I’m carrying water from the spigot at Northeastern’s playing field across the street and through the park to the garden I planted, probably illegally. I used to think of myself as a community activist. Then I received an email from the state that they would run a lawnmower over my roses and I felt more like a guerrilla gardener. Then I came to water the garden and my hose was gone and the water main was turned off, so now I wonder if I’m a neighborhood pariah.
I try not to take it personally. People warned me that it gets turned off some time in October. And maybe someone thought it was the city’s hose. When people see me working on my garden they always say, “You guys are doing such a great job,” as if somehow I am working in an official capacity. Like the Boston Commissioner of Obsessive Gardening.
The first part of the garden I water is the farthest away from the spigot because if I wait til the end I might decide it’s too far to schlep the water. I created this part of the garden first, and it is a miniature version of my oval-shaped garden back at the farm. There are roses and azaleas but also a few tests tucked in between:
I planted blueberries to test if the rabbits will eat them. The rabbits only ate dwarf highbush, so I left it there and now they leave the rest of the bushes alone: we have reached an understanding.
I planted expensive hydrangeas to see if people would steal them. They didn’t.
I planted daisies to see if people would pick them, and they did. But I was so happy to see people enjoying the garden that I just added more.
While I walk back and forth I sing to myself because I can — this is the first time in 20 years that I’m alone so much of the time. I sing the same song over and over again. I just sort of start with one and then stick with it for the rest of the day. I try to sing softly near the tennis courts but still my black garden buckets swing a little too freely when I walk by the kids waiting to play.
My bucket doesn’t fit right and the spigot sprays all over, so I wear clothes that I don’t mind getting wet. The people around me do not. While I wait for the buckets to fill I toss a couple of stray tennis balls back into the court so I look more relatable. I also look up at my son’s dorm. The building is next to the athletic fields, diagonal from my park. I find his dorm room by counting five windows down from the top and four windows over from the right. He told me it’s crazy how much I look up at his dorm window. But I know he doesn’t think it’s that crazy because he never closes the shade. Anyway, I can’t really see anything — I can only see the light.
If I am too interested in what the other kids are like and whether any of them know my son then I might spill too much water. And if my younger son wants alone time and I have to take my dog with me then I have to take one bucket and not two. Not because I need to hold the leash — I don’t. She knows the garden routine just fine. But when she finds a tennis ball she insists on a game of catch. All the Northeastern kids want to play catch with her. She only plays with me though. That’s the price you pay for a dog who can be off leash in a big city. Nothing is free.
Someone posts a notice that says the garden must be removed and the transgressor must resod.
I continue to water the garden and every time I water I add more things to the garden. Digging is like drawing because I get to make new lines, and putting in new plants is like painting because I can imagine the colors and how they’ll come up next year. The dog digs holes for her tennis balls, and I dig holes for plants, and sometimes we like it so much we do it long after my son has gone to bed.
At 2am I am filling buckets at the spigot and the dog is finding tennis balls in the bushes. I tell myself I don’t need to try to look normal as we cross the street — her prancing with her ball, me splashing with my bucket. No one looks normal at 2am.
In the shadows behind the hydrangeas a guy pops out. I’ve seen him before, watching me garden.
He says, “Why do you do it?”
“The garden?”
“Yeah.”
“Well. I’m not sure what else to do instead.”
People who are not my kids think it’s really interesting to listen to my side of a coaching phone call. In fact, lots of people say they’d pay to hear both sides, but it’s clear to me that if someone knows another person is listening to them the call gets useless fast and sounds more like a job interview. Read more
A majority of people in the US are considering quitting their jobs right now according to the New York Times. This is obvious to me because in the months after the towers fell, my world was my recovery support groups — and in my groups, the conversations were all about who is going back to work. Read more
I treat my freezer like a savings account. As a single parent with an unstable income, I know that when there’s an emergency I’ll use rent money, camp money, or even food money to solve the problem. But no matter what the emergency is, I can’t pay for it with frozen broccoli, so with food in the freezer, we’ll always be able to eat. Read more
I decided that as a responsible parent I should wait to get a new dog until my oldest son leaves for college. It’s his last summer at home. We don’t need more tumult.
I waited until after college applications were done on January 15 and then I answered an ad on Craigslist for a puppy they had to give up because they were allergic. They wanted $400 ahead of time then they’d bring me the puppy.
Okay. Fine. So Craigslist wasn’t a good idea. Then I found a site that matches dogs with new owners and I got matched with a dog that was coming from Russia but would be in Maine, and I wondered, what did I say in my profile that made people think I’m an idiot? Read more
Everyone in my family holds a different view about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
I used to track my site traffic like Google was my fortune teller. The top three countries for my audience were always US, UK, and Australia. The next few countries changed a lot, but often Israel was number four. My family is so used to fighting about the Israelis that we even fought about the reason for my large Israeli readership. Read more
Marriage with kids is co-parenting and ironically, divorce with kids is co-parenting: same decisions, same values, same uneven emotional investment. Going through a divorce just to co-parent from different homes wastes so much time and energy that some people argue courts should not intervene in post-divorce parenting decisions, which would legally call a spade a spade and make parenting while divorced the same as parenting while married.
In a divorce with kids, timing is everything
When asked why the Gates chose now to divorce, an unidentified friend of the family said, “They limped through until their kids were out of school like a lot of people.”
Most people realize that the kid’s needs must come before the parent’s needs. This is why celebrities put out press releases that say something like, “We are doing what’s best for the kids.” Jeff Bezos also made sure to mention he’s concerned about the children’s best interests. But obviously, divorce is not an expression of the kids’ best interests. Unless one parent is so terrible that they will be losing custody, staying together until the kids are grown is what’s best for the kids.
Selfish parenting is the saddest part of divorce
Then one must ask, what could possibly make Jeff Bezos decide he needs to have a new wife before his kids are grown up? He can do whatever he wants for work to keep himself interested. Money can’t buy a good marriage, but it can buy space for co-parenting, and Jeff could buy more of that than anyone.
Developmentally, this is the time for Jeff to allow the kids to self-actualize, but if he breaks up the family, then the kids have to focus on dealing with their pain and disappointment. So (giving the benefit of the doubt) Jeff asked himself: Can I wait to fully explore my own possibilities until I am finished raising my kids? And he decided, no he cannot wait. The better question would have been who is better equipped to deal with disappointment, parents or kids?
The kids are the litmus test for who’s right
Melinda, on the other hand, has wanted to leave for a while, but she stayed in the marriage for the kids. This is what it looks like to put the kids first. It’s easier with a lot of money: she can live in one-half of their 66,000 square foot house.
For Bill’s part, even in 2020 he seemed to adore Melinda – he can quantify it. But during the last decade, he has publicly humiliated Melinda with tone-deaf behavior like refusing to let her write part of the annual letter for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which they both run. He brought her to dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s house which made her furious at the time, and still haunted years later. Then Bill doubled down and he misled the press — and possibly Melinda — about the extent of his relationship with Epstein.
Whatever Bill has done, it is so offensive everyone in the family is upset with him. The family knew the divorce was coming and while the lawyers hammered out an agreement the three Gates kids and their significant others went on a vacation with Melinda. Bill was not invited.
What problem does divorce solve?
The problems divorce solves for Jeff Bezos are clear: He needed more attention than he was getting in his family of four children. He needed more fun than he was having with his wife who was raising his four children. When divorce is very sad, because the kids are so young, and a parent is so reckless, there is nothing to be learned about personal development except: fucking do it.
When divorce is a long time coming because a person has the maturity to put the kids’ needs first, and the grace to keep the family steady til the kids move out, it’s interesting to ask what does someone with such deep self-knowledge gain from divorce? With Melinda the question is even more intersting because she has all the freedom she needs.
She said she’s not distancing herself from the Gates Foundation, and its structure will not change. Perhaps this is because the foundation is practically the largest donor to the World Health Organization and for better or worse now is not the time for a world health funding bloodbath. Also, Melinda and Bill will continue working together because they have their collective eye on a Nobel Prize for their Foundation work.
There’s probably not a third person involved. I mean, there is, but Bill’s ex-girlfriend Ann Winblad has been involved from the start. Bill has been meeting her at her beach house for decades, with Melinda’s blessing. So if their marriage can have space for that, it’s unlikely they’d need to get divorced for a third party.
It’s hard to imagine Melinda cannot express herself fully in the marriage — she has unfettered access to billions of dollars and international credentials to make her mark without a divorce; she didn’t even drop the name Gates after her divorce.
So the divorce must be very personal. My guess is that Bill has lost his sense of what’s right. Vox has a great series where they ask what do we do now that would be unthinkable in 50 years. One of the answers is that being obsessed with rational thinking will be unthinkable in 50 years. In 50 years we will require people to balance rational thinking with emotional thinking. We will eventually be finished exalting the person who is all science and no heart.
I guess that makes Melinda a futurist. Because she’s finished right now.
James Maher Photography
US scientists are scared to talk about differences between male and female brains, probably because it will get them fired. The loudest voices say there cannot be male and female brains because there are women and men who think in similar ways. Read more
I’ve been hiding so much that the only way I could sort it out was with a list; a list of things I thought were too awful to write. Read more
Let’s time travel back to the pre-Internet days of 1975. Long-distance phone calls were $1 per minute, so people received most of their communications via US mail, and Christmas cards were so important that the average number of families on a list was 300. That year, two sociology professors from Brigham Young University sent 600 Christmas cards to random families and then monitored how many cards were sent back in return.
Approximately 20% of the recipients took the time to find a card, write a message and send it back to the experimenters. That is an astounding number of people who felt obliged to reply. To give you context, today’s digital marketers are thrilled with a 1% response rate.
The experiment studied the rule of reciprocity – the strong social pressure to return favors. In the context of women, of course, because women send the Christmas cards. The rule of reciprocity has persisted throughout human history because it has survival value for the human species. Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said the essence of what makes us human is this system of reciprocity.
At the core of autism is a lack of social reciprocity. Autistic babies don’t reciprocate a parent’s smile. Autistic adults don’t reciprocate a friend’s Christmas card. Of course there are exceptions. Jewish people don’t send Christmas cards. People who don’t have enough money for food don’t send Christmas cards. But even those people reciprocate intuitively. Psychologist Amy Pearsons’s research shows that women with autism work hard to look normal, and they mimic the acts of reciprocity they see neurotypical women doing. Women with autism can pass for normal, but it exhausts them because passing involves constantly monitoring what is expected.