I scrolled past the ad, guessing–correctly–that my social media feeds would soon be full of pleas from companies to just get the information and take control of my fertility journey today.

The ads were annoying and frustrating, not because of what they were selling–I’m happy people have easy access to fertility testing–but because they were transparently designed to spark a panic that would make me click the “Buy now” button. They each presented the concept of a childbearing window as if it were new information, as if their target market were made up of people who had never once thought about their fertility timeline. 

To these companies, on behalf of most child-free women in their early thirties: We have thought about it.

Some days, I feel I’m alone in agonizing over the “do I want kids” question. But I suspect there are countless people, at this moment, trying to hold a hundred clunky considerations in their heads: timing, housing, finances, support, careers, travel, general freedom, birth vs. adoption, sleep, health, safety, physical pain, partners’ desires, co-parenting. Whether a child is something they want at all.

On top of these personal concerns is, at least for women, unsolicited advice from people around us and the culture at large: well-meaning individuals who weigh in on whether or not we should have a kid (the answer is always yes) and media that positions starting a family as the greatest feat in life. The other day, my friend took a cute picture of me holding her baby. It was the rare picture of myself that I liked. My hair was wavy, my outfit was cute, the baby was cozy and peaceful. I wanted to post it, but didn’t want to field the inevitable winky faces and that baby looks good on you comments that would be sent in return. If you’re a couple in a serious relationship, you can’t go to a wedding without someone leaning close to your ear and chuckling, you’re next! If you’re a married woman around age thirty, you can’t interact with a baby without someone implying that you should make one, too.

A few weeks ago, I flew down to Tampa to visit my childhood friend, Jacquie, and meet her ten-week-old infant. I’d received dozens of pictures of Carter–his smooth pink skin and little upturned nose–and had heard Jacquie’s birth story, and was excited to witness a person I’ve known since kindergarten settling into motherhood. This excitement was compounded by the fact that Jacquie has wanted to be a mom for as long as I’ve known her: Jacquie holding her baby was a person realizing their dream.

Jacquie and her husband, Clay, live in a peach stucco house surrounded by a wall of tropical plants that threaten to swallow the home at any second. I dragged my suitcase up the walkway, went through the metal gate, and quietly opened the front door.

Jacquie was meandering slowly around the living room with Carter swaddled against her chest. I could see a wedge of his bald head peeking from the fabric like a slice of peach.

“He’s just waking up,” she whispered. Her smile took up her entire face.

For the next three days, I watched as Jacquie cheerfully breastfed, changed diapers, and coaxed Carter’s chubby little thighs into and out of countless onesies. Jacquie was gifted with saint-like patience and thoroughness, which made her a natural at newborn motherhood.

I envy people like Jacquie–those who know in their bones that they want to be parents. I equally envy the smaller group of people who are certain that they don’t want kids. (Perhaps I envy them even more. In a culture that forcefully urges starting a family, this seems like the harder call to make.) At age thirty-one, I’m where I’ve always been: highly ambivalent about one of the most monumental decisions a person can make. 

The flaw in my thinking–and one source of my anxiety around the subject–is that I view having kids or not having kids as a lose-lose scenario. It goes something like this: If Robby and I have kids, we lose a good deal of freedom and sleep. Chances are, our marriage suffers for a bit, or maybe forever. We’d no longer be each other’s first priority. We’d probably need to move out of our beloved house, which is perfect for us but would be cramped with a third person. We might drift apart from our friends who don’t have kids. We’d lose the ability to take van trips (there’s no carseat, and a van trip with a kid sounds terrible), and we’d forfeit a good deal of financial freedom, as well as several international adventures. We’d lose our unobstructed spontaneity: A couple weeks ago, we woke up early, packed a cooler and a backpack, caught a boat over to an uninhabited island, and surfed all day. We got tipsy and sunburned. We–I kid you not–tossed a football back and forth and talked about how much we love our little beach bum life. While a very pared-down version of this itinerary can be accomplished with a child, by and large, we’d lose days like that.

If we don’t have kids, we’d lose out on discovering a life we’re vaguely curious about. We’d possibly lose out on someone being around when we’re old, though there’s no guarantee our child would be by our side as we aged. We’d miss the chance to teach a kid how to surf or play baseball or write or garden or hike, though we may have a kid who’s unable or unwilling to do those things. We might drift apart from our friends who have kids. We’d certainly miss out on the specific, all-consuming love that parents have for their children, which seems both noble and divine. 

When my parents visited Wilmington a couple months ago, they stayed in a cute downtown hotel that was attached to a trendy bar. One night, we got drinks from the bar and sat around a fire pit under a sharp crescent moon. The flames fought against their dark metal rim. Robby eventually went home, and soon thereafter, the conversation turned to kids. My mother was genuinely curious where we stood. When most mothers ask questions about kids, they’re really just begging for a grandchild, but I can vouch for mine here. In recent years, she’s stuck to the same adage, which she repeated while the reflected flames filled her scotch glass: “You have to really want kids. And you shouldn’t have kids for anyone but yourself.”

I have two core fears that I’ve carried for as long as I can remember: being trapped and feeling regret. The idea of having a child ignites my fear of being trapped; not having one awakens my fear of feeling regret. I want to live two lives simultaneously, one where I have kids and one where I don’t. Or, I want the human lifespan to allow me to get pregnant at age fifty and still have decades of youth left. 

After years of mulling over my little nightmare web of fear and loss and love, I’ve gotten nowhere. To further complicate matters, I’m on the clock. While thirty-one is by no means the end of the childbearing road, I’m acutely aware of the fact that I’m not nineteen anymore. And personally, I wouldn’t want to start when I’m thirty-six and Robby is forty-four. If we’re gonna do it, I’d like to begin within the next few years. If we’re not, I’d like to mentally establish that so I can finally stop thinking about this and fully lean in to a child-free life.

Robby, too, has gone back and forth over the years, though admittedly with less handwringing. (I’m not sure there could be more handwringing.) Some days, he’s excited about the idea of the two of us doing whatever we want, forever. An eternal honeymoon. Other times, he contemplates having a little person to structure our days around and share the world with. Recently, he’s landed on the pro-kids side more often than not, but isn’t married to it. His view is the one I want to believe: We’ll have kids, or we won’t have kids, and our life will be beautiful no matter what.

In my experiences talking to fellow straight people about this, men seem more certain than women about wanting to have kids. Why wouldn’t they be? Even when you discount the wild experiences of pregnancy, birth, postpartum, breastfeeding, and the lingering effects of those things, it’s no secret that moms carry the majority of the long-term physical, mental, and emotional burdens of childrearing. I recently joked that if I could be a dad, I’d have a kid already.

Last year, someone I trust advised me to close my eyes and meditate on the question of whether I want kids, just for a few minutes. They advised me to enter the space of my body and mind with genuine, compassionate curiosity: no thoughts about timing, or what I’d lose, or what I’d gain, or other people’s desires or expectations. This person suggested that I probably already know what I want, and I just need to shut out the noise. 

I’ve yet to do this. I’m afraid of what I’ll find. I’m afraid I want a kid and my wonderful life and marriage will be turned upside down, or that I don’t want a kid and I’ll have to then share that fact with Robby, who might be deeply, understandably disappointed. Either way, I’m afraid I’ll open my eyes heartbroken.

I want to reframe my view of this binary. Because it is a binary: Even marriage has an escape hatch; being a parent does not. It is a true fork in the road. I want to look down both paths and see different flavors of joy, but I look down both and see bitterness and fear. I’m not sure why.

So, I want to send a thought down each of these two paths. If I write the words, I might come to believe them someday. I might be able to quiet down my mind–the loudest place I know–and listen. Here goes.

To my future child: I love you, and I’m glad you’re here. To my future child-free life: I love you, and I’m glad you’re here. You both arrived from a place of love, not duty or fear. I hope you’re somewhere sunny. I hope you and I are spinning around in the water. I hope we’re sunburned and dizzy and that there is a bird nearby, drifting higher and higher through a sky with no top.

She laughed as she said this, probably because I was in the studio with Robby. If this were a deranged, expensive way of bullying his spouse, I likely would not have joined.

“It’s for a poem she wrote,” said Robby. “The poem is called ‘Celebration,’ and it has a pig in it.

“Well, that’s much cuter,” said Kristen.

The studio where Kristen worked was an airy corner suite of the Cotton Exchange, a cluster of historic downtown buildings that contained creaky wooden floors and a charmingly difficult-to-navigate web of art galleries, clothing stores, and salons. She directed us toward a chair at the back of the studio, set between two massive windows. The afternoon was dark; the sky hung close to the earth. Across the street, the Cape Fear River pushed noiselessly toward the ocean.

Kristen shaved Robby’s right thigh, applied the stencil, rubbed a vaseline-like gel onto a piece of the pig’s outline, and began. When the needle touched his skin, Robby looked over at me and smiled. This was his first tattoo, and I felt honored that it was inspired by a poem I created.

The poem in question was written shortly after I started grad school. It arrived the way most of my favorite poems do: I felt a tug somewhere in my body, sat down, and scribbled out a surprisingly fleshed-out first draft. That draft was called “Vegetarianism” (because I’m bad at titles), but as I revised over the coming weeks, the real name found its way in. Like most of what I wrote in 2018, this poem was about grief. My brother had died four months prior. Loss was all I thought about.

When I look back at my writing from that period, I find it raw and powerful, albeit sometimes frantic. I was operating very close to the source. I moved to Wilmington three days after Stewart was killed, and that first year of grad school had everything: bottomless grief, delightful new friendships, wedding-planning stress, falling in love with a new place, bouts of unbridled rage, learning to surf, navigating my family’s stark new reality. My skin felt like it was outlined in neon. I don’t know how I slept. 

Kristen finished the pig’s outline and started on his fur spots. He would have three spots on his side and two on his thigh. The pig was already very, very cute. He was looking up and smiling, thrilled to be on this specific thigh, wearing this very handsome party hat. Robby’s excitement was palpable. 

I’m a little surprised that the poem “Celebration” is the one Robby connected with most. His most frequent complaint when I share my work with him is: “That one’s sad!” While this particular poem certainly has some levity to it–it’s about the emptiness of life without a person, held next to the joy of their existence at all–there is plenty of sadness within it. But maybe I shouldn’t feel surprised; I think it’s my best poem. It dabbles in surrealism, has good music, and feels well-constructed. It got into a good journal. Though it feels strange and a little rude to applaud my own work, I genuinely love this piece of art I created. And when I look at it, I see myself at twenty-four, full of sorrow and rage and curiosity and joy, desperately trying to make it all mean something. 

If I’m being honest, though, I sometimes fear I’ll never get back to that level–or maybe that feeling–of writing. It’s strange to wax poetic about a time of acute loss. I don’t want to return to that period, and I don’t want to experience this degree of loss ever again. And also, words came easily during that time. I had a lot to say, and a conviction that the things I said mattered. The fact that my favorite poem occurred when I was twenty-four, and I’m now thirty-one, worries me.

“I’m sweating,” said Robby.

“That’s normal,” said Kristen. “Your body is very confused.”

Kristen had moved to the pig’s underbelly, which required tedious shading. Robby tried to hold his facial expression steady as she went over the same tiny piece of skin again and again.

“You’re doing better than ninety percent of the men I tattoo,” said Kristen.

“Do men sit worse for tattoos?” I asked.

She looked at me and smirked. “What do you think?”

Shortly after Stewart passed, the rest of my siblings and I decided to get matching tattoos. In hindsight, I’m shocked we agreed on a design so quickly. We decided on a pentagon to represent the five of us (and because pentagons are present on soccer balls–soccer was Stewart’s calling). Starting from the top of the shape and moving clockwise, we added a parallel line beside the fourth segment; he was number four in the sibling lineup. I chose to get my line in red because Stewart and I both love that color. 

We were all in Charleston at the time, about to go our separate ways after a family beach trip. I found a tattoo artist who had a free hour, and the four of us stopped there on our way out of town. We went in birth order, each getting the shape in a different size and location. Then we hugged in the parking lot, snapped a picture, and headed home in different directions. I wrote my poem not too long after getting that tattoo.

It’s been seven years, and the tattoo has faded. The grief is quieter. I no longer feel like my skin is permanently buzzing. My days are peaceful and happy; my poems aren’t a way to survive. Now, I’m on a mission to rediscover what my poems are. I’m unsure how poetry, this art form I love, should fit into my life. I initially wrote poetry because I felt, as a teenager and early-twenty-something, that the world needed to hear what I had to say. Then, I wrote to process profound grief. Now, accurate or not, I don’t buy into the idea that the world needs my words. I’m not working through a massive life event. Poetry won’t pay my bills, and writing is such a solitary activity that even if I could do it full time, I wouldn’t want to. I’m not writing my heart out; I’m gardening and going to parties and taking walks on the beach.

Kristen put a final touch on the pig’s hoof, snapped some pictures, and secured plastic film over the tattoo. Robby and the pig both beamed.

We walked to one of our favorite bars to celebrate. We each drank a beer under the awning, periodically studying the pig. I peered into his bright little eyes. I wondered if I would write another tattoo-worthy poem in my lifetime. I decided I would. I made a silent commitment to approach my art with more urgency and passion, despite not being in a crisis. Even if my words made no difference in the world at large, they had transformative power in my own life. This little poem helped me through something terrible. I ran a finger softly along the edge of the tattoo’s plastic wrap. Regardless of what poems I do or don’t write in the future, I’m happy to have this one. 

Celebration

I once let a pig, pink and gleaming, into my bed to sleep.
I heard it chuffing in the grass outside and went to fetch it.

It was a full moon. Blades of grass stood rigid
like snowflake spindles. I offered the pig crisp leeks

and a ripe tomato. She looked in my eyes. She sniffed
my palms, sucked citrus and skin into her snout.

I lived alone when this happened. I never told anyone
how her fat-padded back curled into me like a question,

or that I woke to her wet snout on mine. I named her,
took her to the door in the morning, never saw her again.

The night we slept together, she waited until I arrived
in that gentle, mossy place between worlds and whispered

one inch from my ear. Her voice sounded deep and whole;
I pictured my mother thumping her palm against cantaloupes

at the grocery store, listening for a note that would tell her
the shade of orange inside. The pig murmured that her mother’s

milk could have dripped straight from the moon. I don’t know why
she told me; perhaps loneliness had settled in her belly, bubbling

deep and slow. Mine started in the elbows, swinging
from bone to bone: humerus to clavicle, down the scapula.

It zipped along each rib like electricity. Maybe the pig
was simply wading through her own half-dream.

But the endlessly dense hooves of her, the verdant
garden breath of her, the water-smooth armpits and

left glistening ear of her, moon-christened, told me
this night was a celebration of having someone to miss.

Last month, I started to write a blog post, but didn’t finish it. It was going to open on a cemetery in Salem, Virginia, where I went to college. This cemetery is built on a steep hill and has a near-panoramic view of purple mountains. The gravestones are crooked and the grass looks natural but not unkempt. My friend and I once tried to smoke a hookah there, but the wind kept blowing out the coal, which I thought was the ghosts urging us to be more respectful. I buried my dark blue Betta fish there with a spoon. I wrote a poem about the cemetery when I was a freshman, and my mom still says it’s her favorite. The first time Robby and I took a walk together, I brought him there and said it was my favorite place. 

The blog post would then jump several months ahead to the night when Robby and I—now dating—woke up at 2am and went to the cemetery to watch the lunar eclipse. We set a blanket down on the crooked path and wondered at how the moon looked so close. It was a dull, red fist of clay perched a few hundred feet above us. Robby wore his favorite white hoodie, and I wore the Patagonia pullover that belonged to my dad in the 80’s. We leaned against each other in the cold.

I was falling in love with this man, or maybe I was already in love with him at that point. I wanted to spend every second with him. He was brilliant and kind. His eyes, which looked brown at first glance, had gold, green, and blue inside. However, despite my happiness—or, as I’d discover years later, because of my happiness—my brain had started to search for an escape hatch. Robby was the first person I ever truly dated. For that reason, I hadn’t pictured anything particularly serious when we got together, but here we were, several months in, staring at a moon ripe enough to be picked.

In blogging about this experience, the plan was to link this viewing of a lunar eclipse to the one Robby and I had in March of this year, when we slept at the beach in our van and woke up to stare at the red moon hanging just above the dunes. That post would write itself: two big moons, eleven years between them, Robby and I still finding wonder in this life together. 

However, what links these two eclipses in my mind is not their ravishing, understated beauty or how Robby’s shoulder felt solid and warm as I leaned against it in 2014 and then in 2025, but a feeling of profound anxiety. During both of these cosmic events, I was riddled with worries about the future. I feared that the moon, or God, or the universe, would tell me something I did not want to know. Specifically, I was worried that an entity outside of my control would give me a command to uproot my life and explode the relationship I loved, and I could either follow this unseen force or be damned to a life of languishing. (It’s worth noting that nothing about my life is languish-y, and frankly, never has been.)

Looking at the fear written down, it’s silly. I have control of my life; no entity is going to force me to give up a person I love. But the most cunning element of anxiety is that it makes itself look like truth. This condition (disorder? state of being? I’ve tried to stop calling it a “feeling”) has managed to temporarily convince me of some truly disturbing lies over the years—about family, friends, and myself—and it’s only been through sheer force of will and leaning on Robby and close friends that I’ve pushed through these seasons without making (too many) wildly destructive choices. At various stages, I’ve tried to drown out the intrusive thoughts and wicked spirals my brain cooks up by undereating, overeating, drinking in excess, and avoiding being alone.

I was twenty-six when I started to acknowledge that the level of anxiety I felt on a daily basis might not be a universal experience, and was perhaps something that I could try to understand and remedy. I went back to therapy a year ago so I could get to the bottom of it, and this past fall, I went through a massive spiral. (Had I not been in therapy, it would have been worse.) Robby, who served as an excellent sounding board and support system throughout that time, helped me realize that the way I was feeling wasn’t normal or sustainable. I started medication, not to make the spirals stop (though that would be great), but to buy myself a little time when I feel my brain start to catastrophize. I don’t have to follow that train of thought on instinct; I can choose to not take the ride.

I recently reflected with Robby about the searing highs and muddy lows I experience, and how they’ve leveled out a bit since I started taking Lexapro, but that it’s still exhausting to feel like my own brain can pull me under at any moment.

“You’re like a sine wave,” said Robby. I pictured an undulating line from a long-ago math class.

“If I’m a sine wave, what are you?” I said.

“I’m y=1.”

It’s fascinating to live with a person who has a low level of anxiety. Robby doesn’t stay awake at night replaying that thing he shouldn’t have said. He doesn’t dwell on negative interactions with strangers or edit and re-edit emails to ensure he doesn’t offend anyone. A lot of this, I think, comes from being socialized as a man—which, sorry, looks awesome—but much of it is simply his nature. While his steadiness means he doesn’t understand what I’m going through, it also means he’s a calm space to which I can retreat.

The low growl of panic I felt looking at the blood moon in early March lingered for weeks. While the anxiety has various targets it cycles through, this time it took aim at my marriage. My happiness with Robby—which usually feels peaceful and fun—took on an uneasiness, and any run-of-the-mill bickering felt stark and hopeless. At the end of the month, when I felt jumpy and frayed, I opened up to him about how I was feeling. I explained that he hadn’t done anything wrong, but that I couldn’t stop dissecting every one of our moments together as if giving them letter grades. 

Robby listened, brows furrowed, as I talked him through my trouble sleeping and my hesitance to talk to him about how I was feeling. I didn’t want him to spiral and think our marriage was in jeopardy; I knew this was just a particularly nasty thought pattern, the type that I’ve had experience with, and I needed his help to get out.

Robby, as ever, responded first with confusion and worry, and then, as he found his footing, started spitting some excellent advice. He talked about ways I can ground myself when I start to feel uneasy. (He specifically said that I should do training sessions with Thelma, which is both a great idea and something she needs.) He reassured me that I could always come to him. He finished it with, “Buddy, you’ve got to live your life.”

When I go through a season of feeling intense shame, or questioning my marriage, or wondering what the purpose of my life—all our lives—is, or picturing people I love being hit by cars, and trying to mentally train myself to jump in front of a car for someone else if I need to, or predicting what my regrets will be when I die, and concocting ways I can prevent those regrets before they happen, I try to remember that what I’m experiencing is exactly that: a season. I will come out the other side, as I always have. I have people in my life who can help me.

I wish my brain had cooperated last month and I could have written a happy blog post about the moon. That piece of writing exists in another timeline, one where I have a slightly calmer disposition. However, that post and this one end the same way: Over the next fifty years, there will be forty-one total lunar eclipses visible from the U.S. Forty-one red clay moons bouncing over cemeteries and sand dunes and broken-down cars, moons peering down at roofs and into windows where people are together or alone, moons hiding behind oak trees and growing airplane tails, who have no opinion on our fears or our joys or the little fragments of time we hold in our hands. They’re red, and they’re here. And no matter the contents of my life or my mind, I want to see them all. I want to greet them with the same warm shoulder beside me.

1. Would I have two beers with this person?
2.  Would I trust them to look after my puppy for a weekend?

Some people are beer people, some are puppy people, and a sacred few are both. (Some are also neither, which is unfortunate.) Last February, when I decided to travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and wanted someone to go with, I found myself asking two very similar questions:

1. Would this person enjoy partying in New Orleans for three days?
2. Could this person and I drive 13 hours and stay in close quarters for a very chaotic weekend without killing each other?

Robby, for example, is a wonderful person to travel with. He packs light, walks quickly, and likes trying new things. Problem is, he would rather eat a bowl of shattered glass than go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I invited him as a formality and was unsurprised when he said no. He couldn’t get the word out fast enough.

I wanted to do Mardi Gras in the corniest way possible: hotel in the French Quarter, hand grenades on Bourbon Street, wandering along Frenchmen. New Orleans is one of my favorite places in the world, but I didn’t have any friends who lived there at the time. And honestly, though I know the Bourbon Street celebration is made up of tourists (with locals attending cooler neighborhood parties and parades), it felt a little rude to try and suss out more unique places to go. In the same way my friends and I don’t want bachelor parties in our favorite dive bars, I didn’t want to risk crashing an event that was special to locals. Plus, the cheesy novelty of Mardi Gras in the French Quarter appealed to me. Bourbon Street was where I belonged.

As I thought about who I should ask to come with me, I was pleased to realize that there are several people in my life for whom the answers to both “would they like Mardi Gras” and “would we travel well together” are “yes.” Two of those people are named Patrick and James, and they live two blocks up the street from me. I met Patrick in grad school. He’s a music writer from Connecticut by way of Brooklyn who used to wear a black baseball cap and only spoke when he had something hilarious to say, which made me think he was shy. (He’s not.) Pat is sweet and brilliant and very good at pool. Soon after meeting him, I met his partner, James. James, who is also a music writer and is originally from New Jersey, is thoughtful, sharp, and reads a pile of books every month. He and I often do DIY projects together, which we execute with surprising efficiency. Both Pat and James exclusively wear black t-shirts featuring bands I’ve never heard of, and more importantly, they love spontaneity, parties, dive bars, and wandering aimlessly in new places. When I asked if they wanted to go to Mardi Gras on the most cliche trip we could possibly manage, they said yes.

We packed the car and drove thirteen hours. The next three days were a colorful blur: We strolled by the river. We found a magical little bookshop right off Bourbon Street that felt like a different planet. We ate heavy, decadent brunches. We ate horrible Mexican food. We bounced between chaotic, fantastic gay bars. We walked through a stream of bubbles that poured from a balcony in the morning light. We stumbled across the warehouse belonging to Dr. Bob, the strange-but-kind-of-famous folk artist whose work features the tagline “BE NICE OR LEAVE.” The woman working there, who was thrilled when we told her we were staying in a hotel instead of an Airbnb, took out a scrap of paper and wrote down her favorite po’ boy order in the city. We walked another mile to the shop she recommended, passing a neighborhood parade in which everyone was dressed up like food, and ordered our sandwiches. We had a religious experience eating those po’ boys on a park bench. We caught beads and trinkets and a rubber chicken that flew from parade floats. We searched for my phone when I inevitably lost it while jumping up and down at a nighttime parade. We met up with the disturbingly attractive and sober European couple that found it, who were very good sports when I threw my arms around them in thanks. We meandered for hours down Burgundy Street, picking out the houses we wanted to live in. We danced until our feet hurt. 

I left Mardi Gras a better person. This happens every time I go to New Orleans. If I were to participate in a three-day bacchanal in any other location, I’d likely plummet into a shame spiral afterward. But on the thirteen-hour drive back to the Carolina coast, I just felt warm and grateful. I am lucky to be able to have experiences simply because I want to, and I’m even luckier to share those experiences with other people. When Patrick, James, and I got back to Wilmington at 2am, we were still talking and laughing.

Last Saturday, almost exactly one year out from our Mardi Gras adventure, I awoke with no plans. The morning was a welcome mat to a day that could be anything. I ate a cheddar biscuit, threw back some coffee, and texted Patrick and James. I told them I wanted to recreate a day we spent together a year ago, when we walked miles on Burgundy Street for no reason at all.

Wilmington is a far cry from New Orleans, but it has a similar, lighter aura of chaos. And when you live somewhere for years, you have the opportunity to hold the city in your hand like a gem, occasionally turning it to see new fractals inside. 

We met and started up Princess Street. We walked past the cocktail bar with black ceilings and a massive record collection, past the soda-bottling-plant-turned-pop-up-market, past the eclectic coffee shop that’s closing soon. Though we didn’t officially set rules for our day, it was understood that we’d only wander into places that at least one of us had not been before.

We stopped in an off-the-beaten-path art gallery featuring paintings of houses that reminded us of New Orleans. We went to Crofton’s Pretzels, an ancient gas station that was transformed into a lovably ridiculous pretzel bar. We ordered cheese-filled pretzels that burned our fingers, and Patrick introduced me to birch beer. We walked toward Castle Street, pausing to explore a surreal gift shop/aerobics studio/video screening venue, where the owner told us about her daughter who passed away, how she and her husband live on a boat now, how she wants the little shop to become a place of community and love. We wandered into the Spanish market with a wide tiled counter where a family teaches paella classes. We bought olives and tinned fish. We ducked into a tiny witchcraft shop that sold pottery and potions and had strange burlap dolls hanging on the walls. Then, out of morbid curiosity, we went into the new putt putt bar and played nine holes. I lost, despite having a hole-in-one that involved the ball bouncing off a keg.

It was a pointless, delicious day. The three of us wandered, as we always do, with curiosity and no plan. Beautiful things happen when you spend time with people who say yes. Yes, I’ll get two beers with you. Yes, I’ll watch your puppy. Yes, we can wander the same streets we walk every day, finding ways to make them feel new.

I live in a 966-square-foot bungalow in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. The house is 22 feet wide and 45 feet deep. It has white plastic siding (unfortunate) and a quaint front porch with a wooden swing (very fortunate). There’s a jasmine plant that swallows the right side of the porch, and every summer, the vines explode into a curtain of white flowers that smell like angels’ laundry. This house is charming, strange, inefficient, whimsical, and honest. It’s also old: Named the Moore-Davis house, this home was built in 1898 and has a wooden plaque from the Wilmington Historical Society hanging between the two front windows. It used to be two stories, but the second story caught fire at some point (likely between 1938-1949), and the owners removed it entirely–which explains the strange layout of the remaining floor. 

When Robby and I bought the house in 2018, we thought we’d only be here for a few years. We had little interest in or reason for home improvement projects. The walls could stay dingy white, the ancient carpet could remain intact, and we’d sell the house soon and be on our way.

Problem is, we fell in love with this house, and with Wilmington. We decided to stay, at least for a little while. This led to a series of haphazard home improvement projects, passionately–and often poorly–executed, that have increased in frequency and ambition, snowballing into what I can only describe as the early stages of addiction. Or, if we’re being rosy about it, a love affair. I am in love with painting plywood walls aggressive shades of rust and marigold. I am in love with ripping up carpet and extracting the staples beneath until my wrist is sore. I am in love with drilling holes for shelves, realizing I did the math wrong, shouting god DAMN it, patching those holes, and starting again.

Robby is less in love with these things, but pitches in when I inevitably get in over my head. The thing is, I’m not particularly good at DIY. I aim high, plan poorly, and budget inaccurately. Of the dozens of home improvement projects I’ve attempted, several have featured a searing moment of clarity in which I realize I’ve done everything wrong and need to start from scratch. Here is the one I think about the most.

Two years ago, I made the very sensible and chill decision to tear up the carpet in our bedroom, sand the paint off the original hardwood floors, and stain them. I had done something similar two years before in the back room of our house when I ripped up the carpet in a frenzy. (“Frenzy” is truly the only word for it–I got pissed about something completely unrelated to carpet, happened to glance at the carpet, and then moved all the furniture and ripped it out.) While that project ended up being incredibly labor intensive–try sanding an entire room of 122-year-old wood with a 5” orbital sander–overall, things actually went smoothly. The floor was raw wood in good condition; I slapped on two coats of tung oil and called it a day.

This beginner’s luck caused me to approach the bedroom with unbridled hubris. I lifted up a corner of the carpet to find thick original floor boards coated with ugly brown paint. All I had to do, I told myself, was rent a sander–an actual, industrial sander this time–and sand up the paint. I’d find a cool stain, or maybe just some polyurethane, and would have the warm, rustic bedroom of my dreams within a day and a half.

Robby wanted no part of this project. I told him I’d do the whole thing myself; he would not have to be involved at all. He did not believe me.

My friend Elly came over to help. We drank boxed wine, ripped out the carpet, and pulled up the legion of staples beneath. It took hours. The brown paint was disorienting (who paints wood brown?) but the floors were in such good shape that it was hard to think about anything else. What could possibly go wrong when this floor–this stunning, ancient floor–echoed so beautifully when we stomped across it in our boots?

The next day, I rented an orbital sander from Home Depot. I placed a box fan–pointed outward–in the bedroom window to create a negative air space. I put on goggles and a standard, covid-era face mask and got to work. I quickly discovered that instead of detaching in the form of dust, the paint was melting. Within five seconds, the three sandpaper discs on the bottom of the machine were gummed up with hot brown putty. I tried different sandpaper grit levels. I tried moving the machine faster, then slower. The paint kept melting. This was not going to work.

I went back to Home Depot and rented a drum sander, designed for tougher jobs. It was still slow going–the floor had at least two seemingly impenetrable coats of paint, and reloading sandpaper in a drum sander is cumbersome. I hacked away at the floors for hours. It was 11pm when I finally called it a day. I showered, went into the back room where Robby and I would be sleeping, and curled up beside him.

It was at this moment that Robby asked a question that will echo through my brain for years.

“Hey,” he said, “is this lead paint?”

We immediately ordered a lead paint test online and called poison control, who advised us not to sleep in the house. Based on the age of our home, this likely was lead paint, and we’d treat it as such until we could get a test. 

We slept in the van for the next two nights while I worked to rectify the home I had just filled with potentially toxic dust. I felt horrendous. Not only had I created a scenario in which Robby, Thelma, and I were possibly inhaling lead paint, but the floors weren’t even done: stubborn swaths of reddish brown were stuck to the wood in random patterns. Robby and I bought lead abatement suits and masks from Home Depot and tried to sand some more, but it became clear that it would take days for us to remove every piece of paint. Days of us sleeping in the van, renting industrial equipment, and working in a cloud of lead. 

After 24 hours of wearing hazmat suits and fearfully trying to finish the project–during which we called every hardware store in the area, none of which had paint tests–the lead kit arrived from Amazon. It was a container of pretty, marigold-colored Q-tips. We ran one under the sink and then rubbed it in a patch of paint dust. It immediately turned dark fuschia: positive.

We looked at the floor. The wood that had been properly sanded was absolutely gorgeous–dark cool oak with strong grain running through it. The floor was a map of six-inch-wide rivers, sporadically interrupted by toxic waste mudslides. We decided to quit. I briefly mourned the room I had wanted to create, then got to work covering the unfinished floor–paint and all–with five coats of polyurethane. We’d researched how to neutralize lead paint, and this is one of the methods.  Five coats was overkill, but we wanted the lead to remain sealed in, even if the poly chipped. The moment the first coat dried, the floor tested negative. We kept applying coats anyway.

Over the three days of this project, I rented four pieces of industrial equipment, took six trips to three different hardware stores–none of which are near my house–spent hundreds of dollars, had roughly seventy-four marital arguments, and cried three times. The guilt was the worst part: I had forgotten lead paint existed. I had exploded it through our house.

The strangest part is, immediately after we were finished, I felt the nightmare had been worth it. Assuming we didn’t have permanently heightened lead levels (possible, but unlikely! I refuse to get checked!), these messy, warzone-ass floors were still better than beige carpet from the early 2000’s. They felt truer to the house itself.

When the dust settled (oof), Robby and I patched things up. We hung more art in the bedroom. We built library shelves. We added a beautiful duvet and a cool rug and a striking longhorn skull, which is now mounted somewhat menacingly above our bed. Our bedroom has become my favorite room in the house: it’s warm and moody and full of treasures.

I believe that the places we live feel the love we put into them. This is true for generational family homes and college dorms, for cramped apartments and childhood bedrooms. Our homes capture the energy of what’s inside, and the act of caring for them or dreaming with them in whatever ways we can–regardless of how long we’re there or how much we’re legally or financially able to alter–means something. I have the privilege of living in a home that other people have loved, and of being able to uncover a new chapter of this house one room at a time. For me, love looks like poorly executed projects that give me searing back pain and possible lead poisoning. For the person who lives here after me, it will look like stripping off five coats of polyurethane and wondering what the hell  happened here. Hopefully, they’ll forgive me. Hopefully, they’ll do what feels truest to who they are in this home.