Illustration from YTMND.

MOMMY! I WANT MOMMY!

(here I am!)

NO! NOOOOOOO! I WANT DADDDYYYYY!

(ok, he’s standing right there; parents switch positions)

NOT DADDY, MOMMY!

(well, Daddy is the one who is here right now. Would you like robot pajamas tonight?)

NOT THE ROBOT PAJAMAS – THE SHARK PAJAMAS! I WANT THE SHARK PAJAMAS!

(the shark pajamas, buddy?)

THAT’S WHAT I S A I D: THE SHARK PAJAMAS!

(parent begins dressing child in shark pajamas)

NO! I WANT THE ROBOT PAJAMAS ON!

(parent and child together): AHHHHHHHHRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!

Another day ends in tears at the writing to survive household. Maybe our three-year-old son is developing neural networks at incredible rates and his thoughts are pulling him in different directions. Perhaps he is experimenting with control – how much does he have? How will we, the beleagured parents, react to his cries of frustration? It’s normal (right??), but exhausting, and patience-trying, and sometimes it’s hard to see the humor in it all.

Bath time last night was a screamfest. I wasn’t there – baths are generally my husband’s responsibility – but I could hear every outburst. I finally realized what it reminded me of: my son was channeling the long-dead 80s comedian Sam Kinison.

Here is a little taste of my current home life, minus the lunges and hair pulls, with a very young-looking, relatively thin Kinison on the David Letterman show. The comedian was known, as Wikipedia puts it, “for his extremely vitriolic humor” and can be offensive, so viewer beware.



writing to survive – where one day you can read about Gertrude Stein and Edgar Allen Poe, and the next you can watch Sam Kinison.

Now you know about my tasteless side.

Tags: Sam Kinison, preschooler, tantrums

Photo of Gertrude Stein from Ovation TV.

I was possibly the only seven year old in the world whose mother read Gertrude Stein out loud to her. At the kitchen table Mom would puzzle through the books she checked out of the Wilmington Public Library, boring her reluctant audience of one. It became a joke between us, the dazed child resting her head on the table, lulled into submission by the tediousness of Gertrude Stein. “A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger,” I would tease Mom, and we’d laugh.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when she picked an Edgar Allen Poe story as a Halloween treat for two nine-year-olds. We were living in Newark, Delaware, in a one-bedroom, student family housing apartment. My friend Marie was spending the night and we did the rounds of our complex. Many neighbors didn’t expect trick or treaters, and the ones that did weren’t passing out Hersey bars or KitKats. There were several international families living there and I remember getting strange candies, sweet wafers, little trinkets.

Most people didn’t even open their doors, like the hulking single guy who now lived in my friend Belinda’s old apartment (student family housing?). Belinda had lived there with her mother and younger sister and we had spent most of the previous summer together, organizing skits in the little playground and running around the adjacent field where the University of Delaware marching band held their practices. A long scar traced the length of Belinda’s chest, the mark of two surgeries to correct a congenital heart condition. She had another round of operations scheduled in a couple of years. Though Belinda didn’t seem particularly fragile, I wanted to protect her from harm. When she and her family moved to Michigan in late August, we were both bereft and worried about dealing with new schools on our own.

I wanted to go to her apartment, stare down the guy I blamed for her move, get a little restitution Halloween candy. MaryAnn and I walked up the stairs through the dreary light of humming florescents, up one flight to Belinda's place. The strings of my Cousin It costume kept getting under my feet as they brushed against each stair. The hulk's television was on, blaring some sports event. “Trick or treat!” I yelled, pounding on the hollow metal door. No response. Marie looked at me skeptically through her Wonder Woman mask. “Let’s just go back to your place.”

Poster available from All Posters.

Maybe my mother decided to read “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to help us get over our candy haul doldrums. Perhaps she was hoping for a good, old-fashioned Halloween scare. The story, written in 1841, starts slowly (so slowly that she couldn’t have possibly started at the beginning. Even a nine-year-old raised on Gertrude Stein would have protested), but it sped up when she got to the crime scene. Two women have been brutally murdered. Here is the description of one of the corpses, courtesy of the Poe Museum:

"After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity. "To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."

We didn't get very far through the story before Marie became hysterical. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. Finally, Mom called her parents and they picked up my friend half an hour later.

She never spent the night at my place again.

Tags: Gertude Stein, Halloween, Edgar Allen Poe, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mom, storytelling, Delaware

Photo from Columbia News Service

It wasn’t just one box. It was twenty. Or probably more than that – thirty or forty at least. Her mother was a pack rat and a compulsive shopper. In between this visit and the last she had acquired a juicer, a new microwave, an iPod (did she know how to program the thing?), and a set of wooden spoons from a charity based in Africa, in addition to countless other things that Janine couldn’t identify. Some of the boxes were opened and empty; others sat waiting for the knife, their contents in darkness.

It wasn’t just the boxes. It was the newspapers. The books. The bills. There were piles obscuring the windows. Her mother had beaten down a path back to the rest of the house, like a deer makes a path through the brush and undergrowth, to get to the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom. Could she get to the bedroom? The couch -- the only piece of furniture without boxes and papers on it -- had been made up like a bed, with a soiled set of sheets and a blood-stained pillowcase.

Janine followed the trail back to the bathroom, walking carefully, one foot placed in front of the other because there wasn’t enough room to walk normally. Willow, her mother’s ancient grey tabby, all bones and croaked meows, darted in front of her. Janine didn’t respond in time and her fall triggered an avalanche of boxes, a flurry of papers as her mother watched from the kitchen.

“Find the birth certificate?” her mother asked. Oblivious.

Tags: writing prompt, Janine, flash fiction

Mom-mom, 1934.

My obsession with ghosts started in the sixth grade, though it had its roots in my grandmother’s death two years earlier. We were in the kitchen, putting groceries away when she suddenly clutched at her throat and started gasping for air, frantically motioning to the kitchen chair. I stood there, confused, scared. Finally, I moved the cat, and Mom-mom collapsed into the empty space.

It was up to me to dial 911. We waited 40 minutes for the ambulance to come all the way from Elkton. She was dead or close to it by the time it arrived. Congestive heart failure. In a couple of weeks, my mother, her boyfriend, and I moved in with my grandfather and tried to cope with her absence and our new living situation.

I’m not sure where the Ouija board came from. Maybe it was a Christmas present. I started carrying it around with me, taking it to school, begging my friends to help me contact my grandmother. They went along with it and I believed everything. Mom-mom had a friend named Sam up there in heaven. Everything was all right, and she was watching over me.

My mother took the death chair out of the kitchen, eventually storing it in the attic space over the garage. I was into sleeping in tight spaces, under picnic tables, in tiny tents I set up in the backyard. One night I convinced my best friend to spend the night in the attic with the chair. The space was hot and smelled of cut wood and roofing tar. I kept staring at the empty chair, waiting for my grandmother to appear.

Over the years, through neglect and hard times, I kept on waiting. When, as a teenager, I moved to the Little House adjacent to my grandfather’s place and felt totally alone, I wished for a sign of her presence, a sign that someone was watching over me.

Now I know that such hopes are false.

Tags: grandmother, Death, ouija boards, ghosts, grief, writing prompt

Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster

I had a nickname name for him, a code word really, so that I could write it in my notebooks without fear of discovery. Bertie Wooster. It’s embarrassing, but 100% true: I was a 12-year-old P.G. Wodehouse fan, with a huge crush on my ash-blond, hazel-eyed classmate. Even in high school, after the thrill was gone, after Bertie had metamorphosized into a six-foot tall pothead, after I fell hard for a senior basketball player (another unrequited love), I would blush when we passed in the hall.

Crushes, I’ve had a few. They have ranged from the silly (the hot dog stand guy, summer of 1984) to intense (first husband, early days). These infatuations have been distracting, fun even. Nothing, however, has persisted like my 14-year obsession with Mr. H.

We met at work, my first week at my first real job. Mr. H. was cute and asked a coworker if I was attached. And so the internal churning began. I was attached – soon to be married, actually – but I couldn’t shake the butterflies, the deep blushes, whenever Mr. H would show up in the library. There he’d stand, feet away, hovering over the fax machine (the only one in the office); or he’d actually stop by to (gasp) ask me a question. My heart would race: it races now, as I remember those chance moments. Knowing he spent time in our neighborhood, I would survey the sidewalks evenings and weekends, on the lookout. The soundtrack for that year was a strange mix of Morphine and Holly Cole. Her version of On the Street Where You Live, with its stalkeresque undertones stirred up the ironic obsessive in me.



Today I am a happily married woman. Over the years, the crush has been mainly dormant, with a few volcanic moments. At this point, it’s academic – what meaning does this person hold for me? why do I continue to have those frustrating dreams? – but I am tired of it. And so, today, needing a new writing project to fixate on, I thought: why don’t I write a letter to Mr. H? You know, lay out my feelings in a literary sort of way, show them the harsh light of reality; get them out of my system. Maybe I send it, maybe I don’t. If I don’t, maybe I get it published. Everyone’s into reading about other peoples’ sick love obsessions! I can take this useless, ridiculous feeling and parlay it into art.

Yeah. I’ve been working on it for much of the morning, and I find that the writing process doesn’t purge the feelings: it makes them more intense.

My crush has morphed into a middle-aged thing, a yearning for escape from quotidian existence. I am ensconced in my (relatively) safe life, a housewife wannabe writer, parent to one tiring preschooler. Not much excitement here, though things are quite comfortable and loving at home. Maybe I need to take up bungee jumping or fencing, something to liven up the system.

So: Jennifer, let sleeping crushes lie. Oh, and Mr. H, if you are reading this (do you read this blog? I doubt it.), write me back, OK?

Only joking.

Tags: crushes, Columbus, school, Morphine, dreams, Bertie Wooster, Holly cole, P.G. Wodehouse

Fall, 1978, Newark, Delaware: Desegregation of the Wilmington city schools! Teachers’ strikes! Afternoons spent at the Deadhead-run Malt Shoppe on Main Street! I read books and ate toasted onion bagels with butter, while I waited for my mother (emphatically not a Deadhead) to finish her shift at the Shoppe. It was a little slice of the sixties in the late seventies, but Delaware has always been a little slow on the uptake.


Elk River, Winter of 1977-78

The year before, my mother had decided to go back to college. In order to save money, she moved in with Jim, her future former husband, while I went to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. It was a year scented by cigarette smoke and coffee fumes. Mornings were my favorite time of day, sitting in the warm kitchen, a tray of food prepared for me by my grandmother, usually Eggo waffles dabbed with Parkay squeezable margarine and dripping with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, cartoon-character shot glass of orange juice on the side. That winter the snow kept coming. It piled up and formed five-foot drifts in the driveway, places to dig out forts and make snowmen. Snuggling in my grandmother’s bed as we listened to the radio school closing announcements became an almost-regular ritual.

Mom scored a one-bedroom apartment in student family housing in the summer of ’78 and I moved back in with her. She took the couch in the living room while I slept on a full-size mattress on the floor in the bedroom, a wooden orange crate for a bedside table topped with a flowery ceramic lamp, a clock radio, and an “I Love You This Much” figurine -- a robed, potbellied man, arms outstretched – that she had given to me in first grade.

1978-79 was the first year of court-mandated school desegregation for the Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly white, middle class community at the time, to an elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It was the fourth school I had attended since kindergarten.

The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.

After lunch, students were herded over crumbling asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of black history covered the exterior walls. At night the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit (worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become accustomed to choosing my clothes.

The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike from mid-October through most of November. Much of that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a day or two; I read a lot of books from the small children’s section at the University of Delaware library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre, images of children lying on the ground beside their parents, as still and peaceful as if they were asleep.


April 1979

By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch over my grandfather.

Our grand experiment was over.

Tags: grandfather, Delaware, grandmother, Muppets, Kermit the frog, step-father, school, desegregation, Mom

Tuesday’s prompt, tidied up a bit. Although the people depicted here are real, the event is fictitious. The tone reminds me of the Eavesdrop Writer Blog, a site definitely worth checking out.

The Metro is packed. The threatened end-of-day thunderstorms have arrived and I am jammed in with other hangdog federal workers, soaked tourists, and a crowd of high school students all wearing identical Smithsonian raincoats. I stare at a man’s hairy hand, thick gold ring on his index finger, as I hang on to the pole by the doors. We breathe in the heavy air, faint with adolescent sweat.


Picture from The Janus Museum.

As the warning chime rings and a disembodied voice tells us “Doors closing,” she walks in. I see her almost every day at Union Station sitting by the Christopher Columbus fountain behind a phalanx of plastic bags. “Got any money to spare today, baby?” she’ll ask. Before I encountered her there, she once sat next to me on the Metro, in one of those seats half hidden behind plexiglass at the back of the car.

She’s hard to forget, this middle-aged African American woman, probably homeless, maybe a little crazy. Every morning she gets up and puts make-up on her face, stripes of beige and dark tan, giving herself the face of a bland tiger. Her eyes are always hidden behind sunglasses. Today she wears a threadbare, stained trench coat, tan, stylishly cinched at the waist.

Commuters flatten themselves against daytrippers as the tiger woman forces her way into the car, except for man beside me. “Hey, you: watch it!” he yells. She ignores him, the doors close, and we’re on our way. Next stop, Judiciary Square.

Tags: writing prompt, DC

Will I sound like a mealy-mouthed fool?

It’s started – 10 weeks of writing prompts, writing every day for 10 –12 minutes. No edits or changes, just send the piece to that week’s partner and give them feedback on their piece. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Well, I know I can write, given unlimited amounts of time to tinker and touch-up. I’m accustomed to taking my time, going back and changing things, moving words around.

What am I afraid of? Making a mistake? Sounding like an idiot? Actually, though my nerves tingle and twang as I look at each day’s prompt, there is something about it that is freeing. Just go with the words. Letting things go has always been difficult for me.

I attribute this in part to years of dinner table discussions with Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. Anything you said could reveal your intellectual and moral vacuity; flabby thinking was the sign of a rotten psyche. He was good at it, could sniff out half-baked statements, then deflate them with a quick rational jab. How could I challenge what was true when truth was a moral issue and the challenge itself a sign of my moral bereftness? My mother trapped herself for 18 years in these conversations. Over time her tiny reserve of self-confidence depleted.

As I sat in the Writing Salon this Sunday, for one of two class meetings (the rest is online), I watched the instructor. Thin, petite, probably somewhere in her fifties, with dark shortish hair, she could be my mother (I’m finding a lot of women in their fifties who look like they could be my mother; it won’t be that long before I could be her, too).

My mother is full of creative energy. She writes incredible poetry, designs jewelry made from glass and metal she finds on the streets of Baltimore, and has made some beautiful pieces of pottery. Her garden is amazing. She reads and ponders, is an excellent conversationalist, funny and erudite. She has spent most of her career being a copywriter, first for advertising companies and later for two universities. But she has never had the fundamental level of confidence to take on things in her life completely.

Mom, August 2008.

“You’re secretary material,” my grandmother used to tell her with more than a hint of contempt, trying to subdue Mom’s thoughts of going to college. Perhaps no one was surprised when she got pregnant and dropped out to become … a secretary, though she later went back and got a degree in English and Anthropology. Her family refused to see her intelligence, her need to be intellectually engaged.

So here I end up, writing about writing, and it morphs into writing abut my mother. This post took 12 minutes to create, though I can’t bear to let it go through raw: there will be some edits. Over the coming weeks I’ll put class work out here, polished or not, though I’m probably not going to post the bad stuff. Or maybe I will. That could be freeing, too.

In the meantime, I’ll remind my mother of her talents. She reads my stories, tells me I have a way with words. “It must be those Irish genes,” she says, alluding to my father’s side. The last time she said that, I came back with “Or my Polish?/German?/Swiss? genes!” (all theories of nationalities, since she is adopted.) We both laughed – doesn’t that mean I should be making watches or kielbasa or something? – but she knew what I meant. She’s got talent.

Tags: Mom, writing, self-confidence

Nick Cave in The Birthday Party days.

Ten years ago I read an article about ballet dancers. All I remember about it now is this sobering fact: most of them end their stage careers by the age of 30 (a 2007 New York Times article puts the average at more like 35). After a handful of years of twisting this way and that, leaping, bending and living under tight calorie restrictions, the dancer’s body is just worn out. “Another possible career bites the dust,” I thought to myself, but that was the extent of my worries about my thirties.

Today I turn 39 and I find that I am worried about the years ahead. And I feel totally ridiculous about it.

So, reassure me, people! Please?

Tags: birthdays, The Birthday Party

Image courtesy of In Praise of Sardines

Last year this night bled into Sunday afternoon. Following a trail of crushed blackberries, I traced the stains with my fingers and watched as we went from mud to cracked glass to bruise. Late night notes, an errant bike ride, “drama at Inspiration Point.”

In a year, total turnaround, but, as always, I focus on dates.

Tonight’s bad mood explained.

Tags: forgiveness

What could life be like after recovery from hardcore drug addiction?

Today Melinda Roberts Tyler is a successful and award-winning professor of psychology, happily married to her soulmate, full of warmth and gratitude for life. Over fifteen years ago, however, she was a heroin and cocaine addict living on the streets of San Francisco, at rock bottom with very little will to live.

Melindaville chronicles her journey from hardcore addict to honors student and professor. It is a fascinating, though often harrowing, story. After moving to San Francisco to pursue an acting career in the early 1980s, Melinda gets involved in the burgeoning punk scene and performs as part of the band Wild Women of Borneo. Along the way she becomes an exotic dancer and high-priced call girl, as well as demonstrates an entrepreneurial spirit by starting “the world’s first fantasy phone service,” Julie’s Hotline. As her dependency on drugs intensifies, her life begins to fall apart. It takes twelve years of addiction before she begins to put it back together again.

The blog contains excerpts from her memoir in progress (working title: Lost and Found: A Journey) as well as consciousness-raising posts on the nature of addiction as a health, not moral, issue, with underlying causes and more sophisticated solutions than “just say no.”

Melinda’s ultimate goal is to use the proceeds of her eventual book sales to fund a foundation for sex workers. Drug addiction and the sex industry are intertwined. Many sex workers choose that path after suffering childhoods of abuse. Maybe they start working in the business to support an existing habit or begin using just to get through the workday. Drugs like heroin or cocaine provide compelling comfort in a small package, a way to numb the pain of the past and present.

Melinda plans to fund treatment and higher education for these men and women who are so often invisible and voiceless. I can think of no better champion.

Tags: blog of the month

I had a reputation for being melodramatic.

Take the case of Happy.

Happy (short for Happy Easter) was a golden hamster my grandmother gave to me for Easter 1976. He came complete with a Habitrail, one of those cages with a main unit attached to smaller annexes via clear tubes. It was just like a wild hamster warren except translucent, plastic, and above ground. Watching Happy scurry through the tubes, from wheel to main cage to tiny den was amusing. He impressed me with his ability to get through tiny spaces. I would scoop him out of the cage and cup my hands around him, leaving an opening that got smaller and smaller over time. Happy was always able to make it through.

One winter morning, hamster feed in hand, I opened the Habitrail and discovered it empty. All of that time spent squeezing through my fingers had been training for Happy’s escape. His disappearance was upsetting, but even more devastating was the discovery a few days later of his tiny corpse in the basement. It was stiffened with rigor mortis, hamster toes stuck in a permanent curl. Happy’s last meal had been rat poison.

By the age of seven, I had lived through a few pet deaths, all of the feline variety. Sheba had been hit by a car, Amber was anemic, and Regis bothered his neutering stitches until infection creeped in. Each death brought tears, but with Happy it was different. For many months after the hamster’s untimely death, I rode a wave of grief. On long rides to my grandparents’ or on the walk to school, the loss would hit me.

Dinnertime was the toughest, with all that time to think under the monotony of adult conversation. My mother, her someday husband Jim and I would be sitting at the white picnic table in the kitchen and I would feel a pang. The spinach soufflé would grow cold on my fork as I stared past Mom and out the window into the backyard. Happy was buried back there, his corpse stuffed for one final time into a toilet paper tube. I imagined him in better days, pushing his way through my open-toed shoes, doing endless laps on the wheel, escaping from my fingers. I couldn’t contain my sigh, the big exhale of emotion.

“Do you know what I’m thinking about now?” Long silence, then another sigh, “I’m thinking about Happy.”

These words of grief, repeated many times over that year, were not taken seriously.

By age eleven I was ready to try rodent stewardship again, this time with a gerbil. Perhaps it is a sign of Happy’s hold on my heart that I no longer remember the gerbil’s name. He (or she) was also cut down in the prime of life, a victim of illness. He had been listless all day, sitting in a corner of his cage, not touching his food. The gerbil refused to open his mouth whenever I presented an eyedropper full of restorative honey water. I hovered over the sickbed into evening. As night came, a summer storm rolled in. The sky flashed with lightning and my gerbil took his final breaths in an echo of thunder. After it was over, I reached out and stroked his still-warm body with an index finger. And then – an indication of my future impulses? – I immediately wrote my version of the night’s events: “Death of a Gerbil.”

My mother and Jim teased me for what they interpreted as my overemotional response to almost everything. Jim also thought I was too serious and would describe the child me as being like a 42-year-old woman (as I approach the last year of my 30s, his description makes even less sense). The labels were applied with a grain of contemptuous truth to everything from my asthmatic coughing fits that led to vomiting as well as my often-expressed desire in sixth-grade to kill myself.

Over the years I’ve learned how to regulate my external emotional responses, but I still have a flair for the melodramatic that usually comes out in my writing. For example, I started this post with some ideas about the loop of deep self-doubt that occasionally runs through my mind. The initial paragraph read very differently:

I am afraid to see a psychic, for what she may tell me about what she sees in my soul. Will she feel the energy, the darkness that is eating me from within? One look in my eyes, a quick riffling through my internal dialog, and the extent of the rottenness at my core will be clear. She’ll have to make something up, be polite, get me out of there.

This is grown-up melodrama. Like my grief for Happy, when these feelings hit, they are genuine. I acknowledge that there are times when I feel rotten and hollow. This doesn’t mean I am rotten and hollow – my feelings are not objective reality, but to deny them and their origins would be denying part of myself, part of my internal life.

I fight these moments of darkness. But I am convinced they are part of being human and will never fully go away. We don’t want to acknowledge feelings of deep inadequacy, so most of us go around trying to pep-talk ourselves into feeling better. We don’t want to face the beast within.

The good in us, the light, is powerful. It can lift us above the void. But if you feel pangs of self-doubt, why not acknowledge the reality of the feeling, trace it as far back as you can, and move on? Don’t underestimate your ability to confront the beast.

The darkness within doesn’t define us. We are far more complex than that.

For readers who are now thinking of the Nick Lowe song, here it is, as sung live by Johnny Cash, a man whose life was defined in some part by his attempts to push through the darkness. Next post: blog of the month.

Tags: Pets, existential angst