Bruise Clues, or What I Learned When I Almost Dropped My Water Bottle on My Baby

I urgently needed a reminder to slow down and focus on what’s truly important in my life rather than assuming the more I did, the happier I'd be

For any new readers, hello! If you stumbled across me via Substack, welcome. I’m Rachel, a New Jersey-based mom, writer of personal essays and journalism and the ADHD Diaries column, editor of personal essay literary magazine

Open Secrets

, and former erotica author and editor. It’s been a while since I’ve sent a newsletter and I wanted to explain why and hopefully motivate myself to get back to posting regularly because I have a lot of ideas for future posts. But first, let me share why I’ve been so quiet.

Bottle Up and Explode

I’m getting ready to go to story time at one of our local libraries, the outings that have become mainstays of life with my infant daughter. As usual, we are running late; we’ve been on time only once in the three months we’ve been attending them.

I toss my water bottle in my tote bag and lean down to pick the baby up from the floor, my mind already envisioning the next tasks I have to accomplish before we head out the door: settle her in her car seat with a toy, clean my glasses, wash my hands, put on my sneakers. The green metal half-filled water bottle hurtling out of my bag isn’t a possibility on my mental radar, but there it is, barreling toward my daughter so quickly my body has to move before my brain fully realizes what’s happening. I shift to catch it, which I do, thankfully, but not before it slams into my inner arm.

the bruise below my wrist a few days after dropping the bottle

I swiftly move on, having not left myself any time to contemplate the almost accident, placing the bottle in the bag, the bag on the floor, the baby in my arms, then picking the bag up, vowing to always remember the proper order of those actions from now on.

It’s only once we’re home and she’s settled in for a nap that I’m able to reckon with what might have happened, with the fact that in my quest to be a “good mom” and make sure she’s properly socializing, or at least, surrounded by other kids rather than just me for a few hours a week, I almost hurt her in a way I likely would never forgive myself for.

I’ve been so proud of myself for not speeding or trying to take any shortcuts in the car I’m still nervous about driving, even when we’re running so late enough we’ll surely miss half the story time, that I forgot there are other safety hazards lurking far closer to home.

Being Busier Doesn’t Always Mean Being Better

In the days since, a bruise has blossomed on my arm, deepening its color, settling in to keep reminding me of this lesson over and over again. Moving or thinking slowly hasn’t traditionally been my forte; it’s only when I’m multitasking, or I feel like I am, that I feel worthy of, well, living. In the past, that looked like sending rapid-fire emails, pounding out pitches, clacking against the keys and tell myself that the louder I typed, the more profound my words would be.

These days, my version of busyness is rooted in my new role as a full-time mom, with days that might start in the middle of the night, morphing into cleaning up breakfast plates and cups, wiping the high chair first with a wet paper towel, then spraying it down, mopping the floor, tossing clothes in the laundry and folding the clean ones, changing diapers and taking out the poopy ones immediately.

Only during about ten percent of her three daily naps will she let me put her down in her crib without crying, so usually she sits on my lap, and I escape into a cozy mystery on my Kindle, or research recipes to feed her or which shoes should be her first, or add to my list of what to pack in August for her first plane trip. I conclude my day’s motherhood tasks with putting her to bed every other night, which is sometimes as simple as holding her and watching her eyes flutter closed, and other times a far more elaborate undertaking, then wrapping up with making bottles and meal planning.

There’s always something I could—and in my head, should—be doing. That feeling is familiar as a freelancer, but ramped up to a whole new level when it’s not a paycheck but a person I’m now responsible for.

I think often of my friend who told me that after putting her little kids to bed, she’d lie down on the floor and just stare at the wall. Before I became a mom, I didn’t fully grasp what she meant. We’re all busy, right? Yet mom busyness is a whole new breed, one where the stakes feel much higher, so my answer has been to simply tack on additional items on my mom list, whittling down my leisure time until it’s a mere sliver of my day. I’ve had decades of leisure already; shouldn’t I be satisfied with that?

While I’m accustomed to pressure, the internal urge to always force myself forward, to never stop and savor what I’ve accomplished, lest I stay in that state permanently, the bottle incident sounded a very loud alarm in my head that continuing at that pace isn’t just unsustainable, but actually dangerous.

Since getting home from the personal storytelling event I organized in early May, Open Secrets Live, and especially the last few weeks since the water bottle incident, I’ve had no choice but to slow my life down in a way I’m not sure I ever before have as an adult. For as far back as I can remember, I’ve always been in a hurry to do more and more and more, starting with graduating college in three years. I wonder sometimes if I’d taken the full four years if I would have been mature enough to handle law school without crashing and burning my way through NYU before eventually dropping out.

That failure, along with a few others major ones from my twenties and thirties, has followed me into my forties, pushing me to keep going even when it would’ve been wiser to take a break and assess where my creative heart truly wanted to be(at).

Now that I have the life I’ve dreamt of for the last two decades, one where I get to be a mom and watch my baby do basically everything for the first time, where I continually marvel at how it feels like I’m watching her synapses fire in real time, her focused eyes trained on me when I sing to her, her fierce concentration as she pulls herself up on any available surface, I’m trying to learn a new way of being in the world, one where not everything is a race to the top, one where I can step back and just be myself, even if that person doesn’t accomplish even a fraction of what she used to, even if we don’t make it to every story time or play every game suggested for her age in What to Expect the First Year or she hasn’t hit every milestone at the exact second she’s “supposed” to. One where I don’t spend an hour trying to fix the previous run-on sentence, where I just let it go in the interest of actually sending this newsletter instead of letting it languish for another day or week.

Slowing Down Feels Less Like Relaxation and More Like Resignation

It's been deeply challenging to reorient my mind’s-eye self-portrait and, especially, to reexamine myself and my value within my home and the larger world. I may have a print hanging over my bed that says “You are worth more than your productivity” (via the excellent

Janine Kwoh

of Kwohtations – it’s currently available as a sticker) but just because I hung it there doesn’t mean I ever fully (or even partially) internalized its message. I agreed with it in theory but ignored it in practice. Moving more slowly, in work and in my personal life, hasn’t felt like as much of an active decision as one that was pressed upon me, leaving me to navigate it without a roadmap.

hanging this on my wall was a lot easier than embodying it

As I approach turning 50 in November, I’m thinking a lot about not just how to prevent hurting or otherwise failing my child by being in a rush, but also about what I want my life to look like, about whether that hectic-bordering-on-frantic mindset, where the next tasks on my list are always uppermost on my mind, still actually serves me, or whether I need to chuck that mindset out the window and start over.

So much of the past two years have been about refashioning myself, personally and professionally, about rethinking whether what I’ve been used to is what makes sense or was just a rut I got stuck in. Rethinking who I am at midlife has brought with it a lot of unsettling feelings, but nestled beneath those, there’s a surge of hope that it’s not too late to create a life where I can feel accomplished without being overwhelmed.

I’ve been loving my friend

Emily Hessney Lynch

’s new podcast about parenting and social media, It’s a Lot, so much because the women she’s interviewed acknowledge that not everyone is living a glossy, perfect, mom life of gorgeous, nutritionally balanced meals effortlessly made while giving their child nonstop attention and opportunities for educational growth and showing it all off on social media while also flourishing at their careers seemingly without a hint of struggle.

Being a mom is both easier and harder than I expected, which I’ll be exploring more in my writing in the coming months. The most challenging aspect isn’t the fact that I have to watch my daughter like a hawk because she has a knack for shimmying her way into or onto or off of any area or piece of furniture that poses danger, it’s realizing that everything I thought I knew about how I operate best may have been flawed.

I thought I got energy from being on the go all the time, from never allowing my workload to dwindle, from seeing downtime as something I had to earn by hustling harder and harder (the way I’ve viewed “cheating” on diets in the past when I thought those were worthwhile endeavors). I’ve had to tease apart that belief and ask myself whether it’s one that’s serving me, whether it’s how I want my daughter to operate ten or twenty or thirty years down the road. The answer has been a resounding no, and my body has let me know in ways that go far beyond the bruise.

I’ve pulled back from posting everywhere online all the time, with Substack Notes being my new online home away from home, one that feels like less of a pressure cooker, where I can share a random thought or photo or quote or nothing at all without disappointing anyone, including myself. That’s hard to do when there are countless voices telling us that if we want to be successful as writers the trick is to be front and center, authenticating ourselves to our audiences via cunning social media strategy, plotting, planning, maximizing our every online utterance and image. I don’t know what it takes to be successful in the way I still dream of being, but I do know that if it requires being glued to my phone to that degree, if it needs my mind to be monopolized by metrics, I’d rather choose a quieter way of being.

As

Athena Dixon

wrote this week in her Radical Pleasure column at Open Secrets:

Slowing down taught me to say no and set boundaries that I’d struggled with before. I allowed myself permission to not always be on, to not always be accessible, even to that part of myself so wrapped up in production and accomplishments.

My creative plans and hopes and dreams are still there, bubbling up, in various states of progress, but I no longer feel that they all have to be done today or next week or even this year or this decade (or as guilty that they weren’t done yesterday). I hope the podcast I’ve recorded eight interviews for so far about our relationship with our belongings will be one I can launch this summer, but I also know it’s not worth sacrificing my health or sanity to make that happen. I hope I can revise my book proposal about the same topic by the fall, but I’ve had to decouple those goals in my mind because they feel too overwhelming to contemplate simultaneously and lead me to assume a problem with one is automatically a problem with the other.

In 2020, I wrote a Fast Company article where I had experts analyze my to-do lists. This was before I’d grappled with how ADHD has so profoundly impacted my approach to work and task management (or rather, mismanagement). One of the experts, Rashelle Isip, “urged me to take a step back and ask myself what these tasks are helping me accomplish.”

Five years later, I’m doing the same thing but rather than evaluating the lists I still scrawl fresh each day (which is not what was recommended to me), I’m evaluating my entire life. It’s a scary process, requiring me to rethink so much of what I thought I wanted my days and dreams to look like, as well as what I do want pitted against the reality of the physical and emotional and logistical constraints I’m up against.

So while I want to tell you I’ll be sending newsletters every week, or even every month, I can’t. But I hope you’ll stick around slices of this smaller, quieter life I’m building. Topics I have in mind include the most ridiculous argument my boyfriend and I have ever had, the podcast tech issue that made me cry, coveting a flamingo lamp, and why it’s so hard to part with a pair of jeans I haven’t worn in years.

The best way to support my work is to subscribe to Open Secrets Magazine, where every week I edit deeply personal essays by authors from around the world. Paid subscriptions there go directly to paying authors and are appreciated, but I’m mainly focused on reaching 6,000 (or more!) subscribers by the end of August.