By Robin Lanehurst
My wife says I talk too much about this, but I can’t help myself – it’s like a compulsion, whenever something comes up that I can compare to Gwen or relate to our relationship, I have to say it, because if I don’t say it then I stew for a while and end up saying it later, anyway, with more intensity and less logic, and I annoy my wife with all the prepared counterarguments for my position, which is this: that Gwen is the worst, the absolute worst, and then my wife inevitably says, well, fuck her then,but my position is also this: that Gwen is complicated, which makes calling her the worst incredibly unfair and then somehow I end up fully on Team Gwen because I want to analyze, I want to explain her, I need to come up with the perfect metaphor for our relationship like I’m trying to write a fucking poem or something, and then my wife wants to know why I waste so much time on a person I don’t even really like that much and who doesn’t even really like me that much (except we do, we kind of like each other, and we have important things in common like dead parents, pandemic babies, complicated, late-blooming queerness) and I wonder if Gwen and Tim, her husband, have a similar argument over and over again, and if Gwen defends me in the same way that I defend her, and if maybe that’s what our friendship is grounded in, that we will defend each other even as I resent the time we agreed we would never put little girl babies in those god-awful giant bows and then she put her daughter in those god-awful giant bows anyway, and she resents the time we agreed breastfeeding didn’t matter that much and I went on to nurse my son through toddlerhood, and it is kind of nice to know you have someone who will always end up on your side even if they are the worst, the absolute fucking worst.
Robin Lanehurst is a queer, non-binary and neurodivergent writer, educator, dreamer, and mom. Their fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in Beautiful Things, Motherwell, PDX Parent, and Gertrude Press, among other outlets. A former public school teacher and counselor, she now collaborates on curricular projects with non-profit clients and is a teaching artist with Portland’s Writers in the Schools. Robin was a finalist for the 2023 Summer Fishtrap Fellowship and long-listed for the 2021 Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents, and she is a proud alumna of The Attic Institute’s Creative Nonfiction Studio.
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