No Place to Hide

Dream

2009-10-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

In response to a friend telling me about the death of another friend's mother...

A year ago I would have read about Julie's loss and sort of nodded in a
"yeah, that's too bad," kind of way. But my own Dad died 6 months ago,
young too, 78, of cancer and since then I'm fairly speechless when I hear news like this.

The rug that was pulled out from under me hasn't been replaced
with any sage thoughts on the matter. It's just plain old sad is what
it is.

Last night I dreamed that my Mom had put some of Dad's things on
a table for giveaway. Crappy stuff of no value, like if someone had
emptied the dish on my desk that houses assorted pencils, loose
change, buttons and paper clips. My Dad was there, and though he
looked well, I knew he was dying. I saw a scarf of his, some
slippers. "Can I have these Dad?" I asked him. He shrugged, sure.
Those things didn't matter to him anymore, they never did.

They didn't matter to me either, though it was all I had to take away.

Go Dodgers

2009-10-18T16:14:00.001-07:00

My Mother and I are talking about taking a 10-day walking trip. “We have to do it next year,” she tells me like we’re running out of time. But of course we are, even though I can’t imagine my tomboy of a mother any different than I know her today.

“Look for me on T.V. this afternoon,” she says. “1:00, behind first base at the Dodger game.” She’ll be there, mitt in hand like she is every game, and I hope the cameras pan to her because you won’t see a happier person in that stadium; surrounded by my sister’s and their husbands, in the middle of the day, a Dodger Dog in her hand. I think it’s an important game too because if they win, bla bla bla, my Mom won’t come up for the Ellen Bass poetry workshop that I’m producing, but if they lose, bla bla bla, she will come up.

“Do you hate me?” she asks when she reveals her choice of the Dodgers over poetry and Ellen Bass. “Hate you?” I say over the phone, “I love you because you know what makes you happy, you know what you want and that life is too short.”

“Do you really understand that?” she says, “that life is short?”

“Well, of course I think I’m going to live forever,” I tell her as I multi-task like a mad woman, making coffee for the morning writing class, applying lipstick and sending an email all while I hold the phone to my ear. “But it was seeing Dad at the end,” I tell her, my throat thick. “All the things he regretted, what he hadn’t done.”

“Like learn to love?” she says and goes silent.

“Like learn to love,” I say. This was something my Dad told us at the end, that he hadn’t learned to love.

“I’m going to look for you behind first base,” I tell her. “Go Dodgers Mom, go Dodgers.”

The Ring

2009-10-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

All I had done was take off my wedding ring, just for a second, to see if it fit on any other finger, just in case, you know, it wasn't going to be a wedding ring anymore. But there must have been some force in the way I grabbed it off my finger because it went flying, which might have been fine except that I was sitting in the sand, not just a pile of sand like a sand box, but an entire beach of sand that went for miles. I held my breath, craned my neck down the beach to where my family was playing, looked down to where I was sitting and I started to dig.

Girl's Dream

2009-10-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

It's good news she's just given you on the phone. A girl's dream come true. A fantasy. The highest nod of approval from her peers.

And maybe it's the shock of it that makes you bungle it, say something stupid like, "How is this possible?" Which is when she hangs up on you because she thinks you're saying, "You? How did this happen to YOU?" Just like Cinderella's step mother said when she found out the prince had come looking for Cinderella instead of her own horrible daughters. But you didn't mean it that way, it's just that you were so shocked and so proud and scared at the same time. It's just that your very your first thought when she told you was "they'll hate her, people are going to hate her for this."

When you call her back and ask for forgiveness you ask her to do a re-do, to tell you again and let you answer more appropriately.

"Okay," she says, rolling her eyes on the phone.

"Hi Mom," she sing songs, "guess what? I've been nominated Home Coming Queen."

Here I Am

2009-07-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

I'm not tired or feeling rushed or put out by this detour off the
Central San Rafael exit to find a bathroom for Zoe. I'm mostly glad
that I took her seriously when she said she felt sick. Usually when
she says that we're on our way somewhere and while not always in a
rush, I'm one of those people who are determined to get where they are
going, leaving exactly enough time to get there. So I'm glad now that
after craning my head to the backseat a couple of times as I drove and
seeing her pained face, even after I rolled down the window and told
her to breathe, I'm just glad I had the sense to pull over and now
here we are in the gas station bathroom, which is in fairly good
shape; smelling of toxic cleaner, but a perfect place
for her to lose her breakfast in the toilet.

I'm standing behind her, one arm around her middle
just to keep her steady as she heaves into the bowl,
and another hand on her back rubbing it slowly, not wanting
to distract her, but just wanting to comfort and let her know
that I am there. A small bit of vomit splashes out of the toilet and
hits my bare feet in sandals. I don't care, I'm just glad to be here,
grateful to be here after all those years of trying to get away from
my children because I wanted to be alone or work or do my own thing.
This is where I want to be now, there's no place I'd rather be.

No One Knows

2009-04-08T07:37:00.000-07:00

Last night, sitting in the hot tub with my mother, both of us naked and one of us more wrinkled than the other, one of us sipping on some sweet plum drink that one of neighboring rabbi's, a man who never comes without some new brew he's concocted--last week it was a fig tincture, this week plum with brandy--both seriously strong. Sitting in the hot water in the dark after an early evening rain, I said, "this waiting is like staring at the sky searching for signs of the coming storm. We know it's on it's way, we know it's coming, but no one knows when."

We've written the obituary, the eulogy is on its way, the little thank you cards for thinking of us have been ordered, the casket, the papers signed. We've even discussed what we'll wear and whether dad will be naked with a simple wrap or whether he'll wear his favorite sweatshirt--stained and well loved as it is.

This waiting, it's not that we're in a rush--no, we love holding his warm hand, the squeeze of it, his strength in the face of death--it's a joy to be able to walk into his room every morning and chirp, "hi dad!" simply because you can--lucky you.

But the waiting is strange-- all of us, especially dad, packing the bags for a journey we know he'll take, but we don't know when.

patch of earth

2009-04-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

He always said he wanted to be cremated. Never was sentimental or romantic about the big burial. But then a couple of weeks ago my mom turned to him and said, "I want to be buried next to you. Do you want to be buried next to me?" And he turned to her and smiled and nodded yes. I wish I could convey the importance of this simple exchange, these plans made around a patch of earth. Mostly it's about how my parent's love has caught fire in the last 6 months since my dad has been sick. It's the way he asks where she is when she's out of the room. It's how he opens his eyes when he hears her voice, how he reaches out to her when she comes around to his side of the bed. It's the way today, when the six of us were gathered around that bed talking to my father about whether he thought he could handle one more hit of chemo or whether he was ready to let go...it was the way he turned to my mother and they just looked at each other for the longest time.

Rain

2009-04-07T07:56:00.000-07:00

I don't think we want it to rain, though the weather is changing down here in L.A. The skies, while still blue, have patches of white and gray as well. It's not just the Sunday hunt for the little kids that might be spoiled, their disappointment for having to do it inside the house, but it's my dad and everything that has already fallen around here.

It's how he's stopped speaking to us because it's too much work, because it only comes out in a whisper, because there's nothing more to say. "Are you in pain?" we ask, "On a scale of 1-10
is it a 5?" we'll prod. "Are you hungry dad? Should we turn on the ball game, listen to some music?"

They say that the dying begin a retreat from everything that is life. "What's the point?" they think. They won't be a part of it anyway.

Rain, rain go away, come again another day.

a moment from my day

2008-12-11T18:36:00.000-08:00

i'm in ikea today walking around slightly dazed, looking at things and listening to my ipod. My phone rings and I look down to see that it's my mother. "Hello? Hello?" I say, but no answer, though I hear her talking to someone in the background and I realize her phone has accidently called mine. I listen. My father is being placed into the passenger seat beside her. She's picking him up from radiation and I hear him groan, "Ohhhh.....ohhhh." I listen. She thanks someone who has helped dad, and then the sound of traffic as they pull onto Wilshire blvd. in Beverly Hills and their drive home. They're talking to one another; maybe dad will get a haircut; when will they be able to fit him into the triage for the removal of the gallblatter; she thinks she'll get the nurse tomorrow so she can do some holiday shopping. "I hate to leave you again," she says. I listen, evesdropping on my parents. Every now and then I whisper, "hi mom, hi dad," but they can't hear me. They keep talking, saying little things, and then there are spaces where they say nothing. It's just like I'm sitting in the back of the car with them. My parents are real, they're alive; this isn't just a memory or a fantasy. And my father is alive. I'm with them and I'm content to just sit in the back and listen to them drive; street sounds in the background, my father saying little things now and then, my mother responding. "Hi mom, hi dad," I whisper again.

What my teacher said today

2008-05-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

"Through devotion comes change. The luxury of neurosis is over."

—Deena Metzger

saved

2008-05-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

If I touch the hem of his garment
If I drink more water
Pick them up on time
Have healthy snacks for them to eat
If I remember to get cash for dinner and call the theater for an extra ticket
If I get the email from the company who is hiring
If I remember to thank her for the gift
Send the flowers
If he tells me he loves me after I tell him first
If someone beautiful calls me out of the blue
If I remember to pray and stretch my bad arm
If I lose those two pounds
swim the whole mile
Brush my teeth and hug him for no good reason
Write the check, feed the dog, wipe my ass, move the laundry, pick up the poop, thank my father for the money, pluck my eyebrows, change my underwear, respond to her email, swap the sheets on their beds
If I touch the hem of his garment will I be saved?

Choices

2008-02-17T21:06:00.000-08:00

This is about a woman coming home from a four-day trip and standing on the corner of Broadway and 12th with her bags at ten o’clock at night waiting for her husband
This is about him being late and her wondering which other more important thing has delayed him; a call to his lover, one more email, a decision to take the long way.

This is about seeing his car on the other side of the street and the way she has to cross,
how instantly cross she becomes

This is about the shut of the car door and the pull into late night traffic
The way she doesn’t reach over the stick to bridge the gap, no hello honey kiss
The distance, the disappointment that has come out of thin air;
Suddenly, glad to see him, then angry out of nowhere.

This is about a conversation earlier in the day with her friend about how loving people heals us. About how we should love because it feels good in us, not because people are deserving of our love. This is about the way her friend nodded and kept staring at her as if that was the freshest idea she’d ever heard

This is about the man and the woman and how the conversation in the car moves to the kids and what’s happening tomorrow.
This is about domestic life.
About the slightly bossy way he asked her to lock the front door after they got home
The flat spans of dessert as they lay in bed, neither moving to connect. This is the mountain of shoulds, the way she sidles up next to him, her stomach facing his hip, her hand on his chest.

This is about a late night conversation where she suggests they talk about telling their 10-year-old about the lovers because it might be worse when she does find out and feels she’s been lied to
This is about him saying no
How she turns away

This is about coming home but not feeling at home
About a soft blanket of depression she reserves for this man,
About silence and exhaustion and retreat
A decision not to bring up money until after Valentines Day because it would just ruin things
And the long list she imagined making of all the ways she loved him; everything he’d love to hear, how happy it would make him
How down the drain that idea went, for no good reason.

This is about the way we turn away as easily as we turn towards
This is about choices,
Reasons to love, reasons not to
This is about a woman standing alone at 10 at night in downtown Oakland with her bags, which are packed. This is about not knowing if she’s coming or going.

What they Loved

2007-11-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

They loved the motel and they loved standing by the check-in counter, hands around the other, sometimes standing behind the other, hands on an ass.

They loved the motel bed, how crisp and neatly made it was, and they loved the fresh sheets and the fresh starts, they loved the little glasses, always two, with sanitized paper around the lip as if they were the first two, Adam and Eve, to drink from the cup.

They loved the clean, white towels, and they loved the ashtrays and that they were allowed to smoke, that they’d pay extra for that, and the big windows that opened wide and let them puff that smoke out to the bay

They loved the sound of cargo boats, the loading and the unloading, the sounds of commerce because they were a part of that commerce

had passed credit cards and photo IDs, triple A cards over the counter to the young Asian girl at the desk. Yes they said eagerly and nodded their heads, yes to the king sized bed and the ashtrays. Yes to the continental breakfast, the HBO and the complimentary morning paper.

They loved that the concierge never met their eye, never scrutinized, never even said goodbye as they silently slipped through the lobby three hours later and returned home, leaving beds un-maid and towels only slightly used.

They loved the privilege of being anonymous, of not having to answer questions. They loved the freedom of not needing much; a bed, an ashtray, a view of the bay; a window that opened, a working heating vent.

They loved the privilege and the freedom of not needing to answer to each other, not needing the details of where the other had been, what they had said and what they were going to do next.

They appreciated instead the sensible simplicity of a button, a zipper. Tongues were magical, there was nothing to lie about. Curfews were vague. Yes there were people who cared about them a few miles away but they would return to them soon enough.

They loved the peace of this and especially the relief after buttons came undone and boots were tossed and thrown.

They knew how to make the sounds and they knew some dirty words too. They would come hungry but they didn’t care what they cooked up, it was always what they wanted.

They never noticed the terrible brown fabric curtains or the funny little notes left on bathroom counters about forgotten toothbrushes and q-tips at the front desk

They appreciated the hotel’s concern for everything they’d brought and everything they’d forgotten, everything they’d leave behind after their three hours, after they’d mussed the bed and made the sounds, after they’d squeezed out every last bit of tension and stress.

All the things of the day.

The edges they walked, the money they owed, the people who loved them who they could not always properly love back. The lies they told and the people they paid to listen to those lies at $145 an hour. The silent prayers they uttered, the pills that helped them sleep, the tiny goodies they littered throughout their day to get them through.

This was their chance, their time

And they never wasted it

Never tried to fix the other, and if talk of a son’s basketball game went on too long or a story about a remodel glitch went on and on, one would silence the other simply with a smile and a hand placed on a hand, that might slip up to a chest or inside a blouse, and they would remember where and who they were and why they had come to the Extended Stay Hotel or the Phoenix Motel or the Comfort Inn or even the Red Couch.

Time was of the essence, there were bridges to cross and spouses to return to, surely a carpool to drive in the morning, and they loved those things too.

The 23rd Floor

2007-11-26T22:14:00.000-08:00

He would often say, “I love you,” with just that hint of something lingering at the end of the sentence so that his statement became a question. Did she love him too?

In the beginning and for many years, sometimes still he would ask her to say it, “tell me you love me,” he would say, and she would say it to make him happy, a little like giving in to sex if she was tired because then he would be happy for a little while and she could rest her efforts.

The other night in bed he told her how he loved her, something she can’t remember now, but it shocked her, “You love me like that?” she said, astonished, not realizing that he felt that way. She wasn’t concerned, but felt silenced, unsure of what to do or say and so she put her hand on his chest and moved her body into the spoon of his and into the crook of his arm.

They were lying in her parent’s old bed, the bed her parents had abandoned for the new one a few years earlier. They knew this bed as they knew the house; the hot tub, the bathrooms, which mirrors were best for sex. They knew how to live together, knew how to pack a suitcase for a trip, how to make a driving plan. They could manage the children and get to places on time. They were friends with her whole family. Everyone liked them, and they liked each other, but his statement startled her.

Now she remembered, yes, they had been at her aunt and uncle’s house the night before and he was standing on the balcony of their 23rd floor penthouse looking out onto the lights of Los Angeles. She was drinking a gin and tonic inside with her uncle, who was on his second or third.

Her husband was on the balcony, and what he was thinking, he said, “was how easy it would be to leap off, and if I did, I’d want to grab your hand and take you with me.” And then he’d connected it to love, that she was the great love of his life, and this combination of the leaping and the love, the romantics of that, it was so perfect for him, just like him to pull pain and love together like that, which is when she put her hand on his chest, maybe to soothe him or rest him into sleep or back into himself, to take the focus away from her, the object, the loved one, the person he would reach for as he fell.

She wasn’t concerned, mostly shocked. “You love me like that?” she asked as she put her hand on his chest. It was all she could do.

And a little while later when he asked if she would like to make love, she heard the voice inside of herself say no, and the no stood there like a child in a great hall, a great big echo of no

Until she broke it weakly with a yes
Because she could
Because he was standing all alone on the balcony of the 23rd floor of a penthouse in a Los Angeles high rise looking down on Wilshire blvd and the city of angels and a million cars racing back and forth and nightlights and swimming pools and money exchanging hands a million times a second right below him.

And because he came from farmland where the only thing you could count on was the smell of manure or the shake of someone’s hand and the way they looked you in the eye. And it’s not that she pitied him and it’s not that she worried, but he was alone, alone in a way she would never allow herself to be.

“Yes,” she said weakly, and her hand on his chest came alive and it began to travel. This was what was called for.

What Keeps Me Awake at Night

2007-10-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

I may have time to get to the Girl Scout store to get the new troupe numbers and Girl Scout USA insignia.

I wonder if those jeans are worth patching.

Is this middle aged spread or have I been eating too many nuts?

Nuts are good, right?

229 days till summer. Still time to work toward that bikini

My feet don’t hurt that much.

You know, my shoulder feels exactly like it did during the racquetball days.

Damn mosquitoes.

I don’t need any more new clothes.

I should make some soup this week.

I loved Yvonne’s white t.shirt and long flowered jacket. She is so beautiful and neurotic.

I felt pretty at the party but no one mentioned it. Prettier than I’d felt in a long time. Are they just used to my prettiness or am I not pretty at all?

Do I have any underwear that he hasn’t seen?

We should be getting that call from the basketball coaches soon. I hope practice isn’t on girl scouts night.

Get to the bookstore.

If I don’t invite more than two people over at a time we can all drink wine out of wine glasses.

I hope they take those boots back.

Mosquitoes. Will they retreat as it gets colder?

What if I run out of money?

Chocolate bacon, who would have thunk it?

I can feel my hips.

My breasts are like puddles. Exactly like my mothers.

I think I said goodnight to him.

One day my father will die.

Should we drive or fly?

Hawaii sounds nice. People take trips they can't afford all the time. They use their credit cards.

The house really is tilting. Maybe that’s why I wake up dizzy every morning.

200 X 180 =

What else can I offer my students? Will they hate me if I give myself a raise?

Get bread.

Don’t forget lunch for Friday.
Call Jan. Call Tom.
Rent.

I’m too nice.
But not to him. I’m not nice enough to him. I should have said goodnight.

Laundry soap.

I wonder when my haircut is.
I hope he says yes to ice skating with the girl scouts. What was I thinking?
I should get outside more.
My feet don’t hurt that bad.

Maybe the school girl skirt for Halloween.

R. will meet P. She knows about him now. I’ll give her the heads up that he's coming over.

Should I tell P. she knows? No. Some things are better left unsaid.

NANO month.

I could get up early and write.

Damn mosquitoes.
I wonder if he really will get a job.
His feet feel nice.
This room is tilting.
Could I really teach in Cabo?
I hope they take those boots back.
I think I can handle two days of racquetball a week.
Maybe my shoulder hurts from lifting.
I wonder if Janie is mad at me?
I hope that check comes soon.
I’ll stop when that bottle is empty.
The cat will get the mouse.
I’ll call her tomorrow. She’ll understand. I know it’s been a week but she never calls me on mine either.

Sometimes it’s a curse to have such good ideas. I could write that whole penis book in a NANO month. My mom says I could sell that puppy for a million dollars.

Maybe I’m not that smart.
I’m nice, but not that smart.
I am tired though.
I wonder if I’ll write another book.
Do I have to?
His feet feel nice.

Do's and Don'ts

2007-10-15T23:04:00.000-07:00

She called breathless and excited, certain that you and she, your lover’s wife, should write the book on open marriage. It would be fun, she said over the phone, and marketable too, with sidebars of do’s and don’ts, tips and etiquette, that sort of thing.

You’d thought about it of course, both of you were writers and in a position to actually share something. Nearly three years into this and still on your feet, still married and thriving. You might actually have something to offer people.

But a part of you worried that if you did start waving a flag the whole thing would come crashing down on you. You’d lose your marriage or lose your lover and then all your sadness and disappointment with life, your real fears would surface and you would have to accept a truer truth, which is that open marriage is great if you’re getting what you want, if somebody wants to be your baby. But without that, say your husband is having the time of his life with his girlfriend, but the guy you’re with disappears, well, so much for those helpful tips and those all those clever little do’s and don’ts.

At least she wasn’t calling because you’d done something wrong, because her husband had come home last night in a bad way. No, you’d left him in good shape and he was completely capable of making breakfast for the boys and taking them to school. Sure you’d made an impression on him, but you hadn’t left a mark. And as she spoke, all chatty and excited about the book idea, it appeared that she still hadn’t gotten wind of the other little tryst that had happened the night before with your husband’s lover and her husband, a former love of yours and who is closely associated with and the sometimes lover of your lover's wife.

And while it's true that you didn’t break any rules, you don’t mean to hurt people and you don’t want to lie. And so you hoped that you could simply have a whole conversation with her about the bestselling book the two of you would write about open marriage; all those sage words of advice; how to make it work and how not to fuck it up. You hoped to have just this conversation, wondering as you listened to her go on about the book, whether your friendship, if the book project could weather the complexity of this whole thing; everything said and left unsaid; all the tiny lies and the way we protect ourselves and each other.

You wondered whether her husband, a man of 60, would be here in ten years or whether his heart would give way the way his own father’s did at 65. You wonder if that happens whether you’ll have such good news to spread about your open marriage. Maybe you’ll know more about loss then. Maybe you’ll become at expert on that.

potatoes

2007-10-08T22:05:00.000-07:00

I can’t write about the way I stuffed my face last night, my early dinner of potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, how I kept coming downstairs for more and the shame of getting into bed knowing that there was no way I could let my husband touch me, even though it was probably a good night, even though we’d been talking about it, even though it had been weeks, even though I can’t actually remember the feeling of him inside of me.

The relief of the movie in bed, our feet touching, then soon after, the relief of his snores, that another night had passed and I had escaped the intimacy, the awkwardness of touch and the movement toward each other.

I can’t write about how I’ve been wondering if the open marriage isn’t just terribly convenient, that the philosophy may be poppycock, that business about how the four square walls of marriage are limiting, too tight. That business about how other people allow you to express the untapped, that one person can’t be it all for you.

Lately I wonder if having a lover isn’t just a terribly convenient way to drift from each other, both of us a little high, a little drugged in the anticipation of the tryst, the way my step became just a little lighter when P. said he could make the Wednesday night date, how I found myself taking the first full breath of the day.

I don’t know if I can write about how difficult it is to move toward my husband, not for any good reason except that I am comfortable in my defense, tucked as I am behind my great wall. How right, how disappointed.

If they sliced me open they would find road blocks and ditches, and old refrigerators and ovens that people had ditched along the banks and which now blocked the flow of fresh water.

When my lover called to say Wednesday I think I giggled. I sounded like a child. I realized I could make it through today and tomorrow and the next day.

What I can’t write about are those dead refrigerators getting rusty and rained on and clogging up the river. I find myself unwilling to look or uncover. I find myself drifting and blaming and eating potatoes.

What I am unwilling to write about, what I find impossible to write about is the feeling each night of getting into bed with a man I care about but do not know how to move toward. The other night I wanted him to touch me. I wanted to ask but I felt guilty. It was only the pleasure I sought, not the connection. It could have been anyone’s hands, and this is a very hard thing to write about.

Would you like to write with me?

2007-08-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

I teach wild writing and I have a couple of spots open in my weekly classes. If you live in Northern California close to Berkeley and you're interested in joining my wild writing class, email me at lwagner@alamedanet.net and I'll tell you all about it. Classes start in September.

More real blogging soon, promise.

Post Thoughts

2007-07-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

Something about my last post, as honest and as soberly written as it was, scared me. I read it and re-read it. I checked for signs of smugness and inflated stability, but I couldn’t find any; I wouldn’t change a word. And yet I woke up feeling cautious this morning, a feeling that this whole thing could come back to bite me.

I think it was the way I ended the post, the way I so soberly stated the possibility of a marriage crumbling that stuck in my craw. I don’t take that lightly, though the possibility is there in even the best looking marriages.

Last year, when I first got together with my lover, his wife made a comment early on when she realized that the feelings her husband and I shared were bigger than just the sex she had expected us to get together for.

“I hope I’m not going to lose my marriage over this,” she told me over the phone. And I said, “You might lose your marriage, but not over this.” Which is to say the ending of a marriage won’t probably, in our case, be the result of our open marriages, but instead because of the marriage’s own trajectory over time; the issues, the potholes and the changes couples go through.

You could blame the open marriage but I think that would be a mistake.

So it’s not the open marriage that scares me so much, though it does trigger painful experiences, which is why you have to have your eyes wide open if you’re going to do this. As I said in my earlier post, because it operates in the theater of love and intimacy we bump up against our deep woundings all the time; mommy and daddy stuff and who loved you and who didn’t and whether you got enough. But the opportunity here is to wake up, to realize that we each create dramas and stories in our life that mirror our deeper work, our wounding, so that we have something tangible to work it out with. The mistake most of us make is confusing the story and the drama with the deeper work. The mistake we make is hoping that other people will make changes that will make us more comfortable, rather than realizing that we created the very world we inhabit. Manipulating other people to change only keeps us from doing our deeper work.

So if I’m scared about anything, it’s that I’ll get trapped in the story instead of recognizing the deeper river of my work that runs underneath the drama. If I’m scared of anything it’s that I’ll focus on the ways people aren’t loving me enough and I’ll forget that my job is to show up for myself, because people will never love you the way you want to be loved, even if they love you very much.

Regarding Open Marriage, Just a Few Things

2007-07-05T22:41:00.000-07:00

If you can, you must allow yourself to fall in love a little. That’s where the juice is. You have to be willing to have a little skin in the game. Sex without love falls flat after a while. It can’t only be a good time; you have to be willing to unpeel yourself, put down your guns and not be so pretty all the time.

Managing that love can be tricky; to care, but not too much; to feel, but not be overwhelmed with feeling; to be able to remember in detail what he feels like inside of you, but still be able to make summer camp sandwiches and take a walk with your husband, to reach for his hand.

You can’t want to leave your marriage. If you’re looking for a supplicant or for a way out, you’re going to be sad. If you want to be trusted you can’t want to take someone’s husband away. Sure you want them to fall in love with you a little, but you can’t be hoping that your lover will solve all your problems or be your new daddy.

Which means that you need to work on your marriage and work on yourself. Open marriage can’t replace that work. Ideally your lover wakes up something sparky and delightful in you, something your own marriage has a more difficult time conjuring because of the 101 things that make it so perfectly domestic; kids and dishes and bills and did you water the garden? And didn’t I ask you to return those videos? The idea is to wake up and to bring that awakening home to your marriage and to yourself.

And speaking of waking up, Triggers R Us, which is to say, you will get hurt or confused or be full of longing or the desire to strangle someone. We’re in the land of sex and intimacy now, and if you thought you had that shit handled, if you thought 16 years of marriage gave you an E Ticket that bypassed heartache think again brother. You will return to every issue you ever had about who loved you and who didn’t. You will find yourself checking your cell phone. You will be distracted, sometimes unable to sleep, you will swoon and it will remind you at times, especially in the beginning, of your teenage years. But mostly you will return to the uncooked parts of yourself, which means welcome home to some very juicy unfinished business and a chance to grow.

Tell the truth and stay in excellent communication with the players; your spouse, your lover, his spouse. Check in. Ask permission. Email or call to thank the spouse of your lover after a date. Try not to take your time with your lover for granted. His wife is the gatekeeper; if they’re doing well she’s more likely to share him, but anything can happen, so play nice. Your job is to return your lover back to his wife neither dented nor disturbed; you can make an impression, but you shouldn’t leave a mark.

Spouses have veto power. You have a date you’ve been patiently waiting for, but there’s a crisis at home or a change of heart. Let it go, the marriages come first. Less is more. Let days and weeks pass, then find your lover. A major part of what makes this special is the unavailability, the great passionate gaps in between your time together. Want it, long for it, let the hunger happen, that’s what keeps it alive, because in the end we’re just people and our lovers are not so incredibly different from the people we married, which is to say over time we all become tedious. So enjoy that you don’t pay bills or do laundry or share a carpool schedule with this person. Enjoy the small amounts of time you get to see each other, savor those sessions and leave your date just a little hungry.

It’s all good until it isn’t, and each person has to make that decision for themselves. Sharing your spouse, getting intimately involved with another person is not for everyone and if it’s not for you, make a change. Get out and hopefully with everything you came with. But you can’t say. It’s a slippery slope, a Pandora’s Box, and there are no guarantees, but then there really isn’t in marriage either.

These are just a few things for now.

schoolgirl

2007-06-30T12:05:00.001-07:00

On Friday afternoon they told us to come to the retreat the next morning dressed in something that our parents wouldn’t have let us out of the house wearing and something that we were still uncomfortable in.

Nine months earlier I had bought a schoolgirl outfit online because I’d wanted one for a long time and because I knew that somewhere in me a naughty girl lurked, though in all of my 46 years I had never road-tested her.

I’d seen my friend Jane dressed in something like that once; a short kilt and motorcycle boots. That was the look I loved; hip, sexy, confident and just this side of bad. But Jane was tall and skinny and had legs for days. I was shorter and stockier, muscular. I didn’t think I could carry it with the same appeal. People might grimace exactly the way I grimaced at women who dressed too young or whose own bodies spilled over their tight clothing. But my relationship with P. had unleashed something utterly free in me. The first night we were together I danced naked for him. I’d never done that for anyone. I still remember the smile on his face as I moved; total appreciation. And it had been like that ever since; I could take risks with him, it was safe and it was time to explore the schoolgirl.

My outfit came a week later. The black and red kilt was short, see-your-underwear-short, and the black top was totally pirate—just a loose piece of black fabric that tied my breasts together in a big knot, and which exposed my whole tummy. I waited until my family had left the house and I tried the ensemble on in the full-length mirror in my bedroom.

Big mistake. What was I thinking? It was so wrong. My legs were too muscular, too stocky and my stomach wasn’t sexy and concave like the girls in the catalogue. How could I have even thought I could carry this off? I was so ashamed that I took it off immediately and stuffed it in a cruel ball under a chair cushion in my bedroom. Out of sight, out of mind for nine months until last weekend, until the workshop, until I put it on, zipping up the little skirt and tying the pirate top tight. I pulled on my black cowboy boots and looked at myself in the mirror. This was it. This was the outfit I wouldn’t be caught dead in.

People at the workshop were kind. Black men love my “thick” legs, “we just do,” a really handsome man my age said. Another man whispered that my legs were stunning. A couple of women said I was sexy. And as nice as those comments were, mostly what I tasted that day was the kind of exhilarating freedom that comes from unleashing something that has been terribly, horribly, miguidedly repressed. I was enfused me with aliveness and after about an hour I had forgotten about everyone else, forgotten what I looked like to others and was instead appreciating the freedom of my strong body in those sexy clothes.

And so what happened, what I saw was that within a day I went from being a girl who wanted to wear a short skirt and boots, but who couldn’t because she didn’t have the body, to becoming a girl who could wear a short skirt and boots. It was very different from “trying” to love my body with affirmations, something I’d been working at for years. This was me taking an action, a contradictory action that had me live into a different story about me and my body, and in doing so, I made it real.

The Light

2007-06-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

It was a surprise when he told my sister and I, that if we wanted dessert we had to stand near his side of the table with our legs together. He said if he could see a space between our thighs, if he could see the light, then we could have some ice cream.

If I had known this was going to happen maybe I wouldn’t have eaten so much at dinner, but I'm sure I ate a lot; my mother made so much good food and I always remember being hungry. Up until this time I had never thought about my thighs, or any part of my body with concern, so I got up and stood by his chair with my little sister.

It was over so fast. There was no light between my thighs, and I didn’t get dessert.

Now I stand at that same table for every meal, constantly checking and monitoring myself to see if I deserve to eat. I pay for the food I do eat by working out nearly everyday, and going without food when I can.

This is what she said

2007-06-11T22:11:00.001-07:00

She said, “You fucked up. So what? So fucken what?”

That’s what my 70-year-old mother said to me last week on the morning after the night of the two monster martinis, the drinks which I hadn’t seen coming as I drove down the mountain to Los Angeles, nervous and excited as I was to see my high school friends after a 30-year separation. Didn’t see it coming because it was a beautiful, clear day in the basin, and because I’d just spent a week at a writing retreat where I rock and rolled my way through my writing and came away feeling whole and strong and trustworthy. And that first martini was excellent and by the second one I had forgotten that I hadn’t eaten, forgotten how strong a martini can be, forgotten that when you haven’t seen friends for 30 years and one of them has just finished telling you that her 25-year marriage might be over you don’t launch into the big talk about your open marriage and your lovers, no, you don’t do that. And I forgot that my mother was waiting for me back home a few miles away, had lit candles and opened a bottle of wine for the date we had made for the later part of the evening, the date she’d promised me because I’d asked for it, because I don’t live in her town, because I love her. Instead I came home a martini mess, and leaning against the door of her office, I slurred, “Drunk. Can’t talk. Bed.”

In the morning, sober and sorry because I had to leave town and say goodbye to my mother. Sober and ashamed because I had capped off an amazing week with a big drunk and had been insensitive, I thought, to my friend. Tired and hung over and wondering what in me had to keep maiming things, making things harder.

I came into her room to apologize, but she looked at me and she lifted my chin in her hands and she said,

“Honey, you fucked up. So what? So fucken what? The world doesn’t need anymore perfect people walking around, and the world doesn’t need anyone dragging a brick tied around their neck feeling guilty and ashamed either. Who the hell cares what you did? No one!”

That’s what my mother said.

Trust Me

2007-06-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

You are in a dressing room in the little girl’s department at Macy’s in San Francisco and you are crouching and whispering into your 9-year-old daughter’s ear, “trust me,” you say, your arms wrapped around her, your mouth breathing warm into her ear, “honey, trust me, I promise you that I am right here.”

And you are, right here in a large, white dressing room on mother’s day with your two daughters who are shopping for party dresses and shoes to wear to an upcoming bat mitzvah. This is you loving your daughters, this is you shopping with them on a Sunday in the city, a treat, a gesture of connection. This is what mothers do with their daughters.

But now after three frilly dresses that have either cut her off at the waist or been impossible to zip or not gotten over her head, your youngest daughter has started a rapid descent to a place that you have only seen twice before with her, and one that you are not entirely prepared for now. You hadn’t readied yourself, hadn’t seen it coming, didn’t remember the rhythm of the thing, just how dangerous a dressing room can be.

And so if you thought this was going to be a simple shopping trip for party dresses you were wrong. And if you thought it was enough to have the money in the bank to pay for the dresses or even the time to devote to the trip to the city, think again mommy. It’s not even enough to love them you realize now because the damage is deep and what this moment calls for is a turn in the road, a left where you normally take a right. And even though you have no idea how to do this you must because what you see now is too much to bear.

Because everything you tried to avoid by denying yourself food, by suppressing your appetite, by daily trips to the gym, and by hundreds and hundreds of dollars in diet aids is now sitting on a padded, floral bench in her underware and socks clutching a crumpled t.shirt against her chest to hide a tummy that is tumbling over her legs, a tubby little tummy that won’t cooperate, that won’t suck in the way she wants it to, a tummy that announces itself from t.shirts and dresses, that topples over swim suits. A tummy that now has your daughter hyperventilating and whimpering, her eyes scrunched up to cast away tears, a tummy that has her hating you and her older sister because you’re witnessing this and because then she doesn’t have to hate herself and her body which she believes is all wrong because at age 9 she’s a size 12, and because she has a sister who at age 12 is a size 10.

Your cell phone is ringing and from the screen you see it’s your lover calling you to wish you a happy mother’s day.

You don’t answer it, you can’t, not because you’re with your daughters, but because you are in a very different place than the place you meet him in. This is not a happy, I had time to shower and make myself smell good and put on that red underwear you like so much and let’s have a drink first and catch up slow and then make our way to the studio to have the best sex of our lives time. This isn’t that time.

This is you trying to zip up a young girl’s dress and tugging at the fabric hoping you don’t rip it, this is you trying to be chipper as you pick yourself up from the dressing room floor saying, “no problem, I’ll be right back with a better size.” This is you walking out of the dressing room each time and chanting to yourself, “breath, breath, breath.” This is you trying to minimize the problem and pay attention to both sisters, even the older one who doesn’t have anything to cry about, who is having the time of her life because she just found the cutest sandals with gold ribbons that wrap around her slender ankles, who is looking lovely in the new blue halter dress that exposes her delicate bird-like shoulders, and her strong legs, a girl who is beginning to realize that she will turn heads at the bat mitzvah next month, a girl who is now leaning against the dressing room wall, arms crossed over her chest and who has just sneered at her little sister to “lose the attitude Zoe,” something that a friend of hers mother said to her last year in a completely different situation, and which crushed her and now sitting here you are struck by how the very things that hurt us lodge within us and are brought out to hurt others, even if you didn’t mean it, even if you thought you’d sufficiently stuffed the pain away or hardened yourself or gotten over it, even if you thought you’d lost the attitude, you realize that the monster that came after you, and now I’m talking about myself, has been patiently waiting all of these years and has now come home to eat my young.

This is you on a diet from the time you were 14 years old, and the grim business of clothes shopping with you mother who mostly kept her mouth shut because she didn’t know what to say as your own torn and safety pinned clothes from all of your weight gain and distress sat huddled in a pile in the corner. Didn’t know what to say to you as you tugged on pants that were too tight, or tried to zip up dresses that were too small, you opting for big, flowing clothes that might highlight the Rennaissance beauty in you but could never hide your terrible failure for not being a Los Angeles skinny, straight-haired well adjusted girl who could just go shopping with her mother without it exposing every flaw in her orbit. This is you remembering a comment that came from the dressing room alongside of yours on one of those trips where some woman said to her companion, did you see, she spit, how awful that skirt looked on that girl? And you knowing that she was talking about you. This is you not hating that woman, but hating yourself instead for your great failure. This is you remembering the little game your dad sometimes played at dinner, asking you and your sister to stand at the table with your legs together and if there was a space between your thighs you could have dessert. This is you not realizing then that your father was the child with the fat thighs, the child whose parents didn’t think he was beautiful enough or smart enough, but you didn’t know this then and so this is you deciding not long afterwards to hide all of your ugliness, not in extra weight, but in a tight, hard-grip body that was a fucking fort knox, this is you throwing away the key.

But enough about you because there’s something more pressing, more dangerous, more frightening at stake here, which is your daughter collapsed on the floral bench in the dressing room, the way she is coiling in on herself, the way she is retreating, the way she has been apprenticing all along, watching you, the way she is making her way to her own fort knox, a place that even you, mommy, won’t be able to find your way into. It’s the way she turned to you in the car a few months ago and out of nowhere asked, “Mommy, are you afraid that I’m going to be fat when I grow up?” even though you’d never mentioned her weight, even though you’d never talked about diets, even though you’d made sure never to say anything bad about your own body in her presence.

It’s what she did see; that you never got anything for yourself at the ice cream shop. That you never eat bread and pasta, and when asked why you shrug it off, saying you don’t like those foods, which is a lie because they are your favorite foods. It’s your obsession with getting to the gym five days a week because it’s the only way you can breath. It’s all the ways you have denied yourself, it’s your secret mantra that the best appetite is no appetite. It’s your deep desire to not need anything from anyone.

It’s the way she turned away from you in the car the other day on the way to speech therapy because you giggled when she emphasized those dastardly R’s that she was practicing, “orange, artichoke, orangutang” and how she thought you were laughing at her but you were only laughing at her sweetness, how much she wanted to get those r’s right. But the power of her turn from you, how she locked you out, her hand on the door of the car like she was going to leap, the same way she is turning now in the dressing room, turning in, turning toward her own orbit of flaws, and how well you know this moment, all the ways you’ve locked yourself out with your hardened grief, which was alright for you, but impossible to watch now in the form of your beautiful nine-year old who you never meant this to happen to, but who has become someone who sneaks food from the kitchen and has perfected the art of chewing without moving her lips, a child who now pulls clothes off of a rack that are meant to hide who she is, big, floppy pieces of fabric, much the same way she began wearing daddy’s t. shirts to school this year because she said she liked them and you wondered whether it was that she liked daddy so much or couldn’t bear herself.

There is a moment here, a chance and you hope it’s not too late, to divert this train wreck that became the cornerstone for your own life, to step in, one tiny movement, one intimate gesture, one chop of your machete to clear a path that in 47 years you have never taken because you needed to keep punishing yourself, because you thought it was your fault, that you were, in your daughter’s own words about herself, “a failure.” There is a moment here, a chance to bring even yourself home, if it’s not too late, and even though you don’t know where this path will lead you or if you can walk it, and even though you don’t know what words come after the ones you think to say now, you open your mouth and you begin in the most loving, most sincere way you can, because you are strong and you love this girl and my god, you love yourself, you do…

“Trust me,” you say, your arms wrapped around her, your mouth breathing warm into her ear, “honey, trust me, I promise you that I am right here and I know what to do.”

A sweetness breezes in

2007-05-17T23:06:00.000-07:00

After nearly a week of awkwardness, a week where the house felt too small, our bed a postage stamp, a week of sideways glances and small blames that had him retreating to the couch, or had us leaving the house without goodbye, the way we’d refer to each other in front of the children, “your father,” I’d say, “your mother,” he’d say. After nearly a week of this, a sweetness breezes in, as if on loan.

It was the way he sat in his office chair and slapped both hands on his thighs motioning you to sit down. And the way you do, the girls in the other room watching a show or doing homework. And his thighs feel warm under his jeans and he puts his arms around you, though your own arms stay crossed.

Why they’re crossed you do not know. Why you have such a hard time loving him, letting him in you do not know.

The other night after a few hours with P., after all the fun was over, he fell asleep beside you, and you listened to the sound of his snores. An hour later you were back at home in your own bed, leg to leg with your husband listening to his snores, and the whole scene could have been completely interchangeable. You could have spent the evening making love to your husband. The men, their snoring, you, what's the difference? And you think that it’s not so much that one is more deserving of your love, but that you princess, you have become quite the choosing committee.

Name it baby, you like to wear the pants around here, you like it better when you’re in charge, when you’re calling the shots, making the rules, and then, well, thank god somebody left the window open, thank god after a week of awkwardness, you acting like his mother, his roommate, reminding him of carpools and bills unpaid, all said with the faintest glare, and him giving it right back in his perfect way; not coming to bed or saying goodnight.

After nearly a week, a sweetness manages to drift in, and he slaps his hands on his thighs and says sit down and it really doesn’t matter if your arms are crossed because you do sit down and you let the weight of you, the grief of not loving, the effort of so much holding and controlling fall away and you realize how tired you are.

And even if later or tomorrow, the way he says it or does it or forgets the carpool, whatever it is, god help you, put down your weapons woman, surrender, cry uncle, whatever you have to do, open a window and pray, pray for a little sweetness.

Excerpt from a letter to a friend

2007-02-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

...the truth is, i have gotten closer to love in the last two years; I have had my heart cracked open. I have become softer and more receptive, but not because I was thinking big (baby), but because my path to love was so littered with pain, which was the only way I could be broken of my great defendedness. I didn't get any closer to love because I believed I was worthy of love. I got closer to love the way a bloodied, broken-nosed fighter keeps getting up to take the next punch in the face and then finally falls flat and concedes. I conceded to love.

Producing a Eulogy

2007-01-05T13:51:00.000-08:00

“We need more scenes,” I told my dad on the phone. “Good writing is full of live action. You can’t just say, ‘he was a good man, everyone liked him.’ You need real scenes, actual events that show that goodness or else it’s not going to be believable. I need to see you doing more, you know, actually engaging.”

“Mmm,” says Dad. “I see.”

Dad is On My Case.

He wants me to write his eulogy. He’s not so old at 76, and he’s not sick, but he wants the eulogy written before he dies. He wants to see it.

Dad Looks Great On Paper.

He gives away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to many deserving causes. A champion of social justice, he gets behind progressive issues, has parties at his house to raise money for Universal Health Care. He’s taken care of whole families in Mexico, sending their children to college. He funds documentary films about the West Bank, rents commercial space cheap to non-profit groups like Planned Parenthood. Last year, at his house for dinner I shared a table with an Indian man who heads the Gandhi Peace foundation, a woman who led Sri Lankan village mothers into the jungle demanding that rebel armies release their kidnapped sons, and an American woman who ran a bra factory in Sri Lanka that had profit sharing for the workers. Just another night at my parent’s house. Dad even helped put braces on the teeth of a young Chinese woman he randomly met in Tai Pei, but for the life of me, I’m having a hell of a time coming up with the kinds of scenes that will really make his eulogy rock. The thing is,

People Make Dad Uncomfortable.

“Wally,” my husband said gently on our last day in Hawaii, “I think you should consider coming down to the pool with me.”

“Mmm,” said dad.

”And you might want to put on your bathing suit,” added hubby.

“Oh,” said dad.

“But you wouldn’t have to go in the water,” he said.

“Yes,” said dad.

And that’s how my dad came to be down at the hotel swimming pool on our last day of the trip. It was the annual sighting of grandpa, a man who prefers to spend his sunny, grandchild filled Hawaiian vacation indoors, in a dark office, reading newspapers and books and taking naps. But there he was standing poolside, a newspaper tucked under his arm and talking to a women I’d met a day earlier, a freelance correspondent for CBS, while his six grandchildren looked on, heads cocked, a little startled perhaps at seeing my dad in the light.

“And he looked horrible,” says my mom, laughing. “I thought, ‘who is that old man coming toward us.’ Did you see what he was wearing? That old dome topped Chinese Rice Field worker hat? His face is so narrow and that hat is so tall it just made his face go on forever! And his tummy?” she continued, “it was bulging and he was wearing that awful yellow shirt and he shuffled, did you see him shuffling? Mark was holding onto his hand.”

Dad Felt the Pinch.

“I need it for the eulogy,” I’d said earlier in the day. “We’ve been here nearly two weeks and I need a scene dad, something that will help me lead the piece off, like, ‘I’ll never forget the day dad came down to the pool to visit the grandkids.’ Something like that, but then I need you to actually do something,” I said. “Could you put one of them on your lap or maybe even order a drink?”

“Mmm,” said dad. “I don’t know. I should be at home reading. I have so much to do.”

Dad Tried

He stood there, lots of pool activity going on around him; lots of Marco Polo and vacationing families tossing children and balls from the shallow to the deep. I’d met lots of people in the week we were staying in the hotel next door to my parent’s house and I’d talked a fair amount about my mom and her house, how lucky we were to get to come to Hawaii fairly regularly. “Is your dad still around?” I got this question more than once from new friends because I hardly mentioned him. “Um, yeah,” I’d laugh. “He’s around here somewhere.”

Now he was actually at the pool, but sadly, it wasn’t really scene-worthy, I mean, he stood there looking like a Martian who had just landed. “Sit down, dad,” my sister said. He looked around at his family; his wife, his four children, their spouses, their children, a nanny or two. “Uh,” he said, searching for a place to sit amidst beach towels and smoothies, books and sand toys. “Uh, I don’t know. I think I’ll walk over to that grass over there and read.”

“Bye bye grandpa!” some little tot shouted as he trudged away.

I’d used the eulogy before as a way to get him to engage with the grandkids, who he doesn’t see very often. My nine-year-old had given him coupons for Christmas, little squares of paper inviting him to do things like take her to breakfast, get his back scratched, read together or take a walk. “Whatever you want,” she had told him. Even at nine she was trying to make it easy.

“I can use that for the eulogy,” I suggested, “taking her out for breakfast would be a nice scene.”

“Mmm,” he says.

People Are Talking.

“You need to keep an eye on dad,” my brother had mentioned on the phone a week before the trip. “I got a call from the dentist, the one he’s been going to for years. The nurse said he fell asleep in the chair and woke up disoriented and angry. They’d never seen him like that. I think he’s slipping,” my brother said from his big leather swivel chair at the office. “So watch him, and get back to me.”

Dad Wants His Eulogy Now.

“You don’t have much time,” he’d said. “I mean I could be dead soon.”

Like I said, dad’s not sick or especially old, but he’s giving away all of his money and hopes to be perfectly broke in five years. “Then no one will want anything to do with me,” he says, “and I can die in peace.” I have no idea what he means by this, all I know is that this eulogy is going nowhere and I need help.

“So what kinds of things do you want me to put in there?” I’d asked him. “Is this about your accomplishments or do you want me to say weird things like you know how to use a lasso, or the only food you’ve been known to cook is oatmeal?”

“Mush,” he corrected.

“Or how I’ll always remember that time mom threatened to cut my hair if I didn’t get that rat’s nest of a knot out of it, and you got on your knees and combed mayonnaise and peanut butter through my hair for hours until it came out.”

“I don’t know,” he says uncomfortably.

“I have something that you could use,” my younger sister offers. Apparently my 38-year-old sister had sliced her finger cutting pineapple that very morning, “and he actually kissed my finger,” she says. “It was the most loving thing I can ever remember him doing.”

“I kissed it?” my dad says, coming into the kitchen to re-fill his coffee.

What's Up?

Finally it was time to leave the island. Dad drove us to the airport as I fed him pieces of sushi from the front seat. “It’s more than I can eat,” I promised, “here, have some.” He said he hadn’t eaten all day, but that he wasn’t hungry. He said this as he stuffed sushi into his mouth.

At the curb, after we’d unloaded our bags, I leaned in to kiss him. “Dad,” I started to say, “I love…”

“Save it for the eulogy,” he said, landing a peck on my cheek, and then driving off into the balmy, Hawaiian night.

Where is the Love?

2006-12-23T12:25:00.000-08:00

Primordial Love

“It’s like standing on a high dive,” your mother says, “and there’s no water in the pool below, but you insist on diving, believing that there will be water when you get there, even a little water to save your fall, but it’s just concrete, it always is.”

Phone call for Mz. Wagner

You are with your family on an enchanted island. Your mother’s house, a Japanese fortress of glass and wood sits on the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea. Beyond the lanai there is a bright green lawn and purple bouganvilla spilling down the cliff. This is paradise, a chance to take a break from your worries, your anxieties. You were glad to get away and especially from certain dramas back home. The salty, sea air will be healing. The ocean waves will be baptizing. You’ll have sex with your husband, lose a few pounds, take a break from the ensuing drama of your lover’s wife. Beauty and bliss surrounds you. So why are you checking your cell phone and your email?

Where is the love?

In the supermarket in Waimea you and your husband see a young, curly haired woman who has a purse just like yours, only not hot pink like the one you have, but beige. It’s a hard purse to find because it’s only made by this woman up in Canada, and so you chat the woman up and find out that she has been flown to the island from Seattle to cook for a family who lives near your mother’s house on the beach. “Who is the family?” you ask, wondering which family is rich enough to get a catering staff for three weeks. “I can’t tell you,” she says, “I’m not allowed to say.” Rock star, movie star, politician. Could be any one of them. You’ve seen Neil Young on the beach before. Michael J. Fox too. Suddenly a trip to the beach or to the gym is filled with promise. Maybe you’ll see one of these important people and more importantly, they will see you.

Are you my mother?

You are pumping free weights and he walks in. Is it Dana Carvy? Beck? You can’t tell because he’s got his jacket covering his mouth, but the messy, sandy hair seems right. He’s so small. Beck, you think. The aerobics instructor is playing his music in the next room. Maybe she has seen him too. Your arms look so good today. Hope he looks over. Who are you? Who is that woman with the blue bandana and the lean, tan torso? Does he see how hard you’re working out? Has he noticed how you do the whole weight circuit and then run on the treadmill, and then do the whole thing again and then again? Has anybody noticed? Who is this marvelous, important creature that is you?

Soups On

Your mother has brought back chicken soup from Costco because you felt woozy all day. Everyone else is eating salad and chicken for dinner, but the glutenous, thick soup is for you, her first born. It doesn’t look very tasty; all goopy, with huge pieces of white meat and thick slices of carrot and celery bobbing in the broth, but you’ll eat it anyway because it is a gift from your mother. As you’re preparing to take the last of the dishes out to the lanai so you can all sit down to eat, you, in a very prompt and grown up way turn to her and say you, “You know, I don’t feel like the soup tonight.” And it’s not that her face falls, and it’s not that it’s turned hard either, in fact you don’t wait to see her expression at all. You simply realize, in an instant, in anticipation of her possible upset, that you can’t afford to say no to her offering. You will drink the soup.

Father

He wants nothing for Christmas, he never does. Sometimes you bring him books on the Middle East because that’s his real interest, but even then, he’ll have already read them or he’ll say a light “thanks.” He’s a hard man to please. So you tell him, “My gift to you this year is a walk.” You sacrifice your morning workout, your chance to see Beck or Dana Carvey or whoever that sandy haired person at the gym was, just to walk around the hotel and the beach with him. He is slow. He’s older and there’s a paunch around his middle. But you love your dad, you always have, and every staggered little step he takes you take too. Screw your glutes, screw the sweat, you’ll work out later. And it’s not that he doesn’t ask about you, he does. And it’s not that he puts you down, he doesn’t, never has. But somewhere along the walk you both fall silent and you realize, this is it, this is my relationship with my father and it’s just what it is. He loves me enough, but even his love, the love that’s supposed to save me, won’t.

The boyfriend

You’ve been meaning to tell him that you want to spend more time talking, being together to balance out the fucking, but the first thing he tells you when you call from the enchanted island is how much he enjoyed the sight of you sucking his cock last week, the way your hair hung down around your face, your little ears, how beautiful that was. The conversation turns light, it always does. You manage to tell him toward the end of the phone call that you don’t just want to just drink and fuck, that in the New Year you should vary the dates, do other things. “But I took you to the opera!” he shouts in mock protest, referring to the date with his son and wife, the two hours of tedium in the opera house and the family dinner afterwards. You laugh, “sure you did,” you say. He agrees to more proper dates but you’re sad after the call. You wanted something and you’re not sure what it is. You wanted something and you’re pretty sure he can’t give it to you.

Glutes Away!

There’s that Beck, Dana Carvey guy again. He’s speaking to that woman by the free weights. She’s kind of pretty with wavy blond hair, nice enough body, but she’s not special, not rock star special. Maybe it’s not Beck. There’s another guy by the leg weights, he looks like somebody from t.v., Can’t remember his name. Ray something. He’s looking at you. Maybe he’s a movie star. Maybe they’re all movie stars. Maybe they think you’re a movie star too.

The family dinner

If you can just manage to keep it to two meals a day, no, a meal and a half, you’ll still look trim for the family party on Friday night. If you look fat you’re sunk. If your dress is wrinkled, forget it. Hope it’s a good hair day. You’ll wash it the day before so it’s slightly distressed for the party. No time for a pedicure, maybe mom has some clippers and polish. The idea is to look tight, together. The idea is to look perfectly beautiful wonderful. The idea is not to give anybody any reason to gossip about you, your hair, your dress, your body, any imperfection. The idea is to be adored, admired, envied. If you can manage this you will stay safe. You will get the love.

Sleeping with the enemy

2006-12-11T21:55:00.000-08:00

When we discovered the big butcher knife lying under the covers of the master bed when we turned down the sheets to get into it, we were naturally shocked. If you walk into a kitchen and see a butcher’s knife you don’t think twice. But when you pull down the covers of a big, fluffy down bed and you see a knife lying there it stops you, and it takes a moment to reconcile what you see; bed, knife, knife, bed. You generally don’t put the two together unless you’re watching a horror film. Or living in one.

We were at a meditation retreat and we were supposed to be keeping noble silence, but my friend who I was sharing the bed with, she gasped. Our eyes went wide and our jaws went slack. “Shit,” she said.

At first I thought it was a joke.

And then I remembered that the knife belonged to the woman who owned the house, who slept in the bed, who wasn’t at the retreat with us, but whose husband, our friend, was.

My friend’s wife sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed. I need to say that again because it’s so grave and has so many implications, not to mention the affect it might have on my friend’s love life.

My friend’s wife sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed.

I knew it was hers because my friend had mentioned this knife in passing once when he was trying to drum up compassion for the plight of his marriage. He wanted us to understand just how deep-rooted his wife’s paranoid fears were. “She sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed!” he implored.

“Sure she does,” we said, not entirely believing him. I mean, hearing about someone sleeping with a knife can sound like a metaphor, you know, knife in the bed, elephant in the room, until you actually see that knife lying in the bed you’re about to climb into. So we were sort of half listening because we couldn’t picture this knife and also, we knew his wife well; she was our friend too and we were fond of her. But here it was in living color: The butcher knife.

For hours after we’d discovered the culinary weapon I kept thinking about what it must be like to be someone who sleeps with a butcher knife. I’ve slept with the phone near the bed. I’ve occasionally slept with a heavy flashlight when my husband was out of town, but never a knife, and I wondered what it would be like to live with that degree of fear. I could feel it in my belly, how being so afraid would color everything.

It was easy to put my friend’s wife into the crazy corner, to see her fear as a sickness, a sign of how far gone she was. And it lived like that in me for a little while, but as I say, we were at a meditation retreat and so I got to sit with myself which meant sitting with this monkey-minded drama going on in my head that I was obsessed by. It involved some of my friends and it had something to do with sex and who had said what to whom and who I thought I could trust and who I couldn’t and what I was going to stop doing and what I would do more of. I sat there for the first whole day of the retreat scheming how to keep myself from being hurt by these people.

And all this scheming got very tiring and so I welcomed the knife and the diversion it presented.

I knew about some of this woman’s fears; how she thought the roof of the house was going to collapse on them. How she was sure her husband was going to separate her from her wealth. How the palpitations of her heart were a sure sign of a heart attack. I knew how many times she’d been taken to the emergency room because she thought she was going to die, only to be sent home with a sedative. And although my fears were different and seemed much smaller, the thing I realized I had in common with this woman was that we both believed the things we feared were real. She to the point of sleeping with a butcher's knife, and me, who had begun shutting out the people around me who I loved because they could not be trusted. And I realized at that point it doesn’t matter if you’re sleeping with a knife or sleeping with an elephant. You’re in a horror film and it has become your life.

Leftover Stew

2006-12-01T09:38:00.000-08:00

Leftover Stew: When you’ve run out of time to write a good piece and instead have to pull yesterdays moments from your head, scrambling like you do for a matching pair of socks when you should be out the door, hurling undies and bras and stories out of your drawer, out of your head and over your shoulder like some cartoon character

Here’s what you remember:

1. the slight lilt of guilt and pleasure you catch in your friend’s voice on the phone this morning because you know and she knows that your husband is on his way over to see her right now so they can get in their hour or two of sex because her children are at school and her husband is at work and because you saw your own boyfriend the other night and might even see this same friend’s husband next week.

2. how California that sounds.

3. how you will have to tolerate the little smiles and nudges these two give each other tonight when she comes over with her kids for dinner, and even though you love them both and are happy they are lovers, you don’t, just say it, take pleasure in witnessing their little moments of reverie. You just don’t. It’s a private thing and has nothing to do with you.

4. the pleasure, the thrill, the shock of being 46-years-old and having a husband and two lovers and how sometimes you have to say that out loud, sometimes to your friends, which might annoy them and which should embarrass you because you’re bragging, but really, you say it because you can’t believe it, because down deep you still feel like that fat, squat little girl standing with her legs together at the dining room table letting her father check to see if there’s a space between her thighs, which will dictate whether she can have dessert or not.

5. there has been so much dessert lately; the apple pie and the pumpkin pie and there’s chocolate in the freezer. You feel your tummy rolling over your jeans. Everyday is a new scheme to stop eating, to trim yourself, to reduce, especially with Hawaii coming up, and next weeks date with your friend’s husband. Trim, reduce, deny.

6. the shock and the surprise of listening to your 8-year-old in therapy yesterday talking about her own tummy rolling over her jeans, the way she sat there looking straight at Steve, her therapist, telling him what it was like to wear daddy’s shirts to school because then her tummy wouldn’t show.

7. how you told Steve that thing about your thighs and your dad at the dinner table. The way, when the session was over, Steve looked you straight in the eye and said, “there is nothing wrong with your body, your body is fine,” like he was trying to cement that in on your last session together, like if he said it real nice and slow like that you might hear him, and the way you looked back at him, appreciating what he was trying to do, but didn’t smile in agreement, didn’t shake your head wearily like a dope, just looked at him from a million miles away, from a place he could never imagine.

8. no one believes how small you feel sometimes. You compensate so beautifully.

My Father

2006-11-27T22:07:00.000-08:00

When Measure 89, the Clean Money initiative lost a few weeks ago I called my father because he had spent the last two years putting all of himself into it, trying to get it to pass. I wanted to call him to say I was sorry, but I was afraid he would blame me for it’s failing. “Well, did YOU vote for it?” he shouted once I got him on the phone.

”Yes,” I said, a little sheepish, like a child. I wasn’t lying, but I did lie about that other thing he wanted me to do, which was to email everyone I knew about the proposition and tell them which way to vote. “Did you send it out?” he asked a bunch of times after he’d sent me the original email. “Yes,” I lied, and changed the subject. The thing is, I don’t like sending mass emails to my friends, especially if they’re political, even if they do come from my father, who is smart and on the left.

In our regular phone chats he asks me about the girls, about my husband, the house plans. Sometimes he throws a curve ball and out of the blue he’ll ask whether I ever bought that computerized bridge program for the kids that he was obsessed by a few years ago, thinking they needed to learn bridge OR ELSE. Or out of nowhere he’ll ask me whether my kids are learning Spanish or if I’ve been following MY TEAM. But since I don’t follow sports and have no idea what season it is EVER, or who MY TEAM is, I am left speechless for a moment and then I lie in no particular order, “yes, no, yes, no.” Bridge, yes, Spanish, no, MY TEAM, yes, and he laughs because he knows I’m lying and I laugh because this is how we bond; me in my half morning daze, my cowboy boots and coffee, my list of plans; the phone calls and emails, and he in his cluttered office in Los Angeles, reminding me of either a lost planet or space debris, I don’t know, but he’s up there orbiting, trying to make sense of his world, pulling all the little pieces together, just as I try to do in mine.

This morning when I called he said he was overwhelmed with so much to do and I said maybe he ought to take a break after two years of hard work on Measure 89, and he tells me that he usually naps for 30 minutes. I said “Good, rest yourself, it’s a long walk toward death,” and he laughs and I laugh. We don’t know what it means but it bonds us.

Fair Trade

2006-11-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

“I made you come,” he said, joining me in the kitchen as I made the girls toast. “But did you make me coffee?”

“Over there, babe.”

Big Love

2006-11-03T20:16:00.000-08:00

“It’s easy,” he said in his email, “to love our lovers. Much harder for me to love you, to lean into our love. But that,” he wrote, “is the Big Love.”

We’d been calling this creation Big Love from its inception, two years ago when we first met the ballerina and her husband, and at it’s best it is just that; big love, more love, an opportunity to express yourself past the four square walls of marriage, though we've mostly applied that to loving other people.

“Much harder,” he wrote, “for me to love you, to lean into our love.”

After 18 years together, this email from my husband who is working down the hall from me at home and who I haven’t made love to in two months, reminding me that he and I are the love you need to get naked for, more naked than you get with your lover, naked in the midst of your life.

Ours is the love that isn’t about the sexy underwear, the white lacy ones I bought for my new lover, or the garters or the short kilt I bought to wear on our next date. Ours is the love that lives in the chaos of picking up carpools and dog doo. Ours is the love that has to remind the other to get toilet paper and pay the bill. Ours is the love that sleeps night after night in a bed that needs its sheets washed.

Ours is not the phone call my husband makes to the ballerina on his way to visit her, requesting she meet him at the door wearing only heels and stockings. Or the message her husband leaves me to “just be naked when I get there.”

Not that kind of love.

It was once, sort of, a long time ago.

And while I'm tempted to start listing all the small things I’m grateful for; the way our feet find each other at the end of the bed, at the end of the day, our hands clasped, quietly breathing. While I could try to convince you that my husband and I really do love each other, a sentiment that would make you and me both feel a lot better, I won't.

Because as the man said, this is Big Love and so we’re shelving the fairy tale ending for now, we’re going off road, a path we don’t actually have a map for, but which feels more real and more appropriate for us. Destination unknown, but destination true.

twisted and free

2006-10-31T09:32:00.000-08:00

I finally blogged after months of silence. I’d been waiting for some bud to break. Some lighter moment, maybe some wisdom. Let’s face it, I wanted to write something good.

And even though I think the best of my writing has been the darkest material, like the time I went to 12 liquor stores in 20 minutes looking for my cigarette brand when I should have been at the Brownie Court of Awards Ceremony, that time when I was feeling exactly like one of those oily haired, cigarette reeking, broken toothed, white trash mothers who can’t get it together to get to their child’s recital. After so many pieces like that I became self-conscious, less free. I kept thinking that I needed to heal for the reader, that the reader wanted me to get better, make smarter choices. I was afraid I would disappoint you, not with my writing, but with me, who was an absolute failure.

And then things did lighten up and I wanted to write, but I was so happy and I didn’t know how to write about happy without it sounding stupid and gleeful. I’ve told you, I see better in the dark, can find a billion words for weirdo, manage to see past the rainbows and straight into the coming storm. It’s not that I’m a downer, but things are more interesting when they’re twisted, you know?

One of the most beautiful moments was the night I lowered my naked self down onto that cold, dirty cement floor. I remember how he let me tumble slowly to the ground, onto the filth of the floor, and how positively focused I was on the eyes of this man who had completely unleashed me, how I grasped his hand to follow me down to the floor. I tried to write this, but I wasn’t sure how to convey the beauty in such a cold and dirty place, and since I’m not a liar writer I couldn’t substitute furry shag for cold, dirty and cold dirty felt slutty, shameful. People might not understand, and I was only beginning to.

Loves

2006-10-26T17:13:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid there was a chain barbeque place on Pico by the country club, the one my entire family belonged to; cousins, grandparents, friends from the temple. Everyone except my mother’s parents, who felt that the place was too snobby, too Beverly Hills. They lived a few miles away, in Brentwood, which was closer to the beach; more laid back, less fancy. But it was more than that, it was my Napoleon-sized grandfather Harold and his whisky and his leg brace, his limp and his fuckem’, his laugh and his loneliness. I know there was loneliness.

But there was also Loves, the barbeque place, whose radio script sang, “When you’re at Loves, the whole world is in love.” And for some reason that line lodged inside of me for all these years, like even if I didn’t understand it back then I was meant to remember it…“The whole world is in love.”

I don’t think I ever got to go to Loves, with it’s thick slabs of beef and pork, it’s rich red, spicy sauce, it’s million dollar napkins and bibs. Maybe it was the bibs that turned us off, but more probably it was that we didn’t have the money to eat out except only sometimes on a Sunday night after my brother’s baseball games, when we’d meet other baseball family’s at Original Johns, a pizza parlor in Brentwood with sawdust on the floor and a TV stationed high in a corner.

It was probably a relief for my mother not to cook for the 6 of us that night and it was certainly a relief for us kids to go out because it was such a diversion from the routine of home and our green and yellow lazy susan that spun mom’s dinner round and round the dinner table, offering us an array of heavy, over cooked foods; stewed tomatoes and mashed potatoes, turkey, lasagna and a whole lot more. It was a break from my mother’s exhaustion and her anger, my father’s failure and our failure, clearly, to make them happy.

But at Original Johns we could spread out more; have less of each other and more pizza. And my parents could drink beer, which everyone knows increases your love, at least for a little while, and you end up saying yes to things you might say no to, like, ”yes , here’s four quarters for the pinball,” and “yes, you can get another soda,” and “yes, you and your friends can play outside of the restaurant until we finish eating.”

And yes, isn’t it wonderful to be a child outside on a spring night in Brentwood under the twinkling sky, before we ruin the Santa Monica Bay, before we’ve clogged the roads with our traffic and garbage and exhaust and before we know dingily about real love and the failure to love too.

1969, under the stars, I’m a tomboy with hiking boots and jeans, and my sadness has only begun to creep in; I’m beginning to understand what kind of love a pizza and a beer can buy. Their sweet plans of love gone awry, my parent’s hearts are failing, this whole town in failing and the family too; my brother will divorce and marry again, a sister will become bi-polar, another will marry the wrong man, and me, a student of failure, courageous and broken-hearted, will spend the next 35 years pushing boulders into the path of love.

When you’re at Loves, the whole world is in love, though there are only so many scripts, some I suspect I haven’t even read yet.

Truth

2006-09-27T09:24:00.000-07:00

In conversation with my new lover about my previous lover…

“He called you ‘Truth’, that was his code word for you," he said, "‘Truth.’”

“That’s so sad,” I said. “I stopped telling him the truth a long time ago.”

My Dance Teacher # 2

2006-06-18T18:02:00.000-07:00

“I want you to take the pose of the divine,” she told us at the beginning of class. “Show me the posture that connects you to the divine.”

I closed my eyes and instinctively threw one hand straight up toward the heavens, then put my other hand behind me, thrusting it down past my butt like a tough little rooster tail, grounding me to the earth. This was the divine.

“Now I want you to take the opposite pose,” she said, “the anti-divine, if you will. Show me that.” I concaved my chest and curled in, my hands at spastic angles in front of me like arthritic branches grown wrong, my face contorted and twisted in pain.

“How do you know that’s not the divine?” she asked, as we stood there in our contorted postures. “How do you know that’s not the entrance to the divine?” she asked again.

Regret

2006-06-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

Day five at Esalen, the famous meditation and awareness center in Big Sur. I’m on a personal retreat; alone, doing nothing every day except reading and napping, making art, taking baths in the sulfur tubs, meditating and writing.

Day five and I’m standing naked in the open air shower on the cliffs above the sea after my third or fourth sulfur bath of the day. These daily baths have softened and quieted me. I find I have very little to say to people, which is unusual for my big mouth. But now, standing naked at 46, tan and lean after a week of clean food and silence, I find myself standing across from a handsome young man I’d seen in passing all week, each of us too shy to muster anything past “hello.” Now we’re naked and showering alone above the cliffs. He is tall and tan, dark, curly hair, in his 20’s. I think to say something about the large, round mandala tattoo on his back, but this week of stillness has left me incapable of small talk. I mean to look up at him and gesture our connection, but I look down instead, pretending it doesn’t matter; this nakedness, this attraction, this moment. I pretend this sort of thing happens all the time. Pretend I don’t live three hours away with a husband and two daughters who I will return to tomorrow just in time to drive the gymnastics carpool and spend the rest of the week figuring out summer camps for them.

Through the water I see him looking at me, staring at my body. All I need to do is lift my head and meet his eye. But I don’t. I pretend I don’t see him. And then the moment passes and I dry off and I am back in my clothes and walking up the hill to something else, anything, doesn’t matter, something different that takes me away from the simple surrender of eyes meeting in a shower, naked. Two weeks later and all I can think about is how for one moment I might have looked up and simply met his eye.

The Life of Smoke

2006-05-31T09:18:00.000-07:00

This because it's so passionate and because I've been swallowed whole by life and can't manage to post...this, written a few nights ago

By my 8-year-old daughter, Zoe

In the years 2005-2006 I’ve been noticing the pressure life gives you. The questions it asks. The things you do that tears the life apart. I’ve been noticing the fear in people’s eyes. I’ve seen tobacco in places that people don’t think you’re going to look because they’re hiding it from you. I’ve seen how people act when they’re caught smoking. I’m going to tell you a story of the way I’m thinking of it, but I’m not just going to tell you about tobacco and stuff like that. I’m going to tell you about the smoke that factories make because this is all about smoke. At the ending of the story I want you to think about how this is to your life. I want you to know that the smoke that factories make kill the fresh air, and the smoke that you inhale makes you get cancer and you get addicted to it. I want you to know how hard this is to let go of. Think about it and let’s let our story begin.

(we can only hope that the rest of the story is soon to follow. Maybe she's just watching me waiting to find out what happens.)

Fresh Grass

2006-05-02T18:35:00.000-07:00

It was simply the smell of freshly cut grass that hit me today as I crossed the lawn to the library. The smell of freshly cut grass that transported me back to Boulder, Colorado 1979 when I was a 19-year-old gardener on campus for the summer. The fresh, perfect smell of cut grass that I inhaled day after day that dry, hot summer as I pushed the lawn mower across miles of green lawn under the tower of the Rockies. A job that had me watering, mowing, cutting back bushes, picking up litter, and trimming trees with my friend Greg, whose love for Neil Young rivaled mine, becoming competitive in a game we played where we’d recite a single line from a certain song challenging the other to name both song and album.

It was simply the smell of freshly cut grass that transported me today, out of my life; the decision whether to let my husband continue his dance with the ballerina even though her husband and I have ended ours; the brewing drama with my 11-year-old on whether to let her quit the gymnastics team because it leaves her little time to play with other kids; the decision of which book idea I could actually follow through with; the anxiety of whether the new and expensive dress my mother bought me for my birthday is too small and whether it’s too late to return it; the image of my friend who is very sick and possibly dying repeatedly slapping his young son on the back yesterday because the boy wouldn’t listen to him and how the moment stood still for me as I watched him strike his son with hands gone weak because of an illness that is robbing him of all of his strength, his ability to speak and to parent the way he might have imagined.

Grass that transported me past the business of money and whether I am doing my artist husband a favor by bailing him out of being broke each month; whether I’m doing the ballerina a favor by sharing my husband so she doesn’t feel nearly as lonely with hers; the scheme to stop answering my office phone in case it’s her husband, a man I am trying to rinse from my psyche because his departure leaves me confronting my own loneliness and pain.

It was simply the smell of that grass that took me, let me breath in and forget, for a moment as I crossed the lawn today and entered the library.

Not Like You Knew

2006-03-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

It’s not as if you knew your life needed changing
What was it you used to bitch about?
What got you down?
That he didn’t make enough money?
That the house was always a wreck?
It’s not as if you knew your life needed changing
That one kiss under the awning of a Chinese restaurant
in the rain
could unleash
a whole new you
Change your life

Janice and her family moved to the country last year to change their life
They wanted a slower, natural, earthy, small town life
Her strong, smart husband built them a home overlooking a valley
where they could watch hawks and eagles
Janice and the boys learned to ride
They learned to ride horses
But then little Sam, his head started leaking
And 66 nights later
66 nights at children’s hospital
that’s how many nights her husband has slept
sprawled out on a chair next to Sam’s bed
funny, sweet, sassy Sam who razzes the nurses
Now Janice and the two other boys live that other life
the one they made the changes for

And even if you know what’s coming
The man in the walker coming out of the medical building today
How the walker got caught in the door
How I didn’t help him
But thought instead of my father
Able bodied but not forever
Because it’s not like you knew your life needed changing
But it must have
Because a kiss under an awning of a Chinese restaurant
in the rain
can set the whole thing off

**Inspired by Joan Logghe’s new book of poems called Rice

Ethics, order and timing

2006-03-08T23:42:00.000-08:00

And so, because I am not a romantic
When I got together with my husband and the ballerina last weekend
limbs colliding, on our backs, in her bed
The candles, the wine
Her unauthorized breathing
The way her eyes closed and face clenched when she came
What it feels like to let go like that in front of another person
her lover’s wife, your husband’s lover
How three became one
how it was she who held me as I came
His mouth on me, her hands clutching my arm
How they both went quiet afterwards
Resting with me as if we’d all made that train wreck of a journey together

And we had

Because I am not a romantic
What occurred to me afterwards was this:

what are the ethics and the obligation as to where the husband finally lays his seed? Does he leave it in the wife to show her where his real love lies? Where does that seed need to come to rest?

Ethics, order and timing

Following sadness to its true home

2006-02-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

Bear with me because I’m going to talk about allergy medicine for a second and then I’m going to talk about sadness.

Because I got this cold last week; sore throat, sniffles, and it just depleted me. Bad timing too because I was set to start teaching two new classes and the last thing I wanted to do was drag my sorry, exhausted ass into the room and launch a class like that.

That’s when I remembered this allergy medicine that I took a couple of years ago when I had this bad cold, and how as soon as I took the medicine, I mean, within minutes, I went from limpy, sad, sniffly woman to supersonic, fantastic, let’s take over the world, and run a marathon after that and get laundry done and edit 20 pages and make a four course meal for my family, which was fantastic, but which is why they tell you on the package not to take more than one of these little white pills every 12 hours.

But the thing is, the funny thing is, when you get to about hour 10 in your day and the medicine begins to wear down, you start to feel your sore throat again, and the sniffles come back too, which makes me wonder if that allergy medicine is tackling that cold at all or whether it’s just masking it, shooting me out into the world in total spastic denial, and then what have I really accomplished?

And this gets me thinking about sadness and all the ways I’ve masked it, tried to get away from it. I realize that I could spend the rest of my life fixing and changing things that I don’t like, that made me sad, but it would be like putting out little fires that once extinguished would just light up again in new places.

And so what I’m wondering is what would it be like to follow sadness back to its true home?

Because the things that make me sad, and I know reading this might trouble you because these things might make you sad too, like if your husband really did love the ballerina very much and if he didn’t know how to answer you when you asked him whether he’d leave her if you asked him to. Or if the ballerina’s husband, someone you love, wasn’t able to return this love in the way you wanted him to, and what a heartbreak that could be. And even though those things can feel horribly sad, I’m starting to believe that they’re just triggers for a much deeper sadness that isn’t just distinct to me, but maybe to you too. A birthright we all share in some way.

Because you can live a life of preference; this over that. You can try to eliminate the things that hurt, that crack you open and you can stay away from the edge too. You can tell lies if you like. Especially to the people you love. You can even make people say what you want them to say and get them to change, FOR YOU, so you won’t feel sad anymore. You can run from sadness for a very long time. And of course they have lots of sadness medicine too, like Prozak, which many people I love swear by.

But all the while, I’m telling you, your sadness is there, waiting, like a perfectly patient friend, waiting for you to get tired of fixing things and manipulating people or drinking too much or watching TV. or whatever it is we do to numb the pain. What I’m saying is the things that make us sad, they’re just distractions, even the ballerina and her husband, people I deeply love. Their job as problems is to merely trigger sadness so that I might finally find my way home to where sadness really lives. So that I might stop putting out the little fires that trouble me, so that I might finally sit down with the big daddy of pain and let him do his thing to me. Call me crazy, but I believe in my heart that that’s where the healing happens.

But walking headfirst into sadness isn’t for the faint of heart. And it’s not very American either. We don’t like sadness: it’s not very productive and it troubles people. They might not want to be around you.

But what if that journey to sadness’ true home, what if it wasn’t crazy, what if it saved your life?

My Dance Teacher

2006-01-25T21:25:00.000-08:00

“Stop trying to be above it all,” my dance teacher said as she dug her thumbs into my hip joints. “Stop trying to be all up here,” she said, throwing her arms over her head and gesturing something sexy and exotic, her chin jutting out in pure pose. “I want you down here, down in your hips,” she hissed. “ I want you to be like Katarina Witt. I want you to glide. I don’t want to see your feet leave the ground. So just stop, stop trying to be above it all.”

F

2006-01-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

Freedom

Today, out of the blue, the slightest hint of freedom like some exotic, warm wind blowing in off the coast of nowhere. Freedom like the sudden surprise of night blossoms; heady and sweet and impossible to locate in the darkness of the yard. Freedom and sweetness that says soon, spring, survivor, you.

In bed the night before I’d told my husband that I felt trapped. The kind of trapped that inspires insane escape routes like getting yourself sick. The kind of plan you have to immediately apologize to god for.

But now this sweet rogue wind, a window where there had been a wall.

Friendly

The black woman in the post office line today who warmly gestured for me to go ahead
of her because I’d been taping boxes in the corner and she believed that technically made me first. This beautiful, sweet smelling cocoa woman in her 50’s dressed in leather; skirt and jacket and high pointy boots, coordinated in colors of pumpkin, persimmon and rust. When she pulled out her checkbook it was orange. I meant to tell her how great she looked, but mostly I just wanted our eyes to meet because I wanted us to see each other, but I didn’t say anything. I was strangely shy. On the way out she looked at me and I only caught the tail of her glance, but she smiled and I meant to smile back, but she turned and was gone.

Forever

When we were deciding whether to have kids our biggest fear was that we’d split up. So we took a 20-hour drive to New Mexico with the intention to make our decision on the road. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere we realized that while we could say words like Forever and Never and Always, they wouldn’t mean anything. We realized if we wanted to stay together it wouldn’t be because we promised we would, but because of how we treated each other each day. That this good day would get us to tomorrow and a good tomorrow would get us to the next day. Of course it hasn’t been all good days, but somehow we have been able to cobble together enough goodness to make it here, 16 years later, in this old house at the end of the road, with palm trees, and possums and people, our children.

French kiss

I did kiss her. More importantly I let myself go. We’d tried it once before and after the initial tongue and a little exploration I felt the line, the place where I could really fall into her, but I was afraid, so I pulled back. But this time I let myself go. Her lips were soft and her tongue moved slowly. I felt the tiny sprouting of hairs around her upper lip and I wondered if she waxed hers like I did mine. Men are both rough and soft. They push and I like that. But she was all soft and that’s how I fell into her.

Friends

The ones who are still listening to me a year later and who have never told me what to do. The ones who kept their fears to themselves because they trust me and they love me and because they don’t really know what I should do, even when I have asked them. The friend who I hadn’t seen in years who grabbed my hand the other day at the ferry and said, “You’re very vulnerable, aren’t you?” And left it at that. Friends like that.

Fruit

My eight-year-old told me yesterday that she wants to go on a diet because she is fat. She is a little chubby in that way that small children can be; their stomachs distended, bellies popping over. And it doesn’t help that her older sister is such a stick. We were standing in the kitchen and I got down on my knees. I put my arms on her shoulders and looked her in the eye. I said I thought she was beautiful, that she looked just like mama.

beauty

2006-01-10T08:50:00.000-08:00

I told her, "I think I'm trying to write about beauty, though it's not always pretty."

And she said, "no, it rarely is, beauty is rarely pretty."

The Death of Innocence

2005-12-29T12:02:00.000-08:00

She’d crafted the mask out of an Almond Joy candy box, the kind of over sized candy box you get at the movies and she’d been to the movies that day, earlier, with her friend Jane, but now she’d been called home to sit in the garden with her mother and her father’s lover, the ballerina.

She’d crafted the mask out of the candy box, had cut two holes out from the center for her eyes and left the rest uncut so that her mouth, the full expression of her face wouldn’t be seen.

She’d planned it with her mother, knew the ballerina was coming and still, she didn’t know what to say. “You don’t have to say anything,” her mother offered, “we just want to get together.”

She’d crafted the mask out of an oversize Almond Joy candy box after she’s picked up her father’s journal a week earlier and after she’d read what he wrote, that the ballerina, her parent’s friend, wife of John, and mother to Jessie, Joseph and Gale, was the best lover that her father had ever had.

“You don’t offend me,” were the first words that came out of her 10-year-old mouth when the dancer walked up the front steps. And when she casually offered up the zucchini muffins that she had brought with her, the girl raised her eyebrows, “muffins?” she said, “no thanks.”

She crafted the mask because she didn’t know what to say now that she knew everything but understood nothing. And did this have anything to do with why her mother had seemed so sad all summer? And how she, the girl had tried to be better, wrote her mother notes like “mom, we love you, who wouldn’t?” How she hoped that if she just loved her mother harder and stronger her mother would be happy again. The girl's love could save her.

Now the ballerina was talking about love, how it was all about love. How she loved her husband, and how she loved the girl’s mommy as well as the girl’s daddy. The woman told the girl that she too, all of the children, were very loved, that there was enough love for everyone.

The girl wears a candy box mask with the words joy printed on the cardboard between the eyes, There is joy between the eyes but not within them.

A ten-year old girl sits in a garden with her mother and her father’s lover wearing an Almond Joy candy box mask.

The Sea

2005-11-30T22:13:00.000-08:00

For nights now my dreams are only of the water.

In one I’m in a swimming pool at night with other people and someone tells me there’s going to be a healing and the healer is none other than my father. I ask a woman in the pool how it’s going to happen and she looks surprised. She says big changes are coming and I can see that one of her eyes has already started changing, that a green crust has begun to cover one of her lids. My lover is in the pool and he swims over to me and then dives down, swimming like some plank fish over the top of me. He turns around and swims over me again.

In another dream I’m in the deep, darkest part of the ocean watching a big machine with a hook dip people into the sea, drowning them. It happens over and over and sometimes the hook dips even deeper, drowning the crane operator as well.

****

During the day the dark slice is so tempting and it's all I can do to fight it; a thin curtain that so easily parts, beckoning me to a place I know too well. I’ll cut everyone off, that’s how I’ll show them. I’ll stop answering phones, won’t return emails or calls. I’ll say I’m busy and that will stop them because they’re busy too. This is how I’ll get away.

Tonight, after I’d read the story about the three orphans to the little one, after I’d gotten the hot water bottle for her and let her read herself to sleep in my bed, just as I was leaving the room, she said, mom, I don’t know what I’d do without you, and I said, because I had to, because you have to say this, I said, don’t worry; you’ll always have me. And then I turned out the lights and prepared for the sea.

Blowing Smoke

2005-11-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

Was sitting there feeling small, not big. Not important. Not seen. Was thinking it would take something major, like a new book. An important book. Something everyone would be talking about. An achievement. Some supersonic effort that would catapult me out of the ordinary, out of this moment on the porch at mid day with my smoke and my coat on, sitting there blowing smoke into the garden.

Had it been enough to wake up every two hours the night before with a seven -year-old who was crying and twitching because she had a urine infection that stabbed at her throughout the night? Had it been enough to bring her into my bed and talk her through the pain, telling her to focus on her breath and the warm ball of her tummy, then waking with her a few hours later to go downstairs and wash her pee pee and put that thick white cream all over it and then make her a cup of hot milk so she could sleep?

Had it been enough to take a ten-year-old to school early and sit with her in the car while she plotted her birthday, now 8 months away, sitting, listening to her say that she wanted to take her friends to a hotel, not a motel, as well as swim in the Yuba river and go to the Rainforest Café in San Francisco. Was it enough just to nod and say maybe and listen anyway even though none of it sounded good to you?

Was it enough to get to the gym after that and pump those arms even though it’s not short-sleeve weather anymore and all your efforts will go unseen?

Or to spend the morning focusing on four students whose work needed editing, even though it took you more time than you thought you should give it because it wasn’t important enough, or supersonic enough and mostly because it wasn’t about you?

Was sitting there on the porch blowing smoke into the garden feeling small, not big, but having neither the energy or the desire to do anything about it.

Not What You Think It Is

2005-11-03T22:30:00.000-08:00

It's not what you think it is
That's been my mantra for days now
It's not what you think it is
Which enables a more curious stance toward life
A stretching of the fabric
A way to sit back and see past the contours of the ordinary
It's not what you think it is
Your husband and the ballerina for instance
It's not what you think it is
“Well your husband does have a girlfriend,” a friend corrected
Yes, I replied, but it's not what I think it is
it's not what I think it is.

Come On Down

2005-09-24T09:00:00.001-07:00

Our lives will not flash before our eyes.
It’s now or never baby.
It’s put whatever you can in your coffee; you got no cream; you go creamless.

Our lives will not flash, there are no second chances, no curtain calls.
You don’t get to go out smiling, a million friends around you waving, successful, perfect, concluded, finally weighing 125lbs.

Everything you said you wanted, there’s nothing there. I’m not saying don’t dream, I’m just saying don’t wait, don’t long for it, don’t hold out for it.

That balloon you’re clutching, that little string in your hands, the way you’re staring up at the sky looking for answers, look again. It’s just you down here.

The way you play that little game about three months to live and what you would do, everything you’ve kept out of reach for so long, waited for, how you’d eat fresh shrimp with limes everyday for lunch, or how you’d actually order an ice cream cone for yourself when you take your kids out, or eat more burritos, or have the courage to wear a short kilt with military boots like your friend Jane, or dye your hair festival red, or give yourself a couple of days off, or get on a plane to Italy with your husband because he’s never been there.

When you get honest, when you swing that door wide, the truth is maybe you should do those things and maybe you shouldn’t. Who cares? They’re not actually going to change you or help you or heal you. Whether you do those things or not doesn't matter.

That maybe it’s more about wanting and waiting that keeps you suspended, keeps us tolerating our perfectly average lives, the way things really are; how we look in the morning; the lines around our eyes, the grey coming in, how the house gets trashed and the messes pile up; the dishes, the clothes, the bills needing to be paid, another magazine saying no, the friend who doesn’t return a call.

And longing and wanting and all of those dreams you have are just a way to keep you reaching, looking away, high on helium,

And so I was thinking if I really did have three months to live maybe I wouldn’t go anywhere because there’s no where to go. How actually perfectly fine I am to live at the end of this dead end street in this ramshackle house with a family of mice below and a coven of possums above. And sure I could eat with more freedom and my kids would really get a thrill if I did order an ice cream cone in their presence, and I would like to wear that short kilt with the boots.

But who cares? Wanting and waiting is just a way to keep myself floating, but in my heart, really, I just want to come down.

Timing

2005-09-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

Even though my i.pod died yesterday, and even though that was hella bummer just cause I am all about the music, baby, when I saw the motorcycle cop lying flat on his back on 880, lying there on the side of the road as I headed home from the Apple Store with my dead i.pod, heading home all pissed off because the brainiac at the Genius Bar wasn't helpful, treating me instead with a kind of weak disdain because I had nothing for him to fix, no lusty trouble for his Great Brain to fuck. “This i.pod is dead,” he said with a scowl, thrusting it back at me like some dirty piece of meat. I drove home peeved and pissed because a new one was going to cost me and the insurance on this one had only expired two weeks ago. Bad timing, bad timing I grimaced. And bad luck too. And then I saw the cop and I saw his motorcycle twisted and mangled against the guardrail and a couple of bashed up SUV's practically on top of it. And there was the cop lying there on the side of the road with his helmut still on and the small circle of civilians who'd been in those cars kneeling around his body, protecting him, comforting him, and I took a deep breath and I slowed down and I said to myself, timing, timing baby, timing.

The Way We See

2005-08-18T07:40:00.000-07:00

You see better in the dark. When things sting, when they prick at you, when your husband is still on the phone to his girlfriend after an hour, when you see one of their emails and how bold and sexy she is, writing things like, “Do you still want me?” When you wake up from a bad dream where you’ve gone too far and kicked your husband out of the house, when you’re driving like a freak-head through the streets of your town looking for a smoke instead of getting to the Brownie Court of Awards ceremony, anytime you walk on the school yard and into the sea of mothers wearing holiday sweaters, the way you try to diminish your longings for your lover, the way you fight your feelings and then how you give way to his body like you did last Sunday, both of you fully dressed and in a mob of people at your house. It was only a hug but you released yourself and everything you have tried to hold back.

You like the dark; you understand everything better when you see its complexity, its trouble. It’s just the way you are. When the stone from your wedding ring fell out last week and was lost, after the momentary panic you smiled because it perfectly symbolized your marriage; loss and beauty; everything you hoped for and what happened instead and how only marriage can take you down that bright, shadowy path. And mostly whom you have needed to become to live into that.

After a day you stopped looking for the stone because the story about its loss was so much more compelling than the possibility of finding it.

But darkness takes its toll. Cement boots. Bad dreams. Agitation. A desire to smoke. Close down. Shut people out. Valerian and amino acids at night to stop your thoughts, and then waking up every morning at 4:30 to roll out your dark observations; does the lover love me? Not enough. No more emails or phone calls for him. Do I have the energy to teach today? God, I have nothing for my students and have they figured that out yet? Will I ever finish that book proposal? Do I love my husband enough? Am I screwing up the kids? Have I always been this unhappy?

It’s not that you don’t seek the light or appreciate sweetness, you do, it’s just that even when something has loveliness, like last night when you and your husband went to see your kids in the summer production of Beach Blanket Banana, even though you were moved by how beautiful and talented your daughters were, the way they’d memorized their lines and sung with such expression, what captivated you was the way your ten-year-old held hands with Rat Dog at the end of the show when she finds out he rides a Harley, and the way you watched her holding hands with this boy, the way you examined those clasped hands, like tea leaves, reading into the future. You see everything, you see too much. You always have.

Choosing a Dress

2005-08-16T18:17:00.000-07:00

Why she has brought him along, asked him to come to the dress shop she does not know, can't remember, but suddenly the dressing room feels too crowded and the dresses keep coming and are piled on the chair, on the table, hanging on the hook and she can't change fast enough before the salesgirl, a brunette with sparkling green eyes, brings another that he has chosen and wants to see on her.

It hadn't been her idea to come. She'd been saying, whining really, that she had nothing to wear to the party that night. He'd been sitting there reading the paper, holding it up between them and at first she thought he hadn't heard her but then she realized he wasn't listening and so she said it again, pretending even to say it to herself. Nothing to wear, nothing to wear to the party. "Fine!" he'd shouted, and throwing down his paper had called to Mac, their driver, who appeared ever the ready. "We're leaving," he said, "we're going to find Virginia a god damn dress!"

She'd sat there with her cigarette and coffee, regretting, regretting the moment wishing she could take it back because it wasn't what she meant, the dress, not what she wanted, not the dress, but she couldn't say what, and in the next moment he grabbed her cigarette out of her hand, tossed it into her coffee and turned to her, “Get yourself ready, we're leaving.”

Now, in the dressing room, rushed and hot and obedient, the clothes were coming too fast, like a punishment and her own clothes, the ones she had worn in were lost in a pile, drowning in dresses, too many beautiful offerings, and there wasn't time to see them all. If only she'd kept her mouth shut about the party, she hadn't wanted to go but then there was no choice.

The salesgirl kept knocking, "Mrs. Jacobs?" She'd say, “your husband wants to see you in this one,” and she'd oblige, in her nakedness, breasts hanging, underwear, and bra loose, to open the door and receive his offering.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” he shouted from the show room and then there was laughter and she could see them out there, he and the salesgirl, him lording over the place, dictating with his cane, “over there” he'd say, “bring out the green one, I want to see that one.”

And how the girl brings everything he points to. “Virginia!” he calls too loudly and she shrivels. The clothes, they were too much, too fast, too many. She hardly has a chance to assess herself, to stop and face her own reflection in the mirror, to decide if she likes the color, the fit, hardly has a chance to feel the fabric on her skin before the sales girl is opening the door to the room singing, “Mrs. Jacobs, come out, come out wherever you are.” And there she is, the good doll, daddy's girl, exposed, revealed stepping out into the light, into the circle of eyes, his and the salesgirls and now the other customers who are assessing her, then looking back to him, then back to her, then to him, waiting for his answer. There is a silence and the salesgirl guides her to the mirror so she can see for the first time who she had become, what was possible. And maybe it is the light or the fresh air of the showroom but she thinks she looks pretty. And she likes particularly the way the pinks and the purples of the flowers ring around her neck and how pretty the bones of her collarbone are as they meet the edge of the fabric and a smile spreads over her face because now she is happy, at first taking the skirt of the dress in both hands and swinging it a little like a doe see doe and then like a ballerina, on her toes twirling a little like one of those princesses on the jewelry box, and she's ready now, to thank him, to have him see her and so she turns like a child excited, hoping her excitement will make him forgive her for the whining at the breakfast table…but he's gone, not there and she searches the room for him, a little breathless and sees him finally, behind the counter with the salesgirl, laughing at something. And as if in a dream she's become invisible and unsure and her hand reaches up to the pretty place by her collarbone as if to reassure that she's really there, and the reach becomes a rub and the rub becomes a tug and she's aware of the material cinching around her waist; she's unable to breath and she has to get the dress off, has to get it off now…can't wait another second and she reaches her hand back for the zipper…in the dress shop with the saleswoman and the laughter and the kaching of the cash register and the little bells as the new customers come in and are greeted and then a phone and she whimpers, “I can't get the zipper, it's stuck. The zipper” she whimpers, “can't get it loose,” and she feels the heat and the shame and then the anger because she is trapped in the dress and begins to cry and she can't say, can only cry, “zipper, zipper, zipper.”

Some of the Things You're Not Writing About

2005-07-25T08:48:00.000-07:00

#1 The clear-eyed silence between you and your mother. The way she held you at the end of the trip and how painful it must be for her to lose this connection with you; to love you but not to know what's going on with you. How, for the whole two weeks you hardly spent any time together, and how even on that four-mile walk to Puako you managed to avoid the topic of how you really were and whether you and your husband were still involved with that couple. But then how, at the end of the trip, on that last day in the laundry room, how she turned toward you and said, “hug,” and the way you stood together, so still, holding each other. Not one of those hugs where something is trying to be conveyed, a hug like “I love you” or “thank you” or “everything's going to be alright.” This hug was stillness and silence, and then the smallest sound coming from your mother in the moment when you realize that she has felt you, located you, her first child. And that was enough, just to find each other in silence, in a laundry room in Hawaii.

#2 What's going on between you and your lover, his wife and your husband. Where things are and where they aren't; what you're feeling, what the plan is, when you had sex with him last. What's up with that? You know, the whole story; the juice, the details, the drama. You're not really writing about that.

#3 How tight your jaw is, one week later and how it's still kind of sore, a reminder of the weekend-the E and the whole day up in the hills; the heat, the trees, you, walking around bare -chested, sun tan oil all over your body, and your husband, naked in the grown-up sized sand box, with a rake, for hours. Your lover, his wife, your lover, his wife and those easy moments when you wanted nothing from any of them. How all the roles fell away and even your anger at her for making it look so easy; her raven beauty and ability to be both the girlfriend and the wife, for making it seem like you were the only freak in the show, the only one who lived and lurked, who ducked and covered in the shadows. All that fell away and there she was, sister, friend, confident, the woman you share husbands with.

You're not writing much about that because you've taken a break from the narrative, the story line. You're still a part of the drama, but it's like you've forgotten your lines and a part of your brain has gone soft. You've stopped wondering how the story ends; whether the hero gets the girl or if good will triumphs over evil. In fact, you've forgotten what the play is about, and, as if in a dream, you find yourself roaming among the cast, but you've all forgotten your parts and there's an easiness to this, a new level of possibility, an opportunity actually to switch roles if you like, to become, for instance, the aloof lover. You could play that role, try it on, as you did last Friday when you had the pleasure of hearing his voice on your answering machine and then your ability to leave it at that. I mean, he said to call back if you felt like it, and the truth was you didn't.

#4 That you and your husband haven't made eye contact or spoken more than two sentences for going on 40 hours, not that you're counting. And how you kind of like the break and the ability that the two of you have to step away from one another like this. And while it's true that there is an issue at hand, not just a funk, the phrase your husband used to describe it, no, not a funk, not a simple peeve, but a real life makem or breakem issue having to do with money, while it's true that there's this big ol' something sitting there not being talked about because you can't, because it's too triggering, because you need a third party with you, someone who can listen and keep things fair, honestly, your attitude right now is fuck it. You don't want to resolve things just yet because you like your anger and your self-righteousness. You like having the power and knowing that he needs you and that a part of him must be feeling like a really sad piece of dung right now. I mean come on, a 46-year-old father of two, the owner of two cars and holder of a mortgage is broke again and doesn't have a plan. No, you don't mind the distance, you like the distance. You need the distance. You're just fine with the distance.

These are just a few of the things that you're not writing about now.

Lucky Penny

2005-07-21T15:57:00.001-07:00

Are all pennies lucky?

Even this one, the one I see when I look down at my feet at the gas station this morning, half in, half out of my car, waiting for the tank to fill?

Even this abandoned penny; dirty and scratched, run over dozens of times by cars whizzing in and whizzing out, impatient and empty, all of us on the move, grasping for a greater piece of the pie.

Is the accidentally dropped penny, the one that isn't worth bending over for, this worthless circle of copper, the very same penny that is meant to bring me luck on this cold, summer morning? What else in my life is good fortune disguised as loss?

In the dream I had a week ago in Hawaii I only remember the words as I awoke, “lucky penny, lucky penny.”

gone fishing

2005-07-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

deep sea diving. Home on the 14th of the month.

The Crippled Mother

2005-06-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

It is the night of your daughter's Brownie Court of Awards ceremony, a one-hour affair where the girls receive their hard-earned badges and the older ones ascend from brownie to Girl Scout status. You ask your daughter, a first-grader, if she wants you to be there. You haven't worked on any of the badges with her this spring and you're not even sure she's going to get any. She is enamored with the girls whose sashes are covered with colorful swashes of pink, green and blue, a testimony to where they've been and what they've done.

There is a book you can purchase at the girl scout store a few miles from your home that tells you what to do to earn the badges, but you didn't buy it and haven't been back to the store since last fall when you spent $80 outfitting your daughter in her new uniform; the brown tights, the official brownie pin, the brown skirt and t-shirt. You were excited for her that day. She really wanted to be a Brownie. You were a Brownie and a Girl Scout, and 34 years later you still have your forest green uniform, the green knee socks you wore, the belt, the yellow bow tie, and of course the crowning achievement, the sash, which is covered in row after row of badges that you earned and which your mother sewed on for you.

You and another mother, Jeanie, promise each other that you will share the badge book and get your girls together every month to work on sewing and jewelry projects so that your girls can fill up their sashes. But you never do. You forget all about it.

Now, tonight, months later, the thought of sitting through the awards when you're like this, when you're feeling like a freak, a maniac, when all you want, when what you really need is a cigarette, just the thought of being crammed into the trinity Lutheran church with the proud parents from Franklin elementary school, some of whom will bring flowers for their girls, just feels impossible.

When you asked your daughter earlier if she wanted you to come she said yes and that she has a surprise for you. Now, with forty-five minutes until the ceremony you find yourself careening down the streets of your town looking for a cigarette. You'd gone a week without one and you were feeling pretty good about yourself since you'd taken that nearly full pack and dumped it into the garden fire pit. You were even relieved when it rained the next day so you wouldn't have to get on your hands and knees and pick through ash and twig to collect the loose tobacco and re-roll it.

The week had gone pretty well. The sex with your lover this past Sunday at his house, after his children had gone to sleep and while his wife was across the bridge with your husband, the sex that started with sake and ended in his bed hadn't left you entirely demolished. You'd had some rough moments, the few days when he hadn't called and you began to feel desperately unloved again, but you had held yourself up, you'd put one foot in front of the other, you'd been to the gym, you'd focused on your students, been nice to your husband and you'd been writing. You were thinking that maybe you could do this after all. You could have sex with a man who didn't love you like you wanted to be loved. Maybe you were getting stronger, your skin was thickening. But something had pricked at you a few hours ago, you don't remember what, something had nicked a wound and reminded you that you were actually utterly devastated.

Your town, an island, is small, 12 miles long by 1 mile wide and in the first ten minutes you've already been to four liquor stores looking for your brand, Bali Shag light. Nobody carries it. They carry the other loose-leaf tobaccos, the Drums and the other, heavier versions of Bali Shag, but you want the light.

Freak. You feel like a freak as you drive down Central and when you see the Carter family in their station wagon, mom and dad up front, clearly on their way to the Brownie Court of Awards ceremony. You, my friend, are going to wrong way.

Five liquor stores, six liquor stores, you pull up to each one, rush in, scan the counter and ask the clerk if they carry your brand. The Pakistani, the Chinese and the white liquor store employees shake their heads, no. You end up going to nine liquor stores in thirty minutes and no one carries Bali Shag light. Each time you get back into your car and kick up the engine your panic rises. You remember a petition that you signed a couple of years ago outlawing a chain of cigarette stores from opening up and you remember how adamant you were, how you talked about it with your friends, that your town needed to support stores that the people really needed. That was a lifetime ago.

You consider buying something else but as desperate as you are, you've miraculously drawn a line for yourself; if you can't find the Bali shag light you won't smoke anything. You say a small prayer as you enter the stores, please, please, let them have it, but each time as you exit empty handed you experience the faintest triumph, that you were able to walk away without the pack, that you might go one more day without a cigarette.

Freak. Fifteen minutes until the ceremony and you know the other Brownie parents are feeding their children and getting into their cars for the church, but not you, you are driving like a maniac, faster now down the streets of your town looking for a little relief. You are oily, unhappy, dirty and tense. And you're driving in the wrong direction.

The smoke is going to ground you. You know this. You've come to rely on those measured breaths, the calculated inhalations and since you've been smoking for the last month and a half, mostly out in your garden when the kids are at school, you've re-connected with your chain-smoking dead grandmother Ginny and how much she must have needed this steady breathing to ground the out of control spinning that was her life. Like you, she needed to settle herself, needed to keep one foot in front of the other less she…less she...and then she…

But now you're the one driving like a maniac. You're the one who hasn't found her brand and who needs to get to the Brownie Court of Awards Ceremony, which starts in ten minutes. You're the one who needs to surrender to the panic, and the desperation, and your terrible unhappiness, your addiction, you're the one who needs to turn around now and get things right.

When you get to the church it's jammed with parents, and your husband too, who is sitting next to Polly Brown, wife of Max, the man who you sometimes fantasize about when you're having sex with your husband or with your lover, fantasizing that you're fucking or sucking at his house just minutes before Polly walks in the door. For as handsome and tall and Nordic as Max is, it's the hulking presence of angry Polly that gets you off every time.

Your husband turns around in his chair and he makes a coy, little wave to Catherine, another mother from school, a woman who you know he finds beautiful. You hate him in this moment. You hate everyone. But suddenly your hatred is broken by the sound of your baby daughter's clear, strong authoritative voice coming from the front of the room. You can't see her because you're in the back and many of the parents are standing, but it's her, you know your own baby's voice.

“Attention,” she says loudly. “Color guards advance.” At which point scouts holding the American flag make their way to the front of the room which signals you to stand and to say the pledge of allegiance. You hate this too, but put your hand on your heart because you're so full of shame. Shame for needing cigarettes. Shame that you didn't help your daughter earn the badges, shame that you don't want to be here and shame mostly for being obsessed with a man who wants to fuck you but not love you. Ashamed that the only high you feel these days are the moments when you're having sex with him or getting a call from him.

But now here, in the church it is your baby's voice, strong and clear and commanding and you are immediately lifted by it. In this moment the small seven-year-old girl is the strong one. She is the one asking the people to stand and to pledge. And you do it, you do what she asks you to do.

You almost don't recognize her voice. She sounds older and so sure of herself. How did she know the words she was supposed to say? She hadn't practiced at home. She hadn't asked you for help. She'd done this on her own and you realize this was the surprise she wanted you to come for.

Your husband finally sees you and comes to the back of the room where you are leaning against a table. You wonder what people think of you two. You standing there in your beat up jacket with the skull and crossbones emblem and the words Death as Your Advisor written on the lapel, and Walt, the beloved artist in resident at the kid's school, the nicest, cutest dad on the playground, the one who hugs and flirts with the other mothers, who tells them they look pretty. Walt and you, whose eyes are dead and exhausted, the only mother in the room who doesn't have tears of pride, who doesn't know the words to the Girl Scout pledge, the only one who just stands there when the entire room breaks into a silly girl scout song that requires clapping their knees and wriggling their hips. Everyone is hooting and laughing now, singing and clapping, even the couple up front, the gay man and his wife, clearly a marriage of convenience, are wriggling their asses with happiness. And there's Jeanie, who has lost her marriage this year and has just found out that her husband Frank has gotten another woman pregnant. She's laughing and wriggling too. But you're not even pretending to wriggle. You don't have any wriggle in you.

The awards begin and you have to give the troupe leaders a hand because they're moving all 35 girls through the awards pretty fast. You're glad because you're supposed to meet your friend, Mary, a divorced mother from school, at a neighborhood bar for a drink in an hour. The last time you saw her she had been dumped by someone she really loved and she was like pulverized dog meat. Couldn't form a sentence without bursting into tears. She said she was better now and you need to find out why.

You see Zoe, blond and petite, sitting with her friends and smiling. You wonder if she feels connected to these girls. If they're her friends. You usually drop her by the curb in front of the church for the Tuesday night meeting and take off, back to your office to work or to drink or to pine for emails from your lover. You don't really know what she does here; all you know is that her absence buys you silence and time.

They're calling the girl's names now and to your surprise Zoe's name is called and she marches up to the front of the room to receive a little pin commemorating her first full year as a Brownie as well an envelope stuffed with badges. You have no idea what they're for or how she earned them, but you're grateful, so grateful that she hasn't been forgotten, that these women who run the troupe, older women whose own children are grown now, women who don't get paid to be leaders and who come here every week because they love the Brownies and who have been looking out for your daughter, helping her thread needles, and measure flour to make cakes and glue jewels on pieces of felt to make puppets. These are the women who have come to know your daughter, who know what she has done and where she has been.

Beaming, she takes her place among her friends. You try to catch her eye but she hasn't been looking for you. She might not even know you're here. You feel invisible, like a stranger. Finally, in the gaggle of girls she's sitting with, she looks up and she sees you. In the chaos and the noise of the room you lift yourself up over the heads of the other parents and you make the sign that you do at home where you touch your finger to your eye as in I…then to your heart…as in love…and then you point at her…you…I love you. She watches you steadily, and without blinking or smiling she makes the same sign back to you except at the end she sticks up two fingers. I love you too.

Thriving in Neglect

2005-06-13T09:26:00.000-07:00

You were so fond of saying that the thing you liked most about your garden was that it could thrive in neglect. You loved the phrase, thrive in neglect, and when you said it you felt a twisted pride that something so beautiful, so over-grown, so faerie-strewn, tree-toppled and plant-mangled could survive without any attention from you. That aside from a little water it demanded nothing.

You liked things that thrived in neglect. You liked your daughter's pet snake because it lived in pure silence and you could forget that it was there. Aside from the occasional trip to Petco for live baby mice, you could ignore it completely. You liked your cats for the same reason. You can't even remember the last time you fed them though someone in your family must have because they're still alive. Same with the dog. You checked his water when you remembered and tried to remind yourself to feed him when your husband wasn't around, but you didn't touch him much, didn't let him lick you or anything like that.

You appreciated friends who didn't need much extra handling. The ones who didn't mind when you didn't call them for weeks and months, friends who could just pick up where you left off, who didn't whine for more time, who forgave you when you forgot their birthdays.

You didn't think getting married would require too much. It would be like meeting another salmon in the stream and just running the same route together. What fun. You liked your independence and your husband, an artist, was an independent guy, a night owl who liked making art and jumping on his motorcycle at midnight and riding off into the forest, a guy who liked going to raves and all night parties, who didn't mind that you didn't join him, a guy who was more married to his art than anything. His focus gave you the freedom to keep yourself as separate as you pleased.

Until the day he told you that he felt neglected by you. He'd found a phrase in a book that said that in every relationship there is a fuser and an isolator and you resonated with this new tag, isolator. Honestly, though you felt a little like the meanie, it was so much safer to be that one than the other. On the other hand, you couldn't help yourself, you were, by nature, this way.

Having kids was a push. In your original fantasy you were surrounded by your beautiful, children, but in a quiet way. You were together but no one was pulling on you or spilling things on you. Your image of motherhood resembled more of a still life; a pretty picture with everything in its place. But these children needed so much. At first it was just the breast and you managed that pretty well, especially if you got to sit on the couch while you did it and watch Baywatch, which you had never watched in your life and which seemed full of pathos and purpose.

But of course they needed so much more and you found yourself retreating, backing yourself up into work and before too long you became a really busy girl. Workaholic busy. Angry, frustrated, freaked out busy. Lock your office door busy. Let the children watch TV. for hours busy. Tuna sandwiches for dinner busy.

You longed for your isolation, the quiet and the space that allowed you to think. Your temperament was not suited for the loud and messy madness of motherhood. Like your own father who liked being in proximity to his family but not actually interacting with them, you liked knowing your own people were there, but you needed more walls,

You took to wearing that old, beat up jacket with the skull and crossbones on the lapel, the one you stole from your husband with the words Death As Your Advisor, printed above the skull. The jacket and your cowboy boots brought on a calm, familiar, detached feeling. You could breathe again.

Still, something needled you, you wondered if you were neglecting the kids. But as much as you promised yourself that you would spend more time with them you found it hard. You gravitated to your office. You told yourself that they seemed to be thriving despite you; one had become a little soccer champion and the other had a flair for the stage. Still, you wondered, oh stop, you knew; like your wonderful, wild garden, they too seemed to be thriving in neglect.

The smallest things

2005-05-29T17:06:00.000-07:00

The note your ten-year-old writes you because she heard you crying in the bathtub with your husband

“Mommy, we love you very much. Who wouldn’t?”

and the way she comes into the bathroom while you’re lying there in three inches of hot water, lying there after your cry; depleted, exhausted, alone, and how she tacks her little sign on to the tile on the wall across from where you lay so you can see it

“Mommy, we love you very much. Who wouldn’t?”

the way your skin feels right after the bath; smooth and velvety and warm

the peace of being alone in the house because your husband has taken the children out for a bike ride and how you sit on the porch with your summer skirt on and light up that cigarette. How glad you are that you saved this little bit of tobacco for a moment like this

The big, tall, magnificent trees in your yard and the way they move in the wind. The sound of the wind

The peace of being alone and comforting yourself; everything is going to be all right, you tell yourself. You’re going to be all right

The feeling that you could fall in love with your husband again. The sense that the love you seek is right here, at home, with him

The quiet beauty of your ramshackle home at the end of the road, a home with no one inside it except you and the dog.

The way you leave the front door open for the wind. The way you need the wind to keep you moving, especially in these moments when you feel you could stop everything. Stop everything

The way how after the cry and the bath and your late afternoon glass of wine you feel capable again. Strong. Ready. Right. You can mother, you can love. You are still standing

How when your ten-year-old asks you what’s wrong and you say, “I’m just sad,” and she says, “about daddy?” and you say, “no, not exactly,” and how she asks if you’re mad at him and you say a little, but it’s not about daddy, it’s about me. And how she says she and you will talk about it later, and how you see in her eyes how excruciating it is for her to see you upset and to not understand what’s wrong

And how impossible it would be to explain everything to her

And the gratitude you have for her even though you wonder if this is good, if it’s okay for a young girl to comfort her mother like this, again, and again

And how you don’t know. You just don’t know

But you’re still standing and you can love. And that’s all you know for sure right now

Tell the Truth

2005-05-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

You’ve begun smoking again after 11 years

It started a few weeks ago when your friend E. brought that pack to the three-day silent meditation retreat in the country and the two of you made a little ritual of sitting in the tall grass in the late afternoons and after dinner having your silent smokes

Then that friend, the married singer came over, and she was smoking too. You were surprised at first, her being a singer and all, but when she told you that her first love was back in town, someone she always felt she should have been with, you understood the smoking and out of an affinity for confusion you rolled yourself one and smoked it with her in the yard

You called her a week later to ask which brand was she was smoking

Then last week you pulled up in front of that divey liquor store off of Telegraph and bought yourself a pack of Bali Shag. The first one got you high.

It takes about 6 cigarettes to pass from the this-is-disgusting phase of relapsed smoking and into the shit-I-need-a-smoke phase, at which point you’ve become seduced by the deep, measured breathing and the paced inhalations that are utterly calming

There’s something almost spiritual about smoking

After a couple of days you dump the bag of loose tobacco in the trashcan in your office. You think about wetting it down just in case you have an urge to retrieve it but you don’t

A few days later you pull the stale, loose tobacco out of the bottom of the trashcan and you begin rolling it, smoking it again

You remember the days when you were so hard up you searched for butts in trash bins and ashtrays so you could re-roll them into new cigarettes

You sneak the smokes out to the porch when nobody is home or you think the kids are asleep

Sometimes when you really need one bad you suggest to your children that they watch TV and then you go out to the porch to smoke because you’ve essentially just anesthetized them. The house could burn down and they’d never know. The last thing they’re going to do is look out into the yard and see mom smoking. I'm just a ghost

You don’t worry too much about this. You’re not a real smoker anyway. It’s just that life has been a little unwieldy in the last few months and you’ve come to need this one small thing. That’s all. Besides, after this pack is emptied you’ll be done with it

Yeah

Mmmmhhh

Done with it

What I Want to Say About My Wedding Ring

2005-05-17T13:44:00.000-07:00

It’s really dirty; murky, cloudy, bottom of the pool, lose a child during a birthday party dirty. Let’s just have another glass of wine dirty. You can look at porno and I’ll take a hit of smoke dirty. Seedy apartment complex dirty. Hang your bras off the balcony dirty. Walk around in your slippers and a wife beater t-shirt dirty. Yell at your kids and leave greasy pots on the stove for days dirty. Send your kids to school with Cheetos for breakfast dirty. Don’t open your bills dirty. Blame other people for your troubles dirty.

It’s even more personally dirty

It’s dirty like I’m so bummed you didn’t make a bunch of money in the last few years dirty. And how come you’re still in debt dirty. And no, I don’t want to gaze into your eyes and go down to your studio and make art with you dirty. And how come you never say thank you for all the laundry I do dirty. And I don’t know if I can handle you having a girlfriend on the side when I don’t have a boyfriend dirty. And why is the house such a pigsty when I come home from my meditation weekend dirty. And does the dog have to sleep under the sheets with us dirty.

Sometimes I feel so evil

In the beginning it was a really pretty ring

We bought it at Macy’s in San Francisco fourteen years ago. We’d decided to get married a month before because he was leaving California for a year-long artist-in-residency and we knew that we wouldn’t stay together if we weren’t married. The ring cost $400 and he had to sell his motorcycle to pay for it. It’s a topaz, a Cinderella blue topaz surrounded by eensy weensy diamonds, and in the beginning you could see right through it because it was so clean and so clear and it held so much promise that it was like gazing straight into the Mediterranean Sea.

Marriage is so promising

It has to be that way or no one would do it. You have to be a believer. You have to suspend all your intelligence, everything you think you know about how independent you are and how well you think you know yourself. You have to suspend all your feminism and your ideas about equality and how merging won’t make you mushy, and you have to believe that this union is going to bring you home to yourself and turn loneliness and turn sadness and turn darkness on it's head forever. You have to believe in a very abracadabra way that marriage is going to take all your troubles away. Even if you know better. Intelligent people still have to believe this. We can’t help it. Marriage is so full of promise.

And so what?

Exactly. Let’s get on with it

Here’s the thing

I bought some jewelry cleaning solution about a year ago and it’s still sitting in the cupboard un-opened. I have nothing to lose, I mean it. Abracadabra, I’m going to go clean my wedding ring. Because I’m a believer. In my litle dirty heart I’m a believer.

***Abracadabra: Someone recently told me that its literal meaning is: with these words make it so.

How To Take Your Life Back

2005-05-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

Leave your cell phone behind when you leave the house

Listen to the second track of Collective Soul’s 1997 Disciplined Breakdown over and over. Play it loud and dance it in front of the bathroom mirror. Shake your hips because you can, because you have them. Because you’re actually kind of gorgeous at 45. Take the CD into the car when you go to pick up your children at school and play it very loud as you cruise the streets of your manicured town. Don’t worry that you’re somebody’s mother. Fuck that. You’re free today. You’re celebrating. You’re taking your life back.

Consult your homeopath. When she prescribes the goat’s milk remedy don’t worry if you don’t understand how it’s supposed to heal you. Trust her and concentrate instead on her big doe eyes and the way they rest on you, the way you know she is listening to the all of you, to what you say and what you don’t say. Trust her when she asks you if this man who has been your lover has ever told you he loves you. Trust her when she uses the word hollow to describe his tone.

Take a swim. Swim a mile. Don’t think about how heavy your arms feel at first. Don’t think about your next great scheme to starve yourself and knock off a few more pounds. In fact, stop starving yourself. You’re actually pretty hungry.

When you get home eat some salty nuts because they have protein and you need your strength back. Don’t worry about the calories. You’re saying goodbye to the girl who sat longing for her lover to call her or email her. You’re letting go of the girl who was more concerned with how she looked for the lover and what she said to the lover than with who she really was all along. You want that girl back.

When your lover calls on his drive home just say it straight. Don’t blame him. It wasn’t his fault. He never promised you anything. He just wanted to have fun. He is a man who can have sex with people and not have it mean anything more than a really good time. He doesn’t want to be somebody’s boyfriend. He thinks that’s painful.

You know you can have another boyfriend if you want. And maybe there is a cutie pie waiting in the wings somewhere. Your husband is keeping his girlfriend and you don’t know how that’s going to work. It might not be so great on some days and you’ll just have to deal with that. It’s not about another boyfriend anyway.

It’s about you. And you’re taking your life back. True, you don’t know what that’s going to look like or how that’s going to feel. Right now you feel pretty strong, clear, but you know later tonight you might have to have yourself a little cry. That’s okay. You’ve been crying a lot lately, but this time it won’t be because someone didn’t call you. It’ll just be sadness. Just honest to goodness sadness.

24 Lies

2005-05-10T18:13:00.000-07:00

24 Ways in which I have lied to myself about being in a polyamorous relationship with my husband, another man and his wife

1. I'm the kind of person who can have casual sex

2. I'm a freewheeling girl who can't be hurt by people. My cowboy boots alone will save me

3. My sheer power and my animal sexiness will make the lover want to leave his wife

4. He has sex with me because he loves me

5. My sheer power and animal sexiness will heal the lover of his troubles

6. My sheer power and animal sexiness will make the lover not want to have sex with other women besides me and his wife

7. He will see I am the answer to everything

8. I will become more sexy and more powerful through fresh sex after 17 years of monogamy

9. Other men will find me sexy and alluring

10. And a line will form

sex
power
sex
power

11. I will fall deeper in love with my own husband

12. He will seem sexier to me because another woman wants him

13. My husband and this woman will fall in love and leave me and her husband to start a new life together

14. After a lifetime of shrugging off the concept of soul mate I will find mine

15. I will take off 10lbs and experience a magical age reversal. I'll be a 45-year-old who looks 30

16. My bravery to shake the marriage boat and trek into unchartered waters will be a huge boost for my career

17. I'll write a new book

sex
power
sex
power

18. I won't need other people because so many people will need me

19. Being needed will make me feel safe and love and protected

20. I'll never feel alone

21. I'll be happy all the time

22. During sex with both the lover and my husband I will stop fantasizing that the wife of a father from my kid's school is about to walk in and see me having sex with her husband

23. During sex with both the lover and my husband I will stop fantasizing about the time a friend of mine was accosted by the big brother of her boyfriend when she was a teenager

24. During sex with both the lover and my husband I will stop fantasizing about a young girl I knew years ago getting accosted on the sidewalk by a group of boys as she walked home from school

You want it to be about him

2005-05-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

You want it to be about him
You want it to be about him because then it’s tangible
Something you can hold onto
A problem
Something to be fixed
Something to talk about
Cry about
Starve yourself about
A real life drama
In living color
Your life
With characters and a conflict
a protagonist who wants something
That if they can just get
would make them feel so much better
and then everything
I’m telling you
Everything
Would be all right

So today it’s going to be about him
Whether he’ll call
or email
Whether he’s thinking about
Beautiful, important, sexy you

Just say it
Or mouth the words if you can’t
You want to be saved
Say it again
You want to be saved

Saved by love
The way he looks at you
The way he wants you
Whether it’ll get him hard
make him want to leave his wife
Whether one look at you makes him forget everything else he ever wanted

You want to be saved by feeling wanted

And this feels so familiar
This wanting feeling
This leap- frogging
From one special saving something moment to the next
How when you were a kid it was all about the weekend
Or the next holiday
Or the next birthday
Or what you were going to get for Christmas

And then as you grew it was about
marriage
and having children
and being saved by your work
and by making money
And keeping your looks
And keeping your man
And being the kind of woman who everyone wanted to be

And now how at 45 the jig is pretty much up
Cause you know better
And you’ve had all the things that you thought would save you
been on Oprah
In People magazine
Had your books published
Was flown to New York
Where everyone wanted to know
More about
Smart
Brilliant
Incredible you

But that wasn’t enough and you kept wanting
Found yourself a lover
Tried to be even more beautiful

And yet
And now

Now you want it to be about him
You want him to do the heavy lifting
Lifting you out of this place
Loneliness
Emptiness
Nothingness

You keep wanting it to be about something
The next cup of coffee
The next five pounds
The next book
The next love letter
The next phone call
The next deep fuck

And now
Now you’ve come to the end of the story
And it always ends the same damn way doesn’t it?
The protagonist gets what she wants
feels sexy and smart and loved
at least for a little while
But then
it’s never enough
It never is
she wants more
And you want to shake her
You want to scream
You want to rip the pages out of the book and you want to turn her sorry ass toward the mirror and you want to say
It’s not about him
And it’s not about that other stuff
It never is
It never was

It’s about you baby
It’s about you

Something about it calls to you

2005-04-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

Not every day is a good day. I mean, you have to wake up, and it’s not that, not the slow uncoiling of the body from its warm nocturnal rest. Not the way the eyes must sometimes pry themselves open in that creaky way; tin cans clattering on a cold morning.

It’s more that you have to wake up to yourself and who is that? Who is that you are waking up into? Are you the girl whose world will be made right by a cup of Joe and a hot shower? Yes. But then what? What can you rely on next? What little island can you step onto and be comforted with that next security, because that’s what you want, isn’t it? You want to keep feeling good, yes, you want everything just so. You want to continue along a shiny yellow path, a brick road, just say it, a shiny yellow brick road. Because that feels so much better than the unpaved, ruddy path that you can see just to your left if you look down. You know the one, laced with hard little pebbles that cut into the soles of your feet. That path, a little reckless, not clear, a mess of nature growing around it; wildflowers and weeds, nothing tended, nothing clear. And where’s it going anyway? You can’t tell.

No, better, you think, stay with what you know because what you know can deliver you to that wholesome place of comfort. It’s a Queendom, that’s it, that’s what you want, really, if you think about it, admit it, to feel like a Queen. You want praise and love.

So you check the emails and you turn on the cell phone, opening the channels so that no love will go unheard.

And you sit and you wait and you preen; the facial products, the hair products, the clothes, checking yourself in the mirror at least three times a day to make sure you’re still in fine form, sometimes even imagining your lover dropping by unexpectedly, out of the blue, catching you looking perfect and beautiful and ready.

And still, the day is long. There are things to do. There’s your work and there are phone calls to make, people to get back to and you’re pretty good at this; you know the steps and yet there is this longing, this yearning and you can feel it all day. And even if you’ve heard from the lover or a friend, even if you’ve been told, “We Love You, You’re Fabulous,” you can still feel it. It aches.

You read emails but the moment you finish them you’re famished. Really, you’re starving. So damn hungry. And so you find yourself pushing at things, feeling almost a metallic, clanky, clingy edginess, and it hurts and it feels a little desperate because it’s lonely in the Queendom. You’re beautiful, yes, and you’re well loved but you’re so lonely.

Looking down out of the castle you can see that ruddy path in the field below, the muddy one with the hard little pebbles and you wonder. Something about it speaks to you, but you’re not sure. What shoes would you wear? Would you be walking it alone? You’re not sure how to get there and yet it calls to you. Something about it calls to you.

where i am from

2005-04-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

If she thought she was marrying a rich man
If she thought she was marrying a strong man
If she thought she was marrying a man who would keep her safe
and beautiful
and loved
and sexy

If she thought that's what she was getting she was wrong

Sat down and cried on her wedding night
Collapsed on the beach in front of the tacky Hawaiian motel

She'd had the princess wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel
I've seen the photos, the evidence; the big dress, the tiara, one hundred bridesmaids, flowers, photo fabulous smiles
She danced the first dance with her father
a small man with money
a deal maker

But now, days later
No longer a virgin
She's sitting there crying
Ripped off
Tiki lamps and mosquitoes
And not too much to talk about
Because he doesn't like to drink
Because he'd never touched a woman before last night

And if she thought this man
And if she hoped this man
and as hard as she worked this man for the next 45 years
As hard, as tough, as rough, as mean

This is where I come from

Disappointment on a beach in Hawaii with cheap drinks in plastic cups and aloha smiles

Disappointment and longing
longing so hard and so deep
so hard and so deep

Born into innocence and grown into longing

My father changed hotels, borrowed some money and hooked them up with the big hotel down the beach, spent the rest of the honeymoon there, but she doesn't remember that part

Like me, whose honeymoon in Hawaii didn't happen either because
I thought I was getting a man who
And I was supposed to get a man who
And I thought my man would

But you know the rest of the story. You've figured it out by now.
Leaf fall from the family tree

The Dogs

2005-04-21T06:52:00.001-07:00

Been chasing the same thoughts like dogs around the same park most of my life.

Am I loved? Am I important? Valued? Will I be alone? Who will love me?

Been constructing my life, manipulating my life to avoid the less pleasant answers to those questions.

How in high school I realized that nearly every day someone commented on my great clothes, my long curly hair, how much weight I'd lost or what a great fuck I might be. And the way I started to mine for those comments, the way I began to depend on them, like bits of chocolate after a long day, the way I worked them, the way they made me feel; better, prettier, important, desired, loved, the way they made me feel less alone, less fat, less ugly, less unloved.

All the things I really felt about myself; my horrible curly hair, my fat thighs, my insecurity, my fat face, how you'd have to be deformed or drunk to love me.

Unseen and unimportant. Those are the dogs, the same dogs that still yap and nip at my feet. And no matter how successful, no matter how many golden rings, how much weight I lose or whether he wants to fuck me or she wants to fuck me, no matter if I get a phone call telling me that we love you baby, love you baby or another book gets published.

After the big manic ego flush passes though me, after the hot rush of intoxication, the blood bath pulses through me, drowning those dogs and their nipping and yapping

Those dogs are back

Dogs like thought s I've been chasing around the same park my whole life, nipping and yapping and biting and barking and me thinking most of the time that I'm actually getting someplace in all my business; edit student work, pick up jacket at the cleaners, call dentist, write that interview up, all ways I dodge the dogs, ways I keep them at bay, their yapping, their incessant cries, the ways they know me, how exactly where the stubby, curly haired Jewish girl lives and how unsightly and how unholy and how lonely and how afraid she is, sitting there planning and scheming ways to secure the love, the good feelings, making plans for the poison she will feed the dogs, like the burglar who throws the tranquilizer into the dog meat so he can rob the house.

I'm buying time too, entertaining myself, reaching for the next big thing; what I'll do on my birthday, what I'll buy myself, how great I'll look in that dress, whether it will get him hard so I won't have to listen to the sound of those dogs and their yapping and crying. Dogs like the same thoughts I've been chasing around the same park all of my life.

Showering with God

2005-04-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

You’re showering with God tonight. He can feel how sore your thighs are from that walk you took earlier today. He rubs his hands over your ass, feels the smoothness of your skin. The hot water is perfect and God appreciates the heat. Then in the smallest voice he can muster, he whispers, shave. Shave he says, down there, prune, make sweet, make nice, reminding you that your husband is leaving town for four days in the morning.

True, you don’t usually make love after you teach, late on a Thursday night, but standing in the shower with God, you suddenly realize, you remember, as if coming to, that the man lying in bed upstairs is the man you’re married to.

You’d been saving the nice, soft body scrub, the expensive stuff that melts your skin, melts your ass and your arms and your breasts, saving it for the next time you will see your lover because you like to feel extra sexy around him.

But standing in the shower with God you remember, like popping out of a dream, who you are married to, who you actually live with, the man you bed down with every night.

And so with the hot water coming down on you, you let go of the things that bother you; his stubby beard, his too-short hair cut, his irregular breath, the slow way he likes to make love and stare into your eyes. The way he is always trying to find God through sex and through you and how exhausting that is, like he’s not really seeing you, but seeing past you and trying to get something, something from you, something you don’t have to give and something that over the years, you have found yourself more and more reluctant to even offer, even if you had it to give. But tonight you let all of this go because you’re showering with god.

And you realize that when all is said and done, the man upstairs, that’s the man who you need to mean to love. And while it’s not new; the rush and the feel and the excitement isn’t there; you don’t do it on the couch or on the kitchen counter where you’ve been doing it with your lover. It doesn’t start with a kiss, the pushing of tongues. The battle of flesh.

The site of your husband doesn’t make you want more and you don’t count the hours before you’ll see him next, but then it’s not fair to compare when you’ve been with someone for 17 years. You can’t do that, he’s not about that. He’s about loving you just the way you are and that’s not such a small thing, is it? He told you as much tonight. Told you that he’d die for you, told you this on his knees, came to you in your office and got down on his knees in front of you. And god saw this too and he asks you to respect this, to see what you have; a good man, a fine man, a man on his knees.

Loved Still

2005-04-15T01:36:00.000-07:00

when i was a teenager
and I'd get a new boyfriend
the day after
the day after
the big kiss
or the big
fuck
or the big whatever
the trade that I made
that brought
him
into me

the day after
always
I'd be sick
from school

didn't want to be seen
for him to see
me

this encounter
this fresh opening
brought up
all my longing
and fear

was I loved?
and now my life
since then
all of it

I swear
searching
for evidence
that
I am
loved
still

Flying Monkeys

2005-04-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

Somehow fragile
these last many days
waking up dark and without joy
no reason
keeping my eyes averted
trying to follow the flow
get their breakfast
make the lunches
brush their hair
make my coffee

trying to send them off
without infecting them
unleashing this darkness
making them pay
for this dark lizard zipping past my reach

fragile
rode to school with them
yelled fuck to ruby
a word she hadn't heard
because she rode circles
in the middle of the street
with the cars coming
screamed "move it!"
to zoe
who was crying
because ruby had gone first
because she always goes first
because it's not fair
to be the little one

"what's wrong?"
a couple of mothers at school asked
for my eyes and the grief
fragile
any second now
could split
topple
break

I started to answer
something for real
but a million distractions
a kindergartner grabbing a mother's hand
someone tapping someone on the back
me standing there in my grief
for everything
for not hearing back
from publishers
editors
some friends
for really knowing that my drinking
is a problem
for the fear of having to stop
for my judgments and doubts
the tension and the stress
for feeling like I work so hard for nothing

Rode home and unleashed it all
on the phone
to poor Cheryl Johnson
who is charge of the gift wrap sale
spit words into her machine like
ridiculous
wasteful
bullshit
about the gift wrap
and how they want us parents
to give them the names of all our friends
so they can send them bullshit in the mail
wasted paper, dead trees
send them names of all our friends
so my children can get 8 free gifts
including a flying monkey

and this wouldn't be so hard
except the sales guy stood there
at last weeks' assembly
demonstrating how the monkey flies
and the kids yelled and cheered
"20 names"! the man screamed
"Get your parents to give us the names!"

ridiculous
wasteful
bullshit

But it wasn't Cheryl's fault
and so I called her back to apologize
Fragile, I said, just fragile.

God sees everything

2005-04-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

God sees everything, yes he do. God knows things that you don’t. God knows what you dream. He sees you taking the Valerian an hour before bed so you will be guaranteed your little sleep. He feels the way you sit up in bed in the dark meditating it all away, or how you hope to; your fears that you won’t be loved, that everyone else will find the love, love like Easter eggs, the prettiest ones, while you will find the plain and cracked ones, discarded, not sought after, not special.

God sees everything.

He sees how all you want, when your husband finally finishes his sitting is to be held, held like you are loved. You want protection and love and you want your husband to bring it to you, a man who has spent a weekend with a former ballerina, a beautiful woman who you call sister, who you encouraged your husband to pursue, and he has, more than you could have imagined, and you’ve seen the beautiful photos to prove it; her naked body with its tangle of pubic hair, the medicine bundle around her neck, the one he’d given her and which they wore together, placing their wedding rings inside for safe keeping, even saying a prayer for their spouses who were also together, on the other side of the mountain beginning their own ascent, their own juicy pilgrimage, but through sake and tiny crabs that were meant to be eaten whole, claws and all.

Sees how you reach now under your husband’s pajama bottoms for his penis. Sees you grasping it, inching it to come alive, watches you, feels the ache in you, wonders as you do, why, why you’re doing this, what exactly you’re after.

Is it the sex? The penis? Is it about the loneliness? The photos of the ballerina? Is it because you love this man and because he has asked you to prove it? Is this how you will find the something you’re looking for? Because you are searching, aren’t you? You’re looking for something.

And he loves it. Your husband loves having his cock stroked. He’s moaning and getting hard and you know how to do it, the way he likes it. You lubricate your hand even more; you don’t stop.

You’re lying on your side and your face is drawn. You’re certain that your lover, if that’s what you want to call him. Your boyfriend, your friend, your brother…that man across the bay who brought you to orgasm with his own hand and mouth on Saturday night, and who you also delivered with your own tongue on Sunday as he stood above you after the dance and the shower, still wet and sucking and the way he came in your mouth and how tender you were with him.

You’re not that tender with your husband tonight. Your hand isn’t on his chest. You’re not feeling his moans, how much you love what you’re doing. What you’re doing doesn’t make you happy like it did when your lover shook with pleasure. No, you’re separate from this. And it’s not like you want him to finish and get off because it’s not about him, is it? It’s about you and you feel sure this is what a sex addict must feel like; removed from what she does, but needing it all the same, needing it.

When he asks you to climb on top of him you do and at first it’s slow, the way he likes it, and then you find your rhythm and you begin to fuck him.

God sees this too.

Hard, and with a kind of pounding which is the way you like it, which is the way your lover likes it, which is partly what you love about him, that he knows how to grab you, rip off your pants and enter you without asking.

Afterwards, after he comes so hard and deep that he is shaking his head from side to side, your husband says it felt almost like you were angry and you say no, you say, I was just fucking you, just fucking you. And god sees this too.

No Place to Hide

2005-04-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

These are the fast and dirty ramblings of a woman who is barreling straight into her middle age. These writings come from the middle of her life, not a particularly bad time either. She’s not freaked out. She doesn’t sit on the couch all day watching soaps and fantasizing about a life completely out of reach. She is not overweight. Not married to a balding guy who watches sports and says “yes, dear.” She’s not a liar, she doesn’t spend an exorbitant amount of time chatting with the other mothers on the schoolyard in the hopes that she will be loved and understood by them. It’s true that she is invited to their weekly knitting nights and their holiday cookie decorating parties, but she rarely goes, not because she doesn’t like these women, who are mostly Christian and mostly very normal and actually very nice, women who wear sweaters decorated with Easter Eggs and pumpkins during the appropriate holidays. Women who probably don’t have very good sex with their husbands and who don’t know how to tell the truth at home, women who are not particularly self reflective and who haven’t spent enough time in therapy. Women who she might be afraid to run into at one of those end of the year parties in someone’s backyard because they would be drunk and then the awful truth of their lives would come spilling out and it could take hours and she’s such a good listener and she would be stuck.

No. She is not like many people barreling into their middle age that wake up one day and realize that they’re unhappy and living a life without joy or love or passion.

She is not that woman. She is independent, a writer with her own teaching practice and a couple of healthy scoundrels posing as children. She has a good-hearted husband, an artist who marches to the beat of his own drummer. This is a woman who has an excellent life on paper; books published, students who appreciate her, a great family, excellent friends. A woman who gets to the gym at least 5 times a week, who is healed by music and coffee. A woman who dances, who dresses and who loves color.

And yet, these are the writings of a woman who has a darker side, a not for public consumption, not for prime time side. A side that she fears the people in her life would worry about.