My brother-in-law is obsessed with Bigfoot (I promise this is going somewhere). We get him Bigfoot everything – statues, t-shirts, hats, movies. He will take his 2 young sons out “Squatch hunting” for the weekend. Really, it’s an excuse to get to them to go out camping. And the obsession, I think, is his way of trying to embrace the idea of something wild and unknowable. He likes the idea that there’s something out there that we don’t know about, something elusive and hard to find, something that may not even exist. A few nights ago S and A and I were watching “Finding Bigfoot” and S asked me if I was “feeling squatchy”. I laughed, because I knew exactly what he meant.

“Pregnant” in our house has intense meaning. It’s associated with loss, and fear and sadness. It comes with phrases like “You’ll never be able to get pregnant with your own eggs”, and “You’re technically pregnant, but you’re going to loss it soon.” So now we’ve moved on to “squatchy”. The idea being that we’re on the pursuit of something elusive, something hard to find and even more difficult to catch. I like it. I like the whimsy of it, and the silliness. And I do, I feel squatchy.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, my dears. Happy Squatch hunting.

*In other news, we got emergency custody of my step-daughter with a hearing for a permanent custody change next week. Our lawyer thinks we’ll get her.