Jen Deaderick
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Gender, politics, pop culture, women’s history, US history
DED-er-ick. Author SHE THE PEOPLE. She/Her. May or may not be notable. jendeaderick.substack.com
Articles by Jen Deaderick
Bonkers
I spent a crazy amount of money on skin care products yesterday. Like, a bonkers amount. It’s stuff that will last a while, so I can break it down into monthly amounts in my head and feel sort of like it was sane, but really it wasn’t. I was far too vulnerable to a young, hard-selling woman who told me I deserved to look beautiful and gently rubbed things into my face. It’s fine, really. Last night, though, I started crying thinking about how needy I was lately for that sort of caring. How raw I am.
Cake
It was my birthday last week. Fifty-three! I keep forgetting I’m in my fifties. I turned fifty during the lockdown. I had a party. People wore masks and sat in my yard at a distance. It was actually really fun. Still, it didn’t feel real because of the strange liminal nature of the lockdown. It happened in a parallel time. Or maybe it’s just weird to be getting older. In my forties, I could always feel like I was just out of my thirties, but now there’s a numerical gap of a whole decade.
Custom
Well, I’ve decided against going all-paid, after considering it for a bit. I really love having this be open for anyone to read, with people having the option to pay if they can. I get really tired of having to monetize everything. It’s the only way to make even close to a living as a writer, but it isn’t fun. Asking for money is sort of embarrassing. I’ve had people tell me to “get a job” in reaction to my public requests, as if writing isn’t a job.
Flood
There was a flood. Our landlady is in her nineties and her cognitive abilities have been slipping. Rosie was heating up a frozen Trader Joe’s lasagna and went to check on it. I was in the living room with the paused Gilmore Girls. Suddenly, she was yelling for me to come to the kitchen immediately, panic in her voice. I was trying to imagine what had happened to the lasagna that had her so freaked out. I walked in to a waterfall over the cabinets. A small pond was forming on the counter.
LSD
I woke Rosie up to ask her a Smiths lyric. “What time is it?” she asked. I told her it was only 8:15, but that didn’t matter. The song was running through my head and it was driving me crazy that I couldn’t remember the word. Who does he want to unite and take over? Sign painters? Shitkickers? Ice dancers? “Shoplifters!” Rosie said, then rolled over and went back to sleep. I know I should know that already. It’s one of the best known Smiths songs.
Worst
Long, long ago, all the way back in 2015, I had a piece published by the New York Times. It was only online, not in the paper version, but it still sounds cool. I would put the link here, but I’d rather you just Googled “Jen Deaderick Katy Perry.” I really love that people can do that. The piece got a lot of comments, many angry. I didn’t read any of them. I never do. Thoughtful comments are buried under nastiness and stupidity.
Maybe
My mom fell today. She’s fine now. I was in Brockton visiting the boyfriend at the VA hospital and I got a call saying my mom had fallen and was headed to Mount Auburn Hospital. I pulled off the VA sticker pass, drove to Cambridge, got a new pass to stick on my shirt. Mom was sitting lying there on a cot, bored. Didn’t get what the fuss was about. Wanted to get home to watch the movie they were screening at 6:30. She has a walker now. We had to sit around for a while, like you do in a hospital.
Yesterday
Saturday mornings I like to lie in bed listening to WMBR, the MIT station. At 6, 88 Rewound kicks off, playing two hours of hit lists from the past. FM Road comes in after that with old and new country music. This week, 88 Rewound was replaying a 1965 hit list from somewhere in Maryland. Motown was coming in, making appearances throughout the list. Herb Alpert made an appearance. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were still hanging on.
Gilmore
The kid wanted to spend Wednesday, her day off, watching Gilmore Girls with me. How could I say no? We’ve been rewatching the original series over the last few weeks, like we do, and I decided I wanted to jump ahead to A Year in the Life. That’s the revisit to the series that came out a few years ago. We love it. We have developed a lot of opinions about the characters over the years, and we think the revisit is pretty honest about them.
Vintage
I remember sitting in a friend’s car in my early twenties with speed metal blaring over the tape deck and wondering what music my children could possibly find that would shock and irritate me. Surely my generation had already found the loudest and most grating sounds possible. Autotune. That’s what they came up with. It seemed fun when Cher did it, the cool warping of her voice on Believe. Then all pop voices became flat and tinny. I suffer mightily from it.
Bear
It’s foggy today. Real fog, not smoke. There’s a tree in the yard that yesterday morning had its flowers spread out with their faces to the sun. Now the flowers are drooping, avoiding the occasional rain drops. There’s a lot of bird chatter. I wonder if they heard about the bear in Arlington yesterday. A baby that was cavorting just four and a half miles from here. It was later spotted playing in the fields of Lexington farm known for its caramel apples and cider doughnuts. I’m not sure where it is now.
Period
I am a woman of a certain age, so there are certain changes I’ve been going through. One in particular: the Change of Life. What a spectacular phrase that is. It makes it sound so momentous. Nowadays, people tend to avoid the euphemism and just say menopause. A pause in menstruation. Pause is a gentler word. It’s what we do with tv shows when we need to pee or get a snack. It’s also a bit more accurately descriptive, because there a lot of pauses before the show’s over. The show’s not fully over for me.
Mortarboard
Rosie, my kid, technically graduated from high school back in December, but she walked in her commencement last Thursday. That made it really real. She wore a gown and mortarboard, had a tassel. The whole shebang. That morning, I woke up early and ran to Star Market while she was still sleeping. I got balloons, ice cream cake, flowers, and a variety of fun beverages. Then I got a Frappuccino and breakfast sandwich at the in-store Starbucks outpost.
Embouteillages
It’s hazy here today. Smoke from Canadian wildfires has blown into town, and I can smell it in the air. It gives light a more yellow tint than usual, different from a cloudy day. It’s been cloudy here the last few days, and that’s just gray. This is different. The birds are freaking out, like they do. Not to impose emotional states on them. They’re sending out alerts to each other. I just hear it as alarm.
Heart
There a robin’s nest on my front porch. The babies hatched about a week ago, and I’m mildly obsessed with catching glimpses of them. The best view is from the couch, lying down, and a few days ago I fell asleep twice while watching them. Regular readers may remember that there were robins on my back porch last year. That was interesting, but stressful. I couldn’t sit out there without being harassed, and I could only see them from the kid’s room, which meant I needed her approval to observe them.
Head
It’s open window season again. I had my bedroom windows opened wide all night and the birds woke me up at 4AM. I’m always surprised by how early they start chatting. I made coffee and sat and listened to them for a while. Texted with my friend, Felicity, who’s in New Zealand for a month or so. Perfect texting time for her. If I don’t have to be anywhere in the morning, I love waking up at 4. After an hour or so, and a couple of cups of coffee, I can drift back to sleep.
Order
I’m trying to get my house in order. It’s a thing that men tell other men to do in movies: get your house in order! It’s dramatic and refers generally to some sordid goings-on. I initially spelled “sordid” as “sorted,” then corrected it, but getting ones house in order is about sorting, after all. Sorting the sordid. Now I have to look up “sordid.” Is it even the right word? Dirty, filthy, wretched, squalid. From the Latin, sordidus, with sordes, dirt, as its root. It’s now used in a morality context.
Tina
I’ve spent the last couple of hours, since hearing of her death, remembering the impact Tina Turner had on me. It was so long ago that I was listening to Private Dancer on repeat. I’ve lived so much life since then, it’s hard sometimes to remember the seeds that were planted early on. I had never heard of her when the What’s Love Got To Do With It video popped up on MTV. I don’t need to rewatch it now to remember how cool she looked: the weathered jean jacket, the incredible hair.
Untidy
I was just cleaning out my fridge and there was a carton of egg nog in there. Open, mostly full. Not even all the way in the back, which would be an excuse for overlooking it. It had just started blending in, I guess. My mind hasn’t been on my fridge, except when I’d open it and wonder what smelled so terrible in there. Interestingly, it wasn’t the egg nog! I had COVID over Christmas, which I guess explains why I wasn’t paying attention to my fridge back then.
Unwritten
I’m visiting my boyfriend in the psych ward today. I had to reread that sentence a few times before continuing. There were times in the last few weeks when I was determined to never see him again. Bad and painful things happened. Then he drove himself back to the hospital and committed to being committed…a phrase I used about our relationship a few weeks ago, not realizing it would take on a new meaning later. He’s doing the work.
Myself
It’s chillier today than it’s been the last few days, but I’m out on the back porch anyway. My toes are cold. I wish I’d brought out my warmer slippers. I’ll be okay. Yesterday, I was texting with my old pal, Brian Henderson, and wrote “It's not ideal when you're a little jealous of the guy who gets to be in the nut house.” I’m feeling the need for a break. I chose to help Clay through his recent troubles, and I’m glad I did. I love him and I want him to be well.
Wait
When I was younger and less knowledgeable about life, I was often very judgmental about mothers. I’d see a kid at a playground saying “look at me, Mama, look at me!” over and over and be shocked if the mother didn’t immediately look. It seemed so heartless. Your child NEEDS you, ma’am! How can you be so cold? Now I’ve been a mother, and I know that my kid always needed me. For years. Sometimes I couldn’t look right away.
Fame
I went to see Amanda Palmer perform on Saturday night, and the next day I started to write about it. She wore a dress that she’d worn to a major event a few years ago, before the pandemic. I’d been communicating with her a few hours before that event, trying to connect her up with a friend of mine. Amanda was going to be living in London, and wanted some women to hang out with. I had sort of forgotten about that day and that mission.
Hotbed
It occurred to me the other day that the Nineties were so long ago that the show that parodied the Nineties in song, Portlandia, would now be considered an old show. My kid works in vintage clothing and I have heard her call items of clothing “early 2000’s” once or twice. Aren’t we still in the early 2000’s? Dammit! I’m in a laundromat right now. I’m rarely in laundromats, but our dryer is broken. I’ve hanging things to dry, but I finally needed to commit to a proper wash and dry.
Sims
In times of extreme stress, I often find myself playing The Sims. Most of the time, I avoid playing because it sucks up hours of my time. Lots of things suck up my time, actually, so I’m not sure why I avoid it. I lay in bed listening to the Pontoon Palace on WMBR for two hours this morning, and I don’t feel bad about that. Well, not as bad. I could have showered and gotten dressed and done dishes and gotten work done in that time. My mother hated when I slept late or lay around in bed in the morning.
Alzheimers, part five
I dream about my Mom two or three times a week. Every once in a while it’s her pre-Alzheimers, and we chat about things like we used to sometimes do. Mostly she’s how she is now, and I’m trying to keep her safe and happy. In one dream, I found her the perfect place to live, except that you could see into the empty garage from every part of the house. Where’s my car, she’d ask over and over. Why did you take my car?
Alzheimers, part 4
The last time I talked to the social worker on the phone, he was berating me about my irresponsibility. “Just admit you don’t want to be in charge of this. Just say it, Jen. Just admit you don’t want to be in charge of your mother and I can turn her over to the state. Just say it, Jen. Just say it.” I didn’t say it, but of course I don’t. He was yelling at me like it was a shameful thing, but does anyone want to shepherd their mother through Alzheimers?
Alzheimers, part three
“Do you even care what happens to your mother, Jen?” My name is spit out in a disdainful, overly familiar way by the boy in his twenties who has somehow been put in charge in my family. I wouldn’t be talking to you right now if I didn’t, would I, son? I’d be on a beach in a country with no extradition treaty sipping on a fruity rum drink. Instead I’m being yelled at by an abusive boy with a taste of power and seething contempt. I could be his mother.
Alzheimers, part two
Moby Dick is, at its core, a monologue by a man who’s avoiding talking about a traumatic event. I imagine Ismael as a guy I happened to sit next to at a bar. He’s had a couple and he starts telling me this story about a shipwreck, but keeps going off into tangents, spouting dubious knowledge about whales and whatnot. I need to talk about what’s going on with Mom, but I’d rather talk about whales. I’ve got CNN on, muted, waiting for them to show Trump surrendering.
Alzheimers, part one
My mother has Alzheimers. I don’t talk about it publicly because it feels like a betrayal. She doesn’t believe she has Alzheimers. When I tell her that doctors have confirmed that she does, she says it’s just because I told them things. She’s an independent lady. She had to be. My Dad freaked out and left us when I was five and my brother was a baby, leaving my Mom to take care of us and all the mess he left behind. Dad went on to make and lose a lot of money.
Committed
My boyfriend and I don’t make a likely couple on the surface. We appear to be really different to people looking in at us. It’s true that we sometimes have big fights and spend days thinking we shouldn’t be together. Then we come back together. He’s always there at the other side, and I try to be, too, because he is. “We’re committed,” I told a friend who asked about us recently. Committed to what, he asked.
Trader
I ran into one of my high school English teachers at Trader Joe’s the other day. Beth. She came over and hugged me and kissed me on the cheeks a bunch of times. I’d been standing in front of a new baking product trying to decide if it would be good or terrible and it took me a moment to register what was happening. I see her on Facebook all the time, and just saw her in person a few months ago at a reunion, so it didn’t seem odd to see her in Allston. Then I remembered she doesn’t live here.
Ring
I treated a shirt for ring-around-the-collar this morning. My boyfriend’s shirt. I volunteered. He was going to bring it home to do it himself, but I said it was fine. I have a stain stick. It’s easy. I wash clothes he leaves at my house, and he washes clothes I leave at his. He just started wearing white collared shirts again. He had about a dozen in his closet from his white-collar working days, and he pulled them all out a few weeks ago. Decided to start wearing them again.
Snot
I’ve slept all night holding a toilet paper roll like a teddy bear. When my nose would threaten to overflow its banks, I’d wake up and know where to grab a tissue real quick. This saved my pillow from unpleasantness. The ‘Rona finally got me. The ‘VID. So far, it’s mostly like a bad cold, which is a relief. I’m achy, so I’ve been alternating ibuprofen and acetaminophen. That’s why I can type this. My hands hurt too much otherwise. Yes, it is Christmas. Yes, it meant Christmas Eve was a bit pitiful.
Rockin’
I used to hate Jingle Bell Rock, but now I’ve been happily singing it to myself all morning. They warned me I would get a sentimental feeling, and they were totally right. The kid and I have had some rough Christmases, and this year, so far, it’s mostly made me appreciate the pleasant things. I’m exceedingly pleased with my decorations. My piano window in particular is delightful.
Teaser
Howdy! I’m not actually writing something today, so don’t get excited. Just popped in to say I’m going to start doing video chat interviews with fun, interesting people that I’ll be posting here for my paid subscribers. I’m hoping to have one up before the new year. I already have a fun, interesting person lined up to chat with. Anyway, no pressure, but here’s the button for subscribing:
Return
I was thinking about Eden in the shower and thought maybe I’d write about it, but it turns out I’ve already written about that, too. I guess this week’s theme will be returning to themes. I write in that earlier piece that I never want to go back to past relationships, but that’s not completely true. I deeply missed being part of my little family threesome after my marriage fell apart. The family outings, the shared jokes, the daily rhythms.
King
I was going to write about my Dad pretending to care where the rest of us wanted to eat for lunch then announcing “Too bad, we’re going to Burger King!” He did this a lot. Turns out I already wrote about it. This is part of what has curtailed my posting lately. I wrote something about my life every day for a year, and it turns out I had a limited number of major stories that I wanted to tell. Maybe not that I wanted to tell, but that haunt me. I’m a major fan of WMBR, MIT’s station.
Sunset
Made a cocktail of pressed cider and bourbon. Shook it up and poured into a glass with the Declaration of Independence printed on the side and lots of blood red cherries at the bottom of it. What else to do this evening? I’m sipping it out on my back porch watching the same sun set that rose over me this morning. Things continue on. My kid got a tattoo last week and voted for the first time today. She hit the ground running when she turned 18 in September.
Out
Last week was a write-off, productivity-wise, so now I’m hunkered down in a hotel lobby trying to make myself do things I was supposed to do long before today. Obviously, I’m writing this instead, but at least I’m producing something. Something tangible, or at least visible to the outside world. This is how we keep ourselves sane when everything is crazy. A friend wants me to write about Twitter and why I love it, and I’ll do that at some point. Right now I need to do the thing I’m supposed to do.
Toes
I’m back out here with the birds again. It’s in the mid-70s, which is creepy in November, and means I barely even need my light bathrobe, but I’m wearing it to seem a bit more put together. Post-lockdown, and now that the house across the way is occupied and active, it feels less appropriate to wear pajamas on my back porch. I am committed to the practice nonetheless, but will nod to a certain degree of respectability. I sat around a bonfire at my boyfriend’s sister’s house last night.
Portent
“A total lunar eclipse will turn the moon blood red on Election Day” That’s a headline in the Washington Post, the hometown paper of our federal government. We’re looking for potents while waiting for our fellow citizens to decide on Tuesday whether or not we’re going to descend into Fascism. Meanwhile, Little Lord Muskleroy is taking a sledgehammer to my beloved Twitter because some people have tweeted mean things about him and his buddies can’t say the n-word.
And
I just rewatched of Sex and the City, the series, for a project I want to do. It’s really great, and it was like traveling back in time. They go to restaurants and other spaces that I used to go to and that don’t exist anymore. They talk about The One, like I used to, and believe it. They’re young. Even Samatha is over a decade younger than I am now when the series started. Carrie’s The One is Mr. Big.
Thinking
I’ve just watched the PBS documentary of Benjamin Franklin and the HBO documentary of George Carlin back to back. Portraits of a certain American manhood. Two men who loved staying home to tinker with things. Two men who left their wives for long road trips and missed their final breaths. Carlin was a better husband, filled with genuine love for his wife. He wrote love letters and tried to build a happy marriage. Franklin didn’t much care.
Reclaiming
I’m back on the back porch. It’s kind of mess. Bird poop on stuff, straw bits scattered about. It’s not as bad as it could be. The birds were actually pretty thoughtful, for birds. The porch lights I installed have fallen off the railings, but that was the heat. They were held up with two-sided tape. I’ll have to get back to them. I’m not sure what to do with the nest. I guess I leave it there, right? It must be bad luck to take down a bird nest. It feels like it would be.
Flown
The birds have cleared the nest. At least for now. Eggs were laid and hatched, and the babies flew off on Tuesday. We couldn’t go outside to watch without causing robin alarms to go off throughout the neighborhood, so we’d watch from my kid’s bedroom. Are there eggs yet, we’d wonder. We weren’t sure there had been until one day there were little open beaks poking up, open and demanding. The parents darting back and forth with more food, more food, more food.
Scrambled
Did Eversource leave a note a week ago saying my water would be shut off between 7AM and 5PM today? Yes. Did I forget to put it on my calendar so I woke up this morning having forgotten? Yes. So I threw on some clothes and high-tailed it to my favorite local hotel lobby with the Starbucks attached. Ordered coffee and a breakfast sandwich. Used the bathroom. Now I’m chilling on a couch and listing to hotel staff prepare to re-launch breakfast service post-lockdown.
Habitat
We’ve been avoiding the back porch. There’s a bird sitting in the next all the time now, which must mean there are eggs. Just opening the back door makes them mad. I respect that. I’m drinking my coffee in the living room, sitting in the wingback chair I bought a few months ago. The back porch is way at the other end of the apartment. I’m keeping a very respectable distance. Then I hear a scrabbling at the piano window, just above my head. Tapping and commotion.
Inside
I’m sitting in my room this morning. I don’t dare go out onto my porch. Still, there are birds dominating the situation. Two seemed to be fighting earlier. There was squawking and then a crash. Maybe it was a bird fighting with a squirrel. I once saw birds chase a squirrel out of a tree. This was on the other side of the apartment, outside the dining room/office window. The squirrel kept trying to climb, and the birds were coming at it from every angle, swooping and squawking.
Side-Eye
I haven’t been able to really hang on the back porch lately because some birds have taken it over. There’s a nest right above my hammock chair, interwoven with my Christmas lights. A clever and sturdy move on the part of the nest-builder. I believe he is the bird currently squawking loudly from the tree, furious that I’m so close to his home. Technically it’s also my home. He should know that. He’s seen me here before.
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