I'll Be Right Back

Meet my fourth child, Tayto O’Keefe. I do have the right to refer to him as my son because he has made me more slightly insane and tired than any time since I had a baby. Kevin is like “We are not his parents” and I say “Oh Tayto, isn’t Dad, who is your biological father, so silly.” FWIW Eileen also refers to him as her “little brother” and has said a bunch of times that she’s happy not to be the youngest anymore and that the number of boys and girls in our house is now even.

Two tales for ya. We went to the New Balance outlet store to get shoes for the kids and me and I asked if they had the things to measure the kids’ feet. The guy goes, “No! But you can do our 3D foot scanner!” I said, great, let’s do it. By the time this conversation had happened the kids had all run away from me into the depths of the store so I was just like, OK, well let’s do my feet! So I stepped on the thing.

Start with Part I. This is Part II of III or maybe IV. I’ve turned on payments (i.e. Substack subscription) for the rest of the series because I ultimately couldn’t bear this all hanging out there and found myself more guarded in writing about it if I thought it was for entirely public consumption. I am also really mean about Facebook prolapse groups in Part III and don’t want that to be easily linkable.

The first time Trump was inaugurated, January 20, 2017, Emily Gould and I celebrated by writing about the state of our broken vaginas. Eight years (plus one week) later, I marked the second inauguration by having my broken vagina fixed with surgery. It took me a very long time to get to this point. Two presidencies of time! The child whose birth maybe caused my prolapse is now 8, his older sister is 11, and his younger sister just turned 5.

In addition to writing about drinks and lice, I’m the editor of Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. The below is a version of a post I wrote for Nieman Lab this week, with like 5% more editorializing/meanness added. I was worried about the response to this piece from other journalists, but the response has been, actually, fantastic and extremely +1.

I started I’ll Be Right Back in 2016 and some of the very earliest issues were about breastfeeding. This is the 100th issue of I’ll Be Right Back and it’s about my children’s love of caffeinated drinks. That’s the only way you can tell that time has passed though; nothing else has changed, not the president elect and not my face.

For O’Keefe Secret Santa “Loop Engage ear plugs” was all I put on my list and I wanted them more than anything. “Limit the volume without missing a beat,” they say. “Take the edge off while staying present.” This is the parenting dream right? 6:45 PM December 26 I got them in a living room filled with 29 people and I said to my brother-in-law THANK YOU I WANTED THESE SO BAD and then I wanted to put them in right there and just leave them in.

You know how many times I heard about lice this week? Several. No offense, but I thought some of you could use this post from 2017 when Alice and I got lice. Nitwits Belmont closed during the pandemic. If you get lice now and want a professional comb-out you’ll have to go to Lice Aunties in Newton. Not everyone gets the itch but if you do you’ll know. You won’t know-know because you’ll tell yourself you’re wrong but oh, come on, at least in retrospect.

Alice and Hugh really ~~shook things up~~ this year by saying on like February 1 that they didn’t want to do Valentines for their classes.

I’m pretty sure newsletters are supposed to be a “reporter’s notebook” type place where you can talk about the challenging stories that you want to write but that have not yet found a home. My white whale is an investigation into grow-an-animal companies. In a moment of maximum unhinge during the pandemic, I pitched this to a national publication and was rejected.