Category: Under 750

Motherhood/Sainthood/Sandalwood

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Devotion, Exhaustion, and Three-Wick Messaging

Oof. The things I’m seeing about Mother’s Day. The things I see every year. Every day.

We try to turn motherhood into sainthood. Or vice versa.

Bear with me because I don’t know a lot about sainthood, and I don’t have an exhaustive understanding of motherhood, but “exhaustion” and “motherhood” are two words that, if I am ever turned into a school worksheet, will be included in the word bank.

Candles are involved in both sainthood and motherhood, especially this time of year. Big Candle may be trying to sell us on something a little rank.

Don’t get me started on Big Bubble Bath, Big Pedicure, Big Buffet, and Big Five-Minute Power Nap.

(For the record, I love most of those. Try to tear me away from a good buffet and I will ruin your hairdo.)

They want to offer us something utterly restorative in the time it takes to pumice off whatever barnacles have grown on our feet as we walk, run, crouch, wipe, shuttle, rescue, worry (oh, the worry!), and attend in every meaning of the word. A little something instead of space to sit with how wonderful and how hard it is. We get to trail our fingertips in “wonderful” and are told that the “I’m exhausted and doing my best” commentary is something private, something publicly unutterable unless you’re willing to, in the same breath, bring it back to the tonic chord: “But I love my kids.” Amen.

Our expressions of depletion via devotion don’t mean we don’t love our kids.

Quite the opposite. Because why else would we do it?

It’s the love.

It’s the love.

It’s the love.

This love, though? It’s superhuman, and we’re only human, so we try to breathe a little without inhaling the three-wick Cashmere Woods messaging that we’re adequate as long as we’re perfect.

It’s ok to have all sorts of words in your word bank.

Your kids are lucky to have you. We’re lucky to have you raising your kids.

Witnessing

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What I Read April 2026

Graphic with a muted pink background and large serif title “Witnessing,” with subtitle “What I Read April 2026.” Below are four book covers in a row: The Making of Marigold McGrath by Carrie Hayes, Vigil by George Saunders, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and The Great Game by Andrés Martinez. At the bottom, it reads “by Jackie Pick.”

I tried very hard not to have a theme this month.

I know I say that a lot, but this time I meant it. I was just going to read books without some moment where I dramatically connect everything and pretend I planned it that way. It would have saved me from unnecessarily firing neurons I am trying to save for winter.

And then, somehow, there was a theme. Somewhere between books two and three, I realized we were doing a thing.

That thing, by the way, is witnessing. (That “we” by the way is…I don’t know.)

And yes, I mean the very lofty “bear witness” kind. Dress up in a robe, grab your favorite gavel, and put it in your non-book-holding hand. Congratulations! You’re in for some really amazing reads! Just watch where you point that gavel.

Across wildly different books (historical fiction, literary fiction, cultural analysis, whatever it is George Saunders is up to) the same problem keeps showing up. People living (and dying) inside events they may not fully understand. People documenting, interpreting, misinterpreting, or just standing there blinking, as history (or morality, or love, or grief, or politics) does its thing.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I finished this month:

  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • Vigil by George Saunders
  • The Making of Marigold McGrath by Carrie Hayes
  • The Great Game by Andrés Martinez

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison observed that there were no adequate memorials for those who were enslaved in the United States. “No small bench by the road,” no modest roadside markers, no sanctioned sites of mourning. So she wrote one. Beloved is a monument of language and memory. There is, to my knowledge, no more fitting extension of a literary work into the world.

I find myself hesitating to even try to articulate my admiration for fear of diminishing the work. From the first page, it is clear you are entering a kind of sacred space, one that is welcoming and exacting and asks you to be your best self. To sit with the past, witness, reckon, and repair.

(continued here)

Vigil by George Saunders

Vigil is George Saunders doing the afterlife thing he does so well, this time with even more bite and a contemporary target. It’s set in an in-between space that’s not quite heaven, not quite anywhere you can Yelp, where a spirit’s job is to help the dying make peace before they go. Like cosmic hospice with moral stakes.

(continued here)

The Making of Marigold McGrath by Carrie Hayes

Historical fiction set during World War II is something I tend to approach with high expectations and a ready-to-go side-eye, but The Making of Marigold McGrath by Carrie Hayes won me over with its intelligence, its restraint, and its refreshing perspective on what it means to come of age while the world is unraveling. Hayes gifts us a story about what it means to live inside and bear witness to a moment that has not yet resolved into history.

(continued here)

The Great Game by Andrés Martinez

Ordinarily, I don’t read sports books. I barely watch sports. Sports are what I put on when my brain needs a screensaver or my children are in the room and I’d like to keep them there a little longer. But The Great Game by Andrés Martinez is a book about everything sports touch: politics, power, media, identity, community. It’s also very much a book about America’s favorite pastime: wanting to be part of the world while also insisting we should do our own thing.

(continued here)

And there be the April reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?

Suburbialis Clangum: A Melodic Guide to Your Neighborhood Wilderness (Encore Post)

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Nature May Abhor a Vacuum but Suburbia Sure Loves a Leaf Blower.

In the verdant suburban sprawl, the uninitiated masses vainly search for the quaint silence once celebrated in pastoral myths  —  charming, perhaps, to those with less refined tastes. The modern sophisticate, however, appreciates the richness offered by the incessant, blaring symphonies of human achievement. Why pine for the whisper of wind when one can revel in the roar of an arsenal of machinery running day or night (or both!)? Here, in these cultivated fields of progress, the glorious din of civilization justly overrules the silence sought by the hoi polloi. This sonic landscape is not for those unfortunates who crave a rough-hewn quietude, but rather for the discerning citizen who understands that true progress resonates through the hum of industry. The air simply must crackle with the sounds of civilization’s upkeep, the resounding overture of spring.

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