A tried and true snack recipe

to the twenty-second edition of Tiny True Stories! I’m so glad you’re here. Hello to all the new subscribers who found their way here from the lovely Heather Lanier’s excellent newsletter “The Slow Take,” and her most recent post “Anger is Hopeful.” This is a monthly newsletter where I share supershort true stories you can read in 5 minutes or less and little letters of recommendation. If you want to get right to that story, scroll on down past the picture!

I met Heather at NonfictioNow in person for the first time after being internet friends for awhile, and she very kindly wrote about a panel I organized called “Women’s Rage as a Craft Tool.” She got me thinking about something I don’t think I said during the panel itself: For most of my life, I prided myself most of my life on not being angry. I wasn’t one of “those” people (who?!? human beings?). Anger felt like a useless, wasted emotion. Being chill felt more important. And now I feel like, what a waste, to not feel and use our anger. As Heather wrote, anger challenges the status quo. Yes, anger is hope.

So here’s a really short piece, dripping with that anger.

A Tried and True Snack Recipe

This is the whole story: today I took my son to the zoo for his first birthday, and once we got there, he needed to eat, but the zoo has signs everywhere that said No eating in the zoo; I’m a rule-follower by nature most of the time; I love to get an A in Life for someone’s sake I haven’t figured out yet, but my son was hungry, my son needed to eat, my son whose wrists and knuckles are still sweetly hidden beneath soft fat, my son bigger than 98% of kids his age—he needed to eat so I ignored the zoo’s signs and gave him cheerios and didn’t care; I would break every rule I could to feed him, give every bit of my own body—and what would I do if I had nothing left to feed him, if the grocery stores had no food left to feed him, if the grocery stores and the farms and the fields were rubble, no one there to help, no rules left to break, nothing left of my own body to give? I sit at the end of this question mark for many days. I don’t have an answer. I’d beg, steal, sell everything, sell myself, walk until I couldn’t, and then crawl.

This is the whole story: for me this is hypothetical. Every day I feed my children without trouble. I am often annoyed with how many times I clean the high chair in a day, extra food sopping down its legs, crumbs and half-chewed bites swept from the floor and into the compost, washed down the drain with clean, drinkable water.

The last handwritten entry in my writing notebook before this one was just before I gave birth to my son. I was in the hospital bed, waiting for contractions to pick up. I wrote down my passwords to my phone and my password manager for my husband. I wrote a note to my daughter about how much I loved her. In case I died. My son came, so I didn’t finish the note, and forgot it existed entirely.

P.S. Rereading this, it might sound like I have qualms about my son’s size—I don’t! He is perfection and growing just as he should be! I am just thinking of how deliciously large he is, and thinking about those three year olds who are so tiny from starvation that they are the size of infants.

1. Everyone is probably listening to it already, but I love Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. I laugh out loud every single episode, and it’s genuinely like sitting in on coffee with good friends.

2. I’m listening to the audiobook of Andy Weir’s latest sci-fi novel Project Hail Mary. He also wrote The Martian, and I think this is way better. It felt corny at first, but now it’s still corny and I’m falling in love with it anyway, and the audiobook itself is special for reasons I won’t reveal.

3. My friend Amy Rossi has a new novel out THIS WEEK, Cover Girl, about supermodels and the ‘70s and ‘80s music industry, and my copy can’t get here fast enough. You can read an excerpt at PEOPLE FRIGGIN’ MAGAZINE here!

4. These chili chicken verde burgers. Easy to make, and so good my five-year-old took a bite without prompting, though she mostly ate the corn, but still.

May your bellies be full, until next time,

Jill