wendy

17 Oct, 2025

Last night, a friend of a friend asked me how my most recent trip had gone. I leaned on the fridge as I explained: my close friend in L.A., who’d already offered her guest room to me, was struggling to work at home while her spouse was abroad. She’d called on me to slightly extend my trip, and I was delighted to do so. She said it would be our “artists’ residency.” (She’d specifically asked me to be her “house companion,” likening it to a Regency-era Jane Austen thing.) The trip was a success! My friend was able to comfortably work in her own workspace, knowing that I was puttering around the house.

“There’s a word for that!” the friend of a friend said. “Oh, I know this. What is it called…”

“Co-regulation,” I said, after letting a few moments pass.

“Yes! Co-regulation. I do this with my kids,” she said. “The nervous system……”

“Exactly,” I finally said. “If your nervous system doesn’t feel safe, you can’t get anything done, productive or otherwise.”

I briefly mentioned Bowen Family Systems. The addition of one person can either stabilize or destabilize a preexisting dynamic, I said. Then I trailed off. Ugh, I want to always be a stabilizing friendship or presence—and I almost always have been!—but sometimes you find yourself firmly allying with one person, which applies weight, pressure, to an uneven structure or dynamic. Unevenness inevitably crashes on its own; still, you do not want to be the straw that does it. Don’t even get me started on meddling Iagoes.

Anyway. It had been, according to my friend in L.A., a “successful domestic experiment.” My eyes had welled up and I’d agreed. I’d been thinking about it, too, I told her, how much I liked the easy rhythm we’d developed. Nothing too structured. But sometimes we’d greet each other as we alternated use of the kettle; sometimes we’d meet at the table at midday. Whether I were finishing up my day’s tasks or waking up from an accidental nap, my friend had an uncanny sense of when it was time to meet at the couch, texting to ask me if it were TV time. (I am notorious for talking so often, and so much, that I will double the length of any TV episode, any movie. For me, TV is not a passive activity. I’m grateful to true friends who will let me press pause in order to discuss onscreen events. My eyes are filling up again.)

A couple days before my departure from L.A., we’d arrived at the episode of Elementary introducing Ms Hudson. I slammed the pause button. “Mrs Hudson is from the original Conan Doyle stories,” I explained, “and she is supposed to be their landlord. But in popular depictions she always ends up being characterized as their housekeeper instead.” This is straight from Wikipedia, but it’s nevertheless a very important footnote: Hudson invariably gets shunted into the role of these Peters’ Wendy.

I recently happened across a TikTok slideshow explaining Peter Pan, and Wendy and Tinkerbell, through a Jungian lens. Aha! But a lot of the comments were all “it’s not that deep” and “let a book just be a book,” which is so obnoxious. The kinds of people who discuss Jung are obnoxious too, but also, everything has a Jungian lens, because Jung is describing, in fairly simple terms, the neuroscience of what happens when two brains are in the same room.

In Elementary, Ms Hudson is played by Candis Cayne, a trans actress. “That’s a little bit impressive for this show’s time,” my friend said, surprised. I nodded. There’s a single, slightly-regrettable aside, acknowledging Hudson’s identity for the benefit of an “audience of grandmas watching this show on network television in Middle America,” I agreed. So it is addressed economically, in a throwaway line, glanced over. More germane to the story is that this version of Ms Hudson is a bombshell, a paragon of femininity, who—like so many Mrs Hudsons before her—gets Wendy’d left and right.

Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock explains to Lucy Liu’s Watson that Ms Hudson functions as a “muse” to various powerful men; because of her wide-reaching skillset, she is “kept” for a time before moving onto the next. Toward the end of the episode, however, Sherlock and Watson return to their chilly N.Y.C. brownstone to find an unexpectedly cozy, warmly-lit environment that has been tidied to fuck. “A woman’s touch…!” I breathed.

Then Ms Hudson appears before the two of them, explaining that she has reorganized Sherlock’s library “alphabetically by author, from highbrow to lowbrow.” “That’s how I do it!” I shrieked. Not alphabetically, but definitely lumped together by author and by genre, going from reference books and style guides to academic texts, to histories, to pop culture, then essay, then personal essay/creative nonfiction, then fiction, then genre fiction, then graphic fiction, then ‘how-to’ guides, with ‘transition books’ bridging gaps between authors and subject matter. I have always been like this. In college my friend Mike would always misshelve my books, so I’d ask him to just set them down when he was done. Like an actual library will tell you to do! Oh my God! Anyway. Ms Hudson’s method would not work in real life, obviously; it’s how you’d organize a music or DVD library, though.

A day or two earlier my friend had permitted me, at last, to scope out her home office. “I’m very good at organizing, when I’m allowed to do it,” I’d warned her. She thought about it. It was true, she replied; she’d observed firsthand how tidy my little apartment in L.A. had been. (My guy friends in particular have always joked about my tendencies. One friend observed that I “nest,” which is accurate. One called me a “hausfrau”; I flipped out on him. Another friend exclaimed, when I was in my extremely late 20s, that my apartment looked “like a store in Japan.” He clarified: he meant it was impossibly well-organized.)

I looked around the office, suggesting different furniture configurations. I pointed out where her flatbed scanner could move, affording her more desk space. I have always been like this. I giggled as I acknowledged her past attempts at organization—the unused document inbox on the floor, for one. I’ve never been able to use one of those, either; I have to pin things at eye level in order to remember them. I picked some coins up off the desk, asking if I could deposit them in the coin jar. (Then I examined my palm. “How long have quarters looked like this?” I asked in dismay.) I always travel with an emergency stain-cleaning solution, which my friend was delighted by. She thinks my little lifehacks and solutions are great.

Anyway. Hudsonning sounds like a gratifying job—but even Ms Hudson, by episode’s end, is resolved to live independently, announcing her intention to reclaim her agency by flying solo.

The summer I lived in a frat house, I remember, on the very first day, one guy had asked me if I would cook for the boys each night. I’m not your Wendy, I’d snapped at him, and we never spoke again. If he’d only asked me to tidy and rearrange, though…! I once had a coworker whose apartment I enjoyed tidying and rearranging. He’d phone me at night in the middle of the work-week, asking me to come tidy, enticing me with beer or a TV show, and I’d walk over and we’d listen to music and talk while I cleaned. The last time I visited C & J, I picked up an unmarked spray bottle on the counter and asked “can I clean with this?” and away I went. God, I forgot how much I like cleaning and tidying. I don’t know why or how I catastrophically lost this ability during marriage, and neither does my husband. Some of it was down to physical limitations; I’d lost the ability to bend at the waist or to crawl around on my hands and knees. Just searching for cleaning items was cognitively taxing. I remember I kept repurchasing the same things, eventually hoarding cleaning supplies in my already-crammed home office.

As our artists’ residency came to a close, “you could charge people for you to be their friend!” my friend joked to me. I sighed. She hurried to explain: “In Japan—” she began.

“Oh, I know,” I said. “My TikTok algorithm just told me about, uh, Kens?” In Japan, you can apparently hire a “Ken,” a pretty man who will cook, tidy, and even offer emotional support—although whether foot rubs are included in the price, I do not know. “They’re popular with career women in their 40s,” I said sadly. “Another product of late-stage capitalism.”

The kind of labor that would ideally be free, my friend said, nodding, and although that is what I meant, it also wasn’t? I was thinking about women in their 40s, in trying to support themselves and stay afloat financially, having to hire a simulacrum of friendship. That’s how tired working women are, and how utterly frayed once-organic social support networks—communities!—are. (Similarly, I used to refer to my two therapists as “the family I pay.”) But yes, I said—now answering from the perspective of the duly-compensated Kens—people do expect to be reimbursed for their increasingly scant time, their precious effort, their labors.

Whitney used to dream of hiring me on as a full-time personal assistant—when she wasn’t absolutely sick of my bullshit, that is. One time, a big-deal visiting artist, from Japan, said to Whitney, of me, “You should give her to me!” and Whitney huffed, “Take her!” This illustrates our entire dynamic with its attendant problems. But sometimes Whitney would ask me to sit with her while her spouse was working late, and she would crawl into bed and I’d sit in a chair bedside, talking, talking, until she was asleep, and then I’d talk a little more, and then I’d sneak away, lock the door behind me, and drive home. Those were the moments I felt like I was really giving her something of value.

Whitney once told me how lucky I was to work for her, because she’d let me fly home to be with my adoptive mother on a dime, at a moment’s notice. “And she was right,” I told my best friend C. recently. “She said there was no other job on earth that would ever let me do such a thing, and that was true.”

But my adoptive mother had been furious with me for not having a more stable income, for not having a family yet. I’d “failed to launch,” she said. She’d become ill. She was terrified of being left alone. She’d repeatedly demanded that I fly home to be by her side; her anger was at the fact that I’d not yet found a way to bend space and time, to be in two places at once. She knew I was so preoccupied with tending to her that I’d failed to meet her other prescribed milestones: sometimes people will punish you for their own sense of shame, for “making them” feel so needy and clingy and vulnerable. “I was with her so often, the Chicago writers would joke that I was a ghost,” I explained, “because no one ever saw me in person.” Meanwhile, my adoptive mother was so entitled to my presence “because she’d adopted me,” I explained to C. “Whatever I did for her, there was no way I’d ever be able to pay off that debt. There was nothing I could do.” This is how gratitude is weaponized into serfdom. How long can a human possibly owe another human?

I forget how much money unpaid caregiving saves the healthcare industry annually, but it’s billions of dollars. That cut comes out of unpaid carers’ lifetimes. It eats into their work histories, their potential income, and their own health. Et voila! Now the carer needs a carer: a pyramid scheme of sickness. (Then there are the paid carers who might choose that role because they want outsized control over whether someone else lives or dies, who will raid a patient’s jewelry box because they feel they ‘deserve’ it, because their patient was ‘difficult’, ‘demanding’, or otherwise kind of a dick—as people who have lost their body autonomy tend to be. My best friend and I discuss this phenomenon a lot. Sometimes I talk about ‘angels of death’; sometimes I bring up Liza Minelli and David Gest.)

Anyway, I told my best friend C. that I was glad to’ve been able to successfully live with my friend in L.A. for a little while, because other experiences had, for a long time, convinced me I wasn’t even capable of cohabitation. I didn’t tell C. how hard it had been for us to leave each other, to break a routine that worked; I think it might’ve disturbed her. (“I’m sad, too,” I’d said. “Are we codependent now?” my friend in L.A. had asked. “I think it just means I’ve had a nice time,” I’d said.)

I did tell C., though, about telling my friend about my having designed elaborate virtual spaces for LARPs—four games in all. Three of the four games had been a success. One of those successes had been an adaptation of an award-winning tabletop game; to accomplish it, I had interviewed the game’s designers at extreme length, all the while interjecting to explain functional limits (the metaverse has surprisingly few) versus what was possible. Then, certain I had a very clear idea of the game and its tone, I’d asked the designers to write me a list of the funniest or most bittersweet locations for a teenager to have an awkward conversation with their parents. That list is what I ultimately ran with. So the success owes itself to this spirit of open collaboration, to the designers’ trust in my ability to execute their vision while also building onto it. They were excellent at delegating, which is not the same thing as being tyrannical. It’s actually the opposite! It’s a willingness to cede some control: an openness to being surprised, and potentially delighted, by the outcome.

One game went discouragingly. Everything went wrong. I would’ve taken this very hard, I’d explained to my friend in L.A., were it not for my overall 75% hit rate. Ultimately, despite the major efforts I’d expended in advance, there were vanishingly few ways I could’ve actually interceded as a sort of ‘support agent’ during the game’s run.

This is how and why I failed at my first professional job: I’d received people’s demands, but there wasn’t necessarily an open dialogue, and I was lent little efficacy or space to maneuver. (On my very first day, the director of x.x. had warned me “Other people are gonna try to define your job for you; don’t let them,” and I didn’t work out what he meant by this until long after I’d crashed.) So I bore the brunt when things failed—because I was stuck holding the bag of all these competing demands—but lack of support or real collaboration in the planning stages would inevitably result in a failure to launch. I’m still figuring out what went wrong at various turns in my life, but a lot of it comes down to a certain absence of professional generosity. Based on past positive experiences, I can say that affording someone clear guidance, the time to learn, the space to collaborate, some semblance of empowerment or creative control, room for error, and the basic dignity of being treated like a peer and colleague, are allowances that serve the entire team, predicting sure success in the end.

The real problem—speaking anecdotally, looking at video game studios from the outside—is when an auteur treats a potential collaborator as his grunt instead. Then everyone is unhappy and no one is satisfied with anyone’s work. (Happily, I’ve seen auteurs do the opposite! “Not all auteurs”! I’ve even seen the same auteur about-face, from entitled to conciliatory, if you didn’t answer his first email right away.) Similarly, in environments where there is a perceived scarcity of resources, such as the persistent threat of job insecurity, the members of the corpus will become needlessly competitive rather than collaborative, intent on staking out their spot in the hierarchy. Now everyone is behaving like an auteur, turning on those who are just here to help.

“It’s design co-regulation,” I told C., “in that we design our lives and our own interpersonal dynamics. When one person becomes a tyrant, it all comes crashing down.”