The Pleasure Of...Gathering, Gifting, & Giving Up Control
Also, alliteration. Also, clotted cream.
I’ve written before about the tyranny of “effortless” when it comes to pleasures like entertaining (such a stupid word—I’m with Alison Roman on this one), fashion, decorating, etc. As I have also written before (maybe every week?) effort and joy are not antithetical but intertwined. That said, sometimes it’s nice when the effort is not yours. Two of my oldest and dearest friends, Sarah and Grace, put together the most wonderful baby shower (“really more of a sprinkle”) for us yesterday, and all we had to do was tidy the apartment, open the bubbles, stuff our faces, and open gifts.
Grace put together a fabulous British-meets-North American spread of cucumber sandwiches and corn dogs, Scotch eggs and Nova Scotia salmon, Italian cookies from our local bakery plus scones with clotted cream and jam—thus finally bringing to America the debate that has torn apart southern England for centuries, over whether the Devon Method or the Cornwall Method is preferable, jam first or cream. (I think the verdict was a fair but undramatic “really good either way.”) In lieu of onesies etc, we asked for help building the kid’s library, and we got an avalanche of amazing books, some classics and some new, beautifully wrapped thanks to our wonderful friends at the Astoria Bookshop, with library cards the givers filled out with details about the book and why they chose it.
I was happily overruled on the “No games” front, since Sarah came up with the most genius baby-themed Jeopardy! game (including the round “Shakespeare character or celebrity baby?” which revealed that “Aurelius” is not a minor character in one of the Roman plays but Elle Macpherson’s kid. My team and I lost decisively to my actual J! Champion husband, and I am a-okay with that, though clearly it was Ms. Macpherson’s fault.
G and I had talked quite a bit beforehand about baby showers, which are not really a thing in the UK (where we are both from), for reasons that I think are partly superstitious and partly because christenings or parties after the baby is born tend to serve the same purpose. Obviously showers are rarely as twee/heteronormative/retro/consumerist as they tend to get painted in pop culture—I’ve been to many that were delightful—and I also wonder and worry whether my aversion to them is the function of some kind of internalized misogyny, a knee-jerk objection to a ritual that has historically kept having a baby as part of an all-female circle of secret knowing. But if I’m being more generous, I think it’s because the idea of them is so good, in some ways—unlike wedding showers, there is a real need for a lot of the stuff that’s traditionally given as gifts, and I like that they help to cement the village you’ll have and need to help raise the baby. We cribbed some ideas from this article about updating the shower ritual, but I think it’s only a start—there’s a much bigger conversation that needs to happen about how we treat children as a society. What kind of place they are allowed to take up, and how we can do better at treating them as people rather than as problems to be contained.
Reading
For a review coming out soon I just finished Adrienne Brodeur’s memoir Wild Game (which sadly I cannot talk about without getting Chris Rea’s “Wicked Game,” a song I barely even knew I knew, stuck in my head). It’s a pretty crazy story about family history and secrets, the kind of story it would be great fun to tell about other people but dreadful to live inside (did you hear about x, who kept her mother’s affair with a family friend secret for years and then grew up and married her mother’s lover’s son? After everyone found out?) It is also a very WASP-y story, full of excessive drinking to mask emotional wounds, but it’s smart and fascinating, with a great deal more to enjoy than just the spectacle of terrible people being terrible while eating fabulous meals.
Writing
(Deep breath) I wrote one of the most personal pieces I’ve ever published, for an essay series on Curbed, “Personal Space,” that’s broadly about about the relationships people have with places they’ve lived. Outside this newsletter I don’t write like this a lot, because it is far too terrifying, but it was lovely to write about my home for the past decade and this little community I stumbled into when T and I got together. It features some people who read this newsletter and now it’s in the world. (Phew. *Runs and hides*)