Thank you for reading mom blog, a mostly-monthly newsletter by Olivia Dunn. This week’s essay is also a podcast for everyone (usually this is a bonus only for paid subscribers)—I understand many of us may struggle to sit down and read anything this week as it is WINTER BREAK. Go ahead and pop a headphone in while you ignore your child(ren) and join me as I talk about shopping at the mall.
This week’s essay is an oldie but goodie, published way back in 2021, when we were just starting to leave the house again, vaccinated and wary. I chose it this week for a few reasons: one, I am so tired and burnt out by the end of every day that new content is simply beyond my capabilities at this exact moment, and second, in a special effort to create Valentine’s Day Magic for my family, I purchased my husband a box of underpants from Macy’s, which is a theme you can read more about in the following essay (or listen to in the podcast in much more detail). (If you were a mom blog subscriber back in 2021, you might remember this essay, but you’ve never heard me read it before—this was pre-podcast times—so, enjoy!)
Friday night I went out. Out! Down the driveway, down the street, away from my sleeping baby and basketball-watching husband, the three minutes it takes to drive to Anne’s house, where I waited in her driveway to collect her. Her children came to the door one at a time. First, her older child, a daughter, peered through the screen door suspiciously. Then, her younger child, a son, appeared dutifully, flanking the daughter. They were forming a human shield: no one must leave.
I watched as Anne tried to step gracefully between them, angling her body to squeeze out the door without losing anyone, like a goat farmer, sideways through the kennel gate. Their dad helped from inside, roping an arm and possibly a leg. As she hurried towards the passenger door of my car, her son’s face broke into a red tragedy mask and his sobs could be heard echoing off the row of houses across the street.
I put the car in reverse. “GET IN,” I yelled. “We’re going to the MALL.”
Though I have been to the mall, this mall, maybe one thousand times in my life, the experience was going to be a strange one. We were not going to the mall but rather back to the mall; it was our old mall but it is a new world.
A friend who recently started seeing a therapist said that the therapist told her there are three kinds of people who have started therapy in the past year. The first wave were the people anxious about getting sick. The second wave was the people coping (or not) with the isolation. The third wave, which is now, are those of us anxious about reentering society. This thing we have looked forward to for so long, so long, is fraught with unforeseen detail.
We arrived at the parking lot sprawl. I chose a spot, parked the car and took a deep breath. Anne secured her mask. I secured mine. We patted our pockets for our hand sanitizers.
“Remember,” I said, “We can leave at any time we want. We’re in charge.”
At the entrance, I reached for the door with the edge of my cardigan. I looked over to see Anne use the billow of her black sundress to reach for the other door. Safety first. We stepped inside. A whoosh of cool air and with it, the familiar blast of mall smell: french fry + car exhaust + plastic bags + tags + nail polish remover + Yankee Candle. This time, the smell was filtered through the cotton mask I’ve been leaving on the dashboard of my car. Familiar mall smell + cotton + breath + hot car dust.
My mouth felt dry. I felt a bit dizzy. Was it exhaustion? Perhaps—Rosalind has been waking up at 4am as she works through her bottom molars. Was it allergies? Probably. Was it the mask, was it anxiety? I realized I’d forgotten to pack a water. Luckily, this was America: whatever you need is available for a price. There was a vending machine glowing and sentient a few feet from the entrance. I approached it with trepidation.
“I don’t think I’ve been to a vending machine in over a year,” I said, “maybe longer.” I usually used the vending machine at work, to get Jalapeño Pop Corners for the long drive home. Last year I taught remotely; the semester before that I was on maternity leave. I think I haven’t used a vending machine since 2019. I grasped for my wallet.
Someone had wrapped masking tape around the card reader of the Dasani machine. “It’s broken,” I reported. “No it isn’t,” I said, noticing a second card reader below the first, taped one. “Yes it is?” I asked aloud to no one, “Do I have cash?”
“I don’t know, do I?” said Anne.
I was reminded suddenly of being in a foreign country. I had forgotten the rules of engagement. I didn’t have currency. It was like the time I went to Budapest with Amy, and, trying to check out of our Airbnb, we got ourselves locked inside of the apartment complex, trapped behind a giant cast iron gate that enclosed the courtyard and the first-floor apartments. We’d returned the door key, as instructed by our Airbnb hosts, in the (locked) metal mailbox near the gate. And then, after following the rules precisely, we realized we could not let ourselves out without that very key.
The taxi driver we’d called to take us to the bus station was waiting outside. Everyone we’d met in Budapest, up until that point, had spoken some English. I had managed to learn, for the few days we would be there, only “thank you,” which is “köszönöm,” “please,” which is “kérem,” “no,” which is “nem,” and “hello, which is…“helló.”
The taxi driver could not understand, from that smattering of language, what was going on. We were going to miss our bus, the bus that would take us to Kraków, where we would be greeted (and rescued) by our friend Beatrice, who was living there, spoke Polish, and knew generally what to do.
The first thing we tried was using my bamboo travel utensil set to break into the metal mailbox. It didn’t work, and I lost a good spoon. (It got stuck inside the mailbox). The second thing we tried was screaming. “Help!” I yelled. “Please—Kérem!” “Kérem!”
It was quite early in the morning. Nobody was walking by. I didn’t want to disturb anyone’s sleep but we had to get out of there, and we had to get to Poland. We couldn’t stay in this courtyard forever. Finally, a man crept slowly and nervously out of his apartment. He seemed exhausted, or maybe still drunk from the night before—either way, he was wary of us, as I would have been if I were in his shoes. Two frazzled American women with rolling suitcases and bamboo knives, yelling at the top of their lungs.
I couldn’t explain, in words, what the problem was, so I walked over to the gate, grasped it with my hands and shook it like a wild chimpanzee. (Reflecting on this behavior now, I feel a burst of empathy for my toddler. How difficult to be non or pre-verbal!) The man, taking pity on us, walked over to the damp wall next to the gate and pressed a button. The button, we would come to find out, unlocked the gate. This was a regular thing in Eastern Europe, and somehow we had made it three days without either pressing or noticing a single one of these buttons.
We’d make it to Poland, if only barely—the ride through Slovakia took us along narrow mountain paths, thick with snow—and at a rest stop halfway, we realized we still had Forints, not Euros. This meant we could not pay the small fee necessary to enter the bathroom. An older woman took pity on us and gave us some coins. The German man who’d asked us lots of questions on the bus about the indignities of being American (“why does no one get a vacation in your country?) simply hopped the turnstile.
“Nobody knows what to do anymore,” I said to Anne, as we walked towards Old Navy. I was sipping my water by surreptitiously lowering of my mask. “Like these,” I said, pointing to the ground at the arrows, designed to keep customers in forward facing parallel lines, as though viral droplets could read. “Are we following these anymore?”
“Olivia,” she said, “I think all the rules are off now.” She pointed at a man just ahead, with a large, fluffy dog on a leash. “See!” she said. “Animals in the mall!”
At Baby Gap, where I was hunting down a pair of velcro sandals for Rosalind, we saw a tall woman in what can only be described as a bright red bathing suit. She was at the register, asking for something—hand sanitizer? A paper bag? I couldn’t tell. I touched Anne’s arm lightly to draw her attention away from the sale rack. We peered at her in admiration and shock. As a woman, I felt impressed. As a mother, I felt worried. Either way, it was wonderful to see people again.
At H&M, I was looking for some shorts for Jimmy, and also some underwear. I don’t normally buy Jimmy underwear. That’s his job. But I’ve done it before, and only ever out of complete desperation. This month it turns out Jimmy has thrown almost all of his underwear away, because he “doesn’t like it anymore.” Some of the rejected underwear was underwear I’d gotten him years ago, at Muji, my favorite store. “They don’t have dick holes, Olivia, I can’t live like this.”
I looked through the plastic bags of H&M underwear. It was unclear from the photograph of the model if the underwear had “dick holes” or not.
“Do you think I can open this?” I said to Anne, but I already already started ripping.
“No rules,” she reminded me, and we agreed one of the great pleasures of shopping at a place as enormous and unethical as H&M was the ability to do things like this, meaning, rip one bag open a little bit to feel around with my fingers for a dick hole. Unfortunately, all the boxer briefs in the bag were designed for an austere and chaste customer, one who wanted to keep their genitals smoothly encased at all times.
Jimmy was so desperate for underwear (and so desperate to be featured in the blog that he agreed I can write this) that he was forced to wear a pair of my underwear yesterday, which are high-waisted and beige and made from an eco-friendly bamboo fabric. I got them at the co-op, just like the travel utensils. He’d made fun of me for wearing bamboo-co-op underwear before (“What did you say they were made of? Wicker?”) but who’s laughing now? Were they comfortable? “Kind of.”
Rules. Are. Over.
At DSW, we wandered aimlessly through the aisles. “It’s so wonderful to shop in person,” said Anne, “and see things!” We laughed at the simplicity of that sentiment. We touched everything. We considered everything. Everything. Did I need Dr. Martens? Another pair of Crocs? Did Rosalind?
It was difficult to know what I even liked anymore, without having everything tailored so disturbingly to my own tastes by the Instagram algorithm. It reminded me of being in Hungary again, where Amy and I went for brunch the first morning we got there, hungry and delirious with jet lag. The restaurant was totally empty except for us, and our server gave us our eggs and then proceeded to broadcast an entire Coldplay album. I had previously considered myself “too cool” for Coldplay but both of us listened in sleep-deprived reverence and a kind of strange, immediate homesickness. Now whenever a Coldplay song comes on the radio I am reminded of that moment of disorientation, and I am glad.
We had a wonderful time at the mall. Driving back, exhausted and drained of our money, ready to go home again, I thought about how motherhood, too, is a foreign country. Pulling into the driveway, I thought about how our whole house looks different now—we have a plastic horse and a little kitchen with a little hot dog in it, we have outlet covers and bibs and tiny little velcro sandals caked in mud now. We have a perpetually dirty bathroom. When we get ready to set out in the stroller, we ask Rosalind, “do you want to go on an adventure?” and she knows what that means now, stomping her little feet towards the kitchen door. We are lucky to have these adventures, big or small.
Here’s what Jimmy got me this year for Valentine’s Day (I love it):
💖Like💖 this post if you liked it. Comment below with how you celebrated V-day, if at all. Milk Duds? Date night? Macaroni and cheese? I don’t know. Or tell me what the best underwear is (for any gender). If you listened to the podcast and enjoyed it, consider becoming a paid subscriber (they always get the podcast!)
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