short story

Today, I am over at Glow in the Woods rewriting my long story into a short story. Pop over for a read.

the telephone

I loathed the telephone.

Eight months ago, if someone asked me to call her or him, I would groan inside.

Seriously? Can't we just email like civilized people?

Sometimes I still loathe it. Except that when I first sought help with my sobriety, someone gave me a list of phone numbers and told me to call three numbers on the sheet every day. Three.

One.
Two.
Three.

I didn't think it would help. I mean, call a complete stranger and talk about how hard it is not to drink? It seemed like madness or torture. In the early days after I quit drinking, I would stare at the phone and wonder who I should call, and what I should say. So confused and ashamed, I usually called no one. I finally asked someone what I was supposed to say when I called.

"Say, 'I'm calling you because someone told me to call three people on this list to stay sober and I'm doing it.'"
"Well, that's a little rude."
"No, it isn't. It is honest. Pretending you have crap to talk about is both lying and thievery."
"Thievery?"
"Remember that five minute, bullshit story that girl told us a few minutes ago? She stole five minutes of my life I will never get back. When you call, be honest. People will appreciate not having to chitchat. Then they will pick up your calls. One day you may call because it is the thing between you and a bottle of booze."

I didn't want to drink again. And I hadn't managed to remain sober out of my own stubborn will. I mean, I had for a while, but not forever. My father is an alcoholic. My uncles. My grandmother. On both sides, this disease runs rampant. I knew exactly what tomorrow was going to look like, a year from now, a decade...it was not going to be pleasant for me or my kids. Alcoholism is not a tidy, quaint way to die.

All of the alcoholics in my life were exactly like me--isolated and isolating. I realize now that that is part of the disease of alcoholism. The drink wants you alone, sad, full of resentments. The drink wants the drink. Nothing else, and it will take out anything in its way.

I guess it should be no surprise that after Lucia died, I couldn't reach out to friends, and I let their inability to reach out fester in me.  When my friend said it was my turn to call six months after she stopped talking to me, but failed to tell me she was mad at me, or there were issues between us, I felt righteous indignation. She didn't tell me she was upset, or it was my turn to call, or that I should reach out to her. And it didn't occur to me that I should call her. My daughter died. I shouldn't have to call anyone particularly when I loathe the telephone. And it is all about what is comfortable for me. (That is sarcasm.) I thought everyone wanted to talk on the phone but me. I have come to realize lately that people call because they want to stay in touch, not because they love the telephone. (Yes, I'm a fucking idiot.)

I was given the gift of desperation. I was desperate for sobriety, for changing who I was. See, as much as I talk about my friends, something I realized after Lucia died was the only common denominator between any of them was me.

My daughter died. That fact did not relieve me of the necessity to be a decent human being and a good friend. I wanted my friends back. I wanted me back. I wanted to stop feeling the way I was feeling--angry, resentful, sad, alone, lonely, isolated, isolating.

We hold on to things that allow us to drink.Let go of resentments and you begin to let go of the things that justify addiction and alcoholism. And so I called three strangers every day.

It wasn't so bad.

In fact, it was good and a good skill to hone. Now I pass my phone number out to anyone who will take it. I really don't mind the phone anymore. I even email my phone number to women and men who just come into this community, because hearing a living human being breathing on the other end of the phone, who cries with you, that is fucking important some days. Sometimes when I would call people from my list, they would talk about themselves the entire time, and that was a gift. Other people struggle with alcoholism, most of them struggled with grief too. Grief and alcoholism tie together in an ugly, whopperjawed grey-colored bow.


That is one thing I wish I could have reiterated over and over again to friends after Lucy died--that I really wanted to hear about them. All the time. I wanted to be trusted to be a friend again. It is a space where I am most comfortable--to listen, rather than talk. I am not built for sharing my emotions. My people are stony and hardworking. That is why the blog became such an important part of my grief, because the computer gives me enough distance between you and me to share what I am feeling. To cry without the gawking.

But the phone, the phone has taught me to listen as well as talk. To be a better friend. Sobriety has given me many gifts, constant stream of gratitudes, but the most important is that I am learning how to be more human. And I believe the phone has given me a gift of being able to express my emotions in real life a little more easily. To sit with my own emotions, not just other people's.

I am learning.

pain.

I test the floor. Oooo, ouch.
Wait. Breathe.
My back shoots a pain through my mid-section, down through my legs. My knees click, crack, pop, crunch. My hips locked into the cowboy position. I grab for the boy and he crawls across the bed giggling. I grimace and make my way across the bed to catch him.

I want to play, baby, but it hurts. It hurts.

I hobble and wait for him to come to me. By the time I reach the stairs, my walk feels stronger. Thankfully. I take each step by holding on to each wall surrounding me. I was an athlete once. Strong. Formidable. I played football and gymnastics, and rode my bike impossibly long distances with only a little talcum powder and some water.

It is my shoulder, and my back, and my knees, and the bottoms of my feet, and my ankles, sometimes my wrists. Basically, it is my joints. All of my joints. I've been poked. Prodded. Made to walk in a straight line touch my nose. I had to stand absolutely still while a doctor watched me. I have had blood drawn. Pictures taken of my insides. Months and months of testing, and I know that I do not have lupus, or rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme's disease or Multiple Sclerosis, celiac disease, or Epstein-Barr.  I have nothing, but pain, extremely painful pain.

About nine months after Lucia died, when I was doing bloodwork in the early part of my pregnancy with Thor, I found out that I had thyroid disease. My nutritionist told me that endocrine systems break down in trauma and grief. I had nothing but trauma and grief in the those months. I held onto her in my joints, I thought. The pain manifest in the spaces between my hard bits. That is where she snuggled up, in the soft, delicate parts of me. Every movement a reminder of the pain of losing my daughter. The pain of birthing her dead. The pain of parenting a sister-less girl. The pain of babyloss. I didn't mind the pain as much as you would think. It seemed inevitable.

The best I can do is cut out the wheat. Somehow that helps. My endocrinologist thinks improving from not eating wheat is a psychosomatic reaction. He's a number guy. He thinks the nutritionist is bunk. The thinks the anecdotes on the internet are hogwash. When I tell him of symptoms that haven't improved after taking my medicine, he says that it is another disease and he cannot help me. There is no research, he says. But on the internet, I find women and men with Hashimoto's disease talking about how different their lives are after cutting out wheat and gluten. And I am one of those women, I guess. I have been eating like this since February, and it has changed my joint pain tremendously. Psychosomatic or not, I feel better. I can walk without debilitating pain. I can carry my baby down the stairs.

This week I had a cupcake that my mother left in my fridge. I don't know why. I just saw it and thought, "Mmm, cupcake." I ate it and couldn't move that night. I cried in pain. And so I suppose I know now. Cupcakes are not good.

The only downside is that I eat nothing fun. No baked goods. No buttery croissant on a Sunday morning. No tiramisu after a nice manicotti. No cheese sandwich for lunch. No crunchy ciabatta with pesto and fontinella. The doctor also suggested that I cut out the dairy and the meat. (Did I mention that?) No wheat. No milk. No meat. (I didn't eat meat most nights anyway, but whatevs.)

I have been daydreaming about smoking cigarettes. I haven't smoked in years and years, and lately the smell, the ritual, I have been romancing it all. I won't smoke, but I am romancing it. I watch them outside of meetings, inhaling, talking, laughing, relaxing. There is no buffer between me and the world anymore, or me and my stress. I don't take a moment to go have a cigarette and think on it. I don't sip a bourbon pensively when I get a testy email. I don't drink to cushion those emotions. I don't smoke to breathe deeply and take a moment away from my desk and my life. I don't stuff carbs into my face when the kids go to sleep. I just feel it all. Every. Little. Thing. Like my chest cavity was wrenched open in a Y shape, and my heart is exposed .

Here is everything, World. Be gentle.

the rain

I love the rain--the sound, the smell, the feel. I love it more than anything that isn't mammal. Sometimes more than some mammals I know. It feels like a thing to me, like a breathing thing, alive and magical. Maybe it is a residual effect from living in the desert for five years. I understood why societies worship the weather and nature, particularly when you live in a place not designed to sustain human life. Rain brought everything back from the brink of death. The desert after the rains is green, flowering, aromatic. 

I grew up in a place with moss and ferns and bunnies. A hike through the woods had you occasionally glancing at the forest floor for roots and loose rocks. I moved to the Sonoran desert when I was 20, and lived there for five years. In the desert, every thing is designed for survival and protection. Hikes through the desert are filled with heat, snakes, scorpions, dehydration, heat stroke, javalina, large cats, disorientation.  Toads exude psychotropic poison that make you freak the fuck out. Spiders the size of your hand poise to attack from the inside of your shoes. Your senses are heightened. It feels important and exhausting to be in the desert, because you learn how you are wired. Fight or flight. Alone or part of a tribe. Everything is raw and spiny and poisonous and designed for only its own survival. I began to worship and hang my life on the weather, the moon and the winds.

In the Sonoran desert, there is a type of cactus that is just a ball of spines. They call it a jumping cactus. Spines in every direction, free from the confines of roots. It just rolls, jumps, waits for someone to stick to. My dog stepped on one during a hike, and then bit into it to remove it from his paw. It took us three hours with doggie valium and pliers to free the spines from his tongue and mouth. I remember holding him in the back of the truck as he whimpered and growled, while my ex-husband wrenched the thorns from his jaw. You don't just walk after an incident like that. You treadly lightly, come prepared, expect the jumping cactus.

You can fry an egg on the sidewalk in three minutes during a Tucson summer. You can roast pork butt in your car while you work all day. But then monsoon season rolls in. The storms blow through town. And the egg washes away into the street, through the gutters and into the fast moving arroyo, haunted by La Llorona. As you stand in your yard, rain washing over you, you can see lightning hitting the different parts of the city. It looks like Thor throwing bolts at the impious. When the rains come, people rejoice. They stand in their yards in August and let the rains soak them and wash everything away-- the anger, the vulnerability, the need to be poised for attack. Everything is okay when the rains come.

Everything will be okay.

The storm woke me this morning on the heels of a the Sturgeon Moon. Thunder rattled the house, and Jack started barking. My first thought was that a tree fell into our living room. I always go to the worst place first. The dog just barked after a loud thunderclap and I imagined our Japanese maple uprooted and thrown through our lounge. I ran downstairs and the dog was standing in the kitchen staring at me. We regarded each other. I wondered what he thought of the noise, if he thought a tree fell through the upstairs. I opened the back door for him. He poked his head out, sniffed, then came back in, refusing to leave the dry house, even though he hadn't been out all night. Fairweather dog.

Many years ago, when I just left my first marriage and alone for the first time in four years, I had a boyfriend who was full Native American of two different tribes. He taught me about the moons, their names, and the stars. He considered me half, since my mother's people were Central American Indian.

We are both of Aztlan, sister.

But neither of us were truly from the desert where we met, yet it was the first place where we felt at home in our lives, surrounded by people who looked like us. Aztlan, we called it. The ancestral home of the native peoples. We lived in the country of Aztlan. All us brown folk of the same tribe. Nothing could hurt us there, I thought. He wore a long braid down his back, sometimes two. When he dressed for work, he tied a bowtie and plaited his hair and wore a corduroy jacket with elbow pads. Most evenings, we poured some bourbon and listened to AM radio on a transistor. We would sit on a blanket in his backyard and watch the stars. He was a philosophy professor and we enjoyed sparring about God and relativism. We played Scrabble for hours, and danced in the moonlight. I couldn't imagine being happier until I wasn't.

The switch flipped on night. I turned off the happy. He dropped me off at work the next morning, and I knew we were both too proud to ever talk again. He repeated the argument from the night before, "Marry me, or never see me again." And I knew the time was not right. I knew I was too muddled to be anyone's wife. But all I wanted was him.

Give me a year. A year for my broken heart to recover. 
Now or never. It should already be healed by our love. By the fate we share. We are both of the Moon. We are both of Aztlan.
But love doesn't work that way, I pleaded.
But I don't work your way, he said.

And he drove his truck into the sunrise. I missed him before his truck was out of view. I missed him before that even, when we sat up all night and he gave me the ultimatum. It was five thirty in the morning when he drove away. I had insomnia for weeks before I met him, and in the months we dated. So, everything felt like a dream. He would sleep and I would smoke cigarettes and read and watch him sleep. I always drifted off after work in the hot desert afternoons, sleeping for four hours before he came over after his day. Sometimes I would fall asleep at four in the morning, and wake again at five, tired and spent, afraid I was going insane from the lack of sleep. I couldn't make decisions without real sleep. I could be married before I was divorced.

I worked that day, bleary-eyed and confused. I told no one of the night before. I just worked in a fog, the heat and hurt permeating my being. I refused all the offers of drinks after work, and walked home in the hot desert sun. The heat rose off the road creating mirages of puddles. The humidity had risen that morning. When I was half way back to my little adobe house, the sky opened up.

It was like a blanket of rain dropped to earth covering everything. And I ran. Feet pounding. My bag soaked. Being caught in the rain makes you feel wetter than if you were naked in the shower. Your soul feels drenched. Your bone marrow feels wet. I was wholly present in the run. I was in my body once again. I stopped running at the awareness of it. I remembered this Buddhist saying about walking in the rain being unpleasant only if you are trying to stay dry. And so I let myself be wet and free and light and alone. I cried, but not out of sadness exactly, maybe out of surrender, out of fear, out of the battle between me and my nature. I cried and laughed and cried. I missed him, but I knew I would survive.

I am nothing but a jumping cactus some days. Thorny. Unattached. Readying myself for the next passer-by, until the rain transforms me into something resembling human. I thought about all this today when the rain woke me and the dog barked.

friends

I miss my friends.

Strangely, in the earliest of days, I missed so much of myself that wasn't even really gone yet, or maybe that I never really had. Things like my confidence, and my security, and my innocence. And now, I really don't miss any of those things anymore. What right did I have as a thirty-seven year old woman to still have innocence? And my confidence? Nothing but a thin veneer between who I was and who I thought I was, smashed at the first five pounds to get tacked on to my hips. And security, an illusion I should never have mistaken for truth in the first place.

But the things I miss now are people. Lucia Paz. Then the list of friends from childhood on up to and including the ones I have met since Lucy's death who fell away in my lost years after my daughter's death.

Sure, people change. Paths diverge. Friends grow apart. Perhaps we would have grown apart whether Lucia died or not, maybe her death just sped up that process. All I know is that my daughter died, and I lost most of my friends. It is like there is this exotic city of my past lives. Every dude I made out with, every friend who I traded clothes with, every person who made me laugh while we shared a beer, and every one who I ever thought would be there if the shit ever really hit the fan all took up residence in this mysterious city of the past. Daughter death is like the neutron bomb that went off in that city. It looks untouched, and pristine from above, but no one is left. My memory of those people are lovely and beautiful, but our friendships died with my daughter.

That first year after her death, I was too mean. Too angry. Too self-righteous. Too afraid of the phone. Too sad. Too needy. Too selfish. Too integrated in the blog world. Too everything. And one right after the other told me I was too much. I believed them.

Darkness and anger bubbled under my skin. I was a monster. A damaged soul. People say you must be a friend to have a friend, but I was incapable of being a friend. Ironically, the only two people who remained my friends were my ex-boyfriend and my ex-husband. Perhaps it is because they saw me angry, self-righteous, afraid, sad, needy, selfish and jealous before. Ugly Angry Angie, or as my sister calls me Angsty, was the Angie with whom they were already acquainted. It didn't shock or disturb them. Sometimes the words right before someone walked away still haunt me. A friend's parting email was so disturbing, I still think about it and try to do the opposite of what she accused me of. I guess it has become my new ethos: Do opposite of what she thinks of me.

This is the thing. I get it. Who wants to be friends with someone so sad, who is easily hurt, who takes things so personally and so seriously, who finds society at large to be largely unbearable? Even if it is just for a year? I suspect most people couldn't bear the relentlessness of it all. Because sadness was fine. Most people can abide sadness, and justified sadness at that. But what about the hypersensitivity? Or the sarcasm? Or the anger? Or the nasty streak of jealousy? Or the quick temper? Those people walked away from our friendship for self-preservation. I get it. I can't blame them. It was okay to not want to be part of this grief and death and messiness or part of my dark complicated life. I didn't want to be part of it either.

I wish I had known just how long that would last, so I could send a memo around.

To: Friends.
Re: Grief.

Friends, 

I am sorry for being an absolute fucking bitch. I forgot your birthday, didn't ask about your son/daughter's party/first day of school/recent head cold/psychological examination, or your mother/father's illness. It was wrong of me. Grief has invaded my body. I am incapable of even the most benign of human activities and the most base of all human compassion. I will emerge in precisely eighteen months, three weeks and two days and be able to call/hang out/attend your baby shower/have a drink/be a friend. Just hang in there.

Sincerely,
Angie.

I am not that person anymore. And I don't know how to bridge that gap between then and now. I don't know how to deal with the wreckage of the first year after my daughter died. I just don't. I remember getting a letter six months after Lucy died. It was a letter of condolence and apology from someone I knew for fifteen years. Apology for the lateness of condolences. It was honest and beautiful and made me cry. It was comforting to receive the letter, and yet I had no idea what to do after I read it. I still have never really talked to that person again. Not because I didn't want to, but because I didn't know how to reach out afterward. Was that my duty or his? I can see now it was probably mine.

Grief is insidious for those confusions. I sat paralyzed by uncertainty and confusion of protocol, knowing what you would and should do with all things being equal. But nothing is equal. My kid died, so I just sat and waited for someone stronger than me to help figure out what I was supposed to do. And no one did. Grief and death and fear of everything made it abundantly clear that I knew nothing about living. That my entire theological and emotional basis was contingent of everything working out in my favor.

I have no resolution to this post. Just missing, so much missing.

on writing and the drink.

Sometimes a bourbon is just a bourbon. And I want one.

Sobriety gets all muddled up in seven months, like a perfect mint julep. And what I mean by getting all muddled up is that in the beginning of sobriety, quitting drinking was just about me not buying whiskey and drinking it. A few months later, my drinking became about my childhood. A month later, drinking was about my long list of character defects. Throughout those months, I tried to find my vacant spiritual center and remain grounded. So, in the end, the majority of my sobriety has not been about drinking at all. I can see as the time moves forward, and the obsession to drink lifted that drinking was but a symptom of a larger problem. One of spiritual bereftness, soul-emptiness, about the spaces I tried to fill and the emotions I try to drown.

But still, every once in a while, it is still just about the drink. And how I want it and can't have it, and how that fact seems fucking unfair. It seems unfair in the way that anything else in the world is unfair, which is to say, it really isn't that unfair. Losing a child is unfair. Getting cancer is unfair. Not being able to drink is just what normal people should do. Alcoholism is a disease whose only treatment is total abstinence.

Being sober for seven months isn't the longest stretch of sobriety I have ever had in my life, but I suppose it is the most intentional of all the stretches. It is the most personal. The most concentrated period of psychic and emotional changes I have ever gone through, if the moment when my daughter died doesn't count. I started quitting drinking the first time I drank. I didn't understand what alcoholism meant as a teenager. I just thought that my off switch had been obliterated by the awesomeness of bourbon, or more likely, I was never born with an off switch. I swallowed who I was with the Maker's Mark until I fell asleep, or fell on the floor. I didn't realize until seven months ago that drinking until you fell asleep meant you were drinking until you pass out. Funny how framing a concept frames how you feel about yourself.

I didn't drink because Lucia died. Lucia died, and I didn't know what else to do but drink. That is something I learned in sobriety. Drinking was all the emotional coping I was taught. Drink until it stops hurting. Drink until you are present with only the sensation of drunkenness. Drink until you write a novel.

There is a long list of writers who are alcoholics or addicts. The names of my first loves of literature: Paul Bowles,  Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, William Faulkner, James Joyce...the list is unending.

Ernest Hemingway said, "Write drunk. Edit sober." That was my mantra, my ethos of writing. I wrote drunk, then edited sober. I edited hung over, which gave me the restless, irritable eye of a critic. I wrote, so I could drink. Eight months ago, I thought that I drank so I could write.

When I was eighteen, I worked at a beautiful cafe in the gay-borhood, as it is called. It was a beautiful amazing space, full of copper, French doors and industrial steel. We played Annie Lennox and ordered muffins from the finest bakery in town. The coffee was roasted to perfection and served in Norwegian-designed little mugs for too much money.

I drank a lot in those days. I was single and it seemed victimless. Every morning I walked the six blocks to the shop before the sun rose. I was still drunk most days, or at the least, hung over. I drank forty ounces of Crazy Horse malt liquor, which cost $1.95. I was nineteen. I bought my drink at the corner store called the Cop Shop, which wasn't called that because police officers hung out there. I would bring my liquor home, sit on my dirty twin mattress covered with an American flag my father gave me from his service in Vietnam and write short stories and long missives on the back of flyers from the local cafe. I would take them by the stack to write. I had an old typewriter and sometimes wrote by candlelight when the bulb overhead cast strange shadows on my paper. I wrote short stories about people doing ordinary things. A story of a girl falling in love with a statue. A girl taking a cab until she ran out of money. A novel about an artist and a benefactor. I thought I was Jane Bowles. or I wanted to be.

One morning, while I arranged the scones in the bakery case, the cafe manager asked me, "Since you are a writer, does that mean you are an alcoholic?" And I shrugged. "What is an alcoholic? Someone who drinks to write? I guess it does." And then she asked me if I could shower before work, because I lived in a nigh-squat and rarely had hot water. She was getting at the fact that I stunk because I drank too much."Yes," I said,  "I will be a better drunk." And she laughed and thanked me.

I thought about that conversation a lot in the last seven months.That was twenty-one years ago. twenty-one. I am still learning how to write sober. I am still learning how to think soberly. I think my writing is better, maybe less free emotionally, but better.

I am still trying to be a better drunk.

across the universe.

Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my worrrrld.

Her singing catches me up.

Nothing's gonna change my worrrrld.

It makes me sad, suddenly and powerfully sad. Nothing will ever fix that break between thinking nothing is going to change your world and it changing. Her sister died. That is normal to her. One day, someone will tell her that not every sister dies, and that her having a dead sister is something to be immensely sad about. One day, she will ask me if I love her sister more than her, because, well, my world changed when her sister died inside of me. I am still making sense of that, even if it is for a moment during a Beatles song sung by a four year old.

Nothing's gonna change my worrrld.

She skips across the floor. In that crystal clear bell of a voice, she sings the saddest song in the world like it is the most hopeful.  

Tryyyy and you will go hooooooommmme.


I like her words better than the sanskrit.  

Try and you will go home.

I had this image in my mind all day of Lucia, lying still on the hospital bed, as I undress her. (I forgot to do that.) I count her toes. (I forgot to do that. Did she have ten?) While Lucia lies on the bed, I bend over her, cover her bruises with sea lavender, and salvia, and lavender. Dried and fragrant. The purple of her torn skin, and the indigo of her bruises turn into flowers. I baptise her with rosewater and kisses. She turns into a sketch of a girl that comes to life, and dances around me, singing in flowers. The smell of holy covers us.

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting thorough my open mind, possessing and caressing me.

She is sitting still now on the ground, doing an intricate small movement of her hand, weaving yarn together. Her movement is poetry and magic and the sun and the universe, because it is here and I can watch it. But I cannot hold it, no matter how hard I try. I capture it in words, and repeat them until I get somewhere to write them, and they are changed, like she is suddenly. This is a meditation and a lesson and the morning and the mourning.

imaginary friend

She stretches the length of the couch, her nose buried in a book. I want to cuddle her up, nibble on her toes, kiss her neck right under her chin. She looks like a miniature woman with her long muscular legs and artist fingers. It is only her little baby belly poking out in that adorable, perfect, unself-conscious way of a four year old, that reminds me how little she is. I feel like I missed two years of her life, the ones sandwiched between Lucy's death and right at this moment. We exchange smiles.

She throws her book aside, and opens her arms. I forget sometimes that she wants me to hold her as much as I want to hold her. I feel like I am always touching her. Put her hair behind her ear. Tickle her belly. Hold her hand. Rub her back. Brush the dirt off her knees. I lie next to her. We kiss and giggle and snuggle, just under the secretary that houses her sister's ashes. We find comfort there.

"Sometimes I get sad that Lucy died, Mama."
"Me too, love."

She had an imaginary friend. On Lucy's first birthday, Beatrice's imaginary friend came for a tea party. Her name was the Other Beatrice. She looked exactly like Beatrice, she told me, except she was littler. The coincidence freaked me out.

"The Other Beatrice just kissed you, Mama," Beatrice told me. I believed her. But for whatever reason, the Other Beatrice stopped coming over to our house to play. I asked her too many questions, Beatrice told me. Her new imaginary friend started showing up a few months later for three or four day stretches.

Her name is Snowflake. She lives in China on Number One Street. She has a sister named Apple, and another named Fork. "Snowflake's sisters don't die," Beatrice explains. Snowflake sleeps over all the time. I mean for days and days at a time, because "China is very far away and her mommy doesn't mind at all." It used to be that Snowflake was her sister, but had a different mother and father. One day, she was just her friend. She talks to Snowflake, pushes  her in the swing in our dining room, runs with her like they are holding hands. She tells me stories of Snowflake. And I ask, "What does Snowflake look like?"

"I cannot tell you, Mama, because she is my imaginary friend."

Snowflake.
Snow.
Winter.
Solstice.
Lucy.

I made a promise to Lucy that I wouldn't look for her in the wind, in the ordinary, in the imaginary friends, but I want her there. In that which I know exists, but I cannot hold.

Snippets about Thor and Beezus.

It had been a while since I pulled up her picture. The other day, Beezus asked me if Lucy looked like her or Thor.
"Yes, my love."

"Which one?"
"Both of you. She is the perfect blend of both of you."
 


This morning seemed like a fine time to see Lucy. It is overwhelmingly hot, and I am doing work. Looking at pictures is a luxury I rarely afford myself. I called to Beezus. Thor tottered in right behind her, and each of them sat on a knee.
"This is a picture of Lucy, Beez. This is a picture of your sister, Thor."
"Ssssis," he said. He pointed to Beezus then himself.
"Yes, Beezus is your sister, and this is Lucy, she is also your sister."

Lulu meet Thor. Thor meet Lulu.

"Ssssis," he said again, and pointed to the screen then himself.

:::

Pointing. To him and the food he wants. To the place he wants to go. To the toy on the high shelf he can't reach. Grunt. Point. Whine. Point. Giggle. Point.

"Corn. Good." Beezus grunts as corn falls out her mouth.

We are cave people.

Grunt.
Snort. 
Point.
Toot.

Food good. Tummy full. Girl happy. Baby clingy. Mama testy.


:::

The other day, Beezus was carrying a card from the zoo which showed the new baby orangutan. Thor grabbed it out of her hands, staring at it and walking. He came up to me and pointed to the baby orangutan and then to himself.

Yes, my love, you are both babies. You are both little monkeys.

He makes connections. He is using signs. He make long exaggerated nods to answer questions in the affirmative. He is talking when he can. He says sister, mama, dada, Jack and dog, usually right after the other, so it sounds like Jack the dog. He says bird, and thank you and welcome. And other things that surprise me and make me feel like time is going much too fast. Much too.

Yesterday we went to the Farm Fair, and looked at the animals, and he liked each animal, but particularly the piggies. First he pointed at the baby piggies, and then himself. But then he kept waving and blowing kisses at them. They slept in the oppressive heat, but I couldn't help but feel sad. I always feel sad when I see babies wave to people and things that don't notice them at all. I always wonder if it is the first time of many that they learn the world is a cruel, cold place. Is that the neural pathway laid down by an unacknowledged wave? Or maybe they are learning they aren't the center of the universe. In the end, I think both are necessary and heartbreaking lessons.

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I need to practice saying no. I say yes to too much, feel much too stretched these days. But I love everything I do, so I suck it up. I daydream about writing a long leisurely email, not the detriment of any other project. Just an email about books, and life. Maybe I would even complain about my husband if I could sit for a moment and think about some things that annoy me. (He forgets to put the garbage bag back in the can after he takes it out, so I mindlessly drop smelly garbage in the can, and then have to wash it out. That drives me insane.)

Thor just wants to be on me. All. The. Time. He still likes breastfeeding whenever he wants to, and it makes me feel like a Chinese buffet. I say no, and distract him, but he only forgets for five minutes. That makes me feel busy too. Because I am constantly moving a little person somewhere else. Everything takes me four times longer than if the children just sat quietly, reading Dostoyevsky, like I recommend.

Here is Crime and Punishment. Come back when you understand the concept of freedom in Raskolnikov's moral universe.

In the same token, I miss Beezus, even though I spend all day with her. She is starting pre-k in the fall, and that will be a new chapter in our lives--school. I sometimes realize that I didn't say goodnight to her, because she fell asleep with Sam while I was putting Thor to bed. She doesn't care. She doesn't notice. But I do. Holding Beezus is still holding my baby, albeit my long, lanky girl who was once my baby. When Beezus does come over for cuddles, Thor pulls at her arms. He untangles her limbs from my body, then he hits her, or pinches her cheek.

"But she's my mommy too, Thomas. I need cuddles too." Sometimes she cries at the injustice of it, and sometimes she laughs. Mostly she laughs.


Sometimes when I find myself so tired of being touched, I take a shower. I leave the children in the bathroom with toys, and turn it on cold. Of course, it is a millions droplets of water touching me, but it feels like resetting my touch-o-meter. I just want to not be touched, grabbed, pawed by another human, and yet, I know how fucking fast this all goes. It is already too fast. He has morphed from a baby to a baby monkey. And next will be a big kid monkey, and then a teenage monkey.

"Enjoy it. It goes by too fast."

I know. And I do enjoy it.

Right Where I Am

When I first thought about the Right Where I Am project, I kind of envisioned it as a Babylost It Gets Better, though not better, because it doesn't get better, but it somehow changes and the changes are an interesting sensation we must pay attention to, as someone once told me about labor pains (That isn't interesting, sister, that shit hurts.) (And not to downplay the very very important project and work of It Gets Better, which you should totally donate money to.) But I wanted it to be maybe a "You Will Not Feel Like This Forever" project.

Listen, I hated hated hated when people said to me in the early months,  "Don't worry, honey. Time heals. Grief changes. You won't be so raw."  Whether those words came from a widow, or another babylost mama, because even though I wanted it to stop hurting so much, I couldn't envision what not-hurting-so-much was. Did that mean I would forget Lucy? Did that mean I stopped feeling sad? Did that mean I would feel far away from Lucy since the only thing tying me to her was pain? And so, as the idea stewed in my mush-like brain, I began envisioning a space where we don't lecture anyone about grief, where we make no sweeping generalizations about timelines and Kubler-Ross stages, where no one gives anyone advice, or imparts false wisdom about grief, but one where we show our progress by simply cataloguing where we are right at this moment in our life. Then, someone earlier in their grief can look at that place and say, "Yes, I can see now what people mean when they say that grief changes."

All this being said, we have 160 participants. We had three more over the weekend. The posts trickle in, and have become part of this amazing, immense project. The last as important as the first. I am blown away by it. I still have like the last forty to read through (shit, that sounds overwhelming) but I do plan on reading them through, and then organizing them in the little page tab on top of my blog by time. I love that they are a moment in time. A moment in our grief, like a snapshot of this community, all standing together, arm over arm, smiling. Your feelings may have changed the next day, but that is exactly why I think this project is so damn powerful.

This weekend, Josh over at JACKatRANDOM sent me this amazing piece he pulled together. He describes it so much more eloquently than I possibly could. He has read every post. He has pulled a piece of love, wisdom, growth, grief, pain, anger and kindness out of each post and made it one cohesive graphic element. It is breathtaking and awe-inspiring and awesome. Please go over and click it. Ask him for a copy. Send him love. Amazing work. I will be posting it on still life 365 next week as well, and maybe talking to Josh in a Live Chat, so come ask him about Margot and art and writing and grief.

Edited to add: Check out this Right Where I Am page where I put every post in time order. I love ordering things. If you don't see your name on the list, it might be because your blog is private, or your time is not visible or obvious to me. I did the best I could to figure out time, sometimes measured in days, weeks, or hours. 

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In other news, I am not sure I have shared this, but a month or so ago, I became a MISS Foundation Hope Mentor for the Philadelphia/South Jersey region. That means that if you are in need of someone to talk to about your grief, you are welcome to call me, or find a HOPE Mentor close to you. I know that early in my grief, I needed a non-judgmental person to call, or email. Some place safe. I found the blogging community. Maybe you have too, if you are here. If not, call me, email me. I will listen. And if you aren't in need of a person on the other end of a phone line, don't forget that next Wednesday July 27th is International Kindness Project Day, where we do a random act of kindness for a stranger in the name of our baby. You can download the little markers you leave, or email me and I can print it off and mail you some. It is an awesome feeling to do something wonderful in your baby's name. So, come on, start brainstorming!