near year

It is now almost a year and I keep trying to convey the difference between now and then, as though I mean to preserve this moment, which is nothing like I imagined, and also still occasionally kind of sad and odd and hard to quantify. 

I have two more sessions left with my therapist and that also seems odd. Right now I am OK with it, it seems to have come to a natural conclusion. I am aware of what an impact it has made, how it has prepared me for the rest of my life, how it has made certain things easier for me to manage. 

A year after the height of my eyeball freak out, I am calm about my terrible vision, and I have found a way to handle the painful flare ups, even the screamiest red scraping blinks and the headaches, It was kind of like learning how to handle yeast infections and UTIs and strep, faster than a doctor. With mostly things I stir up in the kitchen. I am in charge, I am the powerful witch doctor and spiritual guardian of my own body. This all reminds me of a long impromptu conversation I had with Heather at Giant Eagle, that look she gave me, like, dude, you are telling yourself that other people are giving you bad answers, and you know their answers are wrong and that if you give yourself a second to really believe it, you already know what to do. I did, and I was right, and I found my answer.  It was a wake up call. 

Last year, on this day, I was like a half blind cat, waiting for someone to come back and pet me, put water in my bowl, tell me they were so glad I am where home is. 

I was an impossible ache, a too rapid terrified breath, a lonely waiting ghost. A few days later I was an empty heap. 

I had  finished the last winding of my paper tabletop, pulling and pounding and straining to finish it, and crying for all the stuff wound up inside. I was that giant wheel of carefully arranged tension, one poke, a slight accident, and the entire center would come sproinging out. I cried the whole time I finished it. Karen Dalton low in the distance just filling and spilling and breaking my heart until he called me, late, using tones and words that were stupid and empty of awareness, and my guts did sproing out and I spent days weeping on the floor. 

Then I was full of light, then I was full of bees, then I was full of promise, then what if, then loss, then I was a carbonated underground spring, then raw powerful wanting, then lust and anger and more buckets of sorrow. There followed embarrassment, abandonment, illness, panic, freak out, then finally, thankfully, certainty. Then curiosity, connection, conversation, Speak Easy, possibility, work, play, love, realization, personal awareness and accountability, shorter cycles, tighter circles and always the sense that this life is interesting and worth it, and mine to finally live. 

I am lucky. I know that. I am grateful, I live in that. I am aware, that is the best gift, I am alive, that is so ridiculously easy to take for granted. I love. I am loved. I know who my friends are. I am not broken. I do not squander. I have everything I need in this moment.

I did not remain knocked down.

Did I get our message?

As a child, deja vu felt like a message from my older self to my younger self. Specially coded messages, concentrated for maximum grey matter penetration and shelf life. Sometimes those moments come back to me. But not with the answer, more like, OK, here I am as the adult me and this is the thing I am thinking: ABDCEFG, each letter corresponds to something. I was little and kneeling by the side of the house, near the giant hole I was making with a spoon. I remember cocking my head and hearing the letters, and knowing each one was a code for something else, and that it was coming from a much older me. Much like thinking if I could stare hard and beam my whole heart and best intentions at Tina, a long legged stuffed panda bear with a crooked nose, I’d be able pick up those same vibes later, looking as a grown up lady in those very same brown eyes. To me it was like a storage vessel. I was serious about encoding the message, I wanted to leave an exact copy of my entire emotional catalog in her tiny plastic retina. I always intended to come back and draw it back out, to breath in with my old new self every urgent message of my youth. It’s like I knew I would forget, but felt like I had to remember. To forget was to lose something worse than property.

I kept Tina on my bed for years. She was floppy and dirty and old, bald in patches where the fur rubbed off. At around the age of 12 I began to realize she was uncool, and sometimes she ended up under the bed where no one else would know I had her. By the time I was 16 and emancipated I knew she only belonged in a box. When I was 17 I moved her to Oregon. I could not unpack her. My boyfriend was old and my attachment to a stuffed animal made him seem ancient. I could not let her go entirely. I took her out of the box when I was finally alone. I sat with her and looked into her eyes, waiting for my old message to come flooding out. It didn't. Only half hazy old memories of being little, but the kind suggested by photographs, not the real secrets photos never captured. I could not throw her out but I needed her to take up as little room as possible. I bent her over my knee and cried as I cut the back of the head at the crease of the neck. I took out her weird stuffing, like gutting a memory, the effluvium of childhood on my hands, wafting upward under the force of my hard sniffle, to be sneezed back out. I put her panda stuffing, the part where the hugs were, right into the trash. I folded her feet up to her head, and her arms inward like a hug, and the whole thing in half, a sad little rectangle with panda ears. I told myself I intended to re-stuff her. Into the old suitcase of memories she went, no one would know.

Years later I was getting married. I bought a house. In it there was a room intended to be my office, which was supposed to be a place I could write and create and be alone, several things I entirely failed to do once becoming a boring married grown up. I decided to take stock of what I had become by checking out what I had been, when I ran into the rectangle of Tina. I remembered it as a promise to myself to get the message and not forget. I unfolded her strange empty form and stared into her eyes. Without stuffing they looked cross eyed. There was nothing to hold the shape. Her head folded in and her eyes clicked together. It seemed obscene. I tried in vain to decode the beam. I never could.

Cross my heart and MRI. Stick a needle in my eye.

There's really no way to guess how you'd feel if those two things were looming on the horizon. For me, it sucks. I'm actually, completely, totally terrified. And well meaning statements about positivity and being in the moment and how I have another eye are not helping. I'm not in that place right now. I will find it, I know because I always do. But I also think there is value in honesty, and something to be gained by having, naming and owning the real feelings associated and letting them ride out without being told I should be feeling some other way.

Maybe you had a scary medical thing and you were fascinated or super zen about it. That's great. Maybe you have trained yourself to never "give in" to fear. Rock on. I am not in that place. This isn't easy. I don't need anyone to do anything or say anything to fix it, but I can tell you I'm not ready for "at least". "At least blahblah sunshine" is basically like saying, "You're fear makes me uncomfortable. I think you should keep it to yourself because it gives me weird feels and I want that to stop for me." or "I care about you and I am worried about you and I want to stop your fear or sadness". Fear isn't solved by platitudes. And there isn't anything wrong with having it or naming it. As the listener it's not your fault, it's not your problem, and you can't fix it.

Do you know how to help someone in crisis? You make eye contact with them. You put your hand on their arm. You tell them you know this is hard. You sit with them in silence without expecting them to "get a better attitude". You ask them if there is anything you can do for them. It's like waiting under an awning for a storm to pass. It will pass.

That's it.

Some things only tangentially related to Actual Bea Arthur

When I was in 6th grade I bought this long poofy skirt. It was made of grey denim. It gathered at a high waist and I thought I had really smashed down some fashion barriers. This skirt had so much fucking fabric you could cover a couch with it. I wore it to school exactly once. A very smart girl called me Bea Arthur. That night I wrote in my journal how mortified I was to have turned into 6th grade Maude, with a cinch waist tarp on.

This morning I woke up to a dream where I was naked cuddling with Bea Arthur and she had expressed an eager intention to go down on me. Have fun breaking that one down, weirdos.

The Best Chocolate Cake in the Universe

(I'm going to explain this like you have never, no never, ventured into baking a cake, so if it seems obvious to you, congrats, you have already leveled up! I'd also like to note that I got this recipe off the internet and just wrote stuff down on a sheet of paper, I don't have the big magic brain that came up with the boiling water part, which I am convinced is the reason this is the best cake in the universe, and I wish I knew who to thank.) 

350°

30-35 minutes

2 9” pans

2 cups of white sugar

1 ¾ cups all purpose flour

¾ cup cocoa powder

1 ½ tsp baking soda

1 ½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 eggs

1 cup milk

½ cup veggie oil

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup boiling water

Set your oven to temp and make sure your baking rack is in the middle.

Prep your pans, oil and flour them and have them ready to go.  

Mix up your dry ingredients with a whisk in a big bowl.

Add the eggs, milk, oil and vanilla and mix for three minutes with an electric mixer.

Add a cup of boiling water and hand mix with a whisk. It is going to be very glossy and liquid, you will probably think, “Oh no! What have I done?” Relax, this cake is getting ready to blow your mind.

Mix the batch again and pour your second pan. Try hard to make them even so they cook at the same time.

Now bake it for 30 minutes and check it. A toothpick in the middle that comes out wet means keep going with the heat. Set it for five more minutes. If your pans were not even, or if your oven has hot and cool spots, one cake might need to come out first while the other one chugs along to Cake Town.

Cool your cakes. I mean it. Do it overnight. Don’t skimp on this, or your cake will crack or not come all the way out of the pan, and your frosting will melt and you will be sad, which is the wrong way to do cake. Don’t make it cake’s fault that you are impatient. The good news is that once the cake is cool you will be cutting the tops off with a bread knife to make the top even, and then you get two delicious bonus disks of cakey goodness that will be delicious all by themselves and you will eat them up and be amazed by the sturdy but moist texture of the cake you’re about to frost. Not too sweet, very chocolatey. Seriously perfect.

Frost that Cake

¾ cup butter

1 ½ cups cocoa powder

5 ⅓ cups powdered sugar

⅔ cups milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

This will make an insane amount of frosting. Be warned. However, messing with the recipe seems silly, and halving it will not be enough. So just have extra frosting. This shizz is amazing. Not too sweet, very chocolatey, totally perfect for that cake I just raved about.

Add some berries to the top. Serve it to someone you love for a special occasion. You are now a cake BOSS.

Mother's Day for the motherfuckups

Mother's Day fills me with angry secret bees.

I am a mama. I have two amazing kids. I like being a mama. I've always been motherly, in a nurturing, "Here, let me help you" kind of way. I have an A+ Infinity Surrogate Mama Friend who is utterly fabulous in all the ways I always wanted. And, those are things that are totally worth celebrating. But yet, this time of years rolls around and all my own ancient, secret mama drama comes floating to the top. I find myself forced to smile a lot when I don't mean or want to, and I try to ignore all the sappy sentimentality I never got to experience, because it might make me sob. Or double plus loud swear. Or take off running.

I grew up with a terribly young, mentally ill, alcoholic mother who slept with shiftless layabouts to propel herself forward. A woman who regularly told me I was a mistake. That my whole self, the very life of me, was a gift that she decided to give me "on the table" when she chickened out of the abortion at the last minute. She also told me she regretted her choice, that she once had the power to snuff me out but didn't, a gamble she regretted because look how terrible I turned out and how fat and stupid and how old I made her look and how few choices she could manage now that I had the nerve to eat her food and hate her boyfriends and need new shoes. There is no bouquet of weeds or pastel scripted card that covers all the feelings at the chewy nougat center of that kind of relationship.

I am not mentioning any of this because I want pity or because I think you can do anything about it, I mention it because I understand how weirdly and quietly those of us who were badly mothered can seethe and weep on a day like Mother's Day, and how hard that is to convey to people who just can't wrap their minds around it. Thankfully, we are not the majority. But those who had good mamas, or even mamas they came to love and understand later, can never ever get the pain and guilt and anger involved in never getting there, even for a tiny brief moment. Some say, "Oh, but there is still time! You can forgive, all mothers deserve to be cherished for the best gift you could ever have, she did the best she could with what she had!", but that grates even more.

I hear, "I had a good mother. Because of that good relationship with my good mother I am unable to imagine not having it, and I want to believe there is some way you can have that too, even if it just means you need to open your heart to your mother and adjust your attitude about her because we ALL had problems with our mothers and this brief time I just spent imagining the possibility of not having a loving mother has made me feel like throwing up. I hate talking about this. Why did you even bring it up? What is wrong with you?" Which is why I hardly ever do, I don't want to put anyone through even a tiny sliver of what I went through. Privately, heavily loaded words like, "Mother's Day" provoke an expansive fireworks display of words, memories, tragedies and quiet secret sucker punches, even though I can usually smile through it so no one will know.

Not every part of the word Mother makes me cringe like an abused dog. But the fact that it could makes Mother's Day a monumental effort to keep it normal on the outside. People who got to love and be loved by their mamas are luckier than they can even imagine, and the good ones deserve their the whole cherished cycle of macaroni necklaces and PB and extra sloppy J breakfasts in bed. I learned the painful hard way that no one makes time to  soothe the sulky badly parented adult in the corner who grumps about about commercial holidays, cramming down all the feels with way too damn much cake. They don't know what to say, because they can't possibly comprehend it. And maybe that's actually good. What good is  secondhand heartbreak anyway?

Mother's Day becomes Quiet Weeping and Avoidance Day, party of Me, eventually rounded out by knowing it’s just a stupid day and only has the meaning I give it, and that I have plenty of other rad mama stuff worth celebrating.

Someday I will learn how to tell this story without feeling like I’m the jerk who took a turd to a tea party.

xo

Don't you dare slip through on Nancy's push

Yearbook quotes from the 50's.

“Happy-go-lucky Klondike bubbles up for taffy apples and swims away from female obstacles"

"Edith will miss limeade and sharp clothes"

"Donna will be exploring your insides someday"

"Doris likes black olives and bowling"

"Joycie says squares and book reports are off-key, but enjoys hectic times"

And, my personal favorite: "Nancy is upset by people who go through revolving doors on her push"