Long ago, in a house I shared

with my boyfriend, my roommate, and a friend of hers living temporarily in our basement, the four of us were woken one night by a sound.

A crash? A bump? Couldn’t tell you what it was, doesn’t matter.

Our guy in the basement yelped in response and I did the spontaneous moronic thing I’d always done when I heard a strange noise in my house, which was to yell out

WHAT!

in the closest I could come to a deep, scary man’s voice, but with an irritated twist.

Like, what now? What do you want this time, murderer? Get off my case, man, I’m sleepin’!

WHAT!

Nothing was happening. Everything was fine. We called out to each other and confirmed the total nothingness of whatever the sound was and then we all started laughing in our different rooms.

My roommate pretended to make a phone call.

“Hello, 911? We need some mommies.”

Now, I’m not making light of the situation we’ve got going in the world right now but well wait wait hang on

“Make light”

That sounds a bit good.

There is something in the basement this time, globally-speaking. There’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it and we do need some mommies. It’s heavy and charged out there, and that’s outside of any of Earth’s current direct war zones.

I made the understandable mistake of gluing myself to Twitter during the first few days of the Ukraine invasion. Staying informed is great. Spending hours a day trying to calibrate and recalibrate and re-recalibrate existential threat levels is not helpful to a person’s nervous system.

The hellish climate report that came down the pike at the same time wasn’t exactly, what do I want to say, adaptogenic in its effect, either.

I’m here now to advocate for all of us to set up however many fake mommies we need to carry us through this next period in human history.

Construct your mommy however you need to.

Me, I like to wrap myself in a furry blanket, making sure to cover the top of my head and pull the blanket close around my chest, and then I like to place a pillow over my stomach. I do this in bed with my back against some more pillows against the wall and voila: Wall Mommy is wearing me in a front-facing Baby Bjorn.

Soft breads and creamy things, as you know, are mommies you can eat. Whatever works! Am I advocating for emotional eating? Yeah! Right now in the world? Yeah!

Finally, an underrated mommy is taking a moment to put down your phone and look around the room you’re in. You can stretch out your arms in all directions—wide to the side, up, down, etc—and look all the way around, up, down and behind you, too. What we’re doing here is ascertaining our real-time immediate threats. Our arms and hands find out there’s nothing physically attacking us. Our eyes determine that no adversary is on the move towards us. This is a way to tell our freaking-out bodies that they’re actually okay.

Not under direct attack? This is a state to be treasured. It’s not plain. It’s special and wonderful.

(I learned the physical practice above from the great Luis Mojica and I highly recommend their work.)

And that’s a wrap. I’m off to the dentist now with my decades-long dental phobia in tow, after pretending for years that I simply don’t have teeth. Not all my strategies for living are great! This’ll unwind my nervous system!

Truly, take a few minutes today to do right by your teeth. What good is soft bread as a mommy if you can’t even chew it? None good.