of understanding that dawns on you when you pay a babysitter over $100; and another level that comes when you first begin to grasp the totality of 365 days a year.
And: Luke and I have the privilege to have chosen our lives. We chose Chicago because it’s somewhere in between the two coasts where each of our families are. We chose our jobs, and we chose our house. Crucially, too, we have chosen our family, and just because our parents don’t live nearby doesn’t mean we don’t have family here.
“Chosen family” gets tossed around a fair amount in modern conversations about love, and that’s a certain kind of victory. Conceptually, it’s new-ish. When I was working on my audio project, “Love Without Sex,” I asked dozens of people what “chosen family” meant to them. One person laughed.
“Years and years ago, like 15 years ago, I submitted a question to OK Cupid about whether you feel more connected to your family of birth or your chosen family. The question was rejected because nobody understood what the heck I meant,” they said. “And so it's really, really great to have this question that I did not write, asked of me.” (By the way, the person described chosen family like this: “a community of people who are generally in support of me.”)
A lot of chosen families include members from a person’s family of origin; the term allows you to decide whom to count, and to decide how the word family is defined. When Luke and I realized we wanted to have a child, we thought a lot about our chosen family. At the time, we lived with a couple (some of our best friends in the world), and they, too, were trying to conceive. All of us believed it would be easier to have two babies and four adults than one baby and two adults. We weren’t wrong! There were always adults around when you needed to run an errand or stay out late. We could keep track of their baby monitor when they snuck out to see an Alt-J concert. Everything was easier with four grown-ups.
We also asked our other partners how they felt about us having a baby. If any of them had expressed a lot of concern about it, I don’t think we would have done it. Or, at least, it would have been a much longer conversation. But they were on board, and excited for us!
Looking back at this time now, I wish that I had taken the opportunity while I was pregnant to talk to more people in my community about how they felt about babies and children; about how they liked to show up and be shown up for. I wish I had been able to understand how fundamentally having a baby was going to rock my world, and how easy it would be to slip into isolation. We talked a little bit about it, but not enough.
Nevertheless, my partner Kat is masterful at showing up. (OUR partner Kat? Our partnerS Kat and Brendan? I don’t know. It’s really hard to find language for the family you choose, because it doesn’t really exist. I am tempted to just hit the keyboard at random and call them our aw9tuhrfs.) We didn’t have a script for being a couple of polyamorous couples where one is having a baby, but after T was born, Kat came over once a month to spend some solo time with her for an hour, starting when T was the tiniest blob-creature. When Kat was working from home and our nanny was sick, she offered to come over and work from our home, so there would be another grownup around. (Sometimes Brendan came too. Our aw9tuhrfs.)
When T was one, Kat and Brendan pitched a big idea to us: what if we went away overnight? They could stay with T for 24 hours, and we could eat a big dinner at a non-kid-friendly restaurant, stay out late, sleep in, and, um, be loud.
And here is something I want to examine: this felt like too much to take. Any time someone in our chosen family offered to watch T, I wanted to throw money at them. I don’t want to say that giving up time to do childcare is never modeled, but it wasn’t modeled much for me. The only reason you’d watch a kid who wasn’t yours was if you were being paid to do it, or if you had a biological relationship with the kid. Kat and Brendan are both busy people; there was no way they could give up a whole weekend to be with our poopy, fussy one-year-old. (I mean, she is also hilarious and miraculous, but those aren’t the things that stick out when you think about a person spending time with your baby by choice.) We’d never been away from T overnight, either. Who knew how everyone would fare?
No one knew. But there’s been lots of research suggesting that children benefit from having more adults in their lives who care about them. It’s helpful for kids to have places to turn and lots of grown-ups they feel safe around; as well as multiple futures to imagine, and a variety of ways of living to witness. Relationship building takes time. We wanted our daughter to have relationships with our chosen family.
So we accepted Kat and Brendan’s generous offer, and took off to Milwaukee. In the car on the way, I felt untethered. We talked and talked and didn’t stop talking for the whole drive. There was so much we’d stopped talking about now that so much of our attention was focused on keeping an actual human alive and healthy. We ate at a fancy restaurant that served morels (called Morel); we got vegan ice cream; we slept until 9 a.m. We missed our daughter, and came back home with renewed enthusiasm for spending meaningful time with her. It was like our Zelda heart bar had been near-empty for a long time, and we finally found a Goddess Statue to interact with. (I don’t know if this reference makes sense, because I only know about the heart bar, and I had to google how you get more hearts, and I found the answer confusing. I guess you can also cook or do something related to an inn? Anyway, I hope that you’re getting what I mean.)
The time Kat and Brendan gave to us, to watch T and stay in our house, was greater than any gift I think I’ve ever given to anyone. I felt embarrassed and guilty; like, what had I done to deserve this? It’s one thing for a person who is retired and has loads of unscheduled time to offer to hang out with a baby overnight; it’s quite another for two young people who work full time and only have two days off per week to do it.1 I wanted to write them a novel, or make them some kind of golden casserole that would express to them how meaningful and life-providing this gesture had been; that acknowledged what they’d given, and how far they’d stretched. There was nothing sufficient. I tried to get them good Christmas presents.
On the other hand, two things:
You don’t have to “deserve” unfathomable kindness. When the world offers it up, rather than think transactionally about how to level the balance, what would happen if you just accepted it? What would happen if you allowed it to be normalized?
When I imagine someone asking this of me, it’s so obvious that I would say yes. Of course I would! It is a kind of a gift to get to spend time with children. It’s like broccoli, in that it might not be the thing you think you’re craving, but when you get it, your body feels really good. But we don’t have a culture of asking this kind of thing from our friends.
No matter how much “chosen family” has wedged its way into our lexicon, many of us have internalized the idea that friends simply aren’t the same as family. Why not? Why shouldn’t we show up for each other in sacred ways?
Kat and Brendan did this again for us in January. This time, the trip was a few hours longer, and T, age 2, was more vocal (and more kick-y) when she had a complaint. They were nice about it, but I could tell it hadn’t all been completely smooth sailing.
We got home, and I wanted to build Kat and Brendan a house; I wanted to buy them all the vegan donuts at SmackDab; I wanted to contact a hot celebrity to come and kiss them on the lips. And more than I wanted those things, I wanted to live in a world where their gesture of profound kindness was typical; where I, too, contributed my time to the people I loved; where we all took this kind of care, because we belong to each other.
“Family” is a word that’s kind of like “soul,” or “spirit,” or “vibe.” Its definition exists in liminal space above and outside of language; you know it when you feel it. To try to put it into words is like trying to build a castle out of molasses. Maybe “family” is something that happens to you. It’s a series of actions that we take for and with one another, until one day, my child is your child; my future is your future.
Kat and Brendan chose to be our family when they showed up for us and our daughter in such a big way. It’s amazing and simultaneously so simple that we can build a thing as ephemeral and as enormous as “family,” simply by showing up enough. If you discovered that you have access to beautiful alchemy, you’d be foolish not to use it.
And so I ask you: how will you use it?
Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.
Love,
Sophie
Housekeeping
It’s been a financially difficult month for us, so some more bird paintings are for sale! And this time, they are framed. I put them up for paid subscribers yesterday, but many are still left:
I’m pricing them at $100 each (including US shipping). I’m selling them using a spreadsheet. Here is the spreadsheet!
The directions are also on the spreadsheet, but here they are again: If you want to reserve a painting, put your initials or an X in Column C (want it), and then send an email to sophielucidojohnson@gmail.com and let me know which painting you're buying.
Your X in column C will serve as a hold for five (5) hours. If you haven't emailed me by then, I'll release the painting.
You can't put a hold on a painting with text in column C, but you can check back to see if the painting opens up again. I'll delete the listing once the sale is final.
Here is a link to images of All the bird paintings. They are each individually matted and framed, and are $100 per painting, including US shipping. (For overseas shipping, the cost will be around $20.) If you buy a bird painting, you’ll get a free one-year subscription to the paid tier of the newsletter.
Or, get the paid tier (which comes with recipes, recommendations, photos of my actual family and cats and chickens, a book club, and a soon-to-begin digital Crafternoon once a month) at a DISCOUNT. For just this week, the paid tier is 20% off. All you need to do is subscribe using this link. Anyone who signs up for the yearlong subscription will receive a sticker in the mail! Just email me and let me know that you’ve subscribed and would like your sticker, please!
Loose Thoughts:
I had the coolest celebrity encounter today and I’m still feeling QUITE AMAZED ABOUT IT. First, you have to know that at the school where I work, I am this semester teaching on a pretty dismal floor. It’s dark and everything feels kind of old and broken? Anyway, I was on THIS VERY FLOOR when, in the bathroom, I glimpsed a face I recognized from THE INTERNET. I thought I was right, but what if I was wrong? So I waited outside the bathroom to be sure. She had a kid who had a cool-looking cat book with him, and it all added up. So I asked her, while we waited for the elevator, “Are you… Lucy Knisley?” And she was like, “Yes!” BECAUSE SHE WAS! IT WAS COMICS GENIUS SUPERSTAR LEGEND LUCY KNISLEY, WRITER OF RELISH, KIDGLOVES, and MANY OTHER IMPORTANT BOOKS! After I gushed at her about how big a fan I was, and she left on the “Up” elevator, I wept. She was beautiful and her kid was cool. It’s possible to be a beautiful person with a cool kid and a comics career. IT IS. POSSIBLE. Also she was so nice? And generous? IDK, I’m still swoony about it.
Last night, while reading a Piggy and Elephant book, T correctly identified the emotions “mad,” “sad,” and “happy,” based on Piggy’s faces. Huge news.
She loves dressing up and I want to make her a dress up suitcase, although I have no idea when I’ll have the time. My dream is to go to Goodwill or Village Thrift and pick out anything with bright colors and sparkles. It doesn’t matter what size anything is when you’re two! Then she could try all of it on, and waltz around the house in it. I guess… I’d wash it first.
Kat bought me a hat that says “SAY NO TO PLANS” on it, and I have been wearing it all day, and people have been gazing at it, and then looking at me a little scared. Who are all these plan-worshipping Sheeple?
I dislike when my nails are long, and it feels like it’s happening constantly. I don’t know how to type this way. I asked a girl in my class with really incredible nails (they had TINY CHAINS!), and she said she types using her thumbs on her phone. Whole essays, she said!
When we were young, I used to imagine what it would be like if I could pass a note across the room to my friend Jessica, without having to get up from my seat or trust a bunch of people in between us not to read it. Now my students are literally TEXTING PAPERS FROM THEIR PHONES. Young Sophie: the future has a lot in it that is cool.
I sent this to Kat and Brendan to read before publishing, and Kat said it was fine to publish, “Except I would like to note it was fun both times 😂”
I appreciate your kind and generous offerings to the world. And me. + I love your artwork. And that you're openly presenting a lovely perspective on chosen family, esp. that you include polyamorous members. YOU, dear Sophie, Are Doing A Good Enough Job!
Amazing. Amazingly beautiful. American go-it-alone, do-it-yourself culture keeps those of us who don't have a network of loving, got-your-back extended family from knowing how to offer real gifts of care, and how to accept them. It's worth noting that queer culture and other marginalized communities have long traditions of building chosen family for this very reason. For safety. For survival. For happiness. Because we need it. We all need it. Thank you. Thank you. Yes: you are doing a good enough job.