THIS IS WHY WE'RE HERE

Readers,

I have assembled a bunch of Cafe essays into a manuscript, and am in the process of searching for a print home for them. One possible publisher has suggested that an intro might be helpful in framing for the reader what’s about to happen to them. The following is my first pass at an introduction to a collection of the transmissions you get each week (or, if you’re a free subscriber, each month). I hope you enjoy! Thank you for being here.

xx Caro

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In 2019, I went from having no children to having two children inside of four minutes. This is the kind of thing that can cause the glistening egg of your brain to turn into an omelet.

Perhaps some parents find their footing around six months or a year; I wouldn’t know because I did not. I also don’t know when I will, because we’re well into my kids’ fourth year now and I still feel as though someone neglected to strap me in to the amusement park tilt-a-whirl.

I have the misfortune of possessing what one might consider a poet’s sensibility, which is to say I am frequently seized by shock and awe in the face of, say, a dandelion floof, so I didn’t really stand a chance at equilibrium amidst the demands of adulthood, let alone the strain of raising two humans.

When my children were a few months old, a depression that wouldn’t allow me to eat or move descended like a stinking fog as I sat on the couch, staring. I could not believe what was happening to me, the absolute mercilessness of parenting twin infants. It was like a constant, slow-motion car accident. My state at that time was the emotional equivalent of a permanently dropped jaw.

At some point, after someone fed me soup and an anti-depressant, it occurred to me that, given my profound unpreparedness for reality in general and raising humans in particular, it might be not only smart but functionally necessary to deploy the skills I did possess with as much regularity and verve as I could manage. I had little predilection for constant wakefulness and slicks of baby puke, but retained, somehow, a degree of facility with choosing and ordering words such that I felt a little less like stuffing my own fist in my mouth and screaming until the police came.

I looked around the kitchen one New Year’s Eve around 6pm, an hour or so before everyone’s bedtime, my pilot husband away on a trip, and I took in the scene: the semi-ambulatory children writhing and falling over each other, the puke smeared across their clothes, the bits of food fanned out across the floor, the sagging diapers, my own dirty clothes and hair—and the gaping maw of the dishwasher door, which was the place where the babies would pull themselves up to find the bits of fruit and vegetable I’d leave for them at a relatively clean and conveniently wipe-able surface.

Over the next six months, with the stalwart encouragement of a writer friend, I slowly came to the determination that if I could write, every week, to find the humor and the possible shades of meaning within the seemingly endless contortion and disbelief of my life, maybe the act of sifting through it all could be like that open dishwasher door: an improvised gathering place and service tray for a sprawling, chaotic life, a sort of ridiculous but functional anchor in the high seas of fatigue and emotional deprivation.

I called the series that grew from this experiment Notes from the Dishwasher Cafe, and sent out a new essay almost every week for more than two years. I found, to my delight, that some folks wanted to get it, weekly, in their email inboxes. There are now over a hundred of these short essays, and several hundred readers— which is a modest number in the grand scope of the internet, but a tremendous piece of luck to the terrible tenderness of my heart’s oozing blob.

The essays are as varied in topic (tantrums, birds, tractors, autoimmune disease, ultramarathons, dead cats, planetary alignment) and structure (I’m liberal with the manic, yelling voice of the caps key / indulgent with punctuation and format) as my children’s dumped-out yard toys, but they all have a few things in common: 1) I wrote what I needed to write in order to stay above water; 2) I sent out an essay only if it made me laugh, because play, to me, is the most effective way to learn and the best way to live; 3) I kept them all short enough to be digested during a quick break in the insanity, which is pretty much all anyone gets these days; and 4) I believed, during the writing of each, that someone, somewhere, might need to read what I was writing as much as I did.

This is the audacity of the writer, to believe that what they have to say might be of value to someone else. It is my hope that this particular hubris, paired with the fact that whatever self-regard I once had has been hacked off at the knees by an uncomfortable degree of humility roughly every nine minutes for the past four and a half years, might make my words a suitable buoy for others who find themselves similarly disoriented, scrambled, contorted, misaligned, sinking— and desperately wishing to continue swimming with as much strength and grace as is possible when one feels comprised entirely of elbows.

Each of these essays tries to say, in waves of playfulness (threaded through with a compulsion for bathtub philosophy), you are not alone. I’ve offered to others, as honestly as possible, what I most needed, and in doing so, received it. You do not need to be a parent to read this collection any more than I needed to be a parent to be overwhelmed by my life, but know this: that in the passing connection of words between us, we come into each other’s care.