I Love You. Keep Going.

Restaurant woman.

The Boss at one of my restaurant jobs declares that we will all be required to wear non-slip shoes by Monday. This is weird because I thought that was already a requirement that we were all just ignoring—like when we don’t pull our hair back and have polish on our nails. We make concessions, though. We smile when we want to scream and don’t openly weep that life is slipping away like our feet when it rains on the patio. We aren’t allowed to give dogs water because of the slip-and-fall hazard. I told that to someone once and felt stupid and mean. Now I sneak plastic containers to dogs and tell their humans to hide it. We mustn’t be discovered.

I have to remind myself that restaurant guests are just people who want to eat food. I am also a person who wants to eat food. We have similar goals. We are flesh and hair and we all wear shoes. I am not processing eaters, popping open jaws and pouring gardens and barns down their throats.

I chose these restaurants because I like the way the light feels on my skin in their open floorplans. I like sharing air with waxy leaves of foliage.

A guest asks me about a server who has left. It feels like an accusation aimed at me for not being her. They tell me how much they loved her and how sweet she was, so I spend the next hour vowing to never be sweet. Because now I feel the pressure from her legacy of sweetness—that my personality can’t and won’t live up to that kind of reputation. Because, you know they talk about you when you walk away from the table, like you’re a topiary, or a cheeky barstool—part of the ambiance. I’m tart, but I’m not a glass of orange juice.

There’s always, almost always a moment in the shift when I say, it’s just incessant. It just keeps going.

And I’ll tell you when it’s back to back and I’m changing shoes between jobs, LONGING for the hills I pass on the way into work, where the ridges are highlighted by the yellow stripes of flowers of high spring. I can’t see them without thinking, now that I know it, that if that damn mustard hadn’t invaded maybe those stripes would be the bright orange color of the California poppy.

So I spend my day off weeding in the front yard, which might not seem like a big deal but it’s huge because there are poppies buried in the weeds, so I can’t just violently rip everything out. The poppy roots are shallow and fragile, and my body feels ravaged from tending to all of it. I water the poppies I’ve sculpted from the earth, feed the cats, and lay down to watch Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing. It’s one of those things, of which there are many that reminds me that almost nothing bad happened in my childhood.

But I also think, am I my own momfluencer? But instead of daily YouTube videos, I’m sending out weekly newsletters regardless of whether I actually have any news, and also this feeling that I have nothing to give.

Well, here is some news for the guy on Nextdoor who wants to blame house-cats for the decimation of the bird population:

Funny thing is—she didn’t even catch that bird. Everyone knows she only catches Q-tips and scrunchies. This is an example of Azula stealing Morticia’s valor. Originally, Morti brought the bird in the house, and I got her to drop it. I shooed all the cats out and the birds wings were still working.

She was flying.

But once I opened the front door to release her, Azula caught the bird in her mouth. This all sounds more calm than it was. I yelled more that day than I’ve yelled in a long time. I wanted that bird to live.