I promise that, after two days of sunshine, I will smile
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
Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want a
cylindrical room made of factory glass, the door a
piece of carved mahogany salvaged from the She-Wolf,
Lord's old boat, the one that is sitting on a trailer
in the backyard, the hitch supported by a stack of
cinderblocks. Against the cool glass, set into block,
the mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch. I
will rub my hand against it before I enter the room,
think of the times we went waterskiing or just bobbed
around in the muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass
spreading a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord wasn’t
paying attention to it. He let it sit in the water
all winter long. The varnish wore off, the gleam
melted away. Every year he bought cans of teak oil,
stacked them in the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles
coated the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against
my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against the
boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white
light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of factory
glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I will go inside,
lock the door, and remove my clothes. I will press
myself up against the glass. See if you can tell me
what you are looking at, my blurry image refracted in
each square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff it
out on the rounded wall, again and again. You will
see flesh, the death of ember, the end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though not in the
way you would expect. It had nothing to do with
water. It was emotion. The dike broke, his water
wings deflated, a big hole opened in his roof and the
house filled with rain. You want me to tell you about
it, to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his boat
and my plan. Every weekend I sand down the mahogany,
try to remove the stains, think about my cylindrical
factory glass room. I picture Lord on the other side,
horn-rims slipping off his nose, one hand marking his
place in the book. I mystify him and he likes that.
Image
by Vinje.
![]()
The slog and drag of the humdrum

Here are the things I don't write
about here:
My son's colds and coughs
Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand
that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three
cats, a dog, and three humans
The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I
may mention this in passing, but not in great detail,
since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it
is indeed laborious, like work-on-the
same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours
laborious)
The difficulty of writing something that is
long-term, of continuing through it without the
instant feedback of blogging
Cooking dinner whether I want to or not
How we're
figuring out where the kid will go to school for
kindergarten in the fall
Tips and tricks for keeping one's
sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with
an energetic four-year-old
Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr.
T's business trips
My political views
Natural disasters
The pros and cons of having another child
The perhaps impossibility of having another child
My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the
wisdom of my current career choice
RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of
the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the
blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to
really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for
this space. I'm not sure that many people want to
read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers
are interested in my personal pieces, either angst
from the past or my depressive musings on current
life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness,
exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the
average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue
sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the
whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer
Trinkle sort of way.
It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is
working on something. I just need a few hours with a
keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the
time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just
feels like the right thing to do right now, a
necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify
my existence.
So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the
moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and
offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may
be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps
reposting some of the oldies but
goodies.
We'll see.
Image: Everyday me, as recorded
by my computer.
![]()
Catch up and a writing prompt
So I barely dropped an Entrecard, didn't even go downstairs for two days, just sat in bed, didn't eat, and spend a lot of cuddling time with my son while my wonderful (and healthy!) husband took care of us and everything else.
But that's not why I'm posting. My writing class has started up again. Back to the daily prompts, thank goodness, which provides a break from harrowing memoir, gives me something else to post. Today's selection is White. The prompt is first draft, untouched, warts and all. It seemed like an especially appropriate choice for this blog, which operates in shades of grey and distrusts attempts to whitewash the past. And for another blogger's approach on colors as prompts, check out the most recent stuff at Yoga For Cynics. He's always worth a visit, no matter the topic.
White
Can you think of anything more
bland? White bread, white rice, white collar.
Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment,
of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of
purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in
her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the
petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s
a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the
background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa.
Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words
or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s
sully the white.
Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.
White is too much pressure. Don’t
you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The
white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and
go back into the closet at the conclusion of the
summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes
I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s
fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet
into submission. How long were they white? By the
time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey.
They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my
heel and toes.
“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we
really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white
shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white
things, can see how writing about something muddies
the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained
with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons
of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.
I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets,
the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden
world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is
afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I
say show it to the world, let go of your lily white
fantasies.
They are totally unrealistic.
The wonderful, the not so good, and the unknown
Then, the unknown: my father found this blog. This is not a shocking development, since there is at least one link out there with my full name that points to writing to survive. What does it mean? I don’t know. I hope it means an open line of communication. And that’s all I’ll be saying about it here. Some things are meant to be – yes – private.
Finally, happily, the wonderful: two fine bloggers gave awards to writing to survive in the past week.

John of Storied Mind passed along the Brilliant Blog
Award, which is quite an honor from someone who I
think has a brilliant blog! The premise behind
Storied Mind is that writing and creating stories
about one’s experience with depression can help
break through its deadening effects.
Storied Mind also aims to create a community,
a place where people can gather and discuss their
experiences with depression. All of this is
beautifully done, with thought-provoking posts
that dive deep into the experience of mood-related
disorders and what may work to reach clarity.
Thank you, John. I am truly honored.

Kimmy of The Eagle The Lion and The
Dove passed another award my way, the
I Love Your Blog award. Kimmy’s blog is all about
focusing on the light in darkness, seeking the
beauty in the world and ourselves, knowing that
none of us is perfect. It’s a great dose of daily
inspiration. Thank you, Kimmy – I’m so happy we
found each other via Entrecard!
As a way to share the love and highlight some
outstanding blogs that are part of my daily reading,
I am planning to have monthly reviews, with a feature
on my sidebar linking to the Blog of the Month. Stay
tuned for the October selection.
A talisman against loss
Some children sleep though high fevers, resting up as their bodies fight off the germs. Not our little one. The heat disturbs his sleep. For several nights he woke up in the 2 - 3 a.m. time slot, asking "Is it wake-up time?" Well, no, but we didn't have much say in the matter. Time for a drink of water, maybe for another dose of Motrin, and then we'd settle in for cuddling and long attempts at getting back to sleep. Two hours later, once he was out, I would be able to sleep myself.
The combination of being sick and not getting enough sleep put me in a strange frame of mind. Everything seemed fraught with premature nostalgia. The Duplo block set he got for his birthday, with a castle and the toy knights? A relic of a childhood soon to be over, the toys destined to languish in an attic. The recent photographs of our growing boy? Documentation of a time we won't be be able to remember a year from now. My cuddly 3-year-old will change into a different person, perhaps several times over, and each stage will be as fuzzy in my mind as his first weeks of life. It cut, this realization of the slipperiness of time and memory.
Along with an ache for what has not yet passed, I started to see danger in almost every moment, as though I was preparing myself for an inevitable loss. The bee I saw crawling on our grass -- would it deliver a fatal sting to my son, sink its poison into his chubby bare foot? (Never mind that we have no idea if he is allergic. It is a genetic possiblity). Would this be the dog walk where I would lose my balance and fall backwards, landing on my son, strapped to my back in an Ergo carrier? (Oh, for those days when he insisted on wearing his bike helmet at all times!)
And what about me? Was I paying enough attention to the dangers that I faced? Is the morning coming when, groggy and uncaffeinated, I will accidentally dip my low-hanging robe sleeve into the burner flame, stare in shock as the sleeve is consumed? Would I finally miss that step and go tumbling into a crumpled heap of bone and flesh on the floor below?
Maybe if I tried to keep the dangers in mind, tried to remind myself that what we love can be taken away, that no moment is innocent, I would have a mental talisman against loss.
That was a few days ago. Sleep is improving and my outlook is returning to normal. Neurotic worrying is not what protects us from danger. I am lucky to live in an incredibly safe part of the world, with access to clean water, plentiful food, and good medical care. I don't have to dodge bombs or gunfire. I don't need a talisman.
But I am going to watch my step when I go down the stairs.
Buzzer beater
(Begin boring complaint)
First, C got sick. Then H developed the same cold. When C gets sick, he sleeps like the baby he once was: poorly. Also violently, with lots of tosses and turns and kicks. When H gets sick, he snores more. My cold symptoms started on Tuesday, the same day C developed pink eye, guaranteeing that daycare was a no-go for Wednesday. Babysitter doesn't want pink eye either. Finally, after the first night of good sleep in five nights, yesterday C decided to skip a nap. I have pink eye for the first time since third grade. And I've spent most of his nap time today cleaning up in preparation for the babysitter (at least his pink eye went away).
(End of boring complaint)
Now he is awake. 'Later.
Throw it away
Or write up my petty complaints on my blog? Bingo.
Right now I feel like a frustrated housewife who has this little writing pipe dream. I wish I had more energy at night to write with conviction. If only the kid went to sleep before 9:30. If only he went to sleep unassisted. If only I'd started writing a decade ago, when time spread out before me and my brain was just a wee bit larger.
I know I'm lucky to have this life, to have a little time. It's just enough time to waste.
And now he wakes ...
experiment
the kid is asleep on my lap. the husband is asleep by my side. the visiting brother-in-law is coughing downstairs.
and I can't reach my cup of coffee.





