An inventory of my enemies

on perceived slights small and large

It’s a perfect spring day – warm and sunny, birds chirping, trees blooming, rabbits hopping with fluffy tails on display –  and yet, I’m feeling like a cranky hag. I am trying to overcome my sulkiness and be positive and cheery. I want my mood to mimic the day! I want to radiate warmth, love and light from all of my orifices! I want my inner monologue to read like a Brené Brown book! I just can’t, not today. Try as I might to channel Miss Honey from Matilda, I am Miss Trunchbull, stomping around, grumbling, and mentally shot-putting anyone who dares cross my path. I had a beautiful weekend, got to watch two of my best friends get married, and should be riding high on all that love, but instead, I’m looking out the window, arms crossed, narrowing my eyes suspiciously at all of the warm-day merriment.

Maybe it’s just one of those unshakeable sour moods or maybe it’s the human growing inside of me and rearranging all of my internal organs. Whatever the case, I’m over it. I usually try to escape these bouts of crankiness with various little treats for myself (a long shower, leftover Easter candy, a steady stream of TikTok videos), but none of that is working, so instead, I’m going to lean in and make a list of all of my recent enemies.

ENEMIES

Blippi: Blippi is a children’s performer and Youtuber who is worth gobs of money because of his trash “educational content.” He wears an orange hat, orange glasses, and orange suspenders over a blue button up and when you see him, you think that guy could use a punch in the gut. At first glance, I assumed he was a failed theatre kid, but after doing a little digging, I discovered he is actually, and this explains the unbridled contempt I have for him, a failed comedian (!) who posted gross-out videos under the name Steezy Grossman. Most notably, he performed a version of the Harlem Shake on a toilet where he defecated all over a naked friend. I don’t know which internet content is more offensive to humanity, Steezy’s or Blippi’s. Both fill me with an unencumbered rage that honestly spook me a bit because I didn’t know I was capable of such negative emotion.

I wish anguish and torment to befall him

We discovered Blippi on a day when Charlie was home sick with an ear infection. Charlie has only recently started caring about TV, which is a mixed bag. I’ve noticed an uptick in meltdowns and body-thrashing since the screen time has crept up, but also a correlation in how many minutes I can sit and dissociate on the couch. I can drink my coffee in (relative) peace while some mind-melting animations of a cow strumming on a banjo play in the background, or I can reheat the coffee perpetually until it’s undrinkable while I chase my son around the house, making sure he doesn’t kill himself doing Jackass-style stunts jumping off our coffee table. Historically, we’ve pretty much only allowed Ms. Rachel and Sesame Street, but on-ear infection day, Blippi popped up in a Ms. Rachel video and led us to his channel, where he proceeded to ruin my life for the following thirty-four minutes he was on screen. Ms. Rachel is a similarly loaded children’s performer, but I do not hate her. In fact, I think she’s really sweet and cute. Sometimes the songs make me want to drive stakes into my ears, but that’s not her fault.

Blippi, however, has NO CHARISMA, is generally awful, and my kid is just sitting there, eating it up.  I’m watching him watch Blippi, concern nipping at me, worrying about his future taste in media based on his reaction to this motherfucker. This week, Blippi is public enemy number one.

Nosy Neighbors

The night before we headed out to St. Louis for our friend’s wedding, there was a crazy storm in New York with high-speed winds so intense that a tree literally fell on our house. We were in bed already, trying to fall asleep and get some decent rest in preparation for the nightmare of travelling with a toddler, when we heard a crazy loud bang. My husband sat up, turned the light on, said, “Ah well, the electricity is still working,” turned the light back off and laid down. This is the portrait of an unbothered man who does not have generalized anxiety. I, perpetually bothered and worried about everything, went to investigate to find the fallen tree. Most of the time, his lack of worry is annoyingly correct, so I have to celebrate the times when I’m actually right to be worried. The bummer here is that celebration in these moments is sullen and brief because, well, usually, something has gone terribly wrong.

The tree didn’t do any bad damage, and we were all safe, but it was a bit of a hassle because we had a flight to make in the morning, and we had to pull away from our house and wave goodbye to the house and the tree. I called a tree guy from the internet and texted my sweet neighbor to let her know what was going on, but the tree guy ghosted me (enemy) and when we returned from our trip, the tree was still there, in its final resting place. I like to think we gave it a few more days in the fresh air before it met its grim end in the chipper. When we got home, there was a note stuck in our door with a suggestion for a landscaper from some of our other neighbours who must have seen the tree and assumed we were floundering with no idea of how to handle it and thus just submitting to the new reality of tree-on-house. They probably thought leaving the informational note was a nice-neighborly thing to do but, don’t worry, folks, I perceived it as a slight! My house management skills are just fine, thank you very much. Out of spite, I did not use the number they left, and instead called someone on Google who may have price gauged me, who knows. These nosy note-leaving neighbors (whose windows I can see into every night, where the wife sits very still at the kitchen table not doing anything, um are you a ghost? Go watch some TV and stop freaking me out!) are now also my enemies.

The final enemy in this whole shebang is the assumingly nosey-ass lookey-loo neighbor in our block’s text chain who suggested a brief power outage in her house might be the fault of the “tree-trimming going on in the neighborhood.” As if I’m taking down trees willy-nilly because the idea of ending tree life and causing power outages tickles me.

The man behind us on our flight home

My son – the perfect, adorable, sweet creature that he is – is not a great traveller. He hates confinement, and even Delta’s Comfort Plus seats (brag, I sprung for ‘em) do not exactly leave room to roam. We got him his own seat and brought his car seat, which did help a bit because he fell asleep for a good leg of our return flight. Even so, this didn’t stop the man in the row behind us from making a comment to his seatmate after my son cried for precisely thirty seconds during take-off. During this brief bout of crying, the man – who I feel compelled to mention was wearing a grey sweatsuit, Yankees cap, and a giant bedazzled crucifix necklace – has the gall to sarcastically remark, “Here we go, this is gonna be a fun flight.”

Hey, dumb shit, I wanted to say, have you heard of noise-cancelling headphones? Even if they don’t exist in whatever shitty Staten Island strip mall you grew up next to, they sell them at, wait for it, the airport. You’re just going to sit there, scrolling on your phone, with no headphones, faux-diamond-encrusted-cross thumping against your chest, and do nothing on this two-hour flight? I yearn for the days when I could pop my headphones on and read, scroll through my camera roll, or buy twelve dollars’ worth of sky-internet while I listened to music and shopped online. Instead, now I have a child to care for, so the headphones and the Kindle are rendered useless, and I am forced instead to listen to this guy complaining preemptively about my perfect kid who doesn’t know where he is or why he’s here, or why his ears are killing him all of a sudden. I was positively gleeful when my son proceeded to be a sleeping angel for the majority of the flight, peering back at dumb-dumb McGee, trying to make eye contact with him so I could show off the incredible performance of my little sweetheart.

Then—of course—my son woke up and proceeded to have the biggest meltdown he had ever had on a flight. He screamed at the top of his lungs and threw his body around from the moment he woke up until he finally took a bite of his Ritz Cheese Cracker at baggage claim. A win for that guy, who is my enemy, nevertheless.

Me

I would be remiss to list enemies without somehow incriminating myself. I live with a healthy dose of shame that walks beside me, a glum friend, and without them, I wouldn’t be who I am. I am always curious about these people whose days aren’t governed by self-doubt. What is their secret? Did their parents go to all of their games despite the fact that they rode the bench? Were B-level grades deemed worthy of being posted on the fridge? Were they raised in the blissful sunshine of California?  

My brother likes to say that people are either homicidal or suicidal – that when something goes wrong, they blame others or they blame themselves. Despite what this week’s newsletter might convey, I am most definitely the latter. Behind every external blame, every perceived slight, every enemy – there is the voice in my brain doing backflips to make sure I know that the situation is somehow my fault. Your neighbors are being nice, the voice says, you are just too sensitive, always so sensitive. The guy on the plane made one silly remark, you’re overly critical! Too quick to judge! And your son, his meltdown, probably your fault. A good mom could have calmed her son down, but you were too keyed up and your anxious energy bled into him through osmosis. Had you been able to access some internal pool of tranquillity, he too would have relaxed into your serene maternal energy.

And Blippi? Well, the voice hates him too.

I do everything in my power to give the voice less ammo. I journal in the mornings, attend therapy regularly, catalogue my gratitude, and express my love to those close to me. I do my best to practice empathy for most people I come across. For my son, I have a near-infinite capacity of patience for his big emotions and his wild id desires. For my friends, my family, I am quick to forgive any small blunder. I find humanity, at large, to be good. I have a harder time extending this compassion to myself.

But, because I hate leaving things on a bad note, I’ll list some heroes, too.

HEROES

Cy’s parents, who hung out with Charlie all weekend, lavishing him with love and attention while we celebrated our friends, the father-of-the-bride and his heartfelt wedding speech, the Priest who was deeply confused by my role as best man but quickly held my hand, apologized after said-confusion and complimented my “nice Irish name.” The kind older gentleman whom I watched hold the door open for an even older and less mobile gentleman at the donut shop in Florissant, Missouri, who, when the man ambling towards the door, waved him away, saying, “Don’t worry, go ahead man, I’m slow” responded with, “I’ve got nowhere to be.” For every enemy, there is a hero, a Spiderman for every green goblin, a Ms. Rachel and an Elmo for every Blippi. Reminding myself of this, I’ve worked myself into a better mood, and now I can see that the day is good, that there’s a hummingbird at the feeder, and that the neighbors are friendly, and I, myself, am not so bad.