So I wrote 31 short stories in 31 days as part of the Story-a-Day in May challenge. And while a lot of them were more like “stories” than actual stories, and by the end I was nearly comatose from the effort of trying to pry one more fresh idea out of a rapidly shriveling brain and an imagination rusted and creaking, I learned a lot along the way.

I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo since 2006 (the goal there being to write a 50,000 word novel in November. I’ve met the goal every year but without exception they have been more “novel” than novel) and it’s been invaluable to me as a writer. Most notably it has consistently pulled the inner critic out of me, thrown it on the ground and kicked its miserable, soul-sucking ass. You simply don’t have time to write that much that fast with a backseat writer criticizing your every word choice. So it’s been amazing and important to me and I plan to continue to participate pretty much forever, but there were a lot of bad habits I was letting myself fall into within the structure of that challenge. For one, I would procrastinate so badly at the first part of the month that I would be forced to overdose on writing for the last half until I finished at last, whimpering and swearing that I never, ever, wanted to write again. Ever. And I mostly wouldn’t, until a year later when it was time to NaNo again.

To date, I have never gone back to read over anything I’ve written for NaNoWriMo. Isn’t that sad?

Another bad habit, or maybe this is just a bit of my weak character showing, is that I have a really hard time with commitment. I would come up with a reasonably intriguing story idea, and then spend the first two weeks constantly questioning everything about it from character and genre to my chosen narrative point of view. (Which is one of the reasons that I did all of that writing in the second half of the month, and made my 50,000 goal just when the characters were starting to catch hold and I was so sick of writing that I never wanted to see them again. Poor things.)

Story-a-Day, for obvious reasons, was a better structure for getting me in the habit of writing every day. The organizer of the event left a lot of the details up to the individual, right down to the question of whether we really did, indeed, want to write a story every single day. I did, because I know myself well enough to know that if I leave room for slacking, I will slack. But for sanity’s sake, I kept my definition of what would constitute a short story pretty loose and flexible from one day to the next. Often, I would try to save my more ambitious story ideas for days when I had more spare time and energy, and allowed myself a nice sprinkling of shorter challenges between. I wrote plenty of stories that ranged from 2000-3000 words, but I also did a 100 word story (the challenge there being to hit the 100 mark exactly), a story limited to what would fit on one side of an index card, and even a 140 character twitter story (and by “character” I mean letters, numbers and symbols, not that I put 140 people into one story. Though that might make an interesting challenge for another day).

But best of all, I was not only free to dabble and experiment and abandon with impunity, I was forced to do so if I was going to keep up with my goals. So instead of struggling to commit to one idea and set of characters for an entire month, I was only in it for the day. I thought of this as a great way to toss out and develop the groundwork for all sorts of future projects, and to taste test different styles and genres while I was at it. One day I wrote from the point of view of a zombie, the next I wrote about the sex life of a slug. I wrote original fairy tales and rewrote a classic story or two from a different perspective. I even wrote one very small, very simple story in (probably not very good) German.

A veritable writing Lothario was I, though it did begin to wear away at me by the last few days when the imagination well seemed to be running dry and there was an entire lynch mob of left-behind characters grumbling and mumbling from the corners of my brain, hoping to recapture my attention. That last part I consider a really good thing, though – maybe this means for the first time I’ll actually go back to see exactly what it is that I’ve accomplished.

Here is a sneak peek, a taste of my May in 31 stories, if you’re so inclined. Mostly just the opening lines, though #12 is reprinted here in its entirety, its entirety not being very long. Some, you will find, I took to with more seriousness than others.

1. Joe’s Unfortunate Accident

Joe Blow got up from his bed, walked outside to get the newspaper, and was hit by a piece of debris falling out of the sky from a passing satellite.

2. The Curious Case of the Killer Laptop

She sat down at the computer, hope in her heart.

“How hard can it be?” she pep talked herself. “Just a story. Just one. People make up stories all the time. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

3. Leibe

Es war einmal eine Mädchen mit langes Blonde Haare und ein Mann mit schwarze Augen.

4. A Date for Dinner

The hardest part was choosing a recipe.

5. There But For the Grace of God

His name was Bradley and hers was Vanessa and it was strange that they should find themselves together here in death.

6. How to Begin a Revolution

“No.”

7. Persephone

What young girl doesn’t dream of some darkly handsome man who will one day ride up on his fiery steed and steal her away from it all? From childish things, from her mother’s apron strings. A man, a little dangerous, who will pluck her up out of her own adolescent ennui and place her smack in the middle of womanhood – across that definitive line – and into her own life?

8. The Knave of Hearts

“The Queen of Hearts she made some tarts all on a summer’s day;”

This was in a time when the Queen was much younger, of course, and her tarts were renowned throughout the land as the very finest to be seen or tasted. And there were those who had come from miles around to taste them, before she met the King.

“The Knave of Hearts he stole the tarts and took them clean away.”

Because that is simply what knaves do, when there are tarts to be had. It’s why they’re called knaves.

9. The Benediction of a Ghost

Her body was warm, but her feet felt frozen through. She could feel the cold seeping up from the ground into the pavement of the patio, up through the soles of her boots and into her toes. Her whole body was shaking now, but a dim thought occurred to her that perhaps it wasn’t from the cold at all. The sobbing came just before the tears did, joining the shaking of her body like out of sync audio finally catching up with the moving lips on the film.

10. Death of a Friendship

“Once upon a time.” This is how she started, because her brain was tired and her attention span nonexistent and she’d been on autopilot all day long but Once Upon a Time seemed like as good a place as any to start something. Or even to end it.

11. Zombie

They said that the higher brain functions were gone, that there was no self awareness left, and it was true insofar as it wasn’t anything like awareness as the living know it. But as she shuffled through the darkness, she carried some things with her even now.

12. Her Ending in 140 Characters

Her family gathered, but by then she could no longer speak; just gazed at them with hungry eyes. She died in the night with no one watching.

13. Waiting for Rain

Once upon a time there was a girl who was very brave but very tired and she no longer believed in stories.

14. A Story Written on the Back of an Index Card About the Sexual Misadventure of an Unnamed Slug

The slug had, after slow and careful searching, found its soul mate.

15. The Smize Have It

Far off in the distance, someone was shrieking. But then there always seemed to be someone shrieking, with so many young girls and their stiletto heeled enthusiasm, their hair-sprayed attitude, their lip glossed melodrama. They shrieked when they won and shrieked louder when they lost and ate their shrieks for breakfast instead of food, to keep their figures. This is how to be healthy, boys and girls of America, you obesities, you hippos – eat yowls and cries and piercing howls, set Cheerios aside and spare the milk for crying over later.

16. A Simple Thing Like Love

I want to start with something simple, I want to start with love. I know it doesn’t sound very simple, but it is. The heart wants what the heart wants, as they say. That wanting, like a puncture to your gut when it’s just you alone with your longing, it’s the simplest thing in the world. It’s when you add in people that there’s trouble. That’s when love becomes buried under layers of other, more complicated things, like rejection and disappointment and ambivalence and confusion. It’s when people stick their fingers in it and paint it on the walls that love gets complicated.

17. & 18. A Tandem of Sparrows

Once upon a time there lived a sparrow named Alakananda. She was a very young and inexperienced bird, born into a land covered in gray clouds that often dripped rain.

Once upon a time there lived a girl named Sparrow. She lived in a small and damp apartment high in a building in the big, big, city; tiny box mixed in among the blocks and blocks of other boxes.

19. The Attic

The sound of sobbing was coming from the attic.

“Do you hear that?” was on his lips but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it. No one else seemed to hear it, at least. There was milling and scurrying and the usual movements of a table being set and dinner being made, the family – not his family, but he hoped it might be someday, maybe – exchanging playful barbs and familiar jests and no one saying a word about the sound of sobbing coming from the attic.

20. Iris Reads Her Horoscope

When it was done, Iris sat for a few minutes across the kitchen table from her dead husband.

21. Nothing Burns Forever

Eric was late for his piano lesson that Thursday, a fact that didn’t make him walk any faster.

22. A Fair Share

Emmett Butts was a simple man with simple ways, but on the day he died his eldest son Edgar, wanting to do him honor, laid his body out in the grandest style.

23. Conversation in the Troposphere

“I don’t understand,” she said, in that pitter-patter way that drove him crazy.

24. A Member of the Firm Believer In

Speaking as though to the driver of the car ahead he said in irritation, “What is the point of having a bumper sticker if no one can read what it says?”

25. The Art of Careful Dentistry

I suppose that there are people in the world who would find the presence of the Holy Bible comforting in just about any surroundings, but here in the waiting room for the dentist I couldn’t help but view the blue cover with silver lettering as something of an ominous sign.

26. From the Mouth of the Wolf

A girl like that knew better than to stray from the path into the woods.

27. The Coffin Maker

Mabel double checked the address scribbled on the index card before she rang the doorbell.

28. Robert Daniels in Accounting (co-written with Storm Buchholz)

Any other day of the week, Robert Daniels would have been satisfied with dry toast and coffee, maybe a hurried egg.

29. A Reunion

“Have you been waiting long?” she asked.

“Not long,” he said.

30. The Improbable Death of Laura the Ghost

The greyhound bus didn’t have a regular stop in the town and never had much call for one, but Hwy 77 turned into Main Street and drove right through on the way to Norman, so the driver would sometimes drop the odd passenger off at the Super C.

31. The Bite of a Dragon

She had a scar that stretched along her hip, curved like a smile.

What happens next in my writing journey, I don’t know. But I’m curious to find out.

from March 5, 2010*:

But I Was Okay, Right? I Mean, I Was Blogging and Texting Jokes and Sounded Okay…

Last week I experienced another really rough patch, the kind where just talking myself out of bed is a strenuous activity and I’m never completely sure I’m going to succeed. February being its usual rotten self. And so, knowing myself as I do, I sent a text message to my husband at work stating very plainly that it was a really bad day. To prepare him, to summon the troops for support, to send out a warning while I was still capable of communication, whatever. Because when he came home he found me joking, and hanging out with the kids, just like I knew I probably would be. Looking like any other day. And bless the man, even after 15 years of marriage to me and a text message portending doom I could see the moment in him when he looked at me hard and then his face relaxed and he thought to himself, “Oh good, false alarm, she’s FINE.”

Oh, I was far from fine. Trying to be fine. Doing a hell of a job of faking it. It’s what I do. I make jokes when I’m scared. When I’m vulnerable. I deflect. I try to make it easier on everyone around me. I try not to be a burden, try not to embarrass myself, try not to be sloppy. I was raised to be a good girl, and good girls are happy because that makes it easier on everyone else. Two sentences into conversation later and I was locking myself in the bathroom and completely unable to communicate with Shane for an hour. Too busy gazing into the abyss I’d been trying to ignore was there while simultaneously trying not to step in it.

And I did try to warn him.

I expect the people who love me to see through my brave faces. Sometimes that’s fair, and sometimes it isn’t. I do try to give a hint when I’m capable of it. I suppose that if even my own husband can’t always see through them when he lives with me everyday and I spell it out for him ahead of time, what hope do you really have from way over there? But I was so not okay. I’m still so not okay. How could I possibly be anywhere close, yet? The woman did a number on my head for seven years and then went and finally died like she kept threatening to and it was a relief and it was a complete tragedy and I never got that moment of absolution that I swear I was promised. They always get them in movies. In Nicholas Sparks novels. Redemption, reunion, that last farewell that makes it okay somehow. I was living for it. The last time I saw her I couldn’t understand a word she said. Did she tell me that she loved me? I don’t think so. I don’t think she did. I don’t know!

It’s funny that you say you feel left out in November with NaNo stuff – honestly, I thought I was doing you a favor, and I was trying not to take it personally that you never showed much interest in my November activities. I just remember that first time I tried to write a novel, (!) when I was leaning on you and expecting you to hold my hand through every aspect of it, wanting your opinion on every. Single. Line. Sheesh! And you were such a trooper about it. It’s embarrassing to me to remember that now, and so I operate on the idea that if you’re curious you’ll ask and otherwise I won’t burden you with my insecurities and constant need for validation. And when you don’t ask, I think, “God, I must have been even worse than I realized!”

As for the blog – more then anything it was a desire to get somewhere with my writing – to finally break the gag that was placed on me by having to be the good child for so long, thinking that if one good thing might come out of my mother’s death it would be a new freedom in my writing – that’s what caused me to put so much of my early grief into blog posts. It didn’t get me anything that I could really see, though. In my fictional writing, if anything, I’m buckled up tighter than ever before. And blog-wise I lost a lot of my followers somewhere between “death is catching” “I don’t want to say the wrong thing” and “Hey, I thought this was the girl who posted pictures of celebrities and funny stories about the dentist, this is too depressing.”

And a blog is a poor friend, it doesn’t talk back, not really. So in that you saw the beginnings of a healthy process there in those early months, maybe. But honestly, I don’t know where I am now. There’s no movement, when you talk to yourself. You just spin in circles, I’ve found. That’s where I’ve been, mostly. Pirouettes.

Not okay. But. I can see why it looked that way from where you’re sitting. So I’ll say it. I’m not okay.

*I wrote an email fairly recently to a close friend of mine and I was very proud of it, I felt like I’d managed to express a lot of things that I’d been wanting and needing to express, in general, for a very long time. So I’m reprinting bits of it here, the salient points. In three parts.

“You’ll be alright,” he says to me.
“No,” I tell him. “I won’t. I won’t be okay just for the sake of it. Not anymore.”
It’s true. If I’m ever going to be okay, I’ll have to earn it.
- Markus Zusak

March is dead and buried and I say hallelujah. I am a mold, normally I flourish in the darkness, or at the very least, I abide. This has been something much blacker than I’m used to, though, and I can’t help but keep glancing over my shoulder, making sure that it isn’t still back there somewhere creeping, getting ready to pounce.

No, that isn’t quite true. The fact is I know it’s back there, trailing me, a step behind at most. I can feel it in the prickle along my neck, in the heaviness that presses hard against my chest several times a day with no discernible trigger, in the way that the same people and conversations that once used to fill me up now deplete me utterly. I feel it there in the way words no longer behave themselves in my possession and I just can’t seem to make myself understood no matter how many of them I use and in what order. I’ve spent a long time feeling like everyone has changed, I guess, let me down or left me behind, but the one that’s different now is me. I see that now. I feel myself a stranger living in this skin and I can’t figure out why everyone keeps acting as though I’m who I was before. I don’t even remember her, most days.

So the truth is I don’t know if I’ve come out of it as much as I’ve decided to pretend my way out. Fake a little optimism back into my life. It’s funny really, the things that can inspire us, especially when we’re feeling well beyond the reach of the inspirational. I think the thing that finally penetrated the fog, my own private call to arms, was a song by Frank Turner called “Love Ire & Song.” I’d been wallowing musically until that point, of course, as one does when in the darkness. I’d heard the song before, though, enjoyed it without feeling a personal connection, but then one day it seemed to play at the exact right time with my head tilted just so and the lyrics went:

“Well we’ve been a good few hours drinking
So I’m going to say what everyone’s thinking
If we’re stuck on this ship and it’s sinking
Then we might as well have a parade
’cause if it’s still going to hurt in the morning
And a better plan’s yet to get forming
Then where’s the harm spending an evening
In manning the old barricades?”

I don’t know from barricades, of course, and I sense there’s something rather shameful and maybe even bourgeois in taking an anthem written by a folk/punk singer-songwriter about idealism in the face of aging cynicism and making it all about me and my personal journey.

But it is still going to hurt in the morning. Every morning. For the foreseeable future. And it’s time for me to go ahead and live on anyway. Whoever the hell I am.

So April. I begin with optimism, even knowing that my Dad’s death day anniversary is just over there, on Easter Sunday. Knowing that this is most likely the Easter Bunny’s last hurrah as well.

And knowing that this weekend is the unveiling of the Eleventh doctor, which I’m finding myself really nervous about.

Of course, beginning April at the dentist didn’t seem the most auspicious of starts. New insurance, new dentist – leaving behind the drive-thru dentistry we’d been utilizing, the kind of place where young dentists are just passing through on their way to something better and where old dentists come to die. A place where there is no rhyme or reason or plan to your care, just some vague tooth cleaning and a little glue for any that fall out when duct tape just won’t do the trick.

It got us by, but simply holding steady and maintaining wasn’t quite cutting it any longer and besides, on the last visit they were mean to my son (age 14 and never had a cavity, you should talk to him with respect, old woman) so now we’re back to higher prices and – one hopes – higher class. This was my getting-to-know-you visit, the first date. (New place, new people, with dental themed instruments of torture thrown into the mix I would call it the perfect circle of hell in which to serve time for my sins, whatever those turn out to be at the end of the day.)

And it wasn’t terrible, but first impressions were inconclusive. To be fair, if you wait until I’ve been leaned back at a 45 degree angle for the last fifteen minutes, blood pooling at the top of my brain while someone who looks about the right age to date my son pokes at my gums with some sharp poking thing, all while deconstructing the sorry state of my dental history over her shoulder to the new girl who, poor dear, gets lost from time to time and needs us to start over on that last bit – you know, the poking part – and then you breeze into the room to introduce yourself and shake my hand, I’m not always going to be at my most receptive to your charms in that moment. (There’s free advice for anyone wishing to befriend me. Try, at the very least, not to slice up my gums first.)

But so far I can say with confidence that my new dentist seems to be bald and enthusiastic, the latter of which would normally make me suspicious, but I’ll reserve judgment until after our second date in May. The rumor is that he’s generous with the nitrous, if this is true I won’t even make him buy me dinner first.

By the way, generally when I choose to wax a bit tragic about my dental travails, someone will pop up at about this point and say, “I’ve actually never minded the dentist” or even “I LOVE the dentist!” And I’d like to take a minute to address this person, whoever it might turn out to be this time. I say this with kindness. No one likes you.

What else? I’m doing Script Frenzy this year, which also started up on April 1 though I have yet to technically jump into the fray with actual writing. I’ve dropped out halfway through for the last two years running, but I have high hopes for this year. I’m going to write another stage play, I think, and I’m going to make it another silly one, I think, and I really hope it catches hold of me and takes off this time because I feel like I could really use that right now.

I’d thought that since a lot of my inner editor was put in place by my mother, by her deep-seated need to keep everything private, that maybe her death would set me free to do the kind of writing I’ve always thought that I wanted to do. I still think that, actually, but I also think it’s going to take some time and practice to get there. Right now I don’t seem able to write in the voice of anyone but a motherless child, I can’t picture life from any other perspective. I relate to no one beyond this nose. Still, it would be nice to take a small vacation from that world, and that’s what I’m hoping Script Frenzy will enable me to do.

Oh, and I finished the first Level of Rosetta Stone German, and I’m seriously proud! I still have absolutely no confidence in the speaking part of things – just yet – but I’m enjoying the code breaking aspects of learning a new language and I’m doing well at the reading and and general comprehension. Of course the three genders of nouns are still giving me fits. To augment my lessons I’ve been listening to German music (2raumwohnung, Panik, but my favorite is Oomph! – they’re like Rammstein except sexy) and watching Germany’s Next Top Model without any kind of subtitling. From this I’ve learned “links,” “rechts,” “gradeaus,” “du bist im Labyrinth” and that Heidi Klum doesn’t actually stop to breathe when she speaks in her native language.

In lieu of an elegant ending (endings are my weakness, in more than one way) I’ll show you a picture of the books I won’t have time to read this month, but got at the library anyway:

I get to write another play this month! Isn’t that sort of freaking awesome, if you think about it?

Probably, at 37 years old, I shouldn’t still be getting such a kick out of having a brand new purple notebook and a pen with green ink, but I am. It’s part of this thing that I’m doing now. My friend Kristy was in town recently, filled with inspiration and determination that she was kind enough to extend in my direction. She’s my bold, brave friend, every time she comes to town I nod my head and say “Yes, Kristy, you totally should quit your job and then just see what comes” and then she actually does it and it’s kind of terrifying and I expect her mother to come to my house and beat me up but it always turns out amazing in the end. Because it’s Kristy, and it’s what she does. So this time she’s decided that its time for both of us to take this whole writing thing seriously, and I shrugged and said, “‘kay.” Because that’s what I do, when it’s Kristy. And then I bought a new notebook, I suppose in case it’s longhand that’s been the one missing ingredient between me and total Stephen King-dom.

And every day from 10AM until noon I shall sit in my bedroom with the door locked and a sign taped up as a reminder to my children that whatever it is, they’ll survive 2 hours to tell me about it. And I’ll sit and sit and mostly think about how cool it would be to write stuff. But, baby steps.

So today, as I was writing my name and date on the inside of the front cover of the notebook I had no specific plans for, I realized that it’s my half birthday. So I’m actually 37 and a HALF, then. We always said the word HALF just like that when we were kids, remember? With that extra emphasis, because it mattered. It meant you weren’t merely 10 anymore, 10 was so far in the dust of your aging memory at this point that you might as well be 11. Practically 11. So today I am 37 and a HALF, which could almost be 38, but isn’t.

Obviously I’ve had quite a few half birthdays by now, passing without notice and mention, as have we all. But when I was a kid, it was part of a tradition started by my mother when I was probably 7 or 8. (And a HALF.) She would keep me home from school that day and take me shopping, buy me something special. Partly because my birthday always fell during summer break – which I always thought was a ripoff – but mostly because we had just moved again and being the new girl never got any easier.

So it was a really nice thing she did, there, one of my favorites. I like to imagine that between that and her wont to occasionally blast Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, I might begin to trace the real roots of my unschooling proclivities. And today I will remember my mother as the woman who bought me a 3ft tall Barbie doll because she saw the Lonely Other in my eyes and understood it. She didn’t always get me, but just that once, she really did.

Ironically, my daughter isn’t speaking to me today, for reasons that are still shrouded in mystery. I think I was kind of a jackass when I went to talk with her about it, though, trying to force a make-up because its what I wanted. So now I’m giving her space and using my patience, but nothing feels quite right without her. She’s one of those people whose displeasure can be felt even when she isn’t in the room, it seeps into the air and travels outward in widening circles. I’m like that, too, and so was my Dad. I think it came with the brown eyes.

Pieces from emails written in December of 2008.

My daughter’s hamster died in my hands at 2:30 this morning.

I really hate Christmas. Admitting that I hated Thanksgiving seemed to go a long way toward enabling me to finally embrace that holiday, but I think Christmas is just too big for reverse psychology. I’ve been wallowing, truthfully. And trying to deny it and act like nothing’s wrong, and getting frustrated when I make all the right moves and do everything correctly and it still can’t make this holiday feel good.

Maybe you’re right, about Christmas being melancholy to anyone over 15. It sure sounds right. But I’d really convinced myself otherwise for a few years, there, I thought it was stressful and overly full but a good time, I thought I’d made it my own. This year my heart just hasn’t been in it, though, it’s all been one long stretch of going through the motions and even the thought of having to sit through two movies tomorrow seems more then I have in me.

It’s been a long fucking year and I think I’m just kind of over it, you know?

But then I made the real fatal error of the conversation and mentioned how negative she’s gotten, how she’s isolated out there on the river and she has way too much time on her hands to pick over things (yes, as a matter of fact I was speaking from experience) and make things seem worse than they are and I knew it couldn’t be good for her health. It’s all true, and she ate it up, glommed onto it like a lifeline, the one thing she thought she could do to win me or something, and then in true mother fashion twisted and perverted it. The last two times I’ve seen her she’s been aggressively, psychotically cheerful, she’s been trying so hard to prove to me that she’s turned over a new leaf and is never negative about ANYTHING that it makes my teeth hurt. It’s so fucking fake, I can’t stomach it. I don’t even know how to interact with it. It brings back nightmares of my childhood where she would pull this whole Jekyll/Hyde act, transforming in an instant whenever company came over into this sort of Mom-bot, this perfect hostess that I guess people bought into but to me it was just so very not real, and scarily so.

If you ask me, when it comes to Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll is far more evil and terrifying to me because he’s hiding the bad stuff, he knows it exists and he just thinks he can pretend it away and not be sullied by it. Hyde might be loathsome and evil but at least he’s honest about what he is. I preferred my mother negative, at least it was real.

Is it bad that I’ve single-handedly drank an entire bottle of Dark Rum this holiday season? And bought more?

Well I’ve felt trapped in a loop of questioning years for ages now, easily since my Dad died but possibly even before that when my life path changed drastically from student and theatre major to married mother-cum-housewife. There have been answers in places, growth and movement but just in pieces, in moments, and so often not the kind of lessons that stick. Usually the kind that come in the form of a realization that you’ve struggled toward and suffered into and finally reached that golden “Aha! Now I get it!” And six months down the road you’ve panted and struggled some more on something that is certainly altogether different only to reach the end and discover it’s the same damn golden Aha that you’ve already handled, still has your fingerprints, you thought it had changed your whole life view but you forgot it and had to live toward it all over again from another goddamn angle. Those are the answers I was mostly getting, the one step forward two steps back variety. So this year has been really different for me, there have been shifts inside of me, really profound, solid shifts. Those realizations haven’t just been dried leaves on the wind, they’ve been marble, carved to fit inside me and stay.

And most of them have been positive, they’ve been necessary, they’ve been answers I’ve been waiting a very long time for, and I can feel them settling into me and assuming my shape, I can feel how real they are. And that’s good, right? It’s nice to have some answers finally, it’s nice to feel all of these sudden strides. But on the other hand, I’ve just been pummeled. It’s been never ending. And I am just exhausted.

It’s been a long fucking year.

Bits and bobs pieced together from emails written and sent in November of 2008.

This is not the story I set out to write at all! What IS that? I mean, I expect that kind of thing up to a point. But for the last month or so I have actually been doing my homework and my prep time and I was ALL SET to write a creepy, serious Frankensteinian story, maybe a reimagining, maybe a modern interpretation, maybe just using it as inspiration but it was going to be dead serious and creepy and dark. Definitely dark. And then I sat down and started writing and it’s this – quirky story. Don’t get me wrong, I like quirkiness, it’s great. I like humor, too. But wow, it’s like it didn’t even TRY to be the story I planned for it. It kind of pisses me off.

Ha – I love how your email basically said in the first paragraph “Yes, come, this weekend is great!” and in the second one, “We’re being buried in snow, isn’t it neat?” I might be exaggerating a little, but that’s how it reads for those of us who live in the valley and DON’T TRAVEL IN SNOW. And warm clothes? We just bought all three kids new hoodies, does that count?

We live in different worlds sometimes, J. Especially in November; it would seem. My sunburn just faded for goodness sake. But we’d still like to come this weekend, we’re just a little nervous about choosing the right dogsled team…

My husband is taking a video game vacation. You heard me – he’s taken three actual days off of work so he can pick up his World of Warcraft expansion tonight at midnight and play it until it hurts, or until he has to go back to work next Tuesday. (To be fair, the hospital is -ahem- ENCOURAGING everyone to take ten of their paid time off days by the end of the year for budgetary reasons, but it sounds so much funnier when I leave that part out.)

Miss you guys. You know the song from Cheers, all, “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came…” Yeah. That.

Random: I took that Carl Jung psychological profile thingie that’s all the rage and got the one that makes up only 1% of the population. Look at me, I’m so rare. But hey – dig that 100% introverted, baby!

http://www.mypersonality.info/autumndragyn/

I had no idea.

So, as mentioned, Thanksgiving was actually pretty enjoyable. Which, I suspect, is what happens when you finally and at long last give up all expectation and say “Fuck it. Whatever.” (The name of my self help book is going to be “How To Say Fuck It All So That The Rest Of Your Life Is A Pleasant Surprise.”)

So I felt wistful but not bitter. And I think the first thing that helped turn around my holiday was the fact that for the first time I took an actual interest in the cooking part of it. God Bless the adulterous bastard, if I got nothing else from my crush on Gordon Ramsay, at least it started making me think that cooking might be fun once in a while.

I won’t pretend we went all gourmet by any means, but I made the gravy instead of warming it up from a jar, we cooked the yams properly in a casserole dish instead of sticking them in the microwave. These are big steps for a girl who gets all of her holiday cooking tips from wiki-how. (God bless wiki-how, too.) We discovered some nice short cuts to mashed potatoing – we went with red potatoes, skins on. (Now that it’s come out Gordon Ramsay is a cheater, I don’t feel guilty turning to Rachael Ray for a few tips.) And as I texted, the turkey was amazing. I have never had a turkey so freaking moist, not when Shane cooked it, not even when my mother cooked it. Now, I’m not saying that I did the turkey single-handedly (unlike I shamelessly implied in my text) – not at all. Shane and I were a team effort this year, which was another really nice aspect. But I like to think that I was the missing ingredient to the perfect turkey.

Pieces from the emails I wrote and sent in October of 2008.

Well, I’m finally clawing back up from oblivion and able to take a few moments to chat. Honestly I don’t know why I’m having such a problem resurfacing – it feels like September was a ride down a really steep crazy slide and October is the deep ball pit I landed in and sank all the way to the bottom.

I’m not sure where any of that came from and you’re sweet to pretend it was relevant. Did I mention I’ve taken cold medicine?

Right now I’m finishing up Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein so I can read Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. And this was after reading Spook by Mary Roach and 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill, so I guess you can see where my head has been lately. I think I’ve been trying to rediscover God in some strange and dark places, honestly.

So James concert (where I could have been) in San Francisco was October 1, Shane’ work (where I will probably be) in San Francisco on October 19, Neil Gaiman (where I wanted to be) reading chapter 6 of the Graveyard Book in San Francisco October 5. Oh well, if I had been there it might have turned out to be one of those “And now I can die” moments, and really, I’m only 36. I’d like to keep going a little longer, really.

So, really, the whole thing with my mother was largely a mild bump on the trauma scale – I think at this point I’m still finding myself surprised to be surprised by the depths of her selfishness, but I’m also much faster at bouncing back from the hits. I mean, let’s face it, no one really thought that seeing my psychotic mother once a bloody week was going to be easy, or was even necessarily in my best interest, but I had to try, I suppose.

And of course it’s a complicated story to relate, like most family stories probably are, because what sounds on the surface like a mildly trying conversation generally has incredible amounts of back-story and conditioning and button installations and ritual sacrifices along the way that sort of build, layer upon layer, into something much bigger and uglier than one remark.

First little bit of silliness – when we were out at my mother’s house yesterday I noticed that it was finally our one week of fall here in Oregon, so I went out in her yard to try to grab some pictures. And I very literally walked right into a fairy ring. You know how they say that in places where the toadstools grow in a circle the fairies meet? I’ve looked for them all my life (the rings, not the fairies. Well, okay fine, both) and never seen one, and yesterday I just happened to look down and I was in the center of one. It was very, very cool.

My favorite thing about San Francisco is that you can turn a corner into magic at any time. And my kids want to know what’s coming. They want a plan. They want predictable. They are me, in any other city, at any other time in my life, basically. But in SF I want to wander, I want to take 50 pictures of the same damn building, I want to sit and contemplate the Jackson Pollack, I want to enjoy the freaking view! I really didn’t get any of that on this last trip, or if I did it was in tiny little snatches in between pep talking and keeping track of everything.

It’s like how you can’t really see your own kids grow because you’re with them every day, but someone who only sees them every few months will notice humongous changes. Seeing my kids through the eyes of San Francisco I can see the giant changes for myself, comparing from trip to trip. Khy and Stormy have very clearly crossed that blessed line of reason and compromise where they have some awareness of needs that exist beyond their own. They understand time constraints. Khy worked nearly as hard as I did to keep everyone cheered and upbeat. And Nicky – well, he sees the line. He dances along it now, which is a big improvement. There were still some days when he would moan and complain that he had to walk more than a block to find a McDonald’s, insist that he was about to starve to death any second, and then refuse to eat anywhere else that we passed. But there were also days like the trip to the Museum of Modern Art, where he was a genuinely fun companion.

So I let the kids play, Khy happy to stay out of the water but Storm and Nicky rolling up their pants legs to wade in. To be fair, I knew what I was risking, letting them play in sand and surf with no towels or changes of clothing and a bus ride, train ride and car ride away from both, but it was one of the few moments of serenity on that trip where I felt like I would make it work, whatever happened, and I just needed to say yes to something. And making it work was pretty much what I had to do, because while I managed to squeeze in a little oohing and ahhing and picture snapping and ashes spreading and sunset enjoying while watching out for my kids and taking stressed out calls on the cell from Shane who had taken the wrong bus 30 and I had the bus map, I wasn’t watching quite close enough and Nicky got covered in sand and wet.

So we trudged up to the spray off place by the bathrooms. It had a button for a low one just for feet and legs, and a higher one for whole body. I got to work spraying off the kids and Storm wasn’t too bad but Nicky was a problem. He’s wearing wet, sand covered jeans that are beginning to feel like sand paper and in that moment I KNOW he isn’t going to last dinner, a bus ride and a train ride in that condition. (Did I mention he was also having an eczema flare up? Not a great time for sand rubbing against skin.) So I looked him seriously in the eyes and said, “Can you just pretend for me tonight that your boxers are real shorts so I can take these jeans off of you?” He, thankfully, agreed. So I stripped off his jeans, sent him back over to rinse his legs a little better. He pushed the top button accidentally and soaked his t-shirt. At that point all I could do was laugh, really, which stopped his freak out in it’s tracks and soon we were all laughing. Good news – I actually DID have a change of shirt for him. That plus his hoodie because the sun had set and it was getting a little cooler, and later he walked nonchalantly into the Hard Rock Cafe wearing his boxers and Khy’s socks pulled up to his knees.

Anyway, ages later, after I had finally gotten Nicky squared away, I started helping Storm dry off and reshoe. We were sitting on benches that are right next to the spray, so the next people who come up to use the spray are just right next to us, basically, we’re just out of range of the water and barely. And the next people are two very French, very loud and boisterous, very buff and attractive young men. Probably in their early twenties. And they step up to those water sprays, and they strip right down to their tight little boxer briefs and they pull soap out of nowhere and they start to shower for real, basically. And they take their time, too.

And this isn’t me being prudish, it was just so surreal! And you should have seen the mortified looks on my children’s faces. I just kept thinking, God I love San Francisco.

Flashback to September 2008, a selection taken from emails I wrote at the time.

But it’s made me so freaking beyond lonely sometimes, I can’t even tell you. I mean it’s just like they say, about how much lonelier you can feel in a crowd. That’s totally what I’m experiencing – when I was at my reclusive best I was happy with my own company. But now that I’m on the fringes of this other community, watching them interact and seeing their easy intimacy with one another – it’s not so much that I covet it necessarily. It’s not exactly a “seeing what I’m missing” situation, either. It’s more that it makes me feel intensely aware of my own otherness. My not-quite-fittedness. My disconnection.

Plus I’m freaking out about my decision to take care of my mother once a week. That decision in itself, while carefully considered and made from a place of strength, has served to make me feel outrageously vulnerable just now. I am not naturally disposed to maternal roles beyond the norm – even learning how to mother my own kids can be a stretch sometimes – I was never the eldest or the one likely to take charge. I was baby of the family through and through, and while I learned to fake a certain level of maturity so well that I even had myself convinced, caretaking will never come naturally to me. (Let me clarify – I think that the urge most definitely does, but the wisdom and tools and general wherewithal does not. At all.) So it’s not that I think parenting a parent is an easy role reversal for anyone, I just feel even less equipped than most. I barely know how to take care of myself.

“They don’t have to love me.” “I don’t have to be scared of talking to my brother.” “I will not become my mother’s permanent full time caretaker.” “God is not dead.” My head is filled with too many mantras this month.

Sunday. You don’t want to hear from me on Sunday. It seems like no matter what I do – everything from sleeping through it to creating new traditions to ignoring it to writing poetry about it – I still end up draining the septic tank of my life on Sunday. Not even Jesus would want me for a sunbeam today.

I just had a small family reunion – and believe me, we’re not a close family, either. But it’s sort of a tradition now that every summer my brother comes up from New Mexico, and my extremely neurotic, possibly insane mother says “Oh, I could die any minute of some exotic and strange disease that the doctors refuse to admit I have, this might be my last chance to have all my children together” (on the one hand, you have to understand, she never recovered from my Dad dying and that’s very sad. On the other hand, she’s always been a manipulative control freak psycho in her heart of hearts) and so we get together and eat potato chips and pretend to have something in common. It’s awkward and strained with moments of hope interlaced and I always cry on the way home because it just reminds me that I’m never going to have a close family but I’m always going to wish we were. So there’s that. My Dad was kind of the class and the sanity in the family, and when he died everyone sort of splintered and now we all seem (to me) about half a step away from a Jerry Springer episode.

And besides, don’t let my radical turn fool you, I’m still the same girl at heart that chooses her education, religion, alcohol and men (okay, well maybe not men) on the same principle – take what works for you at the moment, and leave the rest for someone else. Probably someone haughty and judge-y and who’s going to pick on you later for letting your kids watch television or for lying to them about Santa Claus or because they won’t get enough socialization. But fuck ‘em. Everyone has an opinion.

And I’m a big believer in the idea that we do what we’re capable of once we’re capable of it, and every little misstep and procrastination and failure and freak out in a person’s past was necessary to get them to the place where they can accomplish what they think they should have been able to accomplish ten years ago. I have regrets, I even have some shame about my behavior or my lack of ability to step up or whatever in the past. But when all is said and done I believe that I’m honestly always doing the very best that I can. Sometimes my best is crap, see, but that’s life. I think this same thing is true about most of us.

A Year in Email Blurbs, August 2008 – This is a selection of blurbage pulled from emails written and sent in August 2008.

I swear it’s been the most peculiar year. Such a crummy year, really, but at the same time I feel so much revelation and growth and movement happening, that I know it’s been an important year. I’m just really tired out from it. Remember that quote I found once that you liked that said something about there being years that ask questions and years that give answers? Well, this has been a big fat answer year for sure. And it’s all been immensely good in that way, I can’t even tell you how much fear I’ve lost with the coming of these answers, and how much more comfortable I’ve been feeling in my own skin, bit by bit – well, okay, depending on the day – but in another way it’s been kind of exhausting, this unending battery of revelation.

Stormy, not inclined toward the silly or corny without a little nudge, was half charmed and half horrified by Mamma Mia. Musicals are not her natural element. She still got a little extra gooey when Colin Firth was on screen, though, which just delights and amazes me. Anyway, Meryl Streep plays a character named Donna, and her daughter (played by the painfully adorable Amanda Seyfried) is getting married. At the bachelorette party, Donna and her two friends (who used to make up Donna and the Dynamos) show up on stage totally decked out ridiculous and sing Super Trouper. (A song that I myself once sang into a hairbrush in the privacy of my bedroom.) As they sing and dance and pull faces and it’s all very wonderful, Stormy tugs me down and whispers in my ear, “You’re not going to do that at my party, right?” I replied immediately, “Of course I am. Jacqui’s going to sing it with me, too.” And without hesitation (I would almost think she had planned it this way all along, if it weren’t for the mixed tone of satisfaction and horror in her voice) she said, “And Kristy, too.” As though it was settled.

I think today I’m mostly feeling bummed because my daughter is gone for the week and I miss her. I really thought I’d be the Mom who was all, “la-de-dah, my daughter is off on an adventure, isn’t it thrilling?” and I am, but I’m feeling sort of wretched about it, too. I don’t remember being this bereft on her last trip without me. You know what it is, though? It’s because right before this trip I actually saw her grow up in one of those all-at-once bursts, I got one of those brief but clear glimpses of the future where you can see your daughter’s path stretch ahead of her, shining and exciting and wonderful and pointed in the opposite direction from you.

I thought maybe part of it was the way I’d french braided her hair – she hadn’t let me do that in years. But later, sitting in McDonald’s having breakfast, she pulled the braid out and her hair fell to her shoulders, long and full. I nearly gasped aloud at the newest – just another in a series, I suppose, best get used to it – instant transformation. She said, “What?” as I snapped a few more pictures, and when I showed her she said, only slightly surprised and generally pleased, “Oh. I’m pretty.” Later that afternoon I trailed behind on purpose as we meandered through the park, staying in the shade and waiting for the meeting time. I watched her moving with that awkward self assurance – the cocky self consciousness – of a girl just discovering her own feminine power. Her walk changed slightly from moment to moment as she tried out different steps, she casually pulled her hair into a pony tail and secured it with the white band she wore around her wrist, a few minutes later she took it back down again.

She’s so young and fresh my heart could break, but at the same time I recognize that this isn’t about sexuality, it’s about confidence. If she can learn now that she can be attractive and lovable without having to dress in skimpy clothes, simper or preen, if she can learn now that she’s the one with the power until she gives it away – wouldn’t that be amazing?

So this week I miss her and I mourn a little, not just because she isn’t with me just now, but because I can feel her moving away in a bigger sense. But what a glorious thing it is, to watch her walk!

Things here are good. Well… No, they’re good. We’ll call it good. Reasonably good. At least, not bad, anyway. It’s just… You know how you can have years at a time where, looking back, nothing much happened? I mean, lots could have happened, but you’re still in the same skin and on the same path and there are no big surprises so without calling it boring – I’m not saying boring – it’s just predictable and familiar and days sort of blend in to one another (I know I’m mostly alone with this, but those days that blend into each other because the moments are so small and close are some of my favorites. Those lay by the pool days or the watch Doctor Who marathon days, the ones that aren’t flashy and no one will write poetry about them but they make up a string that when all viewed together gives you a warm fuzzy feeling and makes you feel like life ain’t so bad or hard after all). And then there are those years that happen that when you wake up on the other side of them you think, “How did I get here? To THIS place? When did this happen?”

The last time I had a year (or several, tied together) like that was probably when I went from one day being a slacker college drop out with aspirations for the stage and plans to have a long string of hopeless and doomed love affairs to write poetry about while living in my small but hip apartment in the middle of Big City, Somewhere to being a married mother on the precipice of owning a minivan living next to people who put Bush signs in their perfectly manicured lawns, stranded not completely willingly in Heart of Suburbia. In some ways I’m not sure even my Dad’s death shook me up to that same extent, as much as it most certainly did make me rethink every single thing in my life to be sure of it (Do I still believe in God in the same way? Is it the same God? Does green still look the same to me? Do I still hate spinach, or love the smell of coffee? Are my eyes the same shade of brown?) and it most certainly transformed my inner landscape in a profound way that nothing, not even motherhood, – well, maybe motherhood – ever has, but when the dust settled it was still the same life and I was still the same me. Just a little sadder and a lot more lost, but I still didn’t like spinach and I still avoided driving the minivan, so… But now, I think I might be having one of THOSE years, the one that hits you in hindsight with the force of a steamroller, and when I get to the other side of it I will be the mother of teenagers. (Cue threatening music of doom.)

No, really – I don’t mean it in the way that most people mean it. I’m a little nervous about the teen years, sure, but I’m still optimistic that we’ll get through it more or less intact. I think it might even be ridiculously fun. It’s just that it draws on such different skills as a parent, and it’s happening so fast that my head is spinning. I mean, we grew out of diapers slowly. We grew out of tantrums by microscopic increments. (Are they even over? I’m not sure.) So I guess I started thinking the teen years would give some warning, some time to adjust. But no, it really is more like waking up one day and suddenly your son speaks three octaves lower when you look up at him and he owns an electric razor and has inexplicable mood swings and your daughter is wearing a bra and shaving her armpits and debating the merit of various brands of feminine hygiene products. And all I can think is, “Am I qualified for this?” I’m not altogether sure. I passed my baby exam – squeaked by toddler mom-hood just barely, and have (in my own humble opinion) excelled the hell out of being a mother of kids. But teens? We’ll just have to see.

So things are good, but changing, and doing so in a rather shockingly abrupt manner, and I’m trying like hell to roll with the punches but that’s not a quality that has ever been part of my nature. So I’m faking it.