Sitting in a cold doctor's office on a sunny morning, looking at my Moleskine, discovering old writing ideas that I will never use. Please steal them. Give them life. Some of them have been trapped in my little notepad for years.

First the concepts

angel-in-residence

ritual explosives

liquidity of memory

drum-tight heart

Then fill in the gaps

Message on our answering machine, 2003: Giovanni's got a package for you.

Conversation on a dry, dusty day at Children's Fairyland:
Father, very angry, to toddler: You got my shoes dirty right after I cleaned them!
Grandmother, placating: You know how funny he is about his shoes.

Finally, the Moleskine

Good luck reading my writing. I can barely decipher it myself. And I've been drawing the same doodles since I was twelve.

This post is written in homage to koe whitton-williams of the half-life of lineoluem and if the walls could talk. I've chosen to go almost all lower-case in this paragraph, but I could be wrong. I'm working without a stylebook.

Next post: a return to narrative.



Images above: Me, waiting, waiting, for the doctor or, err, the nurse-practitioner
Images below: What I wrote in my notebook while I was waiting

That's me up there, in our office/guest room/exercise space, dressed in full stay-at-home mom regalia. Baggy cropped pants? Check. Shapeless long-sleeved t-shirt? Check. Hair in desperate need of a cut or at the very least a comb? Oh, yeah. And then of course, there is the room itself, the armoire mirror obscured by smudges, the partially-made bed, the pillow propped on my desk chair so that I don't get a backache when I write, the old boxes in the corner that my mother puts in the back windows at night during her visits to block out the neighbor's porch light (she likes to sleep in near darkness). Welcome to my glamorous world.

I don't tend to get dressed up during the week (or ever), because what's the point? Most mornings I sit around writing or letting my mind go in four or five dark directions, and afternoons are kid time. I'm not going to put on my fancy spandex pants to go to the library. Over the years I’ve worn many short and form-fitting outfits, but since my son was born I've apparently given up on looking good. It isn't worth the bother or the expense, and who am I trying to impress? My husband finds even frumpy-mom me attractive and I have no female coworkers to dazzle. The game of dress-up, of wrapping myself in appealing fabrics and styles, is no longer familiar.

But feeling frumpy is depressing, so I'm starting to think about what I wear, to attempt to dress like I'm still in the game, like I haven't given up completely on feeling attractive. It takes work, sometimes it isn't worth it, but I make the effort. I've started to go shopping for clothes in person again, not online or at outlet stores, but in resale shops, places like the Crossroads Trading Company, where I might find funky, offbeat duds on the cheap, where I'm likely to find interesting options in small sizes.

This is where I found the sweater dress.

The dress was short, slate blue and formfitting, with a princess waist and a cozy turtleneck collar. It went well with a pair of knee-high black leather boots that I bought at the same store. When will I wear this thing? I thought, but clothes shopping often puts me in fantasy mode, a sunny place where I shower seven days a week and get my hair cut four times a year, where I remember to brush my teeth hours before I pick up the kid from preschool, where I decide to put on cute dresses every day instead of baggy pants. The dress was under twenty bucks, so I went for it. I made an investment in fantasy. My husband and I were planning a nice dinner at Oliveto to mark the completion of his dissertation, so I had an occasion.

On the evening of our dinner, I laid next to the boy as usual, waiting for him to fall asleep, for his breathing to become even and light before I tiptoed out of his room to change. Boy asleep, dress safely on, I applied the tiniest bit of makeup and pulled my hair back. As I creaked down the steps, my husband was talking in the living room with our babysitter. She is freshly twenty-one, effortless with both adults and children, and as I came closer I realized that I was wearing a dress, that I was wearing the dress. It was as though I had just put on a buttless formfitting leather jumpsuit. I felt exposed, like I was pretending to be something I wasn't, a young person, a stylish person, non-maternal.

I had brought a coat with me downstairs and I whipped it on before the babysitter could see me, then ran behind the magazine rack to put on my boots. Indecency covered, I fluttered out the door with my husband before she could notice that I was dressed as an imposter, that I was attempting to play the part of an attractive, stylish woman. And in the cold restaurant, I kept my coat wrapped around my shoulders, covered my cheap disguise.

Did the blame for my discomfort lie within me or was it the dress? Was I over-thinking the whole thing? (Remember how neurotic I can be?) The dress had one more chance to prove herself. We had a cocktail party to attend.

The party took place in a typical Berkeley house, a small two-bed, one bath, and it was hopping by the time we arrived at 8:30. It was my kind of crowd, mainly parents that had escaped their kids for the night, a mix of thirty- and forty-somethings. The women were brightly plumed, showing off cleavage and shoulders, wearing dresses in thin colorful fabrics. The room was a tangle of bare legs, and men in dark colors, of manicured toes peeking out of exotic shoes. I felt positively demure in my turtleneck sweater dress with black tights and scuffed black boots. The princess waist seemed too youthful, like I should have had an oversized lollipop in my hand instead of a beer. And it was hot in there, so steamy that a bloom of sweat broke out on my wooled-over torso. I could have removed my boots and taken off my tights, could have swung the tights seductively around my head, grazed the faces of the other partygoers before tossing the hosiery out of an open window. But instead I pulled on my turtleneck, looked enviously at the bared collarbones around me.

Apparently clothes are all about context.

I haven't given up on my sweater dress or on regaining my fashion mojo. But I might need to start fresh, to begin with the foundation garments. Next week I will jettison my vintage underwear collection for a more contemporary look.

You won't be reading about it here.



First image: Me, in the office, this morning. The frump-quotient has gone up since then. I got cold and put on a fuzzy sweater and socks.

Second image: Sweater dress.

What is it about my son’s illnesses that plunge my life into despair, knock me into a pit for the duration? Four days at home with a sick four-year-old, four nights of not-enough sleep, his body sandwiched between my husband and me in the middle of the night, exuding heat, the constant bark of his cough punctuating my waking dreams.

“Just spit it out, cough it up and spit it out,” we told him Wednesday night as he hovered over the sink. His coughs have been from the center of his body, deep and hoarse. He let loose a fishing line of spit, coughed again, and threw up into the basin. It was very matter-of-fact, but he was concerned. "Will I need to go to the doctor now?" he asked. "That's not the bad kind of throw-up, is it?"

“I used to cough until I threw up when I was a kid, too,” I told him as I rubbed his back. “It happened to me all the time.” It did. I had a bum pair of lungs and was prone to bronchitis and middle-of-the-night asthma attacks. It didn’t help that my mother and I lived in a series of mildew pits, that I slept hemmed in by cats drawn by my little girl warmth. I was allergic to both mildew and cats and probably the cigarette smoke that twisted through my grandparent’s place. Used tissues would pile around me like snow drifts. I had a lot of “melodramatic” coughing fits.

The doctor said the asthma was nervousness or hysteria or some such nonsense. I remember turning it over in my mind, that these terrifying attacks, the desperate quivering of my lungs for breath as I sat up in the dark, were emotional. They were my fault, or maybe my mother's, for being a single Mom, for being a bit of a hysteric herself.

The unfortunate thing about running on fumes, about being stuck to the side of a sick boy for four days – I have no perspective. I wish I could tell you of the helpful doctor who helped me manage my asthma, who held out her hand for mine. There was no helpful doctor, though I did at least get an inhaler.

The truth is, I've never wanted to be helped, except maybe in my secret inner heart, and if you don’t want to be helped people generally don’t help you. Maybe it’s safer this way, but it’s also a drag, and when you’re in a funk it only drags you down further.

But give me two days of sunshine and maybe a week of health for the boy and the rest of us and I will leave the funk behind. I promise you that everything will be different, that I will smile back at strangers, will embrace friends and acquaintances. After the long gray winter, spring will come again and I will be filled with warmth and perhaps something resembling happiness. Or contentment. I'd settle for contentment, the absence of grayness.



Image: Kid in between colds, disguised as a mummy.
Prompt: Write about a time someone helped you

About a month ago, Haloscan, the company that provided the commenting interface for this blog, went under and I switched to something call ECHO by JS-Kit.

It isn't working very well. Some people have been unable to comment, either because the commenting box doesn't show up or because they are told that their comments are too long (even though they aren't). Sometimes the comments don't load for a long time, which slows the loading time of the blog.

Unfortunately, the blogging software I use is only compatible with ECHO, but I am actively looking for other platforms that might work. In the meantime, if you would like to comment but can't or have been having problems, please let me know at writingtosurvive(at)gmail.com or fill out my contact me form. I apologize for the hassle and hope that I can come up with a solution quickly, or that the folks at JS-Kit can help.

Image: My mother and me on a non-windy day in December at the Berkeley Marina.

My husband and I have always thought this was a funny picture of him, very 70s, very huh? When I posted it on Facebook, where the photo on the screen was larger than the original Polaroid, I finally really looked at the lion. Here was this a wild animal lying on his side like an overgrown house cat, napping while a seven-year-old boy straddled him. This was not a full leonine life. Even lions in zoos get to pretend they are wild occasionally, get to roar and faux-stalk the sunscreen-scented tourists.

Then the comments for the picture started coming in. They were variations on worry, about putting one's child on an actual living lion, no matter how moribund and perhaps drugged (and most likely toothless) the big cat was, with a chilling mention of Dave Egger's novel What is the What: An Autobiography of Valentino Achek Deng. Deng was one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, one of countless children separated from their families or even orphaned, "beset by starvation, thirst, and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia" (Publisher's Weekly review as quoted on amazon.com).

In a few hours, the picture had totally changed for me.

But I still feel bad for the lion.



For the k.d. lang version of What's New, Pussycat?, click here.

Image: Mr. T at Magic Mountain, 25 February 1973.