Some Wild Ideas
An Ordinary Animals thematic statement of sorts
It’s been exactly six months since my first newsletter! I sent it out in late August, on my 41st birthday. Now, I’m officially 41-and-a-half, and this is officially issue 14! Funnnnnn!
To start, I want to take you behind the scenes a bit and let you in on a little secret: I sometimes sneak personal Easter eggs into my writing, just for me.
Like, hidden or slightly altered song lyrics.
See if you can find some Bob Dylan in here or maybe some Taylor Swift in here. (There’s also a lyric from my favorite Kinks song below—can you find it?)
Another thing I do—only half on purpose—is use the word wild way too much. At this point, it’s basically an inside joke with myself. Every time I catch myself using it, I roll my eyes and playfully swat my own shoulder like oh, me, there I go again! And then I just leave it in. I very rarely delete a wild.
I can’t help it! I think it’s my favorite word? It just captures so much for me. Untamed, unexpected, deeply natural—all things pertinent to my interests. It’s short, punchy, and carries a hint of that aloof, hippie energy I love.
And then it hit me: if I’m using wild this much, maybe it’s more than just a word I like.
Maybe I use it so much because it is basically the thesis of Ordinary Animals.
So, in honor of my six-month anniversary of writing and sending out these weird little letters, I want to share a kind of thematic statement, centered around the word wild.
I hope this helps clarify for you (and for myself!) what I want to write about here, the themes you can expect from these letters, and how it’s all just so very wild. (I know, I know. But I had to!)
Here are they are, in no particular order:
1. Wild Tech
I didn’t know when I started this writing project that I’d want to write so explicitly about modern tech culture—but it turns out, I really do! I think about technology and attention and media and screens and the internet and culture all the time.
It’s probably baked into my perspective as an elder millennial—aka the literal last generation to know life before the internet. Yes, the absolute last generation in the entire history of humankind!
We’re on the frontier, the Wild West of the digital age. We’re the first farmers after eons of hunter-gatherers. The first factory workers clocking in at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Humankind has been forever changed in ways we can only begin to imagine—and we were there at the very beginning, as awkward teenagers typing a/s/l? to each other in chat rooms!
Like, sure, that was fun, but now we’re trapped here?!
There’s no roadmap for us as we stumble through this haunted cyber carnival—already out of control but, somehow, also, just beginning. And now we have to raise kids in it, too?! That is so dumb and honestly unfair.
There’s definitely a tech-bro oligarchy happening. These companies are cynically mining our focus and attention for power and for profit, we are most definitely the product, etc., etc.
But even beyond that, I just know from my own lived experience that too much tech use doesn’t feel good. I’m happier, calmer, and more aligned with myself when I’m not drowning in my phone.
I know our lives—and our kids’ lives—aren’t meant for this. And that we don’t have to live this way.
And just to be crystal clear: as I type this, my sons are (very sweetly, I must say) watching Daniel Tiger together. We are not screen-free. Not even close. But we do have some firm rules, some grand ideas, and an ongoing family discussion around technology and screens. We also mess up constantly. We drop the ball, course-correct, and try again, all the time.
That’s how I want to approach this topic—not from some expert, holier-than-thou stance (literally never), but from the middle of the mayhem. As someone lost in the maze herself, trying to escape with her kids' brains and souls intact.
Beyond the everyday nitty-gritty of how we “do screens” in our house, I’m also really excited to explore the bigger picture.
This takes me right back to my undergrad days at ye olde SUNY Purchase, where I was a Media, Society, and the Arts major. I wrote my senior thesis, in 2005, on internet identity. (For context: Facebook started in 2004. Instagram didn’t exist until 2010. So me writing an 80-page paper on internet identity back then was kinda like… exactly on the ball!?! I gotta say?!?)
I would love nothing more than to dust off my copy of Understanding Media and quote Marshall McLuhan at you all. I want to talk about information systems and infinite choice, hegemony and hyperreality, algorithms and the attention economy. You know, just some light critical media theory, if that’s cool with you!
So, over the course of many writings here, I’ll get into it all—the family rules that work for us, the mistakes we make, the off-grid trips we take, the boundaries I try (and sometimes fail) to set for myself—all with a dusting of media theory along the way.
Doesn’t that sound fun?!
Previous posts about tech:
2. Wild Nature
To me, nature is—if not the antidote—at least an antidote, much like Hannah Horvath here:
Is it that simple? I don’t know, maybe?? It feels that simple to me, sometimes.
Over the past decade plus, I’ve come to see being in nature as not just a nice-to-have, but as a necessary, essential human experience—one that needs to be actively prioritized.
I mean, we all feel it—that resetting that happens when you step into the woods, up a mountain, or onto the beach. The way the breeze, the air, the sun, the trees, the horizon does something to us. Something good. Something calming, centering, uplifting.
Nature soothes and resets us because it is us.
I want Ordinary Animals to be a place where I explore what it means to reconnect with our humanness and ‘naturalness’ in an increasingly tech-driven world.
But also? I just want to write about nature for its own sake, too. I mean, right? It’s so pretty! And I just moved to the beach! It would be a waste not to write about it.
And just to be clear—when I talk about “being in nature,” I do not mean scaling mountains, white-water rafting, or anything particularly energetic. I usually mean taking a hike or walk outside in the sunshine or sitting by a fire, a river, or a lake with an unreasonable amount of snacks and way too many books. It’s more lazin’-on-a-sunny-afternoon nature, not life-or-death-naked-and-afraid nature—just so we’re on the same page!
Also, fun fact: Just like my undergrad thesis in media studies was about the internet, my master’s thesis in education was about nature! So both of these threads—technology and nature—have been pulling at me in real ways for literal decades.
Previous posts about nature:
3. Wild Matrescence
Matrescence was a huge part of why I started this newsletter in the first place. I was shook that I hadn’t even heard the term until I was three years into motherhood—and the relief I felt when I finally did! Why has this been kept from us? Why isn’t it a bigger, more widely known deal? It was such a game-changer for me, and I hope it’s just as helpful for other new (and not-so-new) moms—and the people who support them!—who need to hear that the intensity (and contradictions!) of becoming a mother is completely normal.
Since publishing this piece, I’ve spoken to so many women who had never heard of the term before and were so grateful to finally have the language for what they’d been experiencing. It’s proof to me that we humans need words and concepts to help crystallize our own experiences.
So I just want to keep spreading the word. Matrescence is a completely normal developmental process, much like adolescence. It’s a years-long, non-linear transformation—one filled with enormous change and growth in every area of life. It takes time to settle. It’s messy, magical, wild (yep, there I go again), and everything in between.
I’ve been (slowly) working on a Matrescence Questionnaire, and I can’t wait to send it out to the coolest moms I know. My hope is to share their experiences, demystify this process, and make the name of this deeply special, deeply human chapter of life more well-known.
Previous posts about matrescence:
4. Wild Play
I love being a teacher and working with very young kids. It’s genuinely my calling, and I’m so grateful it’s how I get to spend my working days.
Sometimes, I daydream about writing more about early childhood education here—the things I’ve learned through books, theory, research, and all my years of hands-on experience. How kids grow, how they learn, how their brains develop… it’s all endlessly fascinating to me.
I definitely lean a little wild in my approach. In a nutshell, my philosophy is rooted in hands-on, open-ended, child-led, free play. Just let them play—for as long as possible. As much time in the day as they can get, and as many years in childhood as they can have.
It’s simply the richest ground for learning there is.
As a society, I think we over-schedule, over-structure, and over-complicate childhood. We put our adult noses in their business and disrupt a lot of the good work they’re already naturally doing. Rest, downtime, and truly free play are crucial to their development, yet we keep pushing formal academics earlier and earlier.
(Note: This is all much easier said than done in today’s world. It’s beyond frustrating that the best type of early childhood education is often privatized, part-time, and/or wildly expensive. And it’s horrible that those who perform the best work often do not get paid a living wage to do it! So, I get it, it’s hard. Believe me, there’s no judgment here.)
Anyway, I’d love to explore these ideas here, and more! Are there any early childhood concepts you’re curious about? Let me know—I’d love to dive in.
Previous posts about play and education:
5. Wild Motherhood
I love my kids, and I love being their mom, and I’m going to write about it all with so much humor and warmth you might just want to vom! Prepare yourself now!
Previous posts about motherhood:
I’m so excited to continue writing here about all this and more, and I’m beyond grateful to have you along for the ride!
P.S. Here’s the Kinks song I snuck a lyric from. It’s my favorite!:
Having only found your newsletter recently, this was such a great re-introduction. Congrats on being 6 months in! I went back and read your first post, and not to skip over all the other stuff that resonated (I am obsessed with matrescence - i want every person to know about and respect it!!!), I LOL'd at postpartum baby hairs coming in grey - that hit close to home 🙃.
wild love🤗😘