The soft launch of my new life
On coffeemakers, a Room of One's Own, and fantasy fulfillment
The day we closed, we went to the house after lunch, newly ours, and put our daughter down for a nap in a pack-and-play in her future bedroom. I ran to Target to pick up some essentials—hand soap, paper towels, toilet paper. I came back with a coffeemaker.
Our move to Evanston from the Bay Area was fueled by many a fantasy—we came in search of home ownership and space and proximity to family and a lower cost of living and a different kind of lifestyle. I dreamt of writing a book in A Room of One’s Own. Ben dreamt of giving our daughter a yard in which to run around.
Since we first made an offer on our new house over three months ago and entered the chaos of home buying and home renovation and cross-country moving with a toddler (chaos from which we have not yet emerged), I have clung to a singular fantasy. The fantasy is simple. It entails waking up early, by myself, and going to write at the kitchen table with a steaming mug of coffee before anyone else is awake. The house is quiet. Perhaps the sun is rising. Mother-writers are early risers, I’ve internalized. When else can we find the requisite quiet and space? In the new house, I would become an early riser, I resolved. It was time to move on from my two-year fog—waking and immediately having to either throw up or breastfeed, and going back to bed while my husband took the baby and the dog for a walk. (This was one of many resolutions I’ve made to leave postpartum behind me in California and to return to myself in this new midwestern chapter.)
These early mornings would necessitate me being able to make myself my cup of coffee—which, I am somewhat ashamed to admit, I have relied on my husband to make me for the last four years. I am only somewhat ashamed because I blame this dependence on my Chemex pour-over snob of a husband, who made me get rid of my coffeemaker when we moved in together. We didn’t have room for much on the counter of our little Oakland kitchen. And in four years, I was never able to master the art of blooming the grounds or the mysterious ratios which my husband never measures. At some point during this home-buying journey, I said I wanted a coffeemaker in the new house. This meant I also wanted counter space for a coffeemaker, something that seemed feasible in Chicago’s suburban grandeur.
For the last two months, the coffeemaker was hidden out of the view of our construction crews in a built-in bench in the breakfast nook. When we slept in the house last week for the first time, my husband found the coffeemaker and set up the delayed brew feature. (“This is pretty cool,” he admitted.)
Today, for the first, time, I woke at 4:45 and crept downstairs and pressed “brew” on the coffeemaker, which my husband had lovingly prepped the night before. Yes, a corner of the kitchen is still filled with a pile of flat-packed furniture and baby gates. Yes, the kitchen counters are covered in miscellany because we have not moved into the other rooms of our house yet. Yes, there is a Minnetonka moccasin box full of Ikea lightbulbs that I don’t yet know where to put next to me on the kitchen table. But overhauled HVAC system seems to be working, the heat is whirring, and I have my mug of coffee and I am writing. It is the platonic ideal of Turtleneck Season.
The plan is for me to be writing a lot more now. Full-time, in fact. I’m working on a book on breastfeeding. I’m working on professionalizing myself as a writer, which might mean more writing elsewhere and less writing here, or more writing here, for paid subscribers only. I’m figuring it out. This step back from full-time paid employment is not forever and I’m trying to figure out how much I want being a lawyer to be part of my identity right now. But I don’t want to squander this very precious long-dreamt of opportunity to write as much as I want, and so I am very grateful for my coffeemaker.