Dear Readers,

Routine is an organizational human playbook that balances stress levels. From infant care to palliative care, routine is in place. Routine is the skeleton key to a door that leads us down a hall, away from pure insanity.

I will spend at least thirty minutes per Sunday looking at old photos to drug myself with nostalgia.
That’s routine.

From 2000-2012 I was a traditional housewife, with the same routine seven days a week, 5:00am until 11:00pm. I would**:

• Wake, wash, and dress four people.

• Feed five people three meals a day, plus snacks, desserts, juice, water, supplements, and medicines.

• Make all meals from scratch. By far the most time-consuming. From meal planning to grocery shopping in -25C. This was 2000–2012. I made all baby food and every meal from cookbooks I found at Winners. I would have one or more children with me, car seats to wrestle with snow suits, and grocery bags numbering over fifteen. I owned THREE FREEZERS. One was full of dead elk. Only the hunter ate his game. 

• Take kids to all of the extracurricular activities and schools I registered them in in the clothes I bought, while dragging them through Chinook Mall for their haircuts. The salon owner shouted, “NO CHILDREN AT THIS SALON!” So, I took my son home, put him in a tuxedo, brought him back, and said, “He’s a man now!” They cut his hair.

• This is just going to get depressing. I haven’t mentioned the actual cooking or cleaning of the house, home maintenance, banking, throwing three large children's birthdays a year, going to other children’s birthdays, accidents at birthdays, hospital visits, planning every single outing—planning every trip, the packing, the laundry.

• Saving Grace: I got to go to a lot of museums, parks, and malls and waddle around like a child with my children, AND NO ONE WAS THE WISER.
  
  REPEAT FOR TWENTY-THREE YEARS.

  ---

I want us all to have a healthy lifestyle.
I’m efficient.
WHY NOT TRY SOME STRUCTURE HERE on Permanent Retrograde?

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To end things:

Please, sweet Baby Jesus, the exact type of Jesus who is too young to take the wheel. If you are real, Baby Jesus, send someone to at least stand in my kitchen while I clean my kitchen. I don’t need a housekeeper. I would *like* one, but not a need. I just need a witness, a confidante, a kitchen pal.

No segue for that prayer to the God's son; I just thought I'd throw that out first.

20,000+ people are receiving this email, and a small percentage of that number are paying subscribers. If a small percentage of you subscribe now, you will likely save your own life and mine with this Sunday night reading routine. That’s two lives for a few dollars a month.

What should our next topic be?

A romantic plotline about a lover who booty calls on the full moon—for intuitives and witches?
The Worst Things I’ve Ever Seen?
Is Gen Z attitude similar to Gen X?
Are we living in a matrix that now has glitches?
What do you do when you always get involved with the same personality type, and it isn’t the one?

I will get this Newsletter out three hours earlier next Sunday. I will read your topic ideas. I will keep tabs on all of my new subscribers as I scrub kitchen grout.

Be my confidante and kitchen pal,

Kelly

** just a couple laughing asterisk because I thought I did a lot as a trad. wife. Here to say: single motherhood is quite literally impossible.