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.

Tags: feeling frumpy, sweater dresses, aging, feeling forty, imposters, mommy-frump, stay-at-home mom blues

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

Tags: sick kid, writing prompt, Round Robin, asthma, complain, complain, complain, never-ending winter, spring, endless days of rain bring me down, winter of many illnesses

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.

Tags: JS-Kit, Halocan, rapidweaver, rapidweaver commenting problems, Comments, Echo, technical glitches

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.

Tags: drugged lion, boy sitting on lion, Magic Mountain in the 1970s

George "Knobby" Michael?

You can try to get to this blog directly by searching on just my first and last names, but Google won't send you here. Despite the fact that writing to survive is mine and I have the metadata to prove it, most people who are looking for Jennifer Trinkle arrive by way of my guest post at La Belette Rouge or via PublicLiterature.Org. At least Bing puts writing to survive on the first page of results when you search for my name. But the blog itself doesn't have enough Internet power or back links or whatever it takes to convince most search engines that it's mine.

Some people who end up here via Google or Yahoo are looking for information on myelofibrosis. Although I did write a post about Kevin's death from the disease, I want you to know that his ending was dramatic. Atypical. He lived almost ten years after his diagnosis, which is also very unusual for someone who was diagnosed relatively young. Kevin was waiting for a stem cell transplant when things fell apart, which may have saved him, but might have hastened his death, too, if it hadn't been too late anyway. Every time someone lands here looking for information on the disease I feel guilty, since the ending of his story was so idiosyncratic and terrible. It's not like this for everyone. It isn't, really. There's hope.

But at least these searches make some sense, are tied to a particular name or a disease that I discuss in a bit of detail. And the searches for writing prompts or writing to survive have led people to the right place, though I think that the person searching for writing prompt using a toaster really needs to visit one of koe's blogs. Based on the keywords, however, a lot of you who end up here through an Internet search leave disappointed. Writing to survive is a friendly place. I want to answer your questions, want to give you what you seek, so once again, I will attempt to provide clarity, to transmit information.

Yes, this is not a squirrel blog.

Perhaps you were looking for birching stories, or variations on the theme (victorian birching stories, birch corporal punishment, bad boys birching stories). Or you were looking for information -- or something else -- about drunken teenage hookups. One person arrived by searching on the domain name submissivelouise.com. There are no birching stories here, though I did once mention a neighbor's birch tree, and while I took part in more than one drunken teenage hookup back when I was a drunken teenager, I don't tend to write about such things, at least not in the way you might hope. As for submissive Louise, I wrote a brief post about a dog with that name who was not the dominant type.

Some searches are from people looking for answers to matter-of-fact questions: Why is George Michael's nickname Knobby? (Beats me.) Can stork bites spread? (Not the birthmark variety.) How do puffins survive in the cold? (Sweaters and booties.) Can one survive on writing? (Not alone.)

Other queries get me wondering: How did Duran Duran's John Taylor cut his foot in 1984? Was he badly hurt? Was the search on an interesting story about me is i was 8 i was trapped inside of a burning building. it was about 2:00 a.m. when my father smelled smoke in the kitchen a misplaced copy and paste or was this person hoping that someone else in the Interlands had written about his or her private life story? Who "gestures and halts and falls"?

Footsie, neighbor?

I can tell you the good and bad about xylitol. Bad: it can kill your dog, though our dog survived her small exposure. Good: it is low in calories and oh so sweet. Will it make your gerbil listless and cold? Perhaps. But I don't know a thing about xylitol squirrels and this is definitely not a squirrel blog (Or a blog about autodidacticism).

Google leads you here, seekers of information. You are hungry for stories, for hard facts, for the light of knowledge. But once you get here, do you stay? Do you note the address and come back and visit from time to time? Not necessarily. I need better keywords, need to provide the right breadcrumb trail. I need better search engine optimization.

I need clarity.



Confidential to I'm in love with a childhood friend: Most of us have all been through it. Examine your feelings and figure out what's really going on. If it is really love, fess up and get it over with. Good things may happen. Maybe you can become footsie neighbors, or at the very least, you can move on with your life.

Squirrel image from here.

Foot image from here.

Tags: Fred, Jennifer Trinkle, stork bites, puffins, Google, search engines, search strategies, SEO, search engine optimization, the half-life of linoleum, xylitol and dogs, Squirrels, 80s music, keywords, myelofibrosis, La Belette Rouge, Bing