A-tisket, a-tasket,
a green and yellow basket.
I wrote a letter to my friend
and on the way I dropped it.
I dropped it, I dropped it,
on the way I dropped it.
A little boy he picked it up
and put it in his pocket.

— nursery rhyme

My son is an all-consuming project. But if he consumes all of me, there will be nothing left. It is a conundrum.

Often I ponder the primordial mother — the mother before civilization. She lacked the luxury of ruminating on creative renewal, on her loss of independent personhood. I may fret about my figure but I am grateful to live in a time (and place) of caloric abundance.

Lord knows industrial society has its downsides, but God bless the washing machine, the dishwasher, the shipping container. Sure, I shake my head at the extremes of feminism, but I am thankful to have legal autonomy and stimulating work.

I realize that I'm lucky to face this problem, of struggling to balance motherhood with other types of fulfillment. I am lucky to live today — and of course, I am lucky to have my son in the first place!

Modern woman that I am, I cannot "have it all." I can have anything I want, but not everything I want, as my dad reminded his daughters at family dinner last week. Ergo, I must choose what I want the most.

I already made that choice when I decided to have a baby.

"I've resumed feeling guilty about my abandoned creative projects," I told you last October. "But they're less important than my son, who needs me so intensely."

He still needs me, but it's not quite as unrelenting. I can leave him for up to three hours, four in a pinch. So now I'm vaguely planning to rescue a couple of my forsaken schemes. (Vaguely, I stress. And apprehensively!)

There are two projects that I still care about:

  • The album produced by Lex. I need to record the vocals, which is daunting, but I gotta get over myself and simply do it. (Side note: Lex has two small children. Experiencing my very own infant made me approximately one billion times more impressed with his musical fecundity, which I already found pretty impressive.)

    Here's a cover concept that Lex mocked up with AI:
It will be different — not AI, for one thing — but this is evocative. Alice steps onto the Yellow Brick Road, which leads within...
  • Finally publishing the rest of Matthew Sweet's contribution to the Wanderverse mythos, plus updating the website. There is absolutely no excuse for how long I've been sitting on this 😩
Elka’s Welcome
“A throne of gnarled roots, grasping up from the earth below and down from the unseen world above, molded around a woman exuding a fossilized intensity and despairing aura that threatened to stop the tinker’s heart.”
Sonya SupposedlySonya Mann

"It's still true that what will be, will be — but will it be enough?" I asked myself while pregnant.

I have faith that I'll get there.

In the previous newsletter I was job-searching, and argued that I could compete with AI despite costing much more money. Very pleased to announce that I was right!

This spring I'll be helping Splits cofounders Will and Abram tell their story. We started with a profile of Transient Labs, and a post celebrating Splits' two-year anniversary. The latter offers a handy introduction to the company:

We create internet-native payment infrastructure. Participants run the gamut from established corporations to cypherpunk collectives to playful one-off collabs. Everybody involved benefits from robust technology for handling internet-native revenue — for structuring how their funds flow.

If Ethereum is the fruitful soil of this big garden, then Splits is building trellises to support each plant that reaches for the sun. Our mission is to put you in control of your earnings, efficiently and transparently.

As I told the founders, I find Splits compelling because it is an actual tool (well, multiple) that people actually use to do actual things, which is sort of astonishing in crypto.

I also thoroughly enjoyed writing "What the hell is a lead magnet?" for Buttondown. It felt good to unleash my inner marketing nerd!

From others:

Let the astonishments of waking life confuse you, tell them to friends as if recalling your sleepthoughts, return to these moments often and recall them throughout the day. If they came to you in sleep do the same. Do not ignore the reminiscences that seem to mutter in you in response. Do not ignore your own beauty or cowardice, your fear or shame, any touching qualities you see among the confusion. These are the source of a new and noble power.

That's all for now! 😘

As usual, please hit reply and tell me what you think, or what you're working on.

The header image is from George Hitchcock's 1892 painting The Blessed Mother, and the full version is too gorgeous to omit:

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