Why I'm Dining Alone

My Wednesday night tradition + the book that won't write itself.

Lately, every Wednesday after work, I take myself to a bar. It’s a night in which I do everything a bit differently. In normal life, my workday takes an afternoon pause in order to pick up my daughter from school. We run an errand—Trader Joe’s or Target, usually—and then I make dinner, we eat, and continue her usual bath and bedtime routine. I slip into my sweatpants at the earliest hour acceptable, flop down on the couch, and return to work emails after our daughter has gone to bed. The TV flickers in my periphery and the drone of her sound machine snores through the baby monitor speakers. I respond to friends’ texts, chuckle at senseless memes, stare into the void, and eventually go upstairs to read before clicking off the lights at a most sensible hour.

But on Wednesdays nights, my husband is on daughter duty. I leave work a little later than usual. I saddle up to the bar alone, order a drink, and for once, my routine melts away. Here there are no Cookie Monster sippy cups of milk, just my mezcal cocktails and carbonic natural wines. None of the mental gymnastics required of whipping up a dinner of healthy-enough, hopefully-organic, not-too-old foods containing the right balance of fiber, protein, fat, and carbs that two adults and one toddler can all eat together at the table by 6 p.m.

This past Wednesday at the bar, I glanced at the Salads section on the dimly lit card stock menu. A cheery pop song filtered through the air. “Hm,” I mused. In normal life, I’d have vegetables at every meal, avoid wheat when possible, and drink alcohol only on weekends. Then I thought of our usual routine that my husband would be performing at this very moment, a ballet of toddler entertainment and food prep, and pulled my eyes to other sections of the menu.

When I sank my teeth into the salty, onion-y, not-salad cheeseburger between my hands, I had the immediate sensation of ending an abstinence. “Oh hell yeah,” I said to no one in particular, still chewing the first bite that crowded my mouth. I fed French fries through my teeth like a cartoon bunny wood-chipping his way through a carrot. You know that thing I said last week about taking mental snapshots? Of recognizing joy in every moment? I did that, but with a cheeseburger and a mezcal negroni.

I never ate or drank alone in public until I moved to New York City, which is where I discovered the rich joy of taking oneself out. When I lived on the Lower East Side, I’d walk down to Chinatown and post up at the window-side table of my favorite dumpling spot. Beneath the green glow of fluorescent lights, a curt, older Chinese woman would fling a smattering of soup dumplings, noodles, and scallion pancakes in front of me. I’d pull out my book to read and pluck at food with chopsticks in elated silence.

Between social obligations or appointments, waiting on friends to arrive, simply getting out of the apartment, I’d collect myself at a bar or restaurant with a book or my laptop. I’d people watch or make small talk with the bartender. Here, on Wednesday nights, I resume that tradition. I pull out my laptop and write. I pen this newsletter. I work on my book.

I’m writing a novel, which sounds like an insane, delusional thing to say when you are a full-time working mother. Busy mother and full-time employee writes entire novel as side-hustle aren’t exactly words that instill much hope in anyone hoping to someday read this piece of work, me being one of them. I have to say it aloud to remind myself of its permanence. But it’s an idea that’s been with me for years, a story I cannot and will not shake. I started tinkering with in 2020, continued fleshing it out during my time at Vermont Studio Center, and now I take a novel writing class on Wednesday nights to help me focus. Early mornings, my daughter’s weekend naps, and Wednesday nights. These are the only times I am able to steal for my writing—and honestly, for myself.

The beginning of the end of my alone time started during my pregnancy at the height of the pandemic. My husband and I both huddled together in our Los Angeles rental, me working at a desk in the corner of our dining room, him situated behind me at the dining room table. If I moved strategically enough, I could block him with my head on daily Zoom calls.

When my water broke, I was kept in triage until a delivery room opened up for me. Due to Covid policy, my husband was not allowed inside the hospital until I was admitted to a room, so I nonchalantly counted the minutes between my contractions, ate a turkey burger with French Fries, and watched five hours of How I Met Your Mother in total bliss. A gift from the Gods of Parenthood. It was the first I’d been totally alone for that long in eight months—and I knew, also my last.

Most of us understand that, in parenthood, there is little time for meandering walks into Chinatown or leisurely, nowhere-to-be dinners with oneself. There is always somewhere to be. A lot of doing whatever everyone else needs and very little of doing whatever you want. A pre-kid me would balk. It would be the reason I spent nearly 15 years contemplating motherhood. But the me-me, the me that always exists, refuses to believe that I have to choose between passion and parenthood. The always-me believes you can have it all—and will. Once one of my closest child-free friends said she didn’t think she could be a mother because she’d never be able to come home from brunch to take her long, beloved afternoon nap. “Well, you can,” I said. “You just have to negotiate that with your partner.”

After our daughter was born, my boss said to me, “Welcome. The rest of your life will be a running tally of who did what.” Which is true, to some degree, but I feel lucky to have a partner who willingly plays this game with me. A partner who understands me enough to know the simple acts that fulfill me outside of our family—an evening alone at a bar with my laptop, dinner with girlfriends, a workout. Once I asked my husband if he’d mind taking Saturday a.m. baby duty so I could go to a hot yoga class and he said, “Of course! You’re always in a great mood after yoga. I mean. Not to say you’re in a bad mood otherwise…you’re just…in an exceptional…you know what I mean.” I did.

The bar that I go to on Wednesdays is across the street from my 6 p.m. writing class. One square block that I get to claim for myself. Me, at the same bar stool, face lit by the glow of an unfinished manuscript. Here I claim a personal point of latitude and longitude, which reminds me of this quote by science fiction writer and mother of three, Ursula K. Le Guin:

“The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper. In other words, that she's free. Not wholly free. Never wholly free. Maybe very partially. Maybe only in this one act, this sitting for a snatched moment being a woman writing, fishing the mind's lake. But in this, responsible; in this autonomous; in this free.”