Joyful Girl
after Ani DiFranco
I have cultivated a life that gives me pleasure every day! My astrological chart ruler is Venus—the planet of beauty and pleasure—which might be one reason why I am the way I am, but I have been relying on astrology a little too long as an explanation. I guess it just does not feel radical to give myself pleasure, to go in search of joy. I think we all deserve pleasure, even when we have to throw up horse blinders to focus on the carrot instead of the world around us.
The world is all around me, but because I am an American, I was born believing I deserve joy and pleasure, even if it comes at someone else’s expense. My family has had many years of grifted pleasure: two of my immigrant ancestors were born in 1620 at Kebec and Patuxet, and then their parents moved ashore and announced that North America was their land now. The repetitive use of horse blinders to see only what we want to see has been encoded into twelve and thirteen generations of my family DNA. That’s right: I said thirteen. I don’t know if it is lucky or a curse to be me, so I try to find joy where I can, because after four hundred years of my family claiming home on someone else’s home, I am certain that the world owes me nothing.
Sixteen years ago, I bought a house with all the space I will ever need. My house is filled with windows that harness and pull light inside to illuminate most of my day, because my house is located in a part of the United States that gets 214 days of sunlight a year. Yes, we get snow in the winter, but it is still sunny, blinding light reflecting off the crust and obscuring the ice beneath. That’s all right. I like my life. I wake up as my spouse and kids are leaving the house for the day. I roll out of bed and take my dissolvable acid reflux medication and, if it pleases me, I take out my journal and light a candle in the dark to write before I look at my phone. That way, I can tell myself I did something productive today, no matter what.
But I am always productive! Before I write, I start the water for my tea, I feed my guinea pig, I let my dog outdoors for the first of many times. I stack the dishes from breakfast, I wipe down the counters, I start a load of laundry, and then I sit down to write. If I do it all right, everything comes out even and I’m ready to write just as my tea is done steeping. I like to write until it gets light outside, but I also like to write down only one page’s worth of thoughts. Sometimes I transcribe my dreams, another practice I should stop relying upon. I have been using astrology and my own dreams as guideposts for many years, but I do not want to look inside myself much longer because I like myself more when I am a joyful girl, and the bathroom mirror has not budged. The woman who lives there can tell the truth.
I do my Duolingo French lessons because it gives me a lot of pleasure to see the number click over every day—evidence of my dedication to completion. My streak is up to 857 days in a row, and Duo never has a chance to get mad at me because I do my lessons early. I studied Latin in high school because I was going to be an archaeologist, but then I changed my mind and the dead language rusted inside me. So for my fortieth birthday, I decided to learn a new language—the language of my ancestor who was born at Kebec. J’étudiais le français pour plus de deux ans et je ne veux pas arrêter!
I sit in front of the computer in my office, which is probably the prettiest room in my house with the eastern morning light streaming under cherry built-in bookshelves over the windows. Yes, I have an office, and I have a job that barely pays me anything. Sometimes I think I am mostly a stay-at-home parent, but my daughters are all adolescents now and they have not needed me to stay at home for at least ten years. Sometimes I think I am mostly a stay-at-home wife, but when I said I was stacking the breakfast dishes earlier, I meant I was stacking them for either my spouse or my children to do when they get home, because I have a list of chores I do to contribute to the running of our house, and I only do my share. This is just the way it goes.
The job that I do is directing a small press, and I pay myself a laughable amount of money per month because it is more important to me that the press remain sustainable and keep our books in print than that I pay myself something reasonable. I did the numbers once; I don’t want to do them again, but I think it worked out to something like two dollars an hour. That’s all right, because I love my life! I do it for the joy it brings to see our authors’ joy as their dreams are bound between two matte softcovers; we owe each other the world, if we can manage to give it. And I can manage to give it to them because my spouse is able to keep our household’s expenses covered.
So I check the emails that have come into my work inbox, and then I check the emails that have come into my personal inbox, and then I go to both of my social medias and check them, and then I go to both of the press’s social medias and check them. There are always likes and hearts and comments! It is nice to feel loved!
Then I read other people’s social media posts so that I know what’s going on in the world, because while my life brings me joy, it is pretty isolated. I can spend a whole day speaking aloud only to my family, and that doesn’t happen until they come home. So I read my emails, and I check social media, and I print and mail book orders for the press, and I keep the other books in production still in production, and then it is 10 o’clock, and it is time for me to do something that brings me only a little joy, which is trying to stay in shape.
I am still in my pajamas at 10 o’clock because I know I am going to sweat, so I go downstairs and I turn on whatever Netflix series I’ve been watching as a carrot to keep me on the treadmill—recently it’s been the latest season of Outer Banks, because I still love archaeological treasure hunts—and I begin walking at the 3.7 mph speed, which is just enough to make me start sweating after eight minutes. I walk at that speed for two miles and when I am done, I take off my shirt and I wipe down my body and my face and then I come upstairs and I weigh myself, even though I cannot believe that I have to sweat five times a week simply to not gain weight—that I don’t lose any weight after all that work—but that is called being 42 years old. Would I prefer the easy way? Well, okay, then.
Then I get dressed, and I have a hard-clad rule with myself that I have to wear hard pants for eight hours, just like everyone else who works. I am starving by this point so I have a snack, like a protein bar from the Nature Valley box I get at Costco, and I pour myself another glass of water. Then I sit down and I write again, but usually I check social media instead. Sometimes I wonder if everything I do I do instead of something I want to do more. That keeps me occupied until it is 11:30, and that sounds like close enough to lunch time for me. So I head into the kitchen and get myself two snacks this time, because I don’t eat a real lunch, I just eat snacks all day! If I did not have a spouse to make me dinners, I would never eat a real meal.
I eat my lunch snacks, and then I top them off with a package of fruit snacks because I like to be left with a sweet taste in my mouth; that brings me joy. Then I sit down and I read a book. Sometimes I can’t believe that part of my daily routine is sitting and reading during a time of day when I think everyone else is working. It seems like something I would judge in another person. Everything I do is judged and mostly gotten wrong, but oh well—reading keeps me joyful.
I read for an hour, and then I go back to my laptop, check social media for twenty minutes, and I write again. Or I check social media for a full hour, see that it is 2 o’clock, and realize that my day is winding down. Then I grab a seltzer from the fridge, the packages I need to mail for the press, and I leave the house to start picking up my children. I drive around my city for an hour and a half on weekdays, picking up one, then two, then three daughters. Sometimes, they have after-school activities and that complicates the pick-up schedule and I end up driving for more like two and a half hours, killing time in parking lots by checking social media on my phone, but the world owes me nothing: I chose this life and I love it!
I come home and preside over my adolescent daughters’ practice of immediately going into their bedrooms and checking their phones. Sometimes, if I want them to feel joyful, I have made cookies during that earlier 1 o’clock to 2 o’clock hour instead of checking social media. Sometimes. For the rest of the afternoon, I sit in the living room and am present, kind of, on my phone a lot but when my kids pass through, I ask them questions about their day. It seems to give them pleasure.
When my spouse gets home, if it is a weekend, it is cocktail time! We drink varying types of cocktails: my favorite Friday night cocktail is called a Blue Moon, and it is made of gin and crème de violette and lemon juice. My spouse likes olive martinis. I shake us up cocktails and we get a little buzzed while he makes dough for homemade pizza, and by the time the pizza is complete, I am ravenous and I would eat anything. Then he and I will often go out for a walk. My favorite walks are the ones we take in the winter because it is fully dark out. When everything else seems unclear, it is nice to be out in the dark with somebody who gives me pleasure.
We get home, we hang out in the living room for another couple of hours as our daughters pass in and out, and then my spouse and I go downstairs and watch a movie or part of a show. We do not watch movies as a family very often because every time we have tried, we realize how stupid the movies of our childhood and adolescence were, or the kids are bored, or they want us to watch some inane cartoon that means nothing to us, so it’s easiest to keep our TV viewings separate. I know there’s no grand plan here but I think, sometimes, about how we are all seeing only what we want to see.
Then it’s time for a shower, one of my favorite parts of the day, one I never miss. Standing in hot water always gives me a lot of pleasure. It feels good to be warm and alone, even though I am warm and alone most of the day. Sometimes my spouse joins me in the shower, and we take turns scrubbing each other’s backs. It feels good to know someone is getting all the grime I cannot reach off a part of me I cannot reach. I wonder, again, if everything I do I do instead of something I should do more. I get dressed into my pajamas, and then I climb into bed beside my spouse. The best nights to climb into bed are Sunday nights because that’s clean sheets night, especially if I dried the sheets outside on the clothesline so they smell like home. I turn on my side and spoon into my spouse, putting my hand on his hip because it’s the least I can do, because of the joy it brings. I pull the comforter up to eye-level like a horse blinder, blocking out any ghosts that might have slipped into the room, in case I wake up before I want to.
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Kristine Langley Mahler seeks joy on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska. The author of three nonfiction books, A Calendar Is a Snakeskin (Autofocus, 2023), Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022), and Teen Queen Training (forthcoming with Autofocus, 2026), Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press. Her work may be found at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie (ON BLUESKY!)
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