I looked at Glenn like she had a bird on her head. Because I finally had a caption—the “there’s-a-bird-on-your-head” face.

No longer would I strain to describe the look to therapists—the people I paid never to look at me like I had a bird on my head. No longer would I think feeling like I had a bird on my head was all in my head: my mother had looked at me that way my whole life. And who, frankly, could blame her? At four, I’d admitted to a fear of clouds; at seven, to a fear of carbonated beverages. Her face worked overtime during my teenage years: at fifteen, I’d convinced my parents to let me spend a semester at a friend’s high school—in Holland; at seventeen, I was still taking—and trying to get gym credit for—weekly pantomime classes. By the time I reached adulthood she could have used a face-making double: Gary and I got married two years after having Teddy instead of before he was born; I waited until my children’s books were out of print before finally getting an author website and blog to promote myself. Nothing I did made sense to her, which never made sense to me.

* * *

To be fair, sometimes nothing I did made sense to me, either. Like when Gary and I moved back to Boston, where I’d grown up, and where my parents still lived before they both got sick. Though it was initially Glenn’s idea because of her transfer there, and though Gary had agreed—he’d loved Boston when he went to Berklee and always wanted to return to New England eventually—the secret fantasy of living close to people who didn’t get me was wholly mine. Sure, it would be great to move someplace where a friend was already waiting, but it was more than that. Facing your demons was what emotionally secure people did, and in a strange case of mistaken self-identity, I thought I was one of those people: I’d survived a lifetime of my mother’s “what-will-become-of-you?” looks and somehow managed to couple and procreate; I’d earned a living without the teaching certificate she’d always urged me to get as an insurance policy against failure; an animated PBS series had been based on my first book. Hadn’t I earned the right to take my L-shaped fingers off my forehead? Freud said there are no accidents, and my move home proved him right: for all my weirdness, for all my insistence on doing things my way, it turned out that I was completely normal at my core:

I wanted to make the bird on my head disappear. I wanted my mother to like me.

The Forehead

I’ve been friends with Sari Epstein, a creativity-life-coach-guru with a national following, for less than a year. And by “friends” I mean only on the Internet. But it’s been an important friendship to me—and by “friendship” I mean me following Sari Epstein on social media—reading every word of her creativity-life-coach-guru updates, taking screenshots of every one of her creativity-life-coach-guru photos so that I can creep on them for extra details you just can’t get without the creeping. My feed on each social media platform is full of active creative-types, constantly and shamelessly self-promoting themselves, posting about their daily output: their word counts, their book deals, their bookstore appearances, their downward facing dogs and yoga handstands. I would be doing this, too, if I had any creative output, or could do yoga, but nothing ever happens when I open a new notebook and uncap a pen. Whether it’s in the morning, or the afternoon, or at night before bed; whether I’m home alone with a few minutes in between Well/er pieces, or out at a coffee shop, happily eavesdropping and people watching for inspiration; the same paralysis sets in. My mind goes blank. It seems I am closed for business up there, too.