Flotsam

I am not sure whether it’s that my brain has been frizzled into a gray matter lardon or what, but I have been trying to post something here since Monday and failing, again and again.

Maybe it’s because I want to be able to write a straightforward FIN! HOORAY! DEADLINE VANQUISHED! sort of entry, but I am just not feeling it yet, and suspect I won’t be for another week, when the editing is complete. Right now I’m still terrified by the state of my manuscript, and fighting the urge to don a trenchcoat, scarf, and sunglasses before leaving the country entirely, leaving a trail of sweat and vomit in my wake. After I pressed ’send’ Monday night, I surprised myself by bursting into tears. Some of that was probably just my emotional spit valve, releasing the stress that had been building for six months (and isn’t THAT a lovely metaphor!) but much of it was plain old sorrow that my book wasn’t ready and fear that it won’t be in time and that the best part about it will be the (oh so lovely) cover. And look at that, I’ve mentioned four distinct bodily fluids in one paragraph.

I shall defer my FIN! HOORAY! DEADLINE VANQUISHED! celebration for another day, but I do have something else to celebrate instead. Let’s call this the OMFG celebration, as it concerns the news that landed in my inbox this morning, the news that my book is officially available for pre-order on Amazon. Look over in the sidebar, if you don’t believe me (you have to look waaay down, because for some reason my sidebar is getting uppity with me when I try to edit it). My book has an ISBN and everything, and seeing the title in type other than my own is enough to make me believe that this will happen, my editing will be finished and my book will be a physical thing, with that delicious, familiar, book-y smell.
(Do they make air-freshener in New (or Old!) Book Smell? If not, they should. Someone get on that).

The best part of all is that after the book’s title on the Amazon page is my name, and after that, in parentheses, it says Author.
Hand to god, you guys. AUTHOR.

THIS is enough to make me believe in just about anything. Unicorns, a satisfactory outcome to the health care debacle, a race of helpful badgers inhabiting dressing rooms in order to offer scrupulously honest opinions upon your ass in those jeans: anything is possible. Butterfly in the skyyy, I can fly twice as hiiigh—I’ve got the world on a string, and it pulled me deliriously back here to tell you about it.

While I was busy working I kept this insane notebook full of things For After. Things to do, things to write about, pages and pages of notes and lists and reminders. Now, alas, I don’t know where to start, and am so sick of myself after six months of memoir-writing that I can’t imagine my thoughts about Aaron Sorkin’s weird Platonic fixation on male friendship, or my latest beauty discoveries, or my ANYTHING, being of the slightest interest to anyone.

A few months ago I signed up for formspring, and then realized that if I didn’t have time to wash my hair I certainly didn’t need another online writing venue, but now I think it will be a perfect way to ease back into this blogging thing after my long absence. You can ask me any question you like, and I will either answer on formspring or write about it here and leave a link to the post. Here is my formspring page.
(I reserve the right against self-incrimination, though I am unlikely to actually exercise said right.)

I missed you! I am so glad to be back!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that we had a spot of excitement this past weekend, including a baby with a fever of 107, an ambulance ride, and a febrile seizure. It was…well. I think it was the most afraid I have ever been, including all 96 days in the NICU. Apparently these things happen, and it was just a small, fierce virus, but if some Friday you are thinking to yourself “gee, wouldn’t it be funny if my two-year old had an absence seizure while her brain began to poach?” the answer is NO. Also, if you are a NICU mother who stole retained one small oxygen tank (Just in case! You never know!) after the home medical company retrieved the rest, and if your husband discovers this a few months later and makes you return it, and if your baby then refrains from breathing after having a seizure, you should feel free to take this to mean that if the worst had happened, said husband would have been liable for all funeral expenses.

And that is all I will say about that, because revisiting that night, and the way I screamed to Scott to call an ambulance and pressed frozen sweet potato fries to my baby’s back as I thought I might very well be watching her die—is not something I can do, right now. You should know, by the way, that JUST BEFORE that happened I had started a post wondering what unpleasantness January had in store for me THIS year. Ha HA! Next year I am spending the month in a bunker.

So, let’s move on. I have another horrifying story to tell you, one I would be far too ashamed of myself to share, if I had any dignity left at all. Luckily (?) for you, I do not.

It was a dark and stormy night—or dark, anyway—when something occurred that caused me to close my laptop earlier than usual, with a terrified snap. Something that made it suddenly, strikingly clear that I was a danger to myself and others. Myself, because it was my own beloved book I was writing, and others, because they might, one day, have to read it.

What happened, you ask?

USEN.
Does that look like a word, to you?
(Hint: IT SHOULDN’T.)

I’d been typing merrily—or at least persistently—along, and when I paused to look over my last few paragraphs, I noticed that spell-check had a problem with one of my words. “Usen,” to be specific.
I reread the sentence. And again. Huh. Maybe it was some sort of glitch? I erased the word and retyped it, then reran spell check manually. Still, the accusing red squiggle remained.
I was annoyed. “Usen,” as I well knew, was the past participle of “to use.” For instance, in the past perfect: “She’d usen that verb many times in the past.” Or maybe with an auxiliary verb in the passive voice: “Handkerchiefs were usen for staunching the flow of exhausted tears.”

Typing “usen” in the first place was bad. Not noticing anything amiss until spell-check pointed it out was worse. But worst of all was that EVEN AFTER SPELL-CHECK SUGGESTED I REPLACE “USEN” WITH “USED,” I was unconvinced.

Friends, I Googled it. I Googled “usen,” determined to find evidence that it was an actual word. It was only then, as I scrolled through the results, that I realized what should have been obvious: I had been writing for far, far too long that day.
I wouldn’t have thought anything short of head injury could cause me to forget how to conjugate regular English verbs. I remembered past participles, even while insisting that “usen” was among them. I have been conjugating the verb “to use” for nearly 30 years, and I think I do a satisfactory job of it. In fact, when telling this story to my mother, I used (SEE? THERE!) that particular verb several times—correctly.

(My poor mother, by the way. You should have seen her face. The horror. The concern. The fear!
“Usen?” she kept asking, incredulous.
“Usen,” I whispered, hanging my head. I had broughten shame upon our family.)

In addition to being horrifying, I think this story is an excellent illustration of just how hard I have been working, hard enough to slowly liquefy vital parts of my gray matter, the parts where my grammar were stored. So you will excuse me if I am still more absent than I would like to be, here. (USEN. USEN!)

I’d planned to attend the Mom 2.0 conference in Houston next month, as it fell fortuitously on the weekend after my manuscript was due. Alas, I discovered that the editing part of my book schedule is as XXXTREME as the writing portion, the entirety to be completed within a harrowingly slight window. Any changes I want to make must be complete by the 22nd of February, and then the copyeditor and editor work in a flurry, and I implement their changes before the first week of March, when my manuscript is sent away to the design department to be tarted up into a book. My publication date is so near (August 10th! Unless you are at BlogHer! In which case you may buy a copy DAYS in advance!), that the pages read by reviewers and any Fancy Persons I wish to ask for blurbs will be only exactly as polished as they are when I relinquish them to design. Later I will make corrections to the typeset version, but there you have it: FIN.
For some reason, this news threw my spleen into disarray.

It’s silly, because it’s not as if I’d planned to turn in a BAD manuscript on my deadline, but somehow I thought there would be all this time afterward, for editing or changing my mind about things should I wake covered in a cold sweat, convinced that Chapter Fifteen ought properly to be Chapter Four. I have a week after my original deadline of the 15th to edit, but still, knowing that what I turn in on the 22nd may not be terribly different from what ends up on someone’s SHELF, next to real authors—James Thurber, maybe, or sandwiched between Ian Frazier and Joan Didion, the two of them drawing their covers subtly away from mine in distaste—means I’m not going anywhere next month. (Related: anybody want to buy my non-refundable Mom 2.0 early-bird registration pass?)

This weekend, I am taking my Crazy Person’s Bulletin Board to a sort of hippie Wellness Retreat Compound Center Spa Inn, where I shall lock myself in my room to work, emerging only for the occasional calming dip in the therapy pool, or to have my third eye massaged. It’s a vital and luxurious expanse of uninterrupted time, and if I DO lose my mind as I hurtle down the literary homestretch, at least I will already be at what amounts to a sanitarium, eliminating the need for padded transport.

It is odd to know that in less than six weeks, the task that has consumed the last six months of my life will be complete. Though the only reward I require is a book that doesn’t make my copy of The Fran Lebowitz Reader curl its pages in disgust, I have scheduled a small vacation to celebrate. I will be visiting Philadelphia, where I have never been, with one of my very best friends—whom I have technically never met, lengthy daily telephone conversations notwithstanding. I’ll see my editor, and plan to shuffle gratefully into her chamber to anoint her feet with sacred oils. Afterwards I’m off to peruse a nearby museum of medical curiosities, so it is virtually guaranteed to be a successful trip.

You’ll hear from me before that, though. Simone’s birthday (TWO??) is on the 8th, and naturally I’ll want to do some sort of victory lap here when I turn in my manuscript, and again after I finish incorporating the editorial changes and send my baby on its way. I will probably cry a little, remembering all the good times we had, my book and I, wrestling playfully with one another over tense and prodding newborn metaphors forward on their wobbly legs.
But THEN I will finally get back to business, the good olde fashioned business of boring you with discussions of toilet training, and what my Jersey Shore nickname would be (“The Tacit Premise”), and my newfound obsession with polygamy. So wait for me, please, like I’m in prison and you’re unexpectedly carrying my child. I think of you often.

The holidays were lovely, here. I mean, it doesn’t get much better than a baby in fake hair, does it?

I had Christmas Eve pasta at my brother’s/mother’s house, alternately gazing up at the giant tree festooned with familiar ornaments and watching my daughter discover our old wind-up toys beneath the branches. Simone developed a bizarre obsession with Ray Charles, and worked on her dancing (adding a slow, deliberate twirl.)

Having remembered a tearful and unattractively petulant pre-Christmas screed about how there wasn’t ANYTHING I wanted except more time in the day and a fluffy, welcoming king-sized bed (neither of which I could HAVE, woe unto ME), my mother surprised me with a certificate for the latter. I had a sort of shopping-related seizure at IKEA yesterday, wherein I bought not only the bed and a mattress and bedding but also a dresser and laundry hampers and bookcases to replace our VERY child-unfriendly tottering shelves, all despite the fact that our current furniture is still…here. This will presumably be worked out this weekend by fate, my husband, myself, and Craigslist. I’ve undertaken a massive apartment overhaul, which, while ill-timed, makes me happy. Being under crushing quantities of stress is more difficult when the place where you are supposed to relax is not relaxing. (I’ll post some before and after pictures, once there is an after.)

I wrote through the holidays, while it snowed and snowed. Though my overstimulated toddler required much tiresome wrangling at the family festivities, Schmutzli spared her a beating. I even gave her some presents, most notably a chair and a doll.

Finding the doll was quite an adventure. Simone is in an affectionate, doll/animal/anything-with-a-face -loving phase, and I wanted to get her something nicer than the tiny “baby” from Target that she carries about, the one with TWO LEFT ARMS, poor unfortunate thing. I thought a doll with hair might appeal to her follicular obsession, and also, yes, give her hair to pull at night besides my own. I like Corolle dolls quite a lot: they are well-made, BPA-free, machine-washable, come in many sizes, and have expressions that are neither creepy nor inappropriately blow-up-doll-esque (I’m looking at YOU, Baby Alive). But have you noticed how many baby dolls have blonde hair and blue eyes?
I have nothing against blonde hair and blue eyes—I have both, myself. But, for whatever reason, it seemed important to me that Simone have a doll that looked like HER, especially given the seeming omnipresence of blue-eyed toys. I know, I know: it’s silly, and even Simone had blue eyes when she was a baby, as most light-skinned newborns do. If I hadn’t been looking at BABY dolls, with hair, there would have been a greater variety, instead of the current triumvirate of Blonde/Blue Eyed Paleface Doll, Black Doll, and Asian Doll. Options were also limited because I wanted the doll to be small enough for her to manage, and thought short hair would be best, to reduce the odds of it becoming a vast synthetic dreadlock. I finally managed to find a discontinued model that was at least Simone-esque (brown eyes, where hers are olive; red hair, where hers is indeterminately colored), though I was given the impression that it is “supposed” to be a boy.

Simone was pleased with my selection. She kisses her baby, and picks at its eyes with affection.

In fact, Simone was delighted by everything this holiday season—from Duplos to her discovery of apples—the one fly in her ointment being the glasses she refuses to wear. She has an eye appointment next week, so let’s hope it shows that her reluctance is due to improving eyesight rather than rapidly escalating TWO-ness. Her birthday, after all, is next month.

I find it hard to believe that it has been a decade since 2000, but on the other hand, it seems impossible that I fit so much—my best of times, my worst of times—into only ten slim years. In January of 2000, I was a 20-year-old virgin, home from my first semester of college. I was very certain (and very, very wrong) about what lay ahead for me. It’s so startling when things don’t go at all how you’d planned, and yet manage to turn out better than you’d expected.

I hope you ALL had a happy start to your new year, and that only the very best things follow you through it.

Lately, I am working seven days a week in a frantic dash to meet my deadline, and those days seem to blur together and slip away from me, leaving no time to leave the house (last week I ran errands Monday morning, and next stepped outside on Saturday night), much less update my Bushel of Logorrheic Online Gibberish.

I write in my head as I try to fall asleep, and I wake in the morning visualizing my Crazy Person’s Bulletin Board (It has little squares for various sections! With colored pins to signify their degree of done-ness!), surprised to find my jaw clenched. Last night I even had a writing dream, similar to the waitressing dreams of my youth. These aren’t nightmares, or even particularly dream-like: no animals walking on their hindquarters or appearances by elementary school classmates. No, these are ordinary dreams, in which I do my ordinary work. I used to work a dream shift waiting tables and wake up, exhausted, to do the same thing corporeally. When I taught SAT prep I would explain equations in my sleep, step by tedious step. Now as I slumber I write a few lines, or worry over a paragraph, or contemplate the epilogue. I revise and look over my manuscript thus far.

This is not what dreams are for—a fact of which I have advised my subconscious on multiple occasions, though it never listens. In high school, in bed at five a.m. after a night of abandoned-factory-dancing, my dreaming mind would replay the evening in detail, like watching realtime footage of an event I had already experienced.
Perhaps my creative muscle is so strained during the day that it cannot come up with anything diverting at night, but boy, would I like a break. If I am going to revise in my sleep, couldn’t I do it in a Swiss cafe populated entirely by fancily attired goats, or while reclining beside a naked and fondue-bearing Jon Hamm?

This brings me to the other reason I haven’t been posting much: to spare you my inappropriate angst. I seem to be in a perpetual swivet, as my dearest friend would say. Her latest post deals with just that condition, ending with a poem that aptly reflects it.
I am never without worry or work. I worry about what I’ve written and what I haven’t. I worry about finishing a draft far enough before my February deadline to allow for the distance necessary to a clear-headed revision. I work in spurts and longer stretches, half-listening to my family, feeling driven and inadequate on both fronts. I have no desire for food, alcohol, television, or pants that zip and button. I don’t want anything except More Time, and maybe a lavishly outfitted king-sized bed to sink into at the end of the night. Alas, neither of those things are on offer.

People, I am writing a book that will be published. It even has a publication date, on which it will be available in stores: August 10th, 2010. It has a cover—or a mock up of one—that I love, and seeing that cover for the first time smacked me boneless with awe. How lucky am I? So, SO lucky. I would not want to be anywhere other than where I am right now (unless it were a few weeks further from deadline.) I am doing just what I’ve always wanted, and sometimes honestly cannot believe I have stumbled into this life.

Writing a book is the most consuming, exhilarating, terrible, wonderful thing I have ever tried to do. It is also a little like walking around with a partially corroded car battery in your stomach. I’ve never done anything this ambitious and difficult, or that I cared about this much, and that is a terrifying combination. Believe it or not, some of that fear is because, not in spite, of my gratitude. I hold books in such esteem, and have loved so many of them so well for so long, that I take very seriously the opportunity to contribute one of my own.

I got six months, which, it turns out, is not much time, even when you have a Crazy Person’s Bulletin Board and a plan. For one thing, books are more slippery than essays, and have a devious hydra-like quality: no sooner have you finished one chapter than a new one, TOTALLY NOT ON THE BULLETIN BOARD, springs up to take its place. If you are a Slow Writer, as I am, six months seems slimmer still. Even with my new Orpheus-inspired policy of DON’T LOOK BACK AT ANY COST! FORGE AHEAD! EDIT LATER! I have days where eight hours of effort produces a scant handful of sentences.

This isn’t always the case, of course. Over Thanksgiving, I wrote 5000 words in two days, a record. Scott and Simone went to Iowa to see the in-laws, and I stayed home to work. On Thanksgiving I wrote for 13 hours, had fishsticks for dinner, and fell into bed at 2:30 in the morning spent but delighted. It wasn’t easy, and I’d started the day by passing the kidney stone that landed me in the ER the day before, but overall, it was a Happy Thanksgiving and did wonders for my morale. I accomplished more in those two days than I have in the 11 since, and sometimes I wish I could send Scott and Simone away for a bit longer. Here I am, wishing away my own daughter! Why don’t I just cast her out to sell matches in the snow?

My husband was laid off last week. He has a few months to find a new job, and if he doesn’t, we will be in ominously euphemistic Trouble. I made exactly enough from this book to afford the six months to write it, with childcare. After my deadline I’ll resume freelancing, but will be lucky to make enough to cover MY half of expenses. Scott’s lay-off ought, really, to be the thing weighing most heavily on my mind.

But it’s not. Instead I write, and walk around looking mad and disheveled, muttering darkly that it’s not a coincidence that “write” and “writhe” are separated only by one letter, or threatening to take up some nice, restful career, like bricklaying or gerbil husbandry.

It helps to remember that we all do this, all the time. We complain about our kids, when there are women who will never be able to have them, or we complain about our homes when the vast majority of the world’s population live in spaces a fraction the size of an average house. If we could only complain about things that everyone has, we’d have nothing to complain about at all—though I suppose that would mean we could complain about that, and I’m sure we’d find a way to do so. I feel immense relief when I read others talking about the brutal, soul-searing nature of writing a book. When Cormac McCarthy was quoted saying “I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” I thought “Oh thank god! I’m on the right track, then.”

Kyran—who is just finishing her own manuscript—observed in a recent entry that “The emotional climate is completely different, but the physical tension is weirdly similar to the way it felt two years ago, when we were about to lose our house. I guess in the body, stress is stress.”
And I guess it is. I have felt as much stress at times during the past few months as I did living the events I am writing about, and have certainly whined more than I did during the entirety of Simone’s NICU stay. I suspect this is because in the NICU there was nothing I could, or was expected to, DO.

So I’ve been absent partly because I’m busy, and partly because all I can think about is DEADLINEDEADLINEBOOKBOOKBOOK, and I’m afraid you’ll all detest me by February if I don’t keep my stupid mouth shut. But I miss talking to you, and I will try to do a better job of carving out space for non-book things, even if I am currently having trouble remembering what those things are. I am reminding myself of my own excellent advice from back in October, that I needn’t take perspective so far that I get sucked into a relativistic swirl of shame and desperate, overeager gratitude. But this, like everything else, is very much a work in progress.

Things have been tabulated, and we have a winner.

Ahem!
FANCY MATHEMATICAL WINNER DETERMINING METHODOLOGY:

1. First, I combed through the entries for duplicates. Several (five!) of you were so eager to correct your spelling or share a forgotten talent that you commented twice, and so I unapproved one of the comments of each double entrant.

2. Next, I typed the number of remaining comments into the Random Number Generator, and clicked the button.

3. Lastly, I matched the (Random! Because of math! And, according to the website, “atmospheric noise,” WTF?) result (273) with a comment number (273) to find the winner.

It was, as you can see, a complicated and taxing process.

But it’s over, now, and the winner is…Ariel!

Thank you to everyone who entered and astounded me with your collective weirdness, and to Tania for her generosity. Without this contest I would have never known that my friend Alexis once sat astride Shamu, or that among my readers there was someone who “can correctly adjust the idle on a 1974 Porsche 914 using a quarter. In a formal gown.” I myself would have used the quarter to call a mechanic, which is why I am less talented than Michelle.

Ariel, congratulations. I am forwarding your contact information to Tania, so you might want to start thinking of what to engrave on your lovely new necklace…

Just about a year ago, I posted about the charm Scott bought me from Julian & Co. I discovered their website when I was searching for jewelry to celebrate Simone’s birth. The pieces are lovely, and the artist, Tania, is the mother of a former 29-weeker (her son Julian, for whom the company is named). I feel a certain loyalty to and kinship with other mothers of preemies. We’re like a sorority: a haggard, traumatized sorority, whose parties are known for their stiff drinks and plentiful hand-sanitizer.
I sent the link to Scott last October when he asked for birthday ideas, and last Christmas I visited the site to buy my mother a tiny charm with Simone’s name below a pair of footprints, her birthdate on the back.

Back then Tania found my post and wrote to thank me for the mention and grant my readers a discount. She has since become a regular reader herself, and last week she wrote again, to generously offer a piece of her custom jewelry to one of you. I don’t normally host give-aways, but I am making an exception. You have all been so good this year. Think of it as an early present from Schmutzli.

And the prize? Well. It’s a new design:

The cube is just under 1/2 an inch, and is a bit more interesting than traditional baby name necklaces. It can be engraved on up to five sides with your children’s names and birth dates, or a secret code, or your favorite French pronouns—it’s really up to you. The sixth side holds one large initial:

This may be used as a wax stamp to seal fancy letters or forge Elizabethan assassination orders, and to that end the necklace comes with a stick of sealing wax and a set of notecards. If you aren’t into that sort of thing, the sixth side remains a very pretty way to wear your initial.
(Though, let’s face it, wouldn’t it be satisfying to seal that collection agency payment with a wax seal, just to show them with whom they are trifling? Maybe that’s just me.)

To enter, leave a comment on this post by the end of Thursday. I promise not to insert myself under a pseudonym, though I can’t promise to avoid thinking covetous thoughts toward the lucky winner, who will be chosen via that random number generator thing that I know exists somewhere on the Internet. Because this is a third party giveaway, and I am not in charge of shipping, the winner has an EXCELLENT chance of receiving her prize in a timely fashion!

One comment per person, please, and I will announce the results Friday.

Now, everyone say thank you to Tania. And to me, because I just typed up this whole entry, all by myself. And maybe in your comment, you could tell us something interesting about YOU, like an unusual talent you have. This won’t affect your chances of winning, but it will amuse us all immensely.

GO!

In honour of the fact that I appeared yesterday in the Sunday Times, I am going to insert the letter U and replace the letter Z as necessary to make any new British readers feel at home. I don’t foresee a part of the entry in which I mention the back storage compartment of a car, but if there is one, I shall use the term “bonnet” “boot” (thank you, intrepid reader!)

You can read the article online, but only those of you who have access to the hard copy will be able to see the lovely layout, with pictures, including one of my beloved Waffle HOLDING a waffle. There was one of me as well—I have taken a screenshot of the PDF so it is blurry, but you get the general idea. (The general idea being me! In the Sunday Times!)

(Note the the TV tuned to R&B Classics, to soothe the baby.) .

I was frankly terrified at hearing they planned to photograph me—I’d said I wouldn’t mind, but impressed upon them that I wasn’t photogenic, figuring that would be the end of it. But no! A photographer was coming, and could I be ready the next day?

I called my friend Fernanda in a panic, and she proceeded to list all the people who were likely to see the article.

“David Bowie will read it,” she said, “and Iman.”

“I don’t have anything to wear!” I moaned, “Oh, god, I have to CLEAN.”

“Zadie Smith will read it. So will Margaret Thatcher—or at least, someone will read it to her. Sid Vicious would read it, if he weren’t dead.”

“YOU’RE NOT HELPING.”

But it went well, and for once I am not filled with woe by the sight of myself, thanks to Darin Back, who did such a lovely job that I am going to use him for my author’s photo, in which I will be smoking a pipe with a falcon perched upon one arm. (The other arm will be typing.)

I wish I could show you more of the photographs from the Sunday Times shoot, but then I would probably have to buy them all, and they are pricey. There are some amazing ones taken outside, where everything is green and it looks like night, even though it’s really eleven in the morning. One of my neighbors came home while they were setting up, and upon seeing the giant lights all over the sidewalk and great lumps of equipment, she scurried over to the assistant and asked, excitedly “Who is it? Who’s here?” as if Justin Timberlake might be lurking behind a parked car, getting ready for his close up.
No one, alas, was there. It was just me. Hello, neighbor! I write on the Internet!

The article itself was wonderful. I quite like the author, India Knight—she is clever and funny in her own right, and I thought she managed to talk about women writing online without making us sound like silly narcissists or focusing upon what many blogging articles seem to focus upon—the money to be made, and questions of What Will Become of the Children—because certainly if woman are spending time writing online, this must be either the result or cause (or both!) of some deficit in their personal lives. Instead, India makes this observation:

“…this stuff — about irritating husbands or weird rashes or family-friendly holidays, about having kids with special needs or being a single parent or being bored or going to work or staying at home, about what’s on telly and what boots to buy this winter and how you don’t really feel like having sex — isn’t necessarily appropriate work chat, or what you want to tell your friends on the rare occasions you actually manage to get away from your children.
The problem is, or was, that these questions and thoughts and concerns are also the stuff life is made of. They are both trifling and huge, silly but important, dull but gripping, ephemeral but permanent — and universal.”

I think it is my favourite article ever about women writing online, and not just because I am in it. Incidentally, Flotsam comes off sounding a bit dirge-heavy (Infertility! Dead babies! Crying as I read my comments!) but let me assure new readers that I do not roam the digital halls reciting poetry about infant shrouds.
Except on Wednesdays. “BEFORE THEIR TIME WEDNESDAYS,” we call them.

I think it goes without saying that I would never hit my child.

BUT.

If I WERE going to hit her—which of course I am not, would never—it would almost certainly be while we were visiting her doctor. You might think this is because I figure I should at least make sure she’ll receive prompt medical attention, but no.

It wouldn’t be while we were in the waiting room, and she is racing around asking complete strangers to pick her up and then shrieking and going boneless when I—for the record, her mother—try to do so (in order to spare the copy of TIME she has set her sights upon, though I empathize with her desire to rend the face of Glenn Beck). It wouldn’t be when I am shambling helplessly after her down the hall, in order to drag her back to the circle of chairs, or when we are in the exam room with the nurse, or after that, waiting for the medical student, even though during this time Simone will be removing her diaper again and again, and I will find myself wondering whether said medical student could perform an ad hoc tubal ligation (according to a new study, us infertility patients are at increased risk of unplanned pregnancy, as we are less likely than the general population to use contraception. Yes, REALLY. Thank you, Science!)

No, it would probably be after the medical student had gone and we are waiting for the doctor, just into hour two of the visit. Sometime after my empty stomach has begun to produce acid in such alarming quantities that I am forced to surreptitiously remove my bra to relieve my heartburn, after I have found a small container of Cheddar Bunnies in my purse only to discover that they are revoltingly stale. Not that this will prevent me from eating them. By the time I finally begin to lose my patience, to compose slightly hysterical emails to my husband about how NEXT TIME HE IS TAKING THE BABY TO HER APPOINTMENT, SO HELP ME GOD, the scene might look something like this:

Here you can see that she has both removed her glasses and unfastened her diaper, each for the 8,907,543rd time. She’s just finished rummaging through my purse and pushing the rolling stool against the door, and she’s seconds from picking up her coat and swinging it around as her diaper falls the rest of the way off, while I lunge for it, hoping she won’t choose that moment to pee.

But in reality, though I may be brusque as I cover her tiny ass yet again, I won’t lose my cool. No hitting, not even a tiny thwap. I try hard to be a good mother, a patient and loving mother, even when I feel like a frazzled caricature. However, I can’t promise that my post shot sympathy won’t be a tad less effusive than usual.

This is my favorite picture of Ames.
It’s a strange favorite to have, I suppose. The pictures taken after his birth are hard to look at, but I have other ultrasound photos taken much further along, after 20 weeks. I have the requisite adorable profile shots, his tiny nose and chin visible, his arm in the air. I even have some in 3D, and some of him with his sister. But this one—taken just a bit less than two years ago, well before I knew he was Ames, before I knew he was a he—is the one I look at most often.

In case you can’t tell, it is a shot of his legs extended upward from the end of his little round body, as he flipped upside down and waggled them at us. I remember laughing when he did it, and hoping the sonographer had caught it on film. At all of my early ultrasounds, Ames was the ham, waving and wiggling obligingly while Simone did everything she could to avoid being photographed, and as a result I have nearly double the pictures of him. Hers are mostly blurry or overtly threatening, an angry skull face flashed once at the camera.

I’ll be honest. Though I would have been happy with two girls, I secretly hoped for a boy. And just before he died, had I been forced to choose, I would have said Ames was the baby to whom I felt the closest. He was the only one I could feel, you see. My Stampy, thumping away hard enough to make my maternity shirts shiver, though now I’ll never be entirely sure it was him after all. Within hours of hearing he had died, Simone took up every bit of space in my brain, and Ames never got back the part that had belonged to him, at least not all of it. It doesn’t seem fair, and I suppose it is a good thing that the dead can’t get their feelings hurt.

Today is the designated remembrance day for pregnancy and infant loss (it is also, or so I am told, Global Handwashing Day). The date gives me an excuse to write this post, but I could have written it yesterday, or tomorrow, just as easily. These remembrance days are for the people remembering only tangentially. Mostly they are to give the rememberers one day on which they aren’t the only ones remembering. They give someone whose baby died six months or six years ago an excuse to use that baby’s name in conversation, without feeling awkward, without the uncomfortable silences that otherwise follow. On an ordinary Thursday such a mention might make someone worry for your mental health, but on a designated remembrance day…well, I don’t mean to sound cynical. I did light my candle, after all.

It’s odd, but I think I miss Ames more this year than I did last. Maybe it’s because I am writing a difficult part of the book at the moment—not the part you’d think—and it is my job, lately, to slip into my discarded skin and remember what it felt like when it was still fresh. Or perhaps it is because my sister-in-law is weeks from delivering her naturally conceived boy/girl twins, and as happy as I am for her, it is impossible not to occasionally imagine myself in that skin, just for a second. It could be the fact that I am only five pounds from the weight I was when I delivered, and my mind is trying to rub it in by reminding me that what I have now accomplished with cheese, I originally attained only by growing two human babies.
Likely, though, that damn Kubler-Ross was right all along, and grief isn’t linear so much as it is a field of unexploded land mines punctuated by the occasional ankle-turning rabbit hole.
(I may be paraphrasing.)

As those of you who follow me on Twitter may know, I visited a gastroenterologist last week. Aside from the humiliation of discussing my bowel movements with an attractive young man possessing NO appreciation for my command of the euphemism (“Could you be more specific?”) the appointment was fine. After the appointment, however, things took a turn for the worse.

A lab technician drew my blood, and then she informed me that I would need to provide a stool sample. Not right then, thankfully. I would produce and collect the sample at home, and then drop it off during business hours, as one does.

Now, look. I know this isn’t a particularly pleasant topic, but I am told that the only way to deal with trauma is to openly discuss it with others until the details lose their power to horrify. I am trying to heal, here, so you will just have to bear with me.

“You’ve collected stool before?” the technician said. It wasn’t really a question, and I took offense. Do I LOOK like the kind of girl who goes around collecting stool? Is this the impression I give, that of a frequent stool collector?
I answered icily that I had not, and then, to my horror, she produced a large bag full of collection supplies. I had assumed that there would be only a cup involved, but no! I would be collecting FIVE DIFFERENT SAMPLES.

“This goes on your toilet,” said the technician, revealing a large plastic hat into which I would be relieving myself. One of the samples was a swab, a large q-tip I was to run over my own excrement before retuning it to a sterile tube. Another two samples contained liquid to which I was to add precise amounts of…you know. And another two were cups that each needed to be “at least half full.” Depending upon your outlook, you could also say they could be nearly half empty.

The gastroenterologist is located only a mile from my husband’s office, a good twenty minutes from our home. It would have made no sense for me to drive out of my way to return the samples, so when Scott returned from work, I met him at the door with a request:
“I know this wasn’t specifically covered in our marriage vows,” I said, “but I need you to be my poo courier.”

I will draw a veil over what precisely ensued later that evening in my bathroom laboratory, except to say that I did my best, and I will never be the same again. I ran out of material before I got to the last jar, but I didn’t care. I left it empty. I decided I’d rather die of whatever disorder it was meant to test for than spend another moment with a fecal scoop.

Afterwards I washed my hands over and over again. I’d never actually touched anything pertinent, but still they felt dirty, and I kept leaping up to scrub them one last time.
“They don’t feel clean!” I whined, “I’m like Lady Macbeth, with feces!”
Scott explained that this simply made good evolutionary sense.
“If you weren’t disgusted by it you might eat it,” he explained, “and then you’d get sick and die.”

Thank you, Evolution. MESSAGE RECEIVED.

I don’t even want to talk about the fact that one of the samples had to be refrigerated. In fact, I never, ever want to speak of this again. It is a mark of my desperation that I willingly sought out a gastroenterologist—a specialty KNOWN to be overly eager to examine things that, unlike life, are best left un. To his credit, he is the first doctor who has displayed any interest in getting to the bottom of my symptoms, even if he took the bottom part rather too literally. His opinion was that I likely had celiac disease, a conclusion I’d begun to fear some time ago but had been fighting ever since, desperate to avoid a diagnosis that comes with a prohibition against pasta and tuna melts.

But my tests came back today, and I do not have celiac. Everything was fine, with the exception of a barely elevated CRP. The gastroenterologist offered an endoscopy and colonoscopy, but that seems excessive, even to me. I have some vague theories based on my positive clotting antibodies, the CRP, and my TSH being high (for me–2.5), but I’m not a doctor, I just play one late at night on search engines. I see an endocrinologist tomorrow, and then I am going to stop driving to far flung suburbs to be told that there are only small, nonspecific things the matter with me. I will conclude that this is simply my new normal. Markedly inferior to my old normal, but then so are my new breasts, memory, and skin elasticity. C’est la vie.

She made me buy this dress, grabbing at it as we walked by and screaming “BUH! BUH!” This is the same basic method she used to induce me to buy a bag of whiffle balls later in the week. I did draw the line at a headband, seeing as she hasn’t any hair.

I’ve been kind of…sickly. It took me a while to be certain that it wasn’t simply the demands of motherhood wearing me down, or maybe an uptick in my congenital laziness, but eventually I determined that I was truly not myself. Alas, I’ve had little luck convincing medical professionals of this fact.

Each appointment—I’ve seen four different doctors, now—has reminded me of the two years I spent attempting to get my infertility properly diagnosed, and how LITTLE I miss that time. I’d almost forgotten how draining, how demoralizing it is to wait weeks for an appointment, only to spend 15 minutes with a doctor who won’t listen to you, or refuses to order appropriate tests, or WILL order appropriate tests, but is using woefully outdated reference ranges. After my last medical excursion, I sat in my car, near tears, and watched as my doctor SCURRIED OUT OF THE BUILDING TO HER PRIUS AND DROVE AWAY. No wonder she’d been in such a hurry to get rid of me; I was the last patient of the day. Her final words had been that I might want to make an appointment with my psychiatrist, because fatigue is a telltale sign of depression. “Perhaps your antidepressant dosage needs to be adjusted,” she’d said. My antidepressant was prescribed for anxiety, not depression, but the fact that I am on one seems to give doctors a ready psychological explanation for any symptom I have. I wanted to tell her that actually I WAS feeling a little depressed, because of unhelpful appointments like this one, but I was too tired to do so. As I drove home, I wondered for the dozenth time whether it wouldn’t be faster for me to go to medical school so that I could order my own damn lab work.

The two tests she did run were to check for anemia and vitamin D deficiency, and a few days ago I got the results. My clinic’s minimum acceptable level for vitamin D is 30, and many consider even that too low. My level? A whopping 18.

I’m like a prisoner, without the sodomy and ample alone-time. It’s a miracle I don’t have rickets to add to my growing collection—see shingles, recent bout of—of Olde Tyme/elderly diseases. I shudder to think what the result might be were I tested for scurvy.

I rarely left the house during quarantine last year, but even if I had, here in Minnesota we get vitamin D from the sun only May through September. Since quarantine ended, I haven’t exactly made up for lost time. I leave only to drive to another indoor location, where I sit and write. Under the circumstances, it come as no surprise that my vitamin D level is roughly that of a Twilight character.

I’ve been instructed to take one 50,000 IU capsule of vitamin D per week, for eight weeks. To give you an idea of how much that is, the recommended daily allowance for vitamin D (which is, incidentally, a hormone) is currently 200 IU, though there has been talk of raising it to 1,000. It’s only been 24 hours since my first pill (FIFTY THOUSAND!), and so far nothing has changed except that my stomach feels as though I’ve swallowed a hot coal. I’m watching carefully for signs of toxicity—for instance, right now I have to pee. Didn’t I just go half an hour ago? Are my kidneys shutting down, or did I drink too much coffee? It’s too soon to tell.

I wish my doctor would write me a prescription for a vacation somewhere warm and flush with D-laden rays of sunshine—maybe Greece, or The Breakers, the resort I used to visit with my mother when they had promotions in the off season. Didn’t doctors used to prescribe relocation to sunnier climes? Has that gone out of fashion? And if so, could it come back in again?

Yesterday I forgot to mention the series of apartments and townhouses my father lived in after the divorce, where I stayed on Wednesdays and alternate weekends. His apartments before and after his marriage to my stepmother were all in the suburb adjacent to the one where my mother lived. “Brown,” is probably the adjective that best describes the buildings, all near the highway, all with white walls and beige carpet, containing literally thousands of books, shelves of polyhedra models, and a thick haze of pipe smoke. He and my stepmother (though she ought more properly to be called My Father’s Wife, as she openly disliked children) lived in two consecutive townhouses in that same suburb. One of these had a closet which, if you pushed through the hangers to the far back, opened into a basement-like cubby that was too short to stand up in, but was the perfect Lair for a 12-year-old. I filled it with pillows to sit on and lugged in my books and papers. There was one tiny lightbulb with a chain, giving the whole place a yellow cast that would have been creepy except for the comforting sight of the coats that made up one of its walls. It was Narnia, without the Christian parables and with the addition of spiders.

We now return to the program already in progress:

In my senior year of high school, my mother and I went to New York to visit Sarah Lawrence. As the cab drove into Manhattan on the way to our hotel, I felt a powerful sense of calm and familiarity. I had never had such an instantaneous reaction to a place. I found the city soothing, possibly because it is more difficult to sustain an inflated sense of the import of your own problems when you are surrounded by so many people. Still, I was afraid to travel across the country to live among strangers, and deferred my admission for a year while I waitressed full time and girded my loins. And then I moved, arriving on campus clutching a suitcase and my pet bonsai tree.

Sarah Lawrence is located in Westchester county, in Bronxville. I didn’t care for the fact that the people who worked in Bronxville couldn’t afford to live there, or for the ridiculous women I saw wearing FUR COATS to take their lawn mowers to the hardware store, but otherwise it was lovely. It was a picturesque commuter town: campus was a ten minute walk from the train station, and the train station was a twenty minute ride from Grand Central. I loved that I could be in the city in half an hour, and that I could return to trees and grass and graceful old houses just as quickly. There was a stationery store, and a Korean grocery where I bought litchi and muscat gummis by the armful (the muscat package bore this copy: “Its translucent color so alluring and taste and aroma so gentle and mellow offer admiring feelings of a graceful lady.”) The Chinese restaurant had the best fortune cookie fortunes ever, from the intriguing (“The dim haze of mystery will add enchantment to your life”) to the disturbing (“Remember, you are always on our mind…”) (Yes, singular, and you try opening that cookie and not looking around apprehensively.)
And OH, did I love Manhattan. I loved riding trains and subways, I loved wandering in and out of shops and restaurants, I loved the solid old buildings, and buying coffee (It came with milk and sugar in it! So strange!) or pigeon hot dogs from street vendors. I loved sitting in the bar at the Warwick, or outdoors at my favorite restaurant—home of lobster ravioli with saffron cream sauce. It was tiny, cheap, and delicious, this restaurant, and used to be near Union Square, down the street from Air Market, where I’d gorged myself on Mr. Friendly merchandise during my visit in high school. I loved people watching, and the park, and having tea at Takashimaya. In New York, I wasn’t perpetually overdressed, and no matter how late it was, I was never the last one awake. Oh, how I dreaded being the last one awake! My favorite time to fall asleep back then was about 6am, just as the sun was rising companionably over the horizon.

My first dorm room was on the third floor of a converted mansion, and my roommate was a friendly, sensible girl who looked EXACTLY like Tobey Maguire, right down to the haircut. Our floor had three rooms, and my roommate and I shared a bathroom with two other girls. Also on the floor was a gratuitously loud gentleman from the Bronx, who was friends with a guy from Jersey who lived on the floor below. I called them Hoodlum Upstairs and Hoodlum Downstairs. They were bizarrely anachronistic, and I often wondered how they had ended up at Sarah Lawrence in the first place. There were only a handful of straight guys in attendance, mostly sensitive artist types, which these two emphatically were not. Perhaps they had been lured by the 75% female population, not realizing that most of those females were lesbians.
Anyhow, another of their friends was a youth perpetually clad in a puffy North Face jacket, and one night, at the end of the semester, Hoodlum Upstairs had a party. I returned home, depleted by last minute paper-writing (and also, it should be noted, somewhat stoned), and opened the door of my room to see two people—NEITHER OF THEM MY ROOMMATE—having acrobatic sex. One of them, the one whose naked ass faced me, was still wearing his North Face jacket.

I would like to say that I came up with some scathing, witty remark, but to the best of my recollection, I could muster only an icy (and baffled) “Excuse me?”
You can take the girl out of the Midwest, but you cannot extricate her pathological aversion to conflict.
They left, the girl giggling, and I called a friend. While on the phone I heard…noises.

THE FORNICATORS HAD SIMPLY MOVED TO MY BATHROOM.

After I had banished them for good (and resolved never, ever to take a bath again), I composed a Very Strongly Worded Letter to Hoodlum Upstairs, stomped down the hallway, and slapped it furiously on his door.

Ah, communal living! How I don’t miss thee in the slightest.

(Out of time again, damn it. You will have to wait until tomorrow to hear about The Man in The Hole.)

I want to pick out paint colors, and decorate. I am tired of living in collections of rooms all painted a single shade of cream. I am tired of the sense of why-bother impermanence that comes with a home you cannot alter and know you will likely be leaving within a couple of years. I am tired of lugging 20 pounds of baby up to the third floor, and keeping the stroller in my car because it is too heavy to transport up and down the stairs, and separating grocery bags into perishable and non- so that I can haul up only what needs to be refrigerated. I want some sort of outside space—I’m not picky: a porch, a deck, a patch of grass—where I can sit with a book and a glass of wine on warm days. I want to have a place for the lilac trees from our wedding that are currently being lilac-sat by friends, and I want to have a place to plant something in memory of Ames. I want a washer and dryer that aren’t four flights down and that don’t require me to save nine quarters a load for laundry. I want somewhere to park, so that during winter’s myriad snow emergencies we needn’t wake early to move our cars blocks away while the plows go past. I want neighbors with children for Simone to play with. I would like the more-than-$1000 we pay a month in rent to have at least a chance of building equity rather than disappearing into the ether. I want to be able to remodel, say by installing a really nice bathtub. I want a home that is ours, that is us, that makes my heart swell when I return to it.

HOWEVER. I like being able to walk to coffee shops, homemade ice cream, a wine store, boutiques, bakeries, Indian, Italian, Thai, Japanese, and Mexican restaurants, several yoga studios, a bagelry, and just about anything else you can think of. I like it here. I like my neighborhood. The obvious solution would be to get a house nearby, but if you know where I live, you are laughing right now. There are several places for sale on the street behind us—both for well over a million dollars. There are others on the surrounding blocks with more reasonable price tags—say half a million.

There are houses we would love, in neighborhoods we would adore, for much less. But even less is too much. The houses we CAN afford are on the fraying edges of nicer neighborhoods, at best, and in neighborhoods I would euphemistically describe as “lively” at worst.

There is this one house. On the aforementioned fraying edge, a few blocks from a lake, a few blocks from much fancier homes, still mostly in the middle of the city. Less walkable, but not in a suburb, just a residential pocket of urban St. Paul. It has two bedrooms, a beautiful bathroom with a skylight and deep whirlpool tub, gorgeous woodwork and hardwood floors, a screened porch large enough for table and chairs, a second porch in back, a yard with gardens surrounded by lilac trees. It feels solid and clean and well cared for. It felt—and of all the places we have looked at, this is the only time I have said this—like home. But the “fraying edge” part makes me nervous. I thought what would make me nervous is the fact that it’s near a cemetery, but that turns out not to bother me. It is the run down auto-shop on the corner, the alley, the proximity to a busy thoroughfare. The secluded feeling that comes from being the last house on the block is nice in the sunshine, but how would it feel at night? Three blocks in the other direction, naturally, and you are among lakeside houses well out of our price range.

That’s the way of the fraying edge. I went to Sarah Lawrence, which straddles the uneasy border between Yonkers and Bronxville, so the fraying edge is something with which I have a passing familiarity. I remember riding Metro North up from the city, shocked by how abruptly the Bronx turned into Westchester, with seemingly no transitional interlude.

Weirdly, if the house were an apartment, it’s location on the edge wouldn’t bother me at all. Most of my previous apartments have been in neighborhoods about five years and three blocks from gentrification, but the block where this house is located is so…quiet. I tend to find houses creepy in general, at least at night, when I’m alone. Apartments feel safer—I like being able to hear the sounds of people. It is hard to get into an irrational panic spiral about a rapist surely lurking in the closet when you can hear the soft murmur of the late show from the other side of the wall. It tethers you to reason. Oh, you remember. I am here. A person among many people. I feel safer in cities than in the eerie, empty country, but even urban houses have basements perfect for lurking. When I’d housesit for my mother—in one of the city’s safest neighborhoods—I’d barricade myself upstairs and sleep fitfully, HOLDING THE PHONE.

The potential for a reprise of the drunken wrestler situation, in which loud neighbors nearly drove my husband insane, makes a condo a risky proposition. I’d dearly, dearly love a rowhouse in the city, but we don’t really have those here. I might be happy in a townhome, but those are almost all in the suburbs. We could move to Minneapolis, or another city entirely, but where?

I am suddenly in desperate want of the illusion of permanence. I might be nesting—I never DID get a third trimester, after all. Maybe it will pass. I remind myself that things go wrong with houses, and there is no landlord to call.

Still. Paint chips. I love those damn little swatches.

Where are YOU? Apartment? City? Suburb? Do you like it there, where you are? Do you have a house? Is it more expensive than you thought? Does it feel like your sanctuary? Are you typing your comment from beyond the grave after being the victim of a grisly murder? Was the murderer hiding in your basement?

Internet! Give me your poor, your tired, your face sleepers, your huddled masses yearning for funny pictures of alveoli. Once again, I am here to help.

how do you know when ivf works
Pregnancy is usually an indicator that things are headed in the right direction.

can i have a pageant when on metformin can you have a baby
This is really two separate questions, though I am not entirely sure which two. Regardless, whether or not you have a pageant is really up to you, and should not be affected by insulin sensitizing drugs. I would need more information to comment upon your ability to have a baby—with or without metformin—but if you are planning to be a contestant in the aforementioned pageant, I’d hold off. It will ruin your figure.

clever shakespeare names for websites
“As You Link It?” How about “You Can’t Spell Hamlet Without HTML?”
(I may not be the best person for this).

deciphering women “you make me laugh”
She probably means that you’re funny—which is good! Unless she’s saying it scornfully, after you’ve asked her out. Tone is key when deciphering women.

husband insists on brazilian wax
As long as you mean for himself, what’s the harm? If he is insisting that YOU be denuded stem to stern, I feel it is only fair that he do the same. Either way, I see hairless balls in your future.

how to get pregnant with b+
You shouldn’t have any more trouble than a C student, despite what your parents might have told you. Good girls do TOO get knocked up.

lonely hygenist in rome
This search string makes me feel terrible. I can almost see her, loitering around the Trevi fountain, alone, fondling one of those little pirate-hook tooth scrapers. Is there a lonely Roman dentist in the audience?

is there a range u dont have to worry about your child being electrocuted?
Not that I know of, though there will likely come a time when the worry is more “hair dryer mishap” and less “exposed electrical socket”

if a man takes a horse tranquilizer can he become infertile
Yes, in the sense that he may be unconscious

what is the medical term for babies being able to grab things with their feet?
“Monkey”

vicodin safe while breastfeeding thomas hale
I know what you’re getting at, here, but I love the image of you breastfeeding Dr. Hale—his tie askew, his eyelashes fluttering sleepily. Very sleepily, if you’ve taken the Vicodin.

she paints pictures of what she considers an angel. a new face who couldn,t be seen, but such face still lingers because she seen it before.
Wait, the face couldn’t be seen, and yet she “seen it before?” Something’s not right, here.

took off girdle for enema
I think that was wise.