EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
Another unpublished chapter from NOTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT: on noticing who watches my instagram stories, intergenerational auntiedom, and what does and does not feel like a relapse
Happy new year! As a special gift to paid subscribers, I present: another unpublished chapter from NOTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT (buy it here!) this one hailing from a period when the chapters all had different titles: meant to evoke academic essays, instead of the song titles they ended up with. This was actually the first essay I ever wrote from the collection, and the seed out of which the rest of the book sprang. A few sentences are recycled throughout the finished book, but I decided the work worked without it. Plus, publishing it would have required I have a lot of difficult conversations I was too chicken shit to have at the time! So here it is hidden behind a paywall for only you, my subscribers: the most dedicated and committed of messy bitches who love drama. Enjoy the drama!
Early Childhood Education
August, 2019. Montreal.
I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to do any of it, and I certainly did not mean to end up screaming down the street to nowhere, each hand stuffed into the opposite armpit, my chest shaking with sobs. My thick thighs were getting wet with the moisture dewing from the late-summer air, sliding past each other as I pounded my way across an intersection, barely looking for cars, down under an overpass. I had meant to spend a nice weekend in Toronto.
I went to sleep in Montreal the night before and she was nine months pregnant. I had been packing for trips around my too-large country for years, and had never gotten any better at it. I was just cocky now, a cowboy with a backpack—assembling the bare minimum, and always at he last minute. Prepared for the bare minimum. Not prepared for this.