I'm buying a chest freezer

and other concerns

I’m officially on the market for a chest freezer: alert the presses! I’ve spent the morning obsessed, in a chest freezer daze. Shall I procure it from Costco or Home Depot? Dare I order it sight unseen, or must I make an errand out of it, go to a big box store to give one of these babies a good once over? Do I need to give it a good jostle to test its hardiness? Or are all chest freezers cut from the same cloth?

Never in my life did I think I’d give this much thought to a chest freezer, let alone consider purchasing one. In my big city life of dreaming, thoughts of chest freezers rarely crossed the dome. If they did, I was eating popcorn, licking butter off my fingers, watching a murder documentary, and a body was being stored in this type of ice-cold white box. I was not thinking of how legitimately helpful an appliance it might someday be. No, chest freezers were mere tools for the rural murdering folk.  

The first time chest freezers entered my brain in any capacity beyond murdered body storage, I was living in Brooklyn with my newborn son and pumping breast milk, and lots of it. I had something called an oversupply, which is the clinical term for too much milk in dem titties. Before I slowed it down, I was pumping a frankly obscene amount of b-milk (I texted my sister this video in a moment of crisis, wondering if this would be my new identity), so much so that I was pouring some of it down the drain. My sister, who I update with a near-constant barrage of texts detailing every single aspect of my day, including but not limited to breast milk production, was horrified to hear I was getting rid of any because she knows the physical and emotional toll that pumping takes and insisted I get a chest freezer to store it all in. Where would I put it? I asked her. Our place was well-sized for a Brooklyn apartment, but a Brooklyn apartment nevertheless, and therefore, it contained no obvious chest freezer locale. There must be somewhere, she insisted, I sent her a video of the apartment as a reminder, and she tutted. There must be somewhere.

The answer was that somewhere would arrive, just not in our Brooklyn two-bedroom. It’s here, now, in my suburban home, in my two-car garage that we don’t actually park either of our cars in. I like having a garage. It smells sort of damp, is both comforting and gloomy, and stores all of my whimsical Halloween decorations, chief among them being the two skeletons I have arranged sitting next to each other on dusty chairs, gossiping. I like to think the skeletons run the garage, that it’s their domain. Nobody gets in without their vetting and approval. The oversized spiders in the sump pump closet are their thugs, their henchmen.  It’s a whole ecosystem down there, one I treat with proper respect and distance. When I come down in search of an old crockpot or to rifle through a bin of seasonal décor, I tip my cap to the skeletons, bow in deference to the spiders, and smile bemusedly at my husband’s weight bench. He has a reserved area for where he’s going to build a home gym, to “get swole” (his words) and I like to imagine that in the hours my husband isn’t using the bench (24 hours a day, seven days a week) maybe the skeletons are down there, cranking out sets and avoiding leg day.

This morning, I was down there, arms crossed, foot anxiously tapping on the concrete, considering where the chest freezer belonged, and I started getting worried about how this new addition would change the whole dynamic of the garage. Who’s this new hoss, the skeletons will say, whirring all hours of the night, disturbing our peace. I’m already preparing my rebuttal: I hate to mix things up down here, fellas, but my freezer is overrun, the new baby is coming, and I need to start prepping meals and considering the ghastly possibility that my boobs might overflow once again. You both can deal! They’ll shake their skulls at me, none too pleased.

Throwing all my energy into this banal matter probably has nothing to do with the fact that I’ve just entered my third trimester, and that this new baby’s arrival is increasingly imminent. It’s the chest freezer that will forever alter the household dynamic, not the living, breathing human child on his merry way.

Rather than focus on the big feelings I’m having about bringing yet another person onto this planet, into this house, I’m on Wirecutter investigating chest freezers (they say they’re pretty much all the same) on TikTok watching video after video of moms making “hearty meals for lactating mamas” (is there a grosser term in the world than lactating) and sustaining an imaginary dialogue with my judgmental Halloween décor.  

When my firstborn arrived, the world tilted on its axis. Exhaustion and hormones have scrubbed most of the nitty gritty, leaving only the wispiest of memories. I remember the first day in the hospital, still loopy from the drugs, blissed out and in love and shocked at the reality that I grew this thing. Then, the drugs wearing off, and the pain from the c-section. The ibuprofen and Tylenol brought to me in 3-hour-increments. Getting home, him asleep on my chest, my mom trying to put the breast pump together while my husband searched for a parking spot for forty-five minutes. The first night alone with him leaving us shell shocked, the pediatrician flooding us with information, the visitors, the exhaustion, the tears, the sound bath meditation videos. The woman who, on an early walk as a family with the tiny baby wrapped on my chest, stopped us to tell us we were doing a good job.

Beyond that – so much of the first few months is inaccessible to me, beyond the hundreds of photos I have of him on my phone. I know it took me a long time to feel like myself again; after all, it’s quite a rewiring process. And it’s all coming again, all that joy and love and exhaustion and delirium, a semi-truck coming at me full speed, lights blaring, horns honking. But this time, I’m armed, prepared, deploying the guards, stocking the chest freezer. I’m sure it’ll all wreck me again. But what worthwhile wreckage it will be.