I cared very much how I looked in photos. But I’m dead now, so I guess you can choose the photos that you like. I have no more opinions to give. Choose the photos that show how you remember me and how you’ll think of me. Show my kids who I was apart from the person who nagged them to clip their wolfen toenails and lost her temper over the most petty nonsense.
Assuming I haven’t been smashed by a giant boulder or burned to a crisp, wash my body, if you can, if you can get through it. If I ever took care of you, please take care of me this one last time. Please don’t let a stranger do it. It’s just a body; don’t be scared. It loved and lost, it nourished and disappointed. You’ll see that my dead-person skin isn’t so different from your alive-person skin and these arms and hands that stiffen are still the same. They do not turn to scales, they are not the arms of a swamp monster. You always said I had cold hands and, well, at least this part should be consistent.
Kiss my forehead one more time. I don’t know what it’s like to be dead but I would bet my earthly possessions (that are all yours now anyway) that forehead kisses still register.
Clip my hair, save its strands. You might not want them now; you might not want them later. But somewhere down the road I have faith that a descendant will marvel at her great-great-great grandmother’s brown-gray hair and realize that it’s so very much like his or her own. We are a brown-hair family, full stop.
If, in between tears, you are not making inappropriate jokes, then how can you claim to have ever loved me? What’s wrong with you? Get out. I mean it.
Just kidding. See?
When I die, throw me by the fistfuls into the ocean. I prefer the unforgiving slate-gray waters of Maine, but it’s not a deal breaker. It will matter more to you than it will to me. My ashes, like ghostly silt, will cling to your fingertips and float on the surface of the water. You might mistake this for my reluctance to leave, but I am already gone.
Maybe give some of my ashes to my enemies. It’ll bring them joy knowing I’m gone for good. They can do something petty like flush me down the toilet. Dicks.
I worried a lot when I was alive. So when I die, take comfort that I’m no longer worrying about these things:
Am I a good enough mother?
Am I good enough, period?
Why can’t I be more generous with people who love me?
Am I crazy? Like crazy-crazy?
Are my kids okay?
Will my kids always be okay?
I wonder if I just have regular dandruff or it’s some kind of serious skin condition that I can’t seem to ask a doctor about ever?
Should I have wanted a bigger family?
Should I have been such a whore in my twenties?
Should I have been more of a whore in my twenties?
Who the president is.
What’s wrong with the world.
What’s wrong with you.
What’s wrong with me.
What’s wrong with everybody.
How I’m going to die.
When I’m going to die.
I can’t believe I’m going to die.
I’m no longer worrying about anything.
I’m no longer here.
Where has the feeling gone?
The show must go on.
Acknowledgments
Sometimes you will be told (or will tell yourself ) that you are not smart. And sometimes you will be told (or tell yourself) that you are not funny. You will become a mother and tell yourself that you’re terrible at this, you can’t believe it’s this hard, why didn’t anyone say anything, how can everyone not see that you have no idea what you’re doing? Why are brainy people like doctors leaving tiny vulnerable human beings in your care? Don’t they know? It is so easy to not believe in yourself, especially as a girl, as a woman, always. Thank you to anyone and everyone, friends and family and strangers, who saw in me things I couldn’t see in myself.
Thank you, Scot Armstrong, for sending me that random Facebook message about my costume for that Halloween-in-August party, which turned into my asking for your advice about a screenplay, which turned into my coming to LA for that dinner at Chateau Marmont—where I was the only lady eating fries and drinking beer—which turned into my accidentally raking a glob of cheese across my lap and having to walk everywhere with my purse clutched in front of my thighs, which inexplicably turned into you still cheering me on and telling me, after my first McSweeney’s acceptance, to forget about a screenplay for now and write a book of short pieces with this: “Right now you are the Ramones. Keep being the Ramones. Don’t switch to jazz on Thursdays.” You are the best person.
The most sincere this-book-would-not-exist-without-you thank-you to Chris Monks, editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Thank you for that first acceptance and every acceptance since but especially and forever for saying “I like this one” to “Please Don’t Get Murdered at School Today.” It was not a ha-ha piece. It was a piece I wish didn’t have a reason to exist at all. And it wouldn’t have had a natural home anywhere else. But there it was. And that’s where Ryan Harbage read it and sent me the nicest e-mail I had ever received about my writing while also suggesting maybe he would like to be my agent. Well, that was an excellent afternoon. Thank you for being the most responsive and respectful editor anywhere, but mostly thank you for not being a twentysomething hipster. You do our people proud.
Ryan Harbage, thank you for that e-mail (which I will save forever), for your many kind words of encouragement since, for wanting to vomit all over Trump as much as I do, for your excellent taste in GIFs, but most of all for finding such a great home for this weird-ass mental breakdown of a book.
Profound thank-yous for saving my bacon to crack investigators, stellar insiders, and “Let me explain this to you as if you are a small child” great friends Rachel Livsey and Jeff Leeson. I owe you both.
Stephanie Hitchcock, I’m really sorry you had to edit this book while you were pregnant. I thought the joke was on me when I had to write the entire thing during my kids’ summer vacation, but I now think the joke was on both of us. Sorry for writing things that made you cry (but not too sorry). Thank you for confirming for me, through chatty “AND THEN GET THIS THING MY HUSBAND DID” or “WHAT ABOUT WHEN THIS HAPPENS AT WORK” conversations, that you were always the right and only editor for this thing.
A very special thank you to poet and neighbor, Julie Cadwallader Staub, for permission to excerpt her wonderful poem and to designer Joanne O’Neill for the most perfect visual metaphor married to a Wes Anderson-y cover I could ever ask for.
Major high fives or long uncomfortable hugs (whichever you prefer) to the generous friends who encouraged me as I started to share my work. Those early votes of confidence meant more than you know. Thank you, Aimee Boulanger, Kate Barnes, Eric Olsen, Winky Lewis, Teresa Elliott, David Doyle, Cindy Cagle, Erik Shonstrom, John Siddle, Vanessa Violette, Emily Blistein, Marie Claire Johnson, Nicci Micco, and those I will remember I forgot after this is printed. Special thanks to weekend design heroes Michael Dabbs, Jen and Byron O’Neill, and Allison Ross. Y’all know why.
This book wouldn’t remotely be in its current form and would contain a lot more goddamns if not for my readers Laura Haines, Darren Higgins, Beth Urdang, Charlotte Moore, and Tanja Alger. For five parents with summer vacations, actual jobs, pressing social media obligations, and/or eclipse-viewing road trips to deal with, you crammed a lot of reading and note-taking into a stupidly short period of time and I can never thank you enough. On my knees and bowing down with special gratitude for Tanja, who offered to restructure this book for me and then actually DID. Please rescue other people’s books for a living.
I am incredibly fortunate to have been raised in a family of independent, trail blazing, and lipstick-loving women. Judy Harrington, Janet Masse, and Theresa Masse—thank you for populating our family tree with unapologetic greatness. I wish Mary Arrow was alive to see this book, partly because she thought freelance was just a fancy word for unemployed,
but mostly because she never missed an opportunity to show me she loved me, and this book represents all my love in return.
Thank you, Paul Harrington, for my laugh, my sense of humor, for Maine, and for never telling me I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. Also thank you for teaching me how to throw a punch. It’s my favorite.
I wouldn’t have been able to write this book at all without the selfless support of my husband, Jon Hughes, who not only helped make the children I write about but also whisked them away for camping trips and day trips and basically raised them motherless during the summer of 2017. Thank you for trusting me and believing in me even though I’m crazier than a rat in a coffee can. You didn’t ask me to change a word of this book, allowing me to be honest and raw about things that are Not Fun. We both know that if the tables were turned, I wouldn’t be nearly as generous. So, thank you. I love you. I’m sorry. Let’s party.
Last, given this is not only a book about motherhood and children, but also about being a woman, living in this country, right now or ever, at this particular age or at any age, I would be remiss if I didn’t say a profound and heartfelt thank you to the hot-ass chicks who are the main reason I’m surviving any of this shit. To Amanda Gustafson, Meg Rupert, and Jen O’Neill, no one is better than you. And no, no one ever told us it’d be this hard.
About the Author
KIMBERLY HARRINGTON is a regular contributor to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the co-founder and editor of parenting humor site RAZED, and a copywriter and creative director. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and on Medium. She lives in Vermont on purpose.
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Copyright
Reprinted with permission “If Life Were Like Touch Football” by Julie Cadwallader-Staub, from Face to Face, Dream Seeker Books, 2010.
amateur hour: motherhood in essays and swear words. Copyright © 2018 by Kimberly Harrington. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover photograph © 2017 Audrey Shtecinjo/Stocksy
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition MAY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-283875-9
Version 04162018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-283874-2
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