Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 19: November, 2025

This blog post was originally published in my November monthly newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

As you might already know, I’ve been boxing since 2018. It’s my preferred form of exercise for many reasons. Because it’s unmistakably difficult, for one thing, so I feel a real sense of accomplishment afterwards; because I have an outlet for my rage, which is consistent and prodigious; because it’s a bit like chess, so there’s always some new strategy to learn. I’m not the kind of person who can sit with pain for long periods of time—no endurance sports for me, I don’t like to endure. I do like to think, and react, and respond, and obviously deal blows, so my taste in this is reflective of my personality in many ways. I’m very good in a crisis; I enjoy putting out fires; I can handle multiple projects at once.

Boxing calls for something I think of as light-footedness. (That might be a legitimately applicable term in boxing, though as you can probably guess, I’m about to apply it to something else, narratively.) When it comes to boxing, because I’m often smaller than my opponent, I have to do one of two things: remain out of my opponent’s more expansive reach (defense) or work my way to the inside of their wingspan, too close to effectively counter (offense). There’s no planting, no anchoring, beyond what is necessary to derive sufficient strength. My personal weaknesses aside, boxing always requires your mind and body to stay agile. How can you strike back if you’re too heavy on the backfoot? Every punch gets thrown with an understanding of the potential counter. Look for the openings. Never get too comfortable. Light-footedness is a tactician’s measure. Predict, feint, evade, mislead. Motion, constant and disarming, is how you survive.

Here it comes, the metaphor—!

Motherhood reminds me a lot of this aspect of boxing. Something I’ve noticed about myself is that I never sit too heavily, literally and metaphorically. When I rest, it’s with the expectation to be interrupted, which creates its own kind of sensory experience, a surreality where life is in constant motion in my periphery. I’ve also observed that I, and many mothers I know, have lost the ability to be still. That same light-footedness that is such a critical agility in life means we can no longer sink into any particular feeling. We can’t risk getting comfortable in any activity, restful or otherwise—The Child and The Home and The Life Which We Have Crafted From Our Bare Hands make demands we can’t entirely predict. I am ready at any given moment to pick up that task I’ve left unfinished (almost always: cleaning the bathroom). Just as easily, I can get in the car for a spontaneous activity, for a necessary errand, for a day of (imprint this memory on your brain!!!!) childhood fun. I can shift gears. Life constantly punches, and I, in my resiliency, strike back.

But I swear I used to work so hard at being chill. Right? A certain demographic of readers may recognize the feeling. I grew up in the era of the cool girl and it taught me something about just sitting on the couch, being chill. I seem to have misplaced my ability to do that. Sometimes I’m aware with a sensation like pins and needles that I can’t just sit and watch a football game with my husband like I used to. Agitation, I think, would be the word. The sense that if I sit here too long, I’ll never get up again. If I get too comfortable, then nothing will move, everything will grind to a halt, someone will take me out. I’ll just, I don’t know, wither away and die.

Is this possibly the opposite of burnout? Or a symptom, a warning sign? Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing the ability to sit with myself. I am a frequent excavator of the inner space (see also: current activity), but this, for me, is work. Having a child reorganized my mind, reset my relationship to time, so that almost every moment feels like I should be Doing Something, if not for my child or my husband or my job, then for my body, mainly so what little flexibility I have doesn’t completely disintegrate on impact like an old rubber band—which is also technically for My Child and My Husband and My Job. But then again, maybe I was always like this? Maybe I was only chill for my husband, an illusion I crafted that was actually motion all along.

Good god, who am I? In many ways, I think I’ve cast aside the question as a matter of irrelevance. At the Boston event for the GIRL DINNER tour, I mentioned that no man I’d ever dated before my husband thought I’d be a good mother, a fact I delivered with indifference but that was met with gasps—I suppose merited ones. I found it devastating myself, at the time, but have since done away with the implications of the statement, which were: you are Too Ambitious, you are Too Aggressive, you are Too Intense, you cannot possibly Nurture, you are not Soft. And I suppose (look at me, casually supposing!) I must have objected to these things so intensely for knowing these paramours had already betrayed me by reading me so wrong. My motherhood, it turns out, is perhaps most prominently defined by its indulgence. My son is sweet-tempered and so I love to reward him for his sweetness; I find it irresistible, the desire to give things to him, time and special activities and little treats. I am generous in love, which is perhaps why I’m also sparing with intimacy. One only has so many resources. Maybe I have always loved light-footedly. Maybe my survival technique is older than this particular calling. Maybe I have always made my way through life by looking for where I need to be next.

As ever, a non-conclusion. A confession? One of tiredness, yawning and profound. I am tired. All this motion has a cost. Would it be worth it to grow roots and be still, however dangerous such a thing might be? Imagine, someone needing something of me, met with my subsequent refusal. I shudder to think. But in life, I often make another metaphor: sometimes the only tactic is to take the beating, move on. In boxing, it sometimes makes sense to roll with the blow, to gather momentum for a surer reply. Is this me telling myself, by telling you, that it’s acceptable to rest…?

Better you than me! I’ll be over here, darting safely out of reach.