are you there, god? it's me, erin.

on daycare closures, building sales, AI, and life in a constant state of precarity.

I’ve been really loving my home office lately. I repainted it on a whim this spring and then spent the entirety of the summer sleeping in my childhood bedroom, so it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve gotten to experience the everyday cocoon of it. It’s candle season, as we know, and so I’ve been lighting morning candles and playing the same Mozart for Morning Coffee soundtrack that I’ve been listening to since college to grease up my brain and get the neurons firing. Last week I bought a fancy cushion to put on the creaky sidewalk-found chair I use at my desk, and for the first time in my adult life, I’ve given myself a work chair that doesn’t cause me immediate back pain.

As I was walking home from daycare drop-off yesterday morning, eager to review the first pages I received of my book, I felt the rumblings of an essay forming in my brain. I passed a woman on the street who I remembered from my days of coffee shop writing when Silas was a baby. In those days, I’d bring my manual breast pump with me, and in the basement bathroom where the lights flickered and the floors smelled like cherry-scented cleaner, I’d fill bottles with milk. I was once in the bathroom when this particular woman came in to fix her ponytail. She hadn’t expected to find a woman with a wheezing manual breast pump squeezing her pulpy nipple, but there we were, staring into the same splattered mirror. When I passed her yesterday, she was walking with a man, pushing a stroller with a squirmy baby. Things get so much better, I thought I’d write. One day the babies grow up and there’s the extended support of school and community. You won’t always be pumping in a questionably clean coffee shop bathroom! You won’t always be drowning! You might even sit in a comfortable chair and write by candlelight! As I walked home, I tapped out a few sentences into the notes app on my phone for remembering later, and then I got to work on book edits.

At the dinner table, after I’d closed my laptop for the day and settled into the barely controlled chaos of evenings with three children, I heard a flurry of pings from my phone. A daycare WhatsApp group was going off: the school was closed, effective immediately, for an undetermined amount of time, because of a failure to upload staff background checks to a new online system required by the Department of Health. No matter that there are 160 families relying on it’s being operational. No matter that there’s next to no plan B. We have no idea when it might reopen, but murmurs of similar situations at other daycares say the process could take weeks or even months.

Hours earlier I’d learned that my first book was one of the 183,000 used, without permission, by tech companies to train AI. Those words, wrangled from my postpartum brain, squeezed out during the inadequate hours when I could afford childcare, written in assorted coffee shops nearly a decade ago, were being trotted out for the benefit of companies that would have robots replace me.

Over lunch, I’d opened a letter that came in the mail from a real estate company. An apparent buyer, the letter says, is ready and willing to pay above market value for a brownstone in the neighborhood. If “we’d” consider selling, the letter says, they’re willing pay six to eight million dollars for the privilege of buying up this building and converting it to a single-family mansion. Under other circumstances, I might have simply ripped up the letter and scoffed, but when we returned from our summer with my parents, we were met with a new lease that was changed to being month-to-month. There’s lead paint remediation looming for our landlord and he’s not sure if he’s willing, or able, to take on the cost. His health is failing. He’s not sure if his son wants to take over the building. A few blocks away we have friends in the same situation: a building that’s not up to code and owners who would rather sell than comply. With the dangling prospect of eight million dollars, who could blame them, but where are we supposed to go?

Part of all this is being an adult, of course. Things do not always go according to plan. We do not always get our way. We need to be resilient and adaptive in the face of change. In the scheme of things, we’re fine. Daycare will probably reopen. AI stealing my intellectual property might not lead to the end of my writing career. We’ll find, if needed, another place to live.

And yet the constant state of precarity is debilitating. These anecdotes aren’t idiosyncratic hiccups, they’re part and parcel of an extractive, dehumanizing society where children and families are not protected or prioritized and the rich are allowed to ride roughshod over everyone else, stealing words and ripping apartments out from under us. They’re examples of what happens when the ethos of a society is not to protect one another, but to exploit one another.

I can’t tie up this essay with simple encouragement. In the course of twenty-four hours, I’ve gone from drafting an essay about how much brighter things get to writing one about how dark they currently are. I’m sometimes told by readers that they enjoy when I write about the simple things. A paid subscriber recently left me a note saying, “Thank you…I have to say I don’t care for political articles not because I would disagree but because I read you for a simpler glimpse of life and for a little respite from the bigger world.” I understand the spirit of the note, and I’m sorry if this fails to live up to that desire, but the truth is, there’s no respite from the bigger world without acknowledgement of it. There’s no rest without action. There’s no change without effort.

This letter is brought to you courtesy of morning rage, worry, an undisclosed number of Bluey episodes, and ten minutes of painting. Solidarity forever.

PS. Action items from the Author’s Guild for folks whose books were used to train AI.