I'm not back yet
But I will be next month.
My mother's visit, followed by the kid's
illness, my trip away at the end of this
week, and the beginning of the school year
are conspiring to keep me from blogging.
Thank you for all your kind words on Zoe and
writing, and see you in September!
Images: Top, the Golden Gate bridge from the Marin Headlands. Bottom, trying out some doors at Battery Mendell in the Headlands, where they apparently paint to match the ocean.
Welcome to New Jersey, where the Santas stare all night
The kid at Belvedere Castle
in Central Park on a chilly (but not rainy)
Wednesday.
Santas in the pantry at my
father and stepmother's house, watching me as
I hopped onto a neighbor's wireless
connection at 3:00 in the morning (Eastern
time) on Friday.
Me and the kid at the
long-term parking at SFO, 10:00 a.m. (Pacific
time) on Friday. The kid stayed awake through
the entire flight, even after being up since
essentially the middle of the night, even
though he was also sick. As we reached our
stop on the parking shuttle, his eyelids
finally started to flutter and I staggered
off with him flopped in my arms.
More words on Monday.
Twenty-four hour party person
With the change, I also implemented a new commenting system, Disqus, in the hopes that some of the issues readers were having with the other system would go away. Unfortunately, it appeared as though the comments I imported into the system were not linking to my posts. I was also not thrilled with the location of the completed comments, which appeared down at the bottom of the page. So I've switched back to JS-Kit Echo, except that as of Monday night all of my old comments were floating around in cyberspace, unattached to the posts that prompted them. I apologize if one of your comments is out there, either from the brief reign of Disqus or the somewhat spotty ongoing commentship of JS-Kit Echo.
Everything else has changed, too though the language has stayed the same for the most part. Take a look around and leave a comment or email me to let me know if something works or doesn't work for you. You might also learn something new about me, discover another reason why I'm here.
So here you go. I hope you like it. I'm sure I'll be tweaking things over the coming weeks.
Image: Big Skully as angel, December 2009.
Edited 22 March to reflect change in commenting interface and to add all sorts of other stuff, too.
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.