The Applesauce-Shaped Era

On the deleted scenes of your life’s story.

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A Note For You If You’re Having A Bad Day

Hi My Friend,

In my twenties, my life was full of stories filled with twists and turns; sparkles; peaks and valleys. The stories in my mind take this shape:

That’s right: The shape of a magnificent crystal with countless sides and edges and corners and (I’ll say it again because I’m not sure you heard me the first time) sparkles. You want an example¹, and I get that. So here’s the story of how I met and started dating a man I’m going to call Boris. Come along with me on this crystal-shaped journey, won’t you?

Exactly three people had told me that I was destined to date Boris. We were both special education teachers, we both did comedy, we both wore glasses, and we had remarkably similar personalities. So when I finally met Boris at a party, I understood we were supposed to date, and so did he. The only thing I remember from the night we met was that I was wearing amazing salmon-toned silk shorts, and that I got six mosquito bites in the shape of a constellation on my ankle. I wish I could remember even one single thing about meeting Boris, but alas, I can only remember thinking, “I’m glad I met Boris on the night that I wore these hot silk shorts, because I look great; unless he noticed those mosquito bites on my ankle, but maybe he noticed them and thought they looked like a constellation.” It was an egotistical thought.

A week later, he took me as his date to a Halloween party that had punch that had dry ice in it, and taxidermied ravens. Then, I invited him to my house to watch Weird Al’s “UHF,” on a laptop, but sitting on opera theater seats from the 1920s that I’d found on side of the road (???!?!!!!!). I bought every kind of cardboard-box movie candy I could find at the candy store, and we ate until we got sick, and then we made out, which was uncomfortable over the hard metallic edges of those horrible opera seats. One time, Boris and his friend bought a bunch of laser tag guns off eBay from a laser tag place that went out of business. They invited all their friends to play laser tag Capture the Flag in City Park at night, and I saw a baby possum climbing a tree and got distracted and was a total detriment to my team. And then.

I am putting a number of crystal-shaped photos from moments in New Orleans in this post. They are often marked by the sun being in a wonderful place, and costumes.

It’s important for you to know that I was dating a few people. I was dating Boris and two other boys who were also colorful in the way that characters in books are colorful, and I enjoyed dating all of them. But I was trying to make it in stand-up comedy and I had a full time job and I was really into having dinner with my roommates, so it’s not like I saw Boris a lot. Eventually, a month had passed, and I heard Boris was co-hosting a comedy dating show at a bar near my house, so I went to see him. He saw me, and he acted weird. Like, he sort of smiled at me, but he didn’t come up to me or anything; and after the first smile, he actively ignored me. And then, at some point during the show, he and his co-host brought up a beautiful blonde girl, and the blonde girl shared that she’d found love on the show a few weeks earlier — but that she had actually fallen in love with one of the hosts! She was in love with Boris! They were in love and they were dating! Exclusively! (That was not all information that I gleaned immediately, but I did sort of sense that it was true.) I felt angry that Boris hadn’t told me he was in love with a beautiful blonde girl, and he found me after the show and said that we needed to talk, but later, when we weren’t at a bar, and he wasn’t hosting a dating show, and I hadn’t had an amount of gins (I don’t know what to order at bars, and so I tend to order “gin”) that was over my personal limit. We did talk, and it was exactly as I’d assumed. I was mad at Boris for about a week.

Just a week, because at the time, there were too many other plot points to my life to care all that much about Boris’s new girlfriend, and the thing was, I really liked Boris a lot, but we weren’t that great together romantically, so I was emotionally fine with the idea of moving on as friends. 

Which we did. And Boris and the blonde girl broke up, which secretly made me sort of happy (sorry, I wish I had been above that, but I wasn’t), and then Boris get secret-married to a girl who he was just-friends with so that she could use his insurance (I think), and then THEY fell in ACTUAL love, and are still very in love, and are actual married (not just insurance married) and it’s quite a happily-ever-after for them. 

Boris and his now-wife might be maybe in this picture. (They definitely are in this picture.)

But, you probably are not asking, what happened to that blonde girl? Well, she went on to date exactly three other boys I had also dated, or would also date. There was one boy she dated before I dated him, and they broke up on the Fourth of July when a party on the Mississippi River didn’t go as planned. I know a lot of details about their breakup (which aren’t really mine to share) because that boy happened to be the man who would eventually move to Chicago with me, get cats with me, ask me to marry him, and provide half the DNA for my daughter. See what I mean? These stories twist and turn in and back on themselves, and they have satisfying endings. 

But honestly, I tend to over-romanticize stories like these as I feel nostalgic for them. They were sparkly and crystal-shaped, YES, but they were also HARD. I was constantly exhausted. There were moments of desperate euphoria that I wanted to cling to and knew that I couldn’t, and then long stretches where I crashed because I was trying too hard to fill to the brim the story of my life. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I did everything. I thought there were 24 waking hours in a day. I had it in my head that sleep was for other people, and that it didn’t actually make that much of a difference to me. I do sometimes lie around thinking about how shiny everything was when I lived in New Orleans, but it was also scary. There was a lot to lose; and not to be dramatic, but I did lose a lot of it, because I wasn’t always careful with my words or my actions. I am better at this now, but still not GREAT. (Although, I wrote that sentence and thought to myself, “You know what, Adult Sophie would send this anecdote about Boris TO Boris to make sure Boris was OK with it,” so I have done that; Sophie Ten Years Ago would not have.)

I have a lot of reasons for wanting to move to Chicago, but the simplest way to explain them all is to say that in New Orleans I always felt like I was standing on the edge of the edge of a skyscraper, with a kaleidoscope of lights and sounds and images all around me, and it was beautiful, but beautiful in the way that people describe being on acid as being beautiful. I could never fully enjoy what I was experiencing because it was always in the back of my mind that I was one wobbly breeze away from falling. When Luke and I moved to Chicago, I hoped to, I don’t know, find a balcony or something, that wasn’t quite so far off the ground, with a perfectly nice view that I could relax into. And that’s kind of what happened. 

Chicago, autumn, Luke, 2016.

We lived in Chicago for five years before the pandemic. In those five years, I met my girlfriend and we built a community, and everyone seemed less interested in gorgeous impossibilities like waking up at dawn to go to the bank of a river and beat a drum while wearing only a long vest made out of feathers. (This example was a real New Orleans thing.) Exciting things did happen: Luke got pulled onstage during a Neofuturists show (at 11 p.m.!); we went to a party where we had to dress as our original AOL Instant Messenger screen names; we met older neighbors whose apartment was filled with medical oddities and who tried to feed us expensive meat. Nothing with quite the same sheen as the New Orleans stories, but that was what I’d wanted. My chronic gut illness went away, overnight. (That’s another story, but it’s nevertheless true.) The stories of my life felt shaped like a bright blue wooden block in a set of blocks — but it was the most interesting type of block in the set, like maybe a cylinder. 

And then the pandemic flattened everything, for everybody. All possible shapes became blobs. Every single thing that was being built in March of 2020 seemed to be simultaneously tidal-waved to the ground. And it’s not like a blob is a necessarily bad thing, but it wasn’t the thing anyone thought it would be. All our stories became interesting-boring-devastating-dull in the exact same way all at once. 

I got pregnant in the midst of the pandemic. (A popular choice, it turns out.) I gave birth in November of 2021, when no one was going to concerts, but I was allowed two people in the delivery room with me (instead of one), and I didn’t have to wear a mask while I was in labor (though my two people did). And the thing about having a baby and living with a baby and making a baby the center of your life is that all your shapes, no matter what they once were, become applesauce. Your career ambitions? Applesauce. Your friendships? Applesauce. Your sex life? Literal applesauce. (OK, not LITERAL applesauce, but the metaphor works really well, and if you know you know.)

I don’t think parenthood is the only thing that turns everything to applesauce — although maybe other substances feel more on-point for other people who choose other paths (Glue? Gravel? Mulch?). The point is the shape: a shape with no points. You can look at your life and wonder if this is what it will be from now on: runon sentences with way too many “ands” and nothing ever really happening. Full of feeling words, but nothing to show, so it all comes out mush. This has long been a great fear of mine: that my life might cease to be interesting.

In a lot of ways, that’s what’s happened. I don’t know how to talk to people on the phone anymore. “What’s up with you?” I imagine them saying. And what would I say in response to that? T pooped two times yesterday, which is a lot for her? She has tired of playing with her toothbrushes in the bathtub and has moved on to two wooden blocks that she moves from one side to the other for thirty straight minutes every night? She can say “dog, woof woof,” but not with any kind of reliability? Who cares about any of this!? There was an etiquette rule in New York magazine’s long list that went like this: “Friend, if I’ve traveled to your inconvenient neighborhood to meet you for dinner, and I ask, ‘How’s baby?,’ I’m going to need you to parry with something better than, ‘Baby’s fine, boring,’ shrug, eye roll.” The author of this etiquette rule considers the “thousand valid reasons why talking about your baby might feel brain-deadening,” but none of them are quite it. The thing about being asked, “How’s baby?” Is that it feels like being asked to serve someone the crunchiest, most textuarally diverse bite of a bowl of applesauce. “Baby’s fine, boring” is a way of saying, “It is all applesauce.” I WANT to tell you about my baby, but what is there to tell?

Jessi Klein puts it this way in her latest book of essays (which is amazing, and which I will write about at length on Friday)

:

Having a child is a lot like having a dream. You know how sometimes you have a dream that feels very vivid and very important to you and then when you try to tell your friend about it, they’re instantly bored? Maybe they try to attempt to care because ideally or just selfishly most of us are trying to adhere to a social contract that dictates that we stick out those moments for when it’s our turn to be a needy bore. But really, the only time someone is even remotely interested in hearing about your dream is if they’ve had a similar one. This is why you can primarily only talk to other people with kids about your kids. Still, most of our own dreams are so dull that we forget them ourselves. 

This feels exactly true. But I suspect that it’s not only having kids; I suspect that all lives that are lucky enough to be relatively long go through phases like this, where there’s not all that much to talk about, really; or at least, it doesn’t feel like there is. These are the times that it is such an amazing gift to have people around who are content to do nothing with you; to read in the same room as you, to help you run errands, to seriously care about the ins and outs of the latest season of a reality show you like (or to not seriously care, but to be willing to pretend to seriously care for your sake). Love is about a lot of things, but one of the ones that is rarely talked about is being allowed to be boring. 

I was terrified of being exactly where I am now: 30 pounds heavier than I was before I got pregnant, daily vacuuming up loose cereal bar fragments, watching mostly only “Sesame Street,” believing out loud that it is truly exceptional for my daughter to be already singing along to songs at 16 months. (And by “singing along,” I mean that when “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” comes on she will reliably go, “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO AHHHHH NO NO NO,” which is lyrically accurate. She also does the up-high Mariah Carey “ooohs” in several of her hits.) My hair turned gray, I have new wrinkles, none of my clothes fit and I don’t know how to buy ones that do, because I seem to be a size that doesn’t exist, whereas every single thing I’ve tried on for the past year has been way too small or way too big, save for floor-length sacks that are called “house dresses.” And none of that is remotely as bad as I feared, for the sole reason (I think!) that there are people around me who don’t care that I’m boring and wrinkled and wear fabric bags. They love me anyway. 

So the takeaway is that the things you’re scared of becoming or evolving into maybe aren’t always as scary as you think they will be. There is a possibility that, if you’re lucky, your life prepares you for itself. I’m barely in mid-life, so I can’t personally report that this is definitely true — but I hang around a lot of 60- and 70-year-old women who have mostly confirmed that yes, a lot of what seemed really scary isn’t so bad when you get up close to it. And time has a way with things that are hard; it softens them. It turns all the edges to mush.

“gorgeous impossibilities like waking up at dawn to go to the bank of a river and beat a drum while wearing only a long vest made out of feathers.”

Love,

Sophie

A Little Plea

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1. I try not to read Amazon or GoodReads reviews of my books. So many of them are so nice (and thank you, if you wrote one; they make a huge difference when it comes to selling more books), but of course, I skate over those ones, assuming the person is just being nice (sorry), and focus instead on the negative ones. For the most part, it is better for me to treat these reviews like I treat ice cream: best to just not have it in the house in the first place. But when I’m really sad, I often choose to beat myself up by reading all the one-star reviews of my books, and thinking about how those people are the only ones telling the truth, and how I’m a fraud. (By the way, I’m not trying to fish. I am sharing this truth so candidly with you because I suspect that you might sometimes do versions of this yourself; and if you don’t, at least I’m quite sure you understand the impulse.) Someone wrote a review of my memoir “Many Love” that claimed that “everyone thinks their own love life is so interesting, but it is actually really only interesting to THEM.” I hope this isn’t true. I LOVE hearing about other peoples’ love lives. Do you want to send me a long email about your love life? I EARNESTLY WOULD LOVE TO READ IT.