Where to begin

The hour on D.'s old alarm clock glows green on my nightstand by a pile of unread lit mags and a Valentine's Day card that isn't really one but a blank-for-your-message Papyrus selection. D. has written in it in pink gel pen. Where did he even find that? I wonder -- every ballpoint, felt tip, and roller ball we've dug out to write Christmas thank-yous is dried up or nearly so. In the top right corner, in his tiny print, is the year. Before he met me, the keeper of family histories and their artifacts, he never added that to his cards.

I, too, have picked out a blank card by the ubiquitous overpriced paper goods imprint this year -- maybe to make up for this occasion on which neither of us has much more to offer.

There is no card for "I have a brain tumor and I'm sorry it is completely fucking up our lives" (D.). There is no card for "I am holding my shit together as best I can for you and the kids but I know I'm not doing a good enough job" (me). And we're not about to write those things in our respective valentine stand-ins. That would be admitting too much about the beating our marriage has taken in recent months. Okay, years. Illness exacerbates the things that haven't been working and makes them impossible to table indefinitely.

We are trying, in spite of it all. To the outside world, we are managing.

At this time of night, though -- last baby feeding done, late-night TV guiltily consumed in a separate bedroom, resistance to the arrival of the next day keeping me from sleep -- I know our efforts aren't even countering enough of the damage to make this a zero-sum game. The silence I've kept here, protective as it is meant to be, is serving no one.

In a few weeks, I will file our valentines with the rest of our letters to each other, spanning almost 18 years. I have not paged through them recently. I don't want to read between the lines and find the little fissures before they became cracks and then shear points. But leaving the card on my nightstand for six months, as I did last year, is just as much a reminder of my reluctance to face our history.

I never imagined that this was the life waiting for me, for us, when I started writing in this space, and that bears some unpacking. It's been too long. But I'm here.

Woolgathering

With regret, I set down a jumble of slender double-pointed knitting needles and gaze at the limited progress I've made: a one-inch ribbed cuff, the beginnings of an impossibly tiny sweater sleeve, in a rosy pink that calls to mind the columbines for which this particular colorway is named. I can't knit any further without the larger needles that are supposed to arrive today in the mail.

I haven't been able to knit for months. Not for lack of supplies, but from near constant morning sickness, which I'd expected to disappear around 17 weeks as it did when I was pregnant with O. But not this time. Here we are, well into week 24, and there are still plastic bags stashed strategically around the house in case of emergency.

The motion-induced nausea eased off somewhat around week 22, so since then, I've enjoyed being back at my needles in anticipation of this new little one, slated to arrive in the first days of January. But food smells (and certain foods) are still hair-triggers, and all my energy is in reserve for toddler wrangling while D. is at work. So I've been keeping a low profile.

I wasn't prepared to be so sidelined, given that my first pregnancy was so vastly different from this one -- I had energy. But for whatever reason, this baby has insisted that I slow down. Which has meant a lot of sitting with my thoughts since the beginning of May, of listening to voices I tend to push aside when the normal busyness of life keeps me from paying attention.

I had the chance to attend a weekend writing retreat on Whidbey Island at the end of May, where (in between nibbling rice crackers) I gave myself permission to put some of those thoughts on paper. Real paper, an old school notebook I'd abandoned after eighth grade and unearthed again last fall. I wrote words I had avoided writing, read them aloud to a gathering of 60 women on the last day, remembered what it felt like to crack open the stoppered bottle of stories that needed to come out. Found new mentors. Returned home with a changed sense of what I needed to write. But not how.

Since then, I've continued to jot things down on paper, something I never used to do. It all feels fragmented and dream-journalish, as if my subconscious is doing the writing. But, given the slowing of the rest of my life, it's also felt like the right thing. That is, of course, until the needles came back out and the months of yarn deprivation caught up with me.

I'm trusting that the words are still there, and that the writing is taking its time for its own reasons. But I do wish coming to the page could always feel as compelling as waiting for today's postal delivery ...

Processing and processing

Some time back in early November, I reached the one-year mark for a writing goal I didn't realize I'd set for myself.

When I finished my thesis for Little U. on the Prairie in 2011, I wasn't sure how I felt about writing. I'd spent four years wrestling with words in an environment that was meant to give me the time and space to do just that. And yet, after being put through all the academic paces that went with that luxury, I felt like I'd trained for a foot race only to learn that the event I'd signed up for was for swimmers.

Writing in real life is not a process bookended by predictable deadlines at various points in the semester. Nor is it something you're lucky enough to do with a preselected set of peer reviewers. Not that the work that comes out of all that is at all good, either -- in fact, some of my worst writing happened at Little U. Forced into artificial final form for the end of each term, my work was undergoing revision -- prematurely, it seemed -- before I had even had time to get distance from it, much less consider all the feedback from my professors and their workshops. I hated my thesis. The first five chapters felt like mine, but the rest didn't come from my writing brain; they were a strange, out-of-body text generated to make page count.

Somehow, in creating those final two chapters, I lost my voice and my way. When I got back to Seattle after my defense, I couldn't understand why something I had once loved doing and felt confident doing, despite its difficulties, was suddenly like trying to do calculus without knowing any basic math.

So I stopped writing for two years. Partly because life happened -- I'd been sick for more than half the time I was a graduate student with no explanation in sight and I wanted some answers. We got them. And then we had O. Any hope I'd had of getting back to the page evaporated with my claim on a proper night's sleep for the first nine months of his existence. In the haze of new parenthood, the idea of a writing life was so implausible that spontaneously sprouting a third arm was looking more likely (and at the very least, more useful in baby-wrangling).

But in that mid-fall of O.'s first year, I sat down in front of this screen and put words there, one by one. Not the random notes on life with O. that I'd been posting infrequently, but words from my writing brain. It felt strange. It wasn't the voice I'd had in the past nor the stand-in text generator from my final months of work for Little U. I didn't question it. I just wrote.

And I kept doing that. In fits and starts, yes, but always with the knowledge that I would come back to whatever I left behind, as long as it was giving back to me some measure of mental energy that being a mother wasn't. And suddenly, it was November again, and the work was no longer an exercise but a comfortably demanding habit or practice, which is what I'd wanted it to become all along. I think in returning to the screen, the words, the ways of thinking I had abandoned, I was hoping to make them the part of my life I had failed to establish in a meaningful manner in my previous attempts.

I am still at my keyboard even though there's been little to read for a while here. Words are finding their way to the page, so much so that what I'm working on is no longer a reasonable fit for this space on sheer length and scope alone. So if I'm silent, it's not for lack of news or thought. I'm just working.

This is more than I ever expected would come of going back to something that felt more and more exacting with less and less benefit to anyone when I left Little U. If it hadn't been for O., I might not have pursued it at all. But having him has given me a different lens through which to consider the subjects I write about -- the nature of family and its ever-evolving dynamics -- and with that change, the old sensation of being lost has gradually faded.

I still have no map for the path forward with my work. But for now, I'm no longer trying to see a way out of it.

Rude awakenings

At quarter after 11 on a drizzly Wednesday, O. pushes off my lap, where he's been climbing up and down all morning, and starts rubbing his eyes. My rendition of "This is the way the ladies ride," which I've been repeating for half an hour with all the associated bouncing speeds, has finally lost its appeal, and the tell-tale signs of tiredness are on both our faces.

For most of O.'s life, I've automatically kept an eye on the clock -- if it isn't time for him to eat, nap, or be changed, it's almost time -- and we both do better when he gets his needs met on a reasonable schedule. Of late, though, despite my attention to his usual signals -- half-mast eyelids, a sudden interest in cuddling rather than running circles around the sofa -- O.'s barely been sleeping during the day, and I have yet to figure out why.

I've grown skittish of his new quickness to wake. And resentful of every rumbling truck, yapping dog, and shrieking middle-schooler passing our door at certain times of day. Our walls are thin. While O. used to slumber through almost anything, the slightest disturbance now raises his banshee howls right away.

I know he's not fully rested. When he used to nap for three hours straight, he'd wake up babbling to himself and thump the bars of his crib with glee. His screams of distress complain of interruption, of the sudden, abrupt transition from a dream state to reality, almost like the indignant cries of an infant just born. I'd pity him more if his predicament didn't mean a similar disruption of my own work. I am inevitably writing -- I've stepped into that ever changing current of words and thoughts that will only be here in this form on this day now when, unexpectedly, I'm hurled from the stream onto the rocky shore again and someone has made off with my towel and shoes.

Today, though I'm tempted to hustle him off to his crib right away, I buckle O. into his high chair and put his favorite foods on the tray. It's hard to know if this is the right choice -- if I delay putting him down, am I missing that magical window where he'll naturally fall into his deepest sleep state, or if I don't, will I set him up to wake too soon because he's hungry? He seizes a pork rib, bone and all, and gnaws contentedly. That he has the patience for this tells me all is as it should be for now.

I take O. to his room an hour later. There's minimal protest -- a whimper or two as I leave him, but he's quiet in seconds. At last, I can sit and think, the blank page before me, only the slight hiss of air through the floor registers for company.

But I can't settle. Three delivery trucks motor through, engines thrumming. Our neighborhood school lets out, and children call after their friends as they head to the park down the street. It's not the noises themselves distracting me -- I've written in a college dorm that faced a local fire house and in an apartment under another inhabited by an old professor who thumped around with his cane at all hours. He'd swear in Greek every time he couldn't get his PowerPoint slides working for his next day's lecture, which seemed to be a frequent problem. No -- I only cringe now because I'm anticipating a rude awakening for O. and me, though I haven't even entered that meditative state I've been looking forward to.

This can't continue, I tell myself. You can't jump at every potential disturbance or you won't get anything done.

But there is no solution for this when I am both mother- and writer-in-residence. I laugh wryly at the idea of parenthood as a post one might apply for like a guest lectureship at a university. I enjoyed the visiting professors who rotated through my department when I was working on my MFA, but as they weren't permanent, the connections I made with them always felt tenuous and harder to guarantee. That certainly wouldn't be an ideal dynamic for me or O.

Still, I wish in this moment for a little less mother brain and more of the focus that only a particularly emphatic stream of profanity from the old man upstairs could break.

*

I'm linking up with Just Write this week. For more stories and essays, click the button below.

Buzzed

It is silent, except for a hushed drizzle I haven't heard in months. Summer is finally over. The whirlwind weeks leading up to my sister's wedding are over. I'm in the sweater I love instead of shorts and T-shirts stretched from too many rotations in the wash. I can stop tracking the million little things that any major trip requires and just sit, for the moment, without wondering what comes next.

I feel empty, as if I've been turned inside out and shaken thoroughly. The last twelve months feel as if they've been one nonstop, high-speed obstacle course and stillness has been almost unrecognizable to me. But here I am. There's been no time to pause for excitement, worry, frustration, even tiredness -- only fleeting acknowledgment of their presence before sprinting toward the next thing. Now it all floods in, jamming the connections. The heart and the head gasp in unison, like I've touched a live wire.

There will be time to sort it all out. I promise myself this even as the crackle of so many sensations leaves me buzzing. The year's biggest demands are finally past, and now --

And now what? asks the voice in my ear.

I don't need to know right now, I say. And that's the point.

*

I'm linking up with Just Write this week. For more stories and essays, click the button below.

On debris

Author's note: I wrote this in late June and never got around to editing it until this week! Chalk it up to what came out of the incident below -- lots of other writing and even more decline in my laptop's function. The latter's at the shop, so I'm working on borrowed technology until further notice ...

Yesterday, I sat down to write as I've been sitting down to write for several months since establishing something like a morning routine with D. and O. We have breakfast together and go for a walk, then D. leaves for his office and I entertain O. until he's ready to nap. On some days he shuttles happily from toy box to sofa to floor, sorting and piling various items with intentions only he understands. On others, he gets impatient and sweeps aside the entire mess -- a fallen tower of blocks, stacking rings that refuse to stack -- flailing his arms to remove every last offending piece. And then he starts from scratch, arranging the materials he was just rejecting toward whatever ideal his busy fingers want so much to create.

Most of the time, he finds his way, but I've been wondering lately when to step in during those moments of frustration to do more than comfort and redirect, as so many parenting advocates suggest. To teach him how to handle the disappointment without producing quite so much debris. For now, when play is no longer fun, I know it's time to give him a break. That's also where my nap time writing window fits.

My laptop had restarted in the middle of the night -- to install some automatic, unavoidable update the operating system insists on making once every few weeks -- and I'd expected that, given the warning messages it had been flashing the evening before.

What I didn't expect was that the essay I'd been working on over several weeks had been failing to save, thanks to a glitch with the software, for three days.

I'm sure the first thoughts I had after the discovery were unprintable. Silent, fuming, desperate, I considered my options. Rewrite it all? It was worth a shot. The draft that had saved was substantially different from the version that was lost. In a moment of clarity -- rarely do I have these, so ever more my dismay -- I'd drastically altered the direction of the essay, moving sections, reintroducing ideas where they made more sense. Those changes were gone. Sifting through the older draft, I could see the phrases that had triggered the shift in thought, could see fuzzy fragments of particular transitional sentences in memory that I'd begun working in, an essay in pieces that if only I could reassemble them --

Thirty minutes later, I might as well have been trying to rebuild a melting sand castle on a beach at high tide.

The words just weren't right. I was copying a badly damaged artifact without the benefits of the original moment of inspiration guiding my choices. I wasn't hearing the stream of thought, just listening to echoes and fighting a mounting swell of frustration instead.

The impulse to sweep it all aside -- much as O. would -- was suddenly a hard lump in my throat. But there was nothing really to fling, lost data being lost. I understood, though, the temptation of clearing something away, of needing to be rid of the mess that I was unable to right. After a few minutes, I gave up. If I couldn't sweep aside the damage, I could at least clear myself away -- to deal with my frustration without staring the creative disaster in its face.

O. is asleep again this morning. I have, perhaps, another hour to work at this unforgiving thing I do because I need and want to, in spite of all the challenges the act comprises, even without technological snafus. That I'm actually grieving the loss of this essay tells me it matters, that the work is essential, that scraping together the time at the cost of -- well, at the very least, certain household chores and anything else I can't do while O. is awake -- is better than any alternative.

But after looking at the essay yet again, even with fresh eyes, I know I won't be able to pick up where I'd left off. All frustration aside, I can't relocate the place in my consciousness where those particular words dwelled. So I'm going to have to start from scratch.

Am I disappointed? Yes. But maybe there is something to be said for debris, and what can come of rummaging through it.

The work-nap balance

Life's been busy.

I imagine I could start any post that way, but lately it's been a different sort of busy. Busy for just us, D. and O. and me. We've had a lull in travel planning and at last, we've begun finding time for other projects as a family. Outings. Home improvements. Social time with kid-friendly friends. Some tasks are more mundane -- like tweaking our household budget tracking system so that it's not so labor intensive -- but even that feels like a welcome change, a shifting of our attention back to our own home life rather than managing being away from it.

Of course, just as we were starting to get some hours back for all these neglected things, O. began sleeping less and exploring more. Walking and running have given way to climbing, banging blocks together has become building with them, and suddenly, he's in need of an adult playmate much more than before. Which is fun -- as D. was commenting to me the other day, you can now play with him as opposed to watching him play on his own. But all the random weekday tasks I used to do while he self-entertained are harder to juggle. You can't balance the budget while being asked to balance multiple stacks of blocks on your knees. (Believe me, I've tried.)

I'd started to feel a sense of panic whenever O. would nap, which was abruptly down to once a day. My mind was pulling itself in multiple directions during that window. I was supposed to be writing -- I'd told myself months before that I had to treat my work seriously if I wanted to stop second-guessing its value -- but I was also supposed to be researching bids for a new air conditioner and doing basic home care tasks that would take more time than was reasonable to put O. in the playpen for and, oh, how about showering too? Never mind attempting something for true leisure so that writing didn't have to be the sole activity to serve that purpose as well.

I'd sit down before the page and freeze. There was so much pressure to get something done during O.'s nap that I ended up expending more energy being frustrated by my sense of compressed time than using it toward building any sense of accomplishment.

After a few weeks of this, D. gently suggested that we try rearranging my routine a little.

The idea of asking for help hadn't crossed my mind. At least, I didn't feel I could justify asking D. to give up some of his own limited hours outside of work or our family time on the weekend to let me use it to scrub down our bathrooms and wash my hair. I'd looked at those tasks as things I ought to do while he was working or O. was asleep so we could make the most of our down time together. But he was right. Something had to come out of the nap window to return that time to what it was best intended for: putting one word in front of another, without worrying about whether I should be doing something else. I wasn't happy when I wasn't writing, and I needed to give myself a lower-pressure environment to let it happen in.

So we trialed a new schedule over the weekend. For the two hours after breakfast usually preceding naptime, D. hung out with O. while I did some chores and got properly clean, instead of speed-showering. Once O. was asleep, we both had a chance to work on our independent projects. And in the afternoon, we all got to be together for a little World Cup viewing, reading aloud, and stacking blocks on every surface imaginable.

The difference in my state of mind was almost palpable. At the end of the weekend, I didn't feel like an over-wound spinner's bobbin, just a properly tired person who'd done a fair amount of work in addition to taking care of O.'s needs. A reduced set of his needs, but certainly plenty to keep me feeling just as connected to him. And also D. Giving up the time we would have spent together in the morning didn't feel like a loss when it meant being less conflicted about using the time we did have later in the day.

We're now considering having a baby-sitter twice a week to cover the same two-hour morning window. If that works out, I suspect the dividends such help will pay in giving me semi-dependable work hours will be enormous. I know there will still be difficult days when I emerge from my time at the page with no more than a paragraph I'm truly happy with. But the panic that was setting in during the last weeks of ever-shrinking writing time is at bay now with the small but significant protections we're building in.

This just might work. Until O. shifts his routine again, of course, but now I know what I need -- and how making it possible is so very worth it.

A forecast

Wednesday is my second day returning to routine after being away from home for eleven and hosting my mother for another six. The light's fading, O.'s about to wake, and I'm still in yoga togs. Not because I do yoga these days but because they're wash-and-wear and slightly more presentable than pajamas.

The day started with a rush to get O. up and fed before the fridge repairman was supposed to arrive -- but he was late and the morning was an exercise in waiting, half-resumed chores and plans for a much-needed walk held in limbo. That is what the first two weeks of this year have felt like, a suspension of progress. I'm travel-weary and stiff in the joints from being cramped for decompression time, mental and physical. Though, in the name of efficiency, I've tried to skip the post-holiday recovery phase -- the type that follows overexposure to my parents -- it's clear I need it more than ever. So here I am. Poking erratically with one hand at the keys, the other in a bag of chocolate.

I didn't think of writing as exercise, once upon a time, but after these weeks away from the practice, I know it's my form of meditation. I've missed it not because it's pleasurable -- hell, it's hard going most of the time -- but because I'm much worse off without it. Congestion of the mind is killer, and time with my family generates exactly the kind of cloud that stifles me, confuses me. I'm surer of who I am when I'm away from the voices that continue to try to raise me. For that reason alone, I don't think I remember starting any year with a clear head since leaving home -- most Januaries in my memory hold the spillover of December's return to old nests. Ones that are good for short visits but are, for longer, inhospitable.

I've always wanted the beginning of the year to be what so many people seem to enjoy -- a natural time to take stock of what's in store for us. I've peered into the months ahead, though, and it's looking extra foggy. It's a big year for family get-togethers -- more milestone birthdays, a wedding, and all the prenuptial events on top of the usual holidays. It would be an understatement to say I'm approaching all of it with trepidation.

But the year also promises to be an exercise in this exercise -- writing through it all. In recent years, I've dodged the page because I hated the truths about my family it forced me to examine. Can't you write about anything else? I wondered. Shouldn't you just give up on the subject?

How can you leave what follows you, defines you, whether you wish it to or not.

I don't know. But I suspect this year will offer plenty on the matter to think about.

First day

My alarm goes off and my eyes snap open. Dark. It's 5:45, and even the cat is still quiet in her room, not pawing the door to be let out yet. I shake the grogginess from what feels like an otherwise empty space behind my forehead and will my feet to find the floor, then two old polar fleece slipper scuffs with the backs flattened into the soles.

I'm not in thinking mode yet, but this early morning is meant to provide the opportunity.

I let the tap run at the bathroom sink until warm water makes its way through the pipes. Face cloth, no soap. Just warmth and then coolness over my skin as dry air hits residual moisture. Lotion to seal it in, then downstairs to a borrowed laptop. Mine is hopelessly slow, with a space bar that sticks and a finicky charger. This won't do if I'm going to make these early mornings a habit.

Recipe for lemon curd. I've been craving this since before our fridge died, but only two months later am I finally getting to this just-for-me experiment. I've selected a few potential winners (gluten-, dairy-, and egg-free); all that's left is to pick one to try. I scan the instructions, looking for the most appealing candidate -- this is what I've decided to do with the half-hour that remains before getting O. up for the day. I choose the recipe with the least sugar. Corn starch into a small sauce pot, fresh lemon zest. This is as far as I get before breakfast can't be put off any longer.

I'm fine with the interruption. The lemon curd is what I would have spent O.'s morning nap researching instead of doing what I've really wanted to for months: writing. Really writing. Sitting-in-front-of-a-blank-page writing, the uncomfortable sort where the work is hard but the process is purifying and the lies and truths you tell yourself finally get separated because no one else but you is wrestling with the words on the page. I've needed that. This motherhood thing is wild and strange and moving ever faster and setting sentences down steadies me. Except having a very mobile nine-month-old makes doing that impossible while he's awake. And I want that curd too.

*

O. goes down as expected, three hours later, and I reopen the laptop. My brain is awake now, and the erratic static of synapses coming out of hibernation has given way to slightly more organized flashes of thought. Fuzzy still, but thought with language attached. The muscles that were once poised to translate these impulses into text on a page are stiff and tight with disuse. It actually hurts to make them rise to attention again. This isn't going to work, a voice says, infused with all the authority of the practical, no-nonsense persona I usually inhabit.

But I keep typing, even though the first words that appear make me cringe. You've really let yourself go, a second voice chimes in, its imaginary eye looking my writing up and down as if it might embody its writer.

So you admit there was a self to let go, I counter. That there is a self worth getting back.

At the end of an hour, I've dogged my way through three paragraphs, and the voices are quiet.

*

I expect not to return to the work once O. wakes again. The curd needs curding and I'm hungry enough to quit for lunch before O. starts to make noise in his crib. It's okay, I tell myself as I look at the scant progress on the page. This isn't a race. I add almond milk to the pot, set it on a low flame, and begin to stir. I'll come back to the writing tomorrow.

But even as I make my way through the afternoon with O. -- handing him junk mail to tear and wrinkle as I set aside statements and bills, reading from tooth-marked board books, stealing away for a few seconds to whisk the cooling curd -- my mind returns to the tangle of sentences I've left behind. It's happening. The writing sinews are twitching, demanding time and space to flex and uncramp. So is O. He seems to sense I'm not giving him my complete attention, and my offering the latest grocery coupons is not a substitute for play. He circles the living room aimlessly, shrieking his protests at the papers in his hands, and finally starts to cry. I pick him up. This isn't good enough. He wants a game, to tumble and tussle with me, but now he's too tired yet not ready to nap.

I snuggle him and let him finger the zipper of my fleece jacket, apologizing into the fine, silky hair on the top of his head. This is the part I don't yet know how to manage. Writing is immersive, a state nearly as hard to step out of, once I will myself in, as the bed I left this morning. Alert writer, groggy parent.

This is only the first day, though. O. eventually stuffs his fingers in his mouth and snuggles back, his way of telling me he's getting sleepy at last. I think back to the early weeks when naps had no pattern or predictability, and even learning to hold his flailing limbs to lull him into slumber felt awkward. My arms know his shape and heft now, and not from anything more than lifting, cradling, moving with him daily. I remind myself that the day's routine, too, will make space for new habits as long as I start treating them as parts of me again. With tussles reserved for play, not attention.

O. goes down readily, lower lip tucked up tightly under the top one, the rest of his body limp. I head back to the kitchen. Spoon. Sauce pot. The curd looks thinner than I'd expected, but it coats the sides of its container with promise. I taste.

The brightness of lemon dances on my tongue. Its tart zing is everything I'd been hoping for.

*

I'm linking up with Just Write this week. For more stories and essays, click the button below.

Sanity, regained

O. is nursing.

At five months, he finally -- finally! -- figured it out and is now able to get what he needs from me without causing either of us trauma. We started giving him the opportunity to nurse without a supplemental feeder just over seven weeks ago, and, within a few days, he was completely off his training wheels. We are ecstatic.

There have been a few bumps along the way since that first day entirely free of the pump -- some frustration on O.'s part, heat waves that have thrown his appetite off, plugged ducts from having to adjust to less frequent feeding demands -- but that's been nothing compared to the brutal routine of juggling so much nursing equipment in the preceding months (see photo). For the first time since O. was born, I've been able to sleep more than two and a half hours at a stretch. This may go without saying, but I have to write the words because I've wanted to for so long: I am a different person -- a sane one -- once more.

Sleep has meant the return of coherent thought. Instead of falling asleep while pumping -- not something I recommend, by the way, as the pump doesn't quit when it's full -- I've had the gift of quiet moments to reflect on what the last five (almost six!) months have been. O. is easily distracted these days, so there's no catching up on Netflix while he's eating. He'll even turn a nursing cover into a toy, so we keep to his room, lights down, for most feedings. He grabs at my hair, my shirt, my hands. And I sit, thinking in twenty-minute stints about the road we've traveled.

For the first two months of O.'s life, I felt robbed. Not of the breastfeeding relationship some books tout as sacred -- believe me, we didn't have any holy notions about my providing nourishment; in fact, we deliberately steered clear of any conversations with well-meaning people who were self-proclaimed boob enthusiasts because we didn't want to get into debates about lactation philosophies and politics. We just hoped breastfeeding would work and we could check it off the list of things to learn to do, like burping and diapering and giving the occasional bath.

But as a few days' nursing strike turned into weeks, I felt my ability to handle the expected abnormal of having a new baby leaching from me. I had no emotional energy left to love O. with. What I would have traded just to have fragmented sleep and unstructured days only from an infant's erratic waking, not his middle-of-the-night cries and the demands of the pump. It wasn't supposed to be this way, I kept repeating to myself, even though I knew it wasn't helpful. I'd look at O. in his rocking seat and dread the next time he'd rouse himself and then feel guilty that I couldn't enjoy him when he was awake. Every interaction we had was too fraught with the frustrations of getting him to eat, figuring out why he wouldn't eat, allotting precious time I could be using to bond with him to contact doctors who could help us help him eat. Eat already! I wanted to scream. "If it weren't for that damned risk of food allergies," I repeated to D. over and over, teary and spent, "we could just stop the insanity and give him formula. I don't care about the rest of the stupid benefits of breast milk. This is crazy."

But the risk was very real because of my family history. And putting ourselves through a few months of pumping to avoid a potential lifetime for O. of eating the way I have since we discovered what was making me sick was worth the heartache. Or so I told myself at my lowest points, when I wanted to quit and said so to O. in no uncertain terms. Fortunately, he understood none of it. He'd grin at me while I mumbled obscenities through gritted teeth, a smile plastered across my own face to disguise the misery I was feeling. I was scraping bottom then but still determined not to let him see or hear it after slipping just once on the phone with D. D. was held up at work, I was on my fourth pump-and-feed of the day (flanges attached, bottle and baby also in my lap), and I was fighting what I didn't realize was a nasty breast infection. "I just need you to come home," I all but wailed at the phone, balanced on speaker mode on a nearby table. At the sound of my agitated voice, O. burst into tears -- not a cry of hunger or tiredness, but alarm. I picked him up immediately, apologizing into the impossibly soft crook of his neck as he rested his head against my cheek and sighed a shuddery half-sigh.

If only everything could be fixed so easily, I thought.

As these recent weeks have brought a new rhythm to our days and nights, I've been drawn to the idea of putting O.'s story into a more formal body of work. Partly to process it all with the tempering effect of distance, partly to reclaim and recast some of those early memories in a way that I couldn't when we were in the midst of the chaos. Hindsight is a gift -- especially with a positive ending.

I don't know what this project will become. Maybe some of it will appear here; maybe it won't. I've learned more than I ever wanted to about making decisions for the life of someone entirely dependent on my good judgment when I was the least objective mind in the room. I know, I know -- this is just the beginning, you say. But had I had the words of experience to hang on to from someone who had once been in our position, I think I would have felt just a little less hopeless at the worst moments. That is a reason, if any, to write all this into something coherent.

Long-form work and I have had a tenuous relationship in the past (think: the MFA thesis that almost wasn't). But the story I was writing then had no resolution. O.'s does. I'll take it as an auspicious sign that I've actually acquired nearly two dozen books from the library just to read what's already out there for mothers who face what we have. There are a surprising number of resources from those shelves that provide information on what we had to learn the hard way or gather in fragmented fashion from so-called lactation consultants. Interestingly, all of the books I requested were readily available -- no waiting lists for holds -- unlike the majority of the popular pregnancy and childbirth books in circulation. I may be jumping to conclusions based on our experience, but I suspect they're hanging out in the stacks because no one knows they exist -- or knows to go looking before they're needed. I certainly didn't.

I hefted my finds into two big canvas bags at our library on one of the hottest days of the summer, wearing O. in his carrier as I bent to remove each title from the holds shelf. He squirmed against me, eager to be free of his constraints or just hungry; I wasn't sure. But he was motivated and so was I. So I'm putting whatever this is -- brainstorm, project, as-yet-formless cloud of inspiration -- out there to give it weight. Matter, in its many senses, because it does matter. And I'm actually a wee bit convinced, dare I say it, that I can carry it for a while.

P.S.: For those of you who have asked how that trip to Florida went, it did indeed get postponed -- and relocated. Stay tuned for our first plane trip coming up in September, as we fete Troubadour Dad's 60th in the Texas panhandle ...

At four weeks

... you are feisty and fierce in your demands, little owl. You've kept us on our toes since mere days after you were born, with jaundice that required in-home nursing care. You finally learned how to latch to the breast but then refused to nurse two weeks later for reasons we can't explain. That mild fever you had the same day? A change in the musculature of your mouth? We're at a loss. Thankfully you've gained weight on our alternative measures -- round-the-clock pumping for the bottle feedings we swore we'd only rely on until we got your nipple strike figured out. You'll latch now, but only briefly, and you draw blood sometimes before milk.

You're learning at last how to bring your fists to your mouth to comfort yourself when we are not enough, which feels like it has been every day since March arrived. Your cries break my heart even as my own impatience to find answers takes away any confidence in my ability to choose what to do next for you. Keep you alive, yes. But there are so many avenues we've gone down, trusting the guides -- pediatricians, lactation consultants -- who were supposed to help but only compounded our problems.

I've jotted down parts of the story of your arrival -- also complicated and fraught with decisions I wish we hadn't had to make, but there we were and here you are. I remind myself that you are still safe and whole. Even as we continue to find ourselves against these hurdles no one ever talked about or prepared us for. (And why would they have, given how unusual your circumstances seem to be? No sense scaring expectant parents further.) Every time I go to write about you, thinking we've finally cleared the latest obstacle -- now, now we can report with some distance and relief that all is well, I tell myself -- something else catches at our heels and threatens to throw you from our grasp.

But now you're bundled skin-to-skin with me inside the fleece jacket I've zipped around us both. We huddle against each other, tear-stained but not at odds for once. And while you sleep, I can hold off on deciding what we should be doing next for you, for me, for all of us on this wild course that seems to have no end. What I would give just to remain this way, in this quiet hour holding you, and not have you wake again just yet, hungry.

Mother knows best

On New Year's night, the final evening of our holiday visit, my mother and I are the last ones standing in the kitchen. D is in our room down the hall getting ready for bed, and my father, after a weekend of being on call, is sound asleep. We keep our voices low so as not to disturb them, but my mother, finally alone with me, makes her whisper more purposeful.

"You know, now that you've changed your last name, ours will be lost forever in your family."

Before this visit, D and I agreed, should anyone start to ask me about my health -- a challenging subject, given all the questions we still have and the skepticism we often hear from my family about the kinds of testing and treatment we've pursued -- that I would go find him, bring him into the conversation, so that I would not have to defend our choices alone. I don't expect an attack from the angle my mother takes, though, as she scrubs at her wok with her hard little hands. Leaning on the granite by the sink, I am suddenly vulnerable. I can tell she's been waiting to talk to me on my own.

Where is this coming from? I wonder. And why now, five years after my name change became official? Maybe my mother is thinking of the family we've wanted to start for so long but have held off on because of my health, how our children will bear only D's name instead of his and my father's. Or it's my writing, the essay I had published in the fall but never mentioned until this visit. I used a pseudonym as it was, unwilling to place my name, maiden or married, on the work -- because the subject was so difficult for me to write about, much less discuss, I didn't want anyone to find me just yet for further questions.

I wouldn't have brought up the essay had my mother not pressed me so hard to find out what I was really going to do with my life instead of tutoring as I have been. What are your goals? she'd asked.

"Putting something together that I actually believe in publishing," I said, which, without a detailed plan attached, was an only somewhat satisfying response. Whatever my mother's reasons now for raising this other concern about lost legacies, I feel her disapproval like a blast of west Texas wind carrying the smell of cattle ranches from the next town down the highway.

I know I shouldn't respond -- there can be no good outcome from midnight conversations about family differences -- but so much of my writing is tied to this very issue, the knots in our relationship I am forever trying to untangle by examining them, sentence by sentence. I've chosen to be published under a pseudonym not just to give myself privacy but also to protect that process of personal and relational inquiry, taking on a persona whose name won't be recognized by anyone who knows my family. This way, I can write without fearing their real-life loss of face. Not that I expect my parents' friends to read the kinds of literary journals I'd submit my work to, but in this electronic age, I am searchable, linkable, forwardable, potentially viral.

My writing persona, regardless of her name, needs protecting too. To use either of my surnames is to be who they imply I am: wife, sister, daughter, with everything those identities carry with them. Not that I wish to deny those aspects of my life experience, but I am more than all that. I am other thoughts and questions and indeterminacies that do not yet know how to bear up under the labels automatically bequeathed or contracted to me. For now, then, it is easier to shed these names temporarily and just be me, with a pseudonym as a neutral placeholder where it would be inconvenient for someone to address me simply as "she" or "you."

But that's not the answer to the question my mother is really asking on this night.

Why couldn't you have kept our name? It's a loaded question because it immediately implies that I did not choose as I should have (consider why did you change your name for comparison). The differences are minute, but words and meanings are my territory; I can't help being attuned to the subtexts in my mother's query even if she doesn't realize they are there. Why the clannishness tonight? I'd like to ask in return. I glance inadvertently toward the guest bedroom, confused by my mother's sudden coolness toward my husband. I'm hurt on his behalf.

And then it all comes out. Suddenly she's on to our financial arrangements (joint), our career decisions (too much in favor of D's advancement and not mine), even our past marital problems (the particulars of which she can only guess at since I don't share them -- and she is, of course, largely off base). It is all I can do to parry with fragmented sentences in the face of this onslaught. "You give him too much control," she says at last, still at a whisper but eyes blazing, angry for reasons I can't fathom. Do I just run?

I wish I had.

Cornered by so many accusations, I lash back. "My marriage isn't like yours," I spit. "The choices we've made have always been ours -- not just D's or mine."

The argument deteriorates from that moment. I've found the bruised places in her heart, and everything she throws at me from then on is more of the irrational -- which I don't recognize until long after I've met her barb for barb. I am terrible at refusing to engage.

That is what I need to learn, though, because the boundary that marriage establishes between me and my parents is a necessary one. Like my decision to use a pseudonym to separate my writing persona's role from the roles I have to take on in real life, my decision to limit the information I provide about my married life when my mother asks is protective -- young marriages, like young writers' identities, have weak places, foundations that need work. The protection that such a boundary affords as D and I contemplate starting a family of our own has never been more important.

But the price of maintaining that boundary is clearly something I didn't completely anticipate. If anything after this ambush, I've learned that much of what my mother thinks of my marriage is what she assumes about it, perhaps based on her dissatisfaction with her own, because I've left her with little real information to take its place.

Still, some of her last words to me on New Year's night tell me that the alternative -- sharing it all to prevent so much misunderstanding -- will be more costly. "We'll never be able to have a heart-to-heart," my mother says, "because you won't let me be honest with you."

As long as her idea of a heart-to-heart is for me to accept unconditionally her opinion on anything I share, I'd rather keep the details to myself.

How to eff the ineffable

A writer classmate of mine once used that phrase, which she'd acquired from a former professor. I'm invoking it now because, well, there's a lot I'd like to eff.

I don't mean eff as in that wonderfully flexible expletive I would have liked to utter (as noun, adjective, verb, or other part of speech -- thank you, George Carlin) when, at the end of yesterday, my manuscript was not in my hands. Yes, I've e-mailed my professor to get the tracking number.

No, I mean, the unbloggable kind of things I'd like to eff. There are those things that, though usually not trotted out in conversation with acquaintances, I do write about here: thoughts on family, thoughts on illness.

But then there's the stuff of ugly fights, in person, on the phone. The kinds of things you take to a mediator because you just don't have the perspective to work through them in a constructive way. Because both parties involved are raw.

That's been the last month, after many more months of buildup. And I'm not inclined to go into it here because it's not constructive. Not yet.

But that plan for getting through thesis? Well, it works when it's just thesis stuff getting me down. It's not enough for the specific kind of loneliness you feel after you hang up (by mutual agreement), after you sit for hours in silence not knowing what to say or do (because the alternative -- speaking -- will make things worse).

This is what makes my thesis feel so pointless sometimes.

Yes, we have professionals lined up; yes, it's helping. A lot. I don't want to imagine where we'd be without all that in place. We are so new, however, to the changes we've agreed to make, so used to the old habits. Under duress, we fall back on what we know and everything refragments.

I confess: yesterday, I totally effed my plan. Today, I get back to it. And reshape it to address what I can't eff here.

Note(s) to self

I feel like I need to write them.

I have been, actually. A quick e-mail here and there, just a sentence or two. Don't forget to do this, be sure you remember to pick up that, call this person, mail that letter, tell yourself these things because if you don't, they will blow away like powdery snow that refuses to stick.

But there's more than a list of chores accumulating in my inbox. There are ideas, baby ones, for writing. For essays that will have to wait till the thesis is done.

Trust me, I'd work on both if I could, but I know the limits of my energy and concentration. Still, I'm excited. For so long, I've wondered if all I had was this work, and if it was never to get finished or I lost interest, what then?

What then.

I wrote about inspiration in the days after my conference, and then I found myself without it last week. Out of some instinctive need, I went to the library and turned to the voices of the writers I'd met -- some in person, some through the mention of their work. And the fog in my mind began to clear.

It was not the exact subject or idea that helped me. In fact, reading someone else's work on the same thing you might be writing about can be very intimidating -- it's been done, it's so easy to think. And there are critics who will say that it's true, that love and death and trauma are all tired topics. But it's not the what of the writing; it's the how. One of the panels I attended was dedicated to that idea, what happens when we're told that something is too "done" -- or so the language runs -- to write about anymore.

I came away from that panel with more resolve behind what I'd been trying to do in the last few years. Not that this alone can clear those pesky blocks from my mind when the work doesn't know where it needs to go. But in reading the prose of one of the panel members this week, I was able to get away from my own tangled thoughts and understand, through her way of narrating her story, that sometimes not knowing how to proceed is itself the fiber that can tie words together. Instead of trying to sew up holes, I needed to point them out. And what each person doesn't know, how she navigates that -- this is what fingerprints a work, making it its own.

Chapter 6 is at last under way, and no, I still don't know where it will end up. But I know with certainty now that this is okay. That the examination of the unknown itself may be just where it needs to go.

Thank you to everyone who's sent me suggestions, exercises, and even talismans for kicking the writer's block! It's been incredibly helpful to know you're cheering me on.

Reconnecting

The conference is over, and I'm spent. Three days of attending panels, meeting editors and agents, and familiarizing myself with -- well, I'm not sure there's a term to describe what the ins and outs of being a writer entails. It's art and business and mentorship and a tenuous work-life balance, at the very least. I got to hear about that in detail from many different people, who have experienced it in vastly different ways.

I'm still wrapping my head around it all. And I hope to do that in part by writing about it here. But first, I need to get down in words a different story that has run alongside the writing I've been doing for many years.

When I was an intern at a magazine in D.C., the summer before I started my last year of college, a fairly prominent photographer, but not one I'd ever heard of, gave a talk during lunch. He was about sixty at the time, married without children. He spoke about his work, which took him around the world, but more importantly, he spoke about how he came to it from a childhood in rural Ohio and described the family he grew up with there. While he didn't say this explicitly, I saw how their stories were entwined with his and, as a result, were knitted into the photos and writing he crafted long after he'd moved away, like fiber wicking ink.

Under his words whispered a stranger language that my ear didn't understand but some other part of me did. I wouldn't have called it a soul at the time, but I will now. It sat up and took notice, recognizing, though we'd never spoken directly, writing-kin. I was only beginning to learn, in crafting narrative essays, what he seemed to be demonstrating in his photos: the act of examining one's life by looking at and documenting, counterintuitively, the lives of others we encounter. And I wanted to say, yes -- yes! This is what my work is for me too, and thank him for revealing this to me, even as more questions about that impulse threatened to overtake the thought before it was fully formed.

He invited the interns in attendance to contact him at any time after his talk if we had questions or were interested in chatting more, so I sent him a note toward the end of the summer. Coffee, I suggested. Dinner, he replied, his treat. And so, at a tiny Japanese restaurant, with a chef who would introduce me to my first taste of sushi, we talked in the way an intern and a mentor might about writing and life -- or were they, in some breaths, the same? -- until the lights were bright on the sidewalk and the heat of the city had gone.

*

We didn't speak again for years. I graduated, began teaching, got engaged, took a different job that leached what soul I did know I had from me, planned a wedding, and neglected my writing throughout it all. Then came grad school and commuting, not a year after D and I were married. I had no reason to go to D.C., and certainly nothing I felt compelled to share with this man who had encouraged me in his own way to pursue what mattered to me. The challenge of the commute overshadowed my work at Little U., and it made me doubt my drive to write. I stared at white space without excitement or joy or even curiosity about what might appear.

But I remembered what the photographer had said in his talk, so many years ago, about his own challenges before a near-empty page. "Never stop in a tidy place," he said. "Leave a sentence unfinished, an idea only halfway developed, a paragraph mid-stride, as it were. That way, when you come back, you will be able to pick up and re-engage."

So as I did begin to put one word in front of another in this last year, I followed his advice. And the work that has emerged is in some ways the result.

Once I knew I'd be going to D.C. for my conference, I wanted to find the photographer to return, at the very least, the kindness of the meal he'd treated me to. I found his name in a posting for a photography class several months old, but fresh enough that the media contact might still know how to reach him. I wrote to her, telling her in brief this story.

Two days later, the photographer wrote me back. "I remember you well and have often wondered where you were and what [you] have been doing," he said. He'd moved away from D.C. but still visited the city from time to time to meet with his editor. "So please tell me when you will be there. Perhaps your visit will coincide with one of my trips. I hope so."

On Monday, we met for lunch. I was early and tried in vain not to be nervous; he was late and put me completely at ease. From the moment we saw each other, it was as if we were simply picking up the conversation we'd suspended. And so we talked about writing and life, just as before, but this time as friends.

I remembered then what it was to love what I do but even more so how much a connection to other writers is essential to me in sustaining such a solitary art. So I am glad for this dialogue we've restarted, one that promises to continue for a long time. As it turns out, the photographer visits Seattle once a year, so we have an informal standing get-together for the foreseeable future.

As for that strange language I first heard during his talk, I was surrounded by it all week, even in the moments when I was overwhelmed by all there was to take in. So I think it's safe to say I was doing what I needed to for a long-forgotten part of me, and I won't question that further. Or at least, not as much -- as long as this language is mine to hear.

2011

... is off to quite a start.

For the moment, I'm going to ignore the fact that I'm writing this on a borrowed laptop -- mine suffered a catastrophic loss of power yesterday that will only be remedied with a new adapter -- and focus only on the previous week. It was a decent one.

Given the mess that was 2010, I consider that fantastic news.

I had my concerns as the last moments of the year approached. Please, I said to myself, snuggled into a booth at a wine bar, where my family had opted for a late dinner after the concert we'd attended at Lincoln Center. Please let 2011 be better. Really, it wouldn't take much, all things considered.

I don't have a faith I can fall back on, having grown up with a mix of Buddhism, Catholicism, and atheism coloring various years in my spiritual development (none of the aforementioned schools of belief actually stuck). But the wish I couldn't give voice to, as the final seconds of December fell away, might very well have been a form of prayer. To whom, I don't know. Of late, especially as I've written more and more about family history for my thesis and studied the beliefs that shaped it over a generation or two, I've felt the ghostly presence of my ancestors in the aftermath of their influence. Whether they handed them down whole or in parts, their values -- cultural, philosophical -- had their role in making my parents who they are. So as I've attempted to bring my parents to life on the page, I've found myself consulting, in some ways, with the dead, trying to understand and illustrate my parents' ways of being as they stem from their families of origin.

My grandparents believed that their ancestors watched over them and, in some ways, protected them. In the absence of any other spiritual influences in more recent months, I'd say my own meditations on my ancestors have brought them -- or at least the idea of them -- close enough for me to feel their metaphoric gaze.

So perhaps, my wish for a year better than the preceding one was meant for them to hear. Certainly no one else would have been able to as the New Year neared -- everyone, including my family, was playing a horn or other noisemaker handed out by the maitre d', laughing, cheering, raising flutes of champagne. A perfect chaos of anticipation.

I felt some kind of weight lift as the chef and his staff appeared at last, parading down the main aisle of the restaurant while banging pots and pans to signal the official arrival of January. And that lightness has stayed with me, despite travel exhaustion (mostly jet lag), the unceremonious return to post-vacation life (mostly bills and errands and household chores), and lingering uncertainties about how this year will go.

It's a good sign.

Here's hoping the fact that my adapter fried itself at 4:44 (an extremely unlucky number in Chinese superstition because the word for four is homonymous with the word for death) means absolutely NOTHING.

Warning: rant ahead, or a peek into the mind of a food-anxious freak

What follows is an account of one day in my battle with disordered eating. I have fought this problem since before I was old enough to drive a car. It is one of the reasons I finally sought professional counseling through a dietitian this summer, though I didn't know it at the time.

In the months since my work began with the dietitian, I've made many gains. But under the right (wrong?) circumstances -- such as the recent weeks of stress -- backsliding happens. I'm writing about that for the first time here, now, because it's better than keeping silent.

I should have paid attention to the sinking feeling this morning.

It's the kind you get when you haven't eaten in a few hours and your blood sugar dips. Your stomach is growly and your head gets thick and it is all you can do to remember where you were supposed to go next -- much less what you were supposed to do once you got there -- on that list of errands you'd set for yourself.

It was another early morning. And you didn't count on things taking so long. Take a snack, your brain was saying as you headed for the car, wishing you could just stay home. But you were tired and you didn't want to have to have that snack. In the fuzzy logic -- or plain mule-headedness -- of on-the-way-out-the-door thought, you told yourself a doctor's appointment, a haircut, and an in-and-out trip to the grocery store should not take more than three hours. You'll be home right on time for your next meal,* you said. Screw the snack. It's extra calories you don't need. You've lost a little weight in the last month -- don't you want to keep things the way they are?

So you get through your appointment. When you get to the salon -- the bargain-basement walk-in one that also happened to put out a coupon that you needed to use this week if you wanted the additional savings -- you find two other people ahead of you in line. Okay, no problem. You flip through the look books since you haven't had a trim in six months -- better find a picture of what you're supposed to look like so whoever on the rotating staff is assigned to you will do the job right.

And you wait.

And you wait.

And you wait some more. No reason things are slow except that there are only two people working. By the time the woman with the scissors is ready for you, you're regretting that snack you told your brain to forget. The stylist does a good job, a thorough one. So thorough you're wondering if she's cutting each hair individually. And this is just a trim? The morning you thought you'd still have, after finishing these errands, slowly begins to slide out of reach. But, oh good, the stylist is finally done.

This, if you weren't going to take that snack, is where you should have gone home right away instead of trying to stick things out.

After leaving the salon, you head over to the grocery store. What did you need? It takes effort to remember, even though it's just two items. One of them -- salad greens -- wouldn't even be necessary if the greens you bought last Thursday, with an expiration date of November 10th, hadn't already decomposed by the 7th. But you need those greens. What the hell else are you supposed to fill up on if bread and crackers and cereal and all the rest of the food you've ever loved can only be eaten in portions that would make a mouse cry?**

At last, you do get home. You make that salad -- a quarter of an apple, an ounce of goat cheese, not quite a tablespoon of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, tossed with the greens -- and slap some turkey with mustard on low-carb bread. It's a good lunch, a filling one. But you've eaten the same damn lunch for five days straight*** because you've been on autopilot with everything else going on. And now you want what you know you can't have: anything with more than 15 grams of carbs per serving. In any quantity you like.

You wait out the cravings. You're supposed to get on with the rest of the day anyway -- so the morning's gone, and you haven't showered yet, and the workout that you've been hating lately but that you cling to because it means your body still functions and your weight is still under your control needs to be done. But then the phone rings. And you're so lonely that you will totally blow another two hours talking when you know you'll be mad at yourself for shoving off more of the afternoon. Your resistance is waning.

When you hang up, you head for the kitchen. You need fuel for the workout, or that sinking feeling will get you halfway through. So you allow yourself some carbs.

But you've got no willpower left. Between the sugar lows and the lost morning and the loneliness and the sheer sense of defiance you have against all that the universe has thrown at you this year and the last with no rhyme or reason, you've HAD it. Before you can stop yourself, you've inhaled enough from the pantry to horrify your (former) endocrinologist and alarm your dietitian, the latter of whom you should call and 'fess up to right now so she can help you.

And I will.

Tomorrow.

* Eating meals at regular intervals is helpful in maintaining optimal blood-sugar levels and preventing binges.

** Obviously, this is a bit hyperbolic, but when your brain has no fuel, it doesn't process thought very logically or reasonably.

*** Creating variety, even only slightly, in what you eat can be helpful in preventing boredom, which can otherwise trigger binges.

Two-faced

Halloween was a low-key affair this year. Last week, we again attended the annual pumpkin carving party one of D's friends likes to host, but we didn't go in with a plan as we did the first time. Just a gourd of a ghoulish hue and a vague idea of what we might put on it. Here's the end result:


A pair of eyes apiece -- the ones on the right are mine (adapted from a template) and the others belong to D (carved freehand).



I'm amused that the creepy gaze I thought I was creating ended up looking more concerned than anything else. I guess having another face emerging from the side of one's head would be a good reason ...

Halloween night in question was busy, and not just because we got about 200 trick-or-treaters (fairly standard in our neighborhood). We had a last-minute guest, one of our friends from Portland, who was supposed to be on vacation in Venice but had had his passport turned down the day before at the Portland airport. Too beaten up, the gate agents told him. His only option, if he still wanted to make the trip, was to get a new document issued from the nearest emergency processing center -- which was in Seattle.

"I'm going to be fairly rotten company," he warned me ahead of time. Which was completely understandable. But I paused before telling him that I might not be much fun either. Even though we've known each other for more than a decade, I still hesitated to say anything about what's been going on in the last few weeks. On the outside, there are no obvious signs that mark me -- perhaps I look more tired than usual and my clothes are a little looser, but no scars, no broken bones. Still, I've had my resources tapped repeatedly, dealing with unpredictable pain, diverting whatever energy I have into finding a doctor who will listen, waiting for a diagnostic plan to take shape.

As I hinted here, these aren't things I like to tell people in real life, not even my family, because pain, both physical and emotional, is so intimate. To admit to someone that you hurt is to take a risk -- that the other person will respond insensitively, that he or she will downplay your experience, that you will feel worse for having said something in the first place. So I've learned not to talk about pain out loud if I can get away with it; I do it in this space instead.

But with someone I've known so long, it also feels dishonest to pretend all is well. And I'd been run down enough in the last few weeks that the act of pretending was going to be too much in person, especially because the physical pain is so unpredictable; it can flare up at any time. So I told my friend in brief that I wasn't in the best shape. The result was an awkward few seconds on the phone -- he acknowledged what I'd said but didn't seem to know what else to offer. Then someone came to his door and he said he had to go.

So I'm still turning one face to the outside world and letting the other exist here. I wish there were a way to integrate them more. But for now, this is the best I can do.

A tour, as promised

By now, you've seen the front page here -- thank you to everyone for the nice things you've said or e-mailed as you've stopped by. Hopefully everything is actually working (no missing images or other obvious errors), but if you run into a problem, do let me know. I've tested and tested things, but Blogger still has its mysteries.

So what's new around here? Stand-alone pages! Thank you, Blogger, for creating these. This blog was beginning to feel a bit all over the place in the last few months -- since D and I had finally finished commuting, that initial topic running through the blog was no longer the primary reason I was coming here to write. But there were other themes that had been showing up, so I decided to group posts accordingly under some new headings, which are at the top of the sidebar at right. Yep, it's my filing gene at work again.

All the clutter in my former sidebar was driving me slightly nuts too, so that's been given its own space as well. If you haven't already checked out my blogroll, it's hanging out behind the button with the little mouse on it in the new sidebar. If I'm a regular visitor to your site and I've left your link off or mislinked to you, please let me know! And likewise, if you've blogrolled me, please check that my link is updated: thisroamanticlife.blogspot.com. The extra (a) makes all the difference.

I've been reading (mostly for my thesis) even though I haven't written recently about it -- those resources, along with other stuff I've found worthy of note on my bookshelves (real and virtual), are now behind their own sidebar button too. More to be added to the list soon. The library's been keeping me well-stocked in the last few months.

So there you go! That's the short and sweet version of the tour. Again, feel free to explore, and thanks, as always, for reading.

The only way out is through

At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

The last few days have been challenging on the work front. I've reached the point where it's time to get going on the writing and I'm really not sure I know what my story is. I have no outline, as my thesis committee has more or less forbidden me to use one (it's for my creative good, to free up my mind from all the structure I like to impose on it). All I have as a result is a pile of personal documents -- letters, journals, school records, etc. -- and a lot of questions.

I've been gathering and sifting through these artifacts all summer, partly in an attempt to organize all the debris, partly to determine what can be thrown away. A lot of this stuff was boxed up, occupying unnecessary space in our closets, so it needed to be dealt with. I think I've finally streamlined everything as of yesterday, so the logistical work is done. Which means I can no longer avoid the really tough part: the emotional excavation of the memories in those boxes, memories I've blocked out for a long time.

I unearthed something in one document yesterday that brought back a lot of feelings, so many that I had trouble disentangling them from one another. Anger, shame, fear, hope, confusion, gratitude, grief -- I imagine there was more in there, but I couldn't stay with the memory long enough to identify anything further. It was too overwhelming.

I'm sure I'm afraid of the memory because there are truths about myself and others wrapped up in it, truths I didn't want to see before because they would cause me pain. Now that it's been so long, bringing those truths to the surface is going to be much harder work. And at the end, I get pain as my reward. Why am I doing this?

Good question.

The writing of this work plays some essential role and fulfills some crucial need in this whole process, I know, so maybe I'll have an answer eight months from now. That's the deadline if I want to graduate this spring.

In a way, I've been working on the project itself for much longer than just my recent years at Little U. on the Prairie. Elements of the subject matter have shown up time and again in creative essays I've deliberately tried to make about something else! Apparently this isn't unusual either -- one of my professors commented in a workshop that for a while, every single piece she wrote was about her dead mother. "You'll get a lot of mileage out of this," she said, about the subject dogging me. I wasn't sure at the time whether to feel good about that or taken aback by it. Does anyone really want to look at his or her personal griefs as something to "get mileage" from?

Anyway ...

I finished another reading this week -- a collection of short stories by Madeleine Thien called Simple Recipes. Many of the stories were published in literary journals before becoming part of the collection, and interestingly, now that they're side by side, the repetition of one theme among them is very noticeable. Specifically, each story seems to deal with a child's experience of being caught between parents whose relationship is slowly unraveling. The cause of that dissolution changes from one story to the next, and the actual conflict doesn't always take center stage, but the author does seem to circle the theme over and over as if she's searching for some way of understanding it. I can't say it makes for great variety in a short story collection, but the gaze trained on that repeated idea is compelling.

Speaking of which, it's time I turned my eye back on my work. To the dig, then ...