13 Comments

dear sophie,

thank you for this, which is delightful as always.

some specific delights:

-- "insurance married" (should be a real allowable legal category)

-- the idea that "sleep is for other people" (which could be on t-shirts) *

-- the Neofuturists!!!! (i love them very much)

-- "It is all applesauce" (it IS!) **

-- UHF!!!!! (the first movie i ever purchased at age 13 with my $50 tower records/video gift certificate i received at my 1991 bar mitzvah; i also got the Naked Gun)

* "i'll sleep when i'm YOU" is the new "i'll sleep when i'm dead"

** do you know this carl sagan quote: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”

love,

myq

PS i'll happily send you a long email about my love life. i loved reading about yours. i'm not only saying this because i'm nice. i AM nice, AND it's true. one time, i did a comedy set and the comedian judy gold (who is now my friend and i am grateful because i love her and her comedy) saw my set and said i was funny and i said "thank you, that's very nice of you to say" and she said "WHAT'S NICE; IT'S TRUE!" and i still think it was both, because honesty doesn't always have to be "brutal" honesty. sometimes honesty is gentle honesty. and i like that honesty better. so i do my best to offer it. your writing is great. it moves people. it moves people to say nice things to you, which i believe are all true and even more valuable than the other things people say. (i also keep two files in my email; one called "nice fan" and one called "nice messages." i don't generally look at negative reviews all that much unless they're funny. sometimes they are. one time i got a tweet that said "i love every comedian in the world except myq kaplan." and that's wonderful and hilarious and makes me feel special nonetheless.)

PPS the PS is way longer than the S. hope that's allowed! love!

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So fucking good. Thank you for this, it is everything.

- one person wading through applesauce to another

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This GOT ME. We share a lot of backstory (New Orleans, teachers, Chicago, polyam, pandemic babies) and I feel this so hard. It's so hard still being in New Orleans and living this applesauce middle aged mom life while all around me the bright young things are getting younger and shining harder as I figure out who I am as a mom and teacher and human on this other, less sparkly, more predictable (and yet heart exploding) side of life. Thank you for writing all the things you write.

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This is lovely, Sophie. A really good one.

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My love life includes being insurance common-law, and because our whole family is trans, none of us go by the names listed on the insurance card :-D

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Also, I'm going to be That Person and tell you to enjoy the applesauce days. The other day I spent the evening with my favorite 5 yr old while her mum was out seeing Regina Spektor <3 , and I remembered that kids love scissors. Tape and scissors are a great gift for the 3 - 5 yr old in your life. Will they cut their hair? Probably. Will you remember that forever? Absolutely. Did we cut up the flyers into tiny pieces with our scissors and then sweep them up? Sure did. (a kid sized broom is also a hit)

As the parent of a 17 1/2 yr old who has zero time/patience/interest for/in me, I actually do miss the days of paging thru picture books and just hanging out in the bathroom while my wee kiddo narrated a story between two washcloths

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founding

Thank you for this, I felt it so deeply. It was a relief to have someone articulate this feeling. In my twenties I did many things that were fun and romantic and exhausting partly because of the stories they would become or the person I would be when I did them. I went midnight sledding, I rode in secret bicycle parades, once at an art party I got spanked by a clown in front of my film studies professor (this sounds like a weird dream but happened in real life).

Then the pandemic happened. AndI turned 30 and then 3 years of pandemic happened plus I had a baby.

I am so enchanted by this tiny person and the delightful nothing that fills our days but when I talk to my friends I feel like I’m trying to carve anecdotes out of dust. Just desperately trying to make a story out of seeing a dog while on a walk or a new librarian leading Baby Lap Time.

Just to say, thank you for articulating this so clearly and beautifully. These are the applesauce days

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Applesauce or some other sludgy substance is a bit what my day to day with mecfs feels like. Maybe like motherhood its stressful & demanding but the highlights don’t always make sense to othere (i showered... it was epic). I’m interesting on substack, I trust, less so over a coffee, I fear. Thank you for putting words around that.

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I LOVE THIS because I’m not in applesauce days yet but I maybe see them looming and am afraid of losing all my edges. But this is so REASSURING! I’ll probably LIKE applesauce days! Whew

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Thank you for this. I totally relate to the fear of applesauce. But I would like to create the case for “we can learn from applesauce”.

I became a mother pretty late in life (39), so I had already had decades of excitement and self-destructiveness and drama, and wasn’t actually as afraid of applesauce as I would have been a decade earlier. I even started looking forward to learning what I could from the applesauce. I absolutely learned to love the “paying attention to the little things” part of the applesauce time. Although I did struggle with it, the slowing down and taking time to just “be” with my child was indeed good for me. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t nervous about it at the time, or that I wasn’t worried about what I was perhaps changing into--and I did have (non-mother) friends who chided me for only talking about my child (or talking too much about the experience of mothering), so I did sometimes feel ashamed about it. But the absolutely awesome reality of being responsible for another’s life was good for me, it gave me so much determination to stay alive and thrive, so I could help my family thrive.

It also changed my practice (as an artist) immensely--no longer did I have the luxury of hanging out in the self-doubt/melancholy space. If I wanted to continue creating and exploring the world as an artist, I had to learn to be *much* more efficient, which mostly meant a lot of mental gearing-up for the few and rare windows of time when I could work, so I could “hit the ground running” when I did have a babysitter or the kids were in day care. Which I certainly wasn’t going to waste with self-wallowing.

I think that parenting applesauce-time is a huge time of service--to your child, your family, your community, and, if we can accept it for the evolutionary importance that it has, also to ourselves. I learned so much in that time, and I don’t regret the applesauce at all.

Instead of reading typical how-to guides to parenting, I read a great book about the role of mothers in evolution when I became a mother-- I highly recommend “Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species” by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

(Here from publisher) “In this provocative, groundbreaking book, renowned anthropologist (and mother) Sarah Blaffer Hrdy shares a radical new vision of motherhood and its crucial role in human evolution. Hrdy strips away stereotypes and gender-biased myths to demonstrate that traditional views of maternal behavior are essentially wishful thinking codified as objective observation. As Hrdy argues, far from being "selfless," successful primate mothers have always combined nurturing with ambition, mother love with sexual love, ambivalence with devotion.

In fact all mothers, in the struggle to guarantee both their own survival and that of their offspring, deal nimbly with competing demands and conflicting strategies. In her nuanced, stunningly original interpretation of the relationships between mothers and fathers, mothers and babies, and mothers and their social groups, Hrdy offers not only a revolutionary new meaning to motherhood but an important new understanding of human evolution. Written with grace and clarity, suffused with the wisdom of a long and distinguished career, Mother Nature is a profound contribution to our understanding of who we are as a species - and why we have become this way.”

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Not sure if this is universal but it has felt that now that my kid is nearing 4, our lives are starting to regain something like solidity. I still tend not to have much to say with people that isn't either about work or parenting but being more used to being a parent means my brain has slightly more space to be interested in things aside from every little thing my kid does. The physical labor and intimacy of parenting is so intense during the infant and toddler years that it's almost an act of self-preservation to get to be boring.

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This is brilliant. And, lest we forget, applesauce -- the good, natural variety -- is kind of yummy. xo

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founding

You are SO FAR from boring. I love the Sophie that is right now.

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