Happy Hour Hack: On tricking your kids and seeing mothers as heroes
The Sarah McLaughlin edition
Welcome to the Happy Hour Hack, a weekly Friday post of tips and inspiration to take you into the weekend. I always share one thing from my interviewee of the week, along with any ideas I receive from readers, plus some things that are piquing my own interest.
Happy early Mother’s Day, ladies!
I hope you all can spend Sunday in a way that brings you satisfaction and joy. And if you want to give a person the gift of brilliant women’s perspectives on art and life, give them a subscription to The Creators Forum!
Monday’s post will be an interview with Patti motherfucking Smith, and it will be available in its entirety to paid subscribers only.
Hack
This week’s tip comes from the jewelry and metal goods maker Sarah McLaughlin. (Get last-minute Mother’s Day gifts here!) During my chat with her, I was so impressed by how organized she is. And here’s a golden piece of advice on how to get done what you need to get done:
I have really tricked my son into liking most everything I like. He loves to cook and he loves to work in the garden. And I taught him how to fold laundry. He helps me do dinner prep. It would be significantly faster if I just did it myself, but this is how we’re going to kill 45 minutes that I would not know what to do with him otherwise. So after I nurse my daughter at 5, everything is cut and peeled and seasoned. There’s a mise en place, so I can just throw it together while he’s watching Daniel Tiger.
Check out the rest of Sarah’s wisdom, on not putting too much pressure on yourself too soon after having a baby and not asking your partner for what you need, here.
Two Books
Two, because maybe you’ll be given some time to read on Sunday?
This. Book. After I read this book, I had to tell every mother I knew about it. I bought it for two ladies. I had a friend who was pissed I had already read it because she wanted to surprise-gift it to me. After reading this, I felt how I imagine men in 18th-century America felt after reading Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. I felt seen; I felt part of a secret community; I felt encouraged; I felt riled up.
In a nutshell, this is the funniest, smartest, most honest thing I’ve read on motherhood and, actually, life in general.
Thankfully, The Cut ran an excerpt of the first essay. Read this, and you will know if you should buy this book.
If the excerpt is too long for you, at least read this:
The truth is that motherhood is a hero’s journey. For most of us it’s not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was there. And what I’ve learned is that there’s a reason motherhood as a story is so infrequently told.
It’s because, for so many people, our safest, sweetest, earliest memories are of nestling in our mother’s lap, in her rocking warmth, hearing her sing as we get milk-drunk and sleepy and burrow, heavy-eyed, into the crook of her soft arm. And if you knew that your mother’s journey was, intrinsically, a hero’s journey — if that was in any way an established narrative in our culture — you’d have to accept that this memory of womb-like safety, this foundation upon which so much of our identity is built, was often just an illusion. You’d have to realize that while you were blissed out on your mother’s lap, one of those epic battles, the kind that envelops heroes as they fight their way out of a ring of fire, was raging just above your head. No one wants to believe that in the moments you felt the most peaceful, the woman cradling you so softly was shielding you from a sword that she herself was holding.
Every mother you know is in this fight with herself. The sword that hangs over her is a sword of exhaustion, of frustration, of patience run dry, a sword of indignation at how little she feels like a human when she so often has to look and behave like an animal. Mostly, it is the sword of rage: the rage and shock of how completely she must annihilate herself to keep her child alive.
Ultimately, the hope of impossible delight almost always wins out over the impossible torment. I know this because here I am, alive, writing this, and here you are, alive, reading it, which means our mothers did what heroes do: They kept us all alive to tell our own tales one day. And what I can tell you is that so much of the heroism of motherhood is the ability to swallow the sword. To swallow the pain and frustration and keep everything inside. No one wants to think that their mother, that all-forgiving source of limitless unconditional love, occasionally, in a fit of rage or boredom, met her limits. And yet, of course she did. No one wants to know that after your mother finally placed you in your crib, she walked out of the room and screamed into a blanket, or cried in the bathroom, or drank a bottle of wine, or all of the above. No one wants to know that as she rocked you and sang you the tenth lullaby of the night, she was fantasizing about putting you down, walking out the door, and never coming back.
A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves but about how she stays.
And now for a phenomenal example of a story that does indeed tell motherhood’s story:
This is fictionalized mythology, which is kind of an odd concept, but I’m into it, especially when it’s reimagining a lot of the female characters (maybe Medusa wasn’t actually a monster? Maybe she was a victim?). This story of Circe follows an outcast woman who transforms from wanting to only please her father to discovering her own powers and her own path. But, ultimately, it’s an epic tale of motherhood. And some of the passages are the truest things I’ve read of early motherhood. Being a mother is hard…even for a goddess. You can get the book here.
Cocktail
We are officially in the thick of SPORTS SEASON. I love watching my children play sports. Even though I have never enjoyed watching baseball (I go for the dogs and beers), I love watching my son play baseball. What I don’t always love is watching all the other kids play baseball. So I sometimes like to turn an interminable Little League game into a little happy hour. One of my go-to faves for this occasion is a gimlet.
(Side note: I very proudly will not try to get stains out of baseball uniforms. I will not be shamed by every laundry detergent ad ever made. That is not my purpose or pride in life. I don’t give a shit if my kid’s pants have grass and dirt stains on them. Good for him. It was a hell of a slide.)
A gimlet is such a simple drink, but it can be ruined so easily. You have to use fresh juice and you have to get the specs right. Your inclination will be to use less simple syrup than citrus—but don’t do it! The drink needs the viscosity of the simple syrup; it tastes watery otherwise.
Gimlet
2 oz gin or vodka (it’s a choose-your-own-mood adventure!)
1 oz fresh lime juice
1 oz simple syrup*
Shake hard and strain into an insulated spill-proof container. I suggest making a double.
*Dissolve sugar in water in a 50:50 ratio.