The Weird Kid

I am thirty years old and I am tired. I buy my husband's cream stout, and the electronic register beeps when the beer passes over it, reminding the check-out girl to make sure the sale is legal. She looks at me. I have my license all ready. I'm perversely proud of the photo on my license. The lady taking it said, "Oo, let's do this one again," when it came out on the computer screen. I looked like a Berke Breathed cartoon.




I said, "No! Nope, it's fine." Because I know the particles of this photograph will never align to form a Guess Jeans Girl, so let's all at least have a laugh.

Now the check-out girl looks at me, for only a second, and then continues scanning my groceries. My shoulders loosen and I quietly put away my license. The sign says, "If you look under 40, we will card you." Yeah, well. Lady, you may live the rest of your life without seeing my license photo. And it's pretty goddamn funny. That's on your head now.

Also, I smell urine. Everywhere in my house. I'm tired and everything smells of pee. Other people don't smell it, but dammit it's there. It must be. So many things pee inappropriately in the house. My baby and my easily frightened dog and my bland cat. Possibly myself, I don't know.

Yesterday I lucid-dreamed. I came to realize in Scarlett Johannson's double-wide that I was dreaming, that this couldn't be real. So I left my husband with Scarlett and her fat dog, took off my clothes, and went down the street. It was so sunny. I think I was looking for a place to pee. I lost lucidity then. But for that brief moment I'd never been so free.

I can tell you her name, Tina, and that she was anemic, with long dull red hair. Think Sissy Spacek in Carrie, but hollower-looking. Dressed country-western in the grunge era, blouses tucked into her Wranglers.

We sat next to each other during the first church service of our Freshman year at boarding school. I was anxious to make friends and had learned it was the shy kind of girl who might respond to me. Tina was nice to me. She was awkward, obsessed with movies, couldn't speak over a reedy whisper, and laughed, like a nervous tic, at absolutely everything I said. We fit together fairly well. I was her only friend until she dropped out Junior year.

But it was this one conversation, a whole year after we first met. The one where she confided in me that she was only ever nice to me because she wanted to meet my roommate, Veronica Vahn. Veronica got up at 5am to set her hot rollers, every day. She was attractive, but frightened and uncomfortable when other teens wouldn't let her be in charge of them. She left school four years later without a single friend, though she had managed to become engaged to the Dean of Boys by then. I think he let her be in charge.

Reading my shock and disappointment, Tina reached out an arm to comfort me.
"But it doesn't matter now! Now that I know you, it doesn't matter that you're fat, or that your hair is messy. At first, I found myself...repelled, by you. But now you're the best friend I've ever had!"

Repelled. I have never forgotten that word. That was the word. I was repellent to her, that first day, when she smiled at me.

I didn't get mad at her, forthrightly. I just went to do laundry, and slammed things while I did it. I was blindsided by the honesty. Not often do you get to know what someone is really thinking, and when you know it, well, it is nobody's fault.

So I finished my laundry, and then I lost thirty pounds and began to use a curling iron and hairspray. One point alloted to all the dicks of the world who say they make fun of fatties to help them change. It didn't last, of course. Nervous breakdown and all that, it will pack on the pounds and cause you to ignore your beauty routines.

Sean says he can't stand to hear me talk bad about myself. But this stuff, it gets in your head and helps you define yourself. Repellent. If it had just been the mean Junior High boys who said it, maybe I could compartmentalize better. Repellent. But this was one of the nice people, the ones who don't say what they think right off. Repellent.

My problem is, I see no reason to believe everyone isn't still thinking it. I'm better at ignoring it. Maybe.

Panic attacks brought me to shameful, whimpering catatonia before and during my first pregnancy. But I learned that the attacks were my own doing, and to stop them. And they have been gone since about a week after Smudge's birth.

Two weeks ago I had the first dark tickle of the old terror. Lying in bed, post-sex, post-birth control. I lay there, and I thought, "What if it is happening right....right now?" What if that irrevocable decision is fusing to my body, attaching life to my life, right now? What am I doing, o god what if I want to stop?" And that swirl, that loss of control started to climb up me.

Our decision to have another child is the fulfillment of a duty, to our daughter and to our future selves. We believe it is the right thing to do. Two kids. Two kids is right and good. But somehow I have cognitively dissonanced "two kids" from "have another baby." I want the first but not the latter.

I have created a misery in my brain. I expect this. Two babies, ravenous and brutal for my attention. Pulling my ugly hair and struggling against their car seats. The screams. I hate screams. Up all night again, not sleeping with my husband in my big blue bed, instead finding myself attached to a dirty-feeling breast pump in the middle of the night. Having to readjust, that painful painful readjusting.

Yet our family isn't complete yet. We know we...we just need another.

I got my period today. Far from relieved, I just know now I have to keep trying, trying to create my love and my fears into flesh.

I don't want to write about my family in my new blog. "Family," meaning the one I came out of, not the one I am building now. Writing about them is the blogging equivalent of stuffing myself sick on cheap, stale candy. I don't think I can describe it better than that, even if it doesn't quite make sense.

So, I'll just relay this.

A Short Conversation with my sister-in-law.

"No, your Mom can't come to the phone right now cuz she's in the bathroom making deviled eggs."

Okay then.

But just let me say, hours later I saw the crusting, half-full cream cheese package behind the sink with my very own eyes. Just in case you thought it was a new scatological slang. No no.
Not at all.

Brucie is 11 years old. The last time I saw him he was only 3. I remember him then, how he leaned against me languidly and asked, "Imez...can I do your hair?" His father Dan, now my adored friend, once my math teacher, let his eyes drift while his wife chuckled uneasy.
"Oh, he just loves hair. He plays with his sister's dolls and stuff...just because she's older, you know."
That scene, particularly the glazed look in Dan's eyes, became a private joke between me and Sean.

Two nights ago Brucie stepped up to me after an 11 hour drive, with a big grin and hugged me tight, no matter that I'd become a practical stranger. He was impressed by my decorating scheme. He saw the yarn on the couch I'm inexpertly trying to wrench into a purple octopus for Smudge.
"You knit!?"
With a huge grin he sat on my floor and opened his travel bag. He pulled out 5 inches of stockinette stitch resting on two long purple needles. "I LOVE knitting!"

The next morning Brucie did my daughter's hair in braids, then pig-tails, then cornrows, then buns, joyfully restyling them throughout the afternoon. He enthusiastically took over my pancakes, cooking each to a lovely golden brown, always remembering to butter the pan first. "I'm a great cook. But I still might want to design clothes when I grow up."

The kid is so cool. Not like any other little boy I've known. So...affable and cheerful. Kind and unwary. His parents are terribly in love with his older sister, as she is modestly beautiful, chaste, poetic and musical, with feisty sensibilities. A girl birthed right from the pages of Bethany House Christian novels that the family loves to read. Far from being jealous, he sits near her, skinny legs pulled into his chest, anxious to fill in all the good parts of the stories of her greatness. Never minding his own lack of stories.

That night in bed Sean observed, "Terrific kid. But I think Dan's already taking high doses of Homocil."

Dan is A Good Christian. That is how he defines himself. And of all the "good Christians" I have known, he has more right than most to consider himself one. So it isn't surprising that he disagreed when I told him I remember him not liking my sorta closeted gay best friend Leon in high school. But really, he didn't. And the only reason I can imagine, as Leon showed respect and excelled in math, is that Leon was gay.

Leon wrote me this about Brucie:

I wish I was there to take in the scene of a sweet, 11 year old Queen breezing through your home, goldening your pancakes, setting your hair, and laying down a blanket of domestic bliss. Lord knows if he were my child, I'd encourage it. Soccer? Heck no! We're going to cooking class! Dinner party? No problem, my son will crochet a table cloth! But, he's not my son, but Dan's. If I were a betting man and there was a line on this in Vegas, I'd put my chips down 10 to 1 that Dan's gonna be hard on his son and will resent him on some levels.

It would be so like Satan to throw a flamboyant wrench of this magnitude into their family's well-greased Christ-loving machinery. If Brucie was gay, the family would truly believe it their loving duty to try and help him fight it off, and Brucie, perhaps like Leon, would never entirely free himself of the shame.

Another of our teachers at the same Christian school, he was gay. Massively, la-la-la like Liza gay, but yet he married and had children and tried to be straight, as Christ would apparently have him do.

No one was fooled. Probably not even Jesus.

I gotta keep in touch with little Brucie.

I am glad
I had
No Internet


Until I was around 18 years old, I had an intense, all absorbing fantasy life. I lived inside it as much as possible, whenever I was alone. Sometimes I think getting too old to enjoy it was one of the things that made my mind go bunky.

Anyways, I had, from about 13 on, and imaginary boyfriend. He morphed a little as the years changed. But he was always: full grown, unusually tall, quiet and contemplative, and attracted to me as if to an addiction. I was always my own age.

He and I lived in a number of isolated homes over the years. No one, honest to god, understood our love. We were very poor in a New York apartment when I was 14. We spent our days hunkered on the pull out couch, eating ice cream, having clutching, gasping sex, and watching television. That was my fantasy, friends. My fantasy involved unemployment and television.

Later he became ghastly wealthy, and we lived in an ancient Victorian, buried in vegetation on top of a mountain he owned. We spent our days re-enacting scenes from Calvin in Hobbes (I was Calvin) and Bloom County.

This is all a very round about way to get to my question. It occurs to me, if, at 14, I had a chance to find a real version of my quiet, misunderstood man, via the internet, I would have taken it and never looked back. Delivered myself to anyone who would take me. The fact that whatever man who would be attracted to me at 14 made him strange wouldn't have occurred to me, ever. I was weird and lonely, searching out he who'd understand.

But there was no internet.

This is my first memory of anybody mentioning something that was probably America Online: Some commercial, in the early early 1990's, of a family talking about how useful this computer service could be. All I really remember of the commercial is the father saying, "Does anyone else thing sports players and hugely overpaid?" indicating that if you did, you could write about it and find others like you on your computer.

The first time I used the internet I was a Junior in high school. 1995? It was a friend's account. I immediately started a chat with someone from The Netherlands. I called myself, "Cool Beans." And the whole time, adreneline was splashing through me; I felt drunk and nearly out of control. All I could think about, through the day, was getting another chance to go back on the computer and see if the men I talked to had left a message for me. It would be like a 17 year old boy suddenly stumbling across a Light Saber that worked. Fantasy to reality, holy shite.

Thank GOD I was 19 before I got my own connection. I was too tired and screwed up by then to run off with strangers. Although I did meet my husband via the internet when I was 20. Huh.

Round about? Oh yes.

It's just so weird in my own memory. It's like, I woke up, this incredible technology existed for every-day personal use. How did something as enormous and life altering as the Internet slip under my radar?


Now here's the question.

Can you remember the first time you used the internet? Can you remember the first time you heard about it? What was it like? Did it blow your mind or was it just another advancement, like your first car with power windows instead or roll ups?

The moral is sketchy: something along the lines of demons from hell play good trombones. Nonetheless, let me share with you my instant happy.

Sometimes I think I really am heading toward a gunt. That word, if you don't know, is a compilation of two words describing a fat woman's overhang, and one of those two words is "gut."

Gunts are not on quality people. That sentence got stuck in my brain at the book store yesterday. See, I had my fill of my lawn chair and staring at the Netflix envelopes on my table that perfectly matched the mood I was in when I queued them two months ago. "Modern Marvels: Candy!" So at 6:30 I drove thirty miles to town with my baby. I went to Borders.

I don't go to Borders. I don't go because I....I do not welcome myself there.

One Imez stands at the door with her arms crossed as I lug Smudge through the glass doors.

She says, "Hey, Tubby, smell that? All those books, brand new? And the music? See those pretty $6 ergonomic pens? Huh? NOT YOURS. HA!!"

Maybe if I didn't always go to the bathroom before I look around. Looking at displayed things makes me have to poop, I don't know why and I'm not proud of it. But there you are. So I always have to face the mirror.

And One Imez is there, "Jesus could you brush your hair once in awhile? Do you really think no one can see that grease spot on your shirt? The one you got while stuffing freezer taquitos in your hole?"

She continues outside, beside me while I shuffle around the discount shelves.

"Hey, Gunty. Look at all these people. Look. I want you to know, every single one of them is better than you, and they all think you have crawled out of some over-turned trailer to steal books for fuel to cook meth with. They can afford new books, cuz they have jobs. And they deserve new books, too. Because they don't shuffle around looking like a retarded hippo on welfare. NO. Put it BACK, you are not paying five dollars for a baby book. You hardly read to her anyway, Mother of the Year."

Gunts are not on quality people. So, under that sort of abuse you can imagine I rebelled last night. I went to the cheap shelves, proto-gunt be damned, like a starving squirrel with a stolen nut. I bought two $4 books for Smudge. I bought a 50% off tiny package of blueberry-pie body wash ("Yeah, like it's gonna help, little piggy.") for $5. And as a trembling middle-finger to One Imez, I bought a collection of Looney Toons for full price, $26. Looney Toons are worth their weight in gold. They completely arrest my daughter while resting me, and dammit if they aren't kinda funny, too.

I didn't bring the bags in till this morning, and Sean saw them. He was...well, mad. He and One Imez were mad.

He said, "This is why we don't get ahead." He had one hand on the two Goodwill shirts I bought the baby for $4 total. I said, "Hey! C'mon! What are you holding in your hand right there?" I mean, c'mon. Goodwill.

He held up the other hand. "A Border's bag." He recounted how much I spent yesterday, including gas and fast food. It was a lot. I had nothing to say.

It hadn't been a logical excursion, it never had been, not from the start.

Besides, buying stuff won't make One Imez go away. Or my gunt. It just gives me less reason to hold my head up, I guess.

In high school I had this friend that I usually hated.

I am a reluctant subscriber to the mirror-theory of hating people. That is, if dislike for someone really pounds you in the gut; you find yourself just wanting to shove them off things, it's because they're brazenly mirroring to you parts of yourself you hate.

Therefore when I hated Misty it was because she was me. I'd watch her interact with people more popular than her, I'd listen to the funny, wry things she said and see how she screwed her face up into just the right look of chubby-girl-knows-deeply-your-hurt. And I'd think, "Goddamn you that's my line. That's how I'm going to get into the popular group."

Well, consciously I'd think, "You stupid little faker, they'll never like you."

By the time I graduated I had decided she had a truly black soul and was gratified to find her, a year later, wallowing in a pointless life. She lived in Arkansas, in a rotting house with five lonely homely stoners, one of whom was her boyfriend. She worked in the office of a Dairy Council, had arrogantly changed her name to Carys and had taken to wearing what was either a pentacle or a Star of David around her neck, I can't remember which. But either was ridiculous for a ex-Seventh-Day-Adventist from Omaha. All to show off of course. Disgusting. Weird clothes and quoting Nietsche could not change the fact that she was starting a life-sentence of mediocrity. Just like me. So Ha Ha on you.

Two months ago I moved a box and the bottom broke open and Misty's yearbook fell out. She had ran out of money for the boarding school we went to and had left before getting the yearbook of her Senior year. Someone gave it to me to give to her next time I saw her.

Now, you see, I am sophisticated, and noble, and so I sought her out through a mutual friend, to send her the yearbook.

Ten years had past. I found her. Still named Carys. Except now she is archaeologist. In Hawaii.

I emailed her. A lot, trying to find out how the hell this did happen. How she come up out of that soft easy mire we both had lived in? She and I were unavoidable soul sisters in suffering at the hands of the stupid world around us. Our job was to avoid it and make fun of it. Not...enter it.

She was happy to tell me all about it in long meandering letters. There was this line.

"then one day it just struck me, that if I didn't do something this would be my life – forever…and it wasn't a particularly bad life really, all things considered you know, but I just knew I wanted more…"


I sat in my decomposing lawn chair for the better part of a week, after reading that. Watching a sprinkler nourish weeds and a naked baby and yeasty dog. How dare she not be me anymore. Or rather, how dare she be me and do something I couldn't. Work hard, yank on to a dream even though it wasn't easy to hold. Have adventure, restart a stalled life, instead of being scared and hoping to god today wouldn't bring pain.

I don't want her life. I want my life, because it is good. I love that damn sprinkler, weeds, baby and dog. I just want more, too. And how insulting to be shown that it is possible.

Today I kicked the dog. I told her to go outside and she instead tired to sneak off down the hall to the air conditioned bedroom. I screamed in this weird enraged cawing-bird voice (you do what I tell you! When I tell you to do something do it!!!!)and kicked her. She yelped, and I immediately felt like a total shit. She ran outside, curled up and started licking her tail.


For five seconds I was my dad or my brother or an angry 6 year old again bossing her imaginary friends around so she could have some power. What the hell? Pain finds tiny, sudden openings to crawl out of. And finds the easiest most helpless victim, that poor brown thrown-away mutt.

What a cowardly piece of shit to do that.

I will never kick the dog again.

Our nurse practitioner, Sandra keeps moving around the valley, and we follow because she is so nice and laughs at every joke we make like she had paid to hear them. In the last place she worked, her medical assistant was a neat plumpish girl who wore little rectangular frame glasses and was in love with Smudge. Named Wendy. She became pregnant about 9 months ago.

We were getting Smudge a check up half way through Wendy's pregnancy. She was four or five months along and showing. She looked sick. But still cheerful. She said it was weird that all of the sudden she'd started losing weight this far in. When she'd left the room Sandra said,

"This pregnancy mean so much to them. Did she ever tell you about her...first baby?"

She and her husband practiced co-sleeping with their baby. The baby was smothered. In her blankets, in bed with them one night. It was four months old, a boy.

We were shell-shocked the whole drive home. Thinking of that wonderful girl Wendy, thinking of waking up next to your baby's cold body. And how she got up every day now and went to work weighing sweet little naked babies on that grocery scale and putting Dora band-aids on their chubby legs after shots. The fortitude to pull yourself together and get back to your life.

And I said, "If Smudge died like that, it'd be over for us, wouldn't it? You'd never forgive me, even if it wasn't my fault." The thoughts weren't formed as I said them, they just came out, ready-made truths.

Sean was wordless, though he tried to talk. Eventually all he could say was, "I'm so sorry."

Like the time she pulled pepper spray out of my purse and sucked on it, burning her mouth. I was sobbing and immediately begging Sean for forgiveness. All he could say is, "Where were you?" I was there. I just didn't see it in time.

It'd be the end. I'd be on my own. The only thing Sean really asks of me is that I protect and love his daughter. For him, there are no extenuating circumstances.

We saw Sandra in her new office last week, I called to get directions from Wendy at the old office. I thought to ask after her baby but didn't. I just said it had been so nice having her in our life.

Sandra told us. When we'd seen Wendy all those months ago the baby was already dead inside her.

But Sandra said they're already ready to try again. It wasn't the end of them.

I muttered to Sean that I had a new blog going. I wouldn't tell him where it was, though. Not ready. He was unnerved and asked, "Is it the 'My Fat Fuck Husband and His Screaming Brat' Blog?"

Well, it hadn't been. But now I must consider.

Screaming Brat. Motherhood is hard on me. Ha ha! I know, that makes me incredibly unique, with a delicate and beautiful pain that runs much deeper than any of yours. I'm simply turgid with complexities, you know.

What I mean to say is, I think half of all known blogs are the recountings of the sweet mishaps of mothering. 'My kids are just nuts but man oh man do I love them.'

I just can't feel that coming out of me. And I feel, wary? of myself because I don't have it coming out of me. I waited for motherhood to switch me over. Take me out of myself, to shut off that bad piece of brain. But now I just have less time to be inside myself and it makes me lie on the couch and despair.

Today I gave my daughter, she is 19 months, a look that made her start to sob. She was reaching for me and screaming for no reason and I was just...sick of it. Just a look. Sean saw it. He said it was monstrous. Like I was looking at a creature completely alien to me, that the only thing I knew about it was that it was something to despise.

I felt terrible. Poor kid. Poor kid. I resolve never to let my baby feel like that again.

Sometimes I think I'm unraveling.

But I've never gotten wound.

You should know this.

If you take the dead snake, because your husband goddamn won't, and double wrap it in shopping plastic bags, tie them tightly, and put them in the bottom of the garbage can, well, honey, you're still gonna get yourself a barrel full of maggots. A hundred at least, if you wait a week.

I remember reading something in high school science about how people used to think that maggots spontaneously generated from dead meat. This was proven wrong at some point in science's glorious evolution.

But now I don't think they researched it carefully enough. I mean, there was a lot of maggots.

So, I'm not scared of snakes anymore. I passed one dead desicated one on the lawn today that my dog has laid there for safe-keeping, and almost sat on a live one as I lowered down onto the grass. And I thought, my goodness, this lawn is very snake-y.

Didn't scream. Didn't run fast back to the house, leaving the baby as a decoy. "Take her, Snake Overlord. She's not so smart yet, she won't mind!" Just sat and continued pinching dandelion heads off my lawn.

In a lifetime of so little internal growth, this one I'm proud of.

When I was little I would look at my mom's feet a lot, since they were often off the ground in one way or another. She was most often in the recliner, on the sofa, sitting splay legged on the floor. I thought her feet were horrible.They were always dirty. Not just played in the mud dirty but an older, deeper dirt of neglect. And the skin around the heels and pads was white and cracked. I thought it looked very painful and disgusting. I'd look at my own pink little feet and feel very clear joy that they were mine.

Today my feet are like my mom's. I say today, because I just realized it. Dry and cracked and dirty because I never wear shoes and socks, only Stride-Rite sandals, because I don't have to bend over to put them on. And Smudge's feet are small and pink.

Smudge's feet have all the potential mine did.

I think about drugs all the time. Every day.

I have never taken an illegal drug, and I have never been drunk.

I had my reasons. I was better than those who did, mainly. Then I tried to get drunk for the first time recently and found the journey there too unpleasant to continue. Terrible tasting alcohol making you feel hot and furry in your head, heavy and tired, not happy and sweet like I wanted.

Every page I turn, ever DVD I put in, someone is smoking pot and having a great time. I can feel it, floating up and up and above all the bullshit in your life and nothing matters. I want that. I want it so bad.

Sean tells me of new drugs becoming popular, one that starts with an "s"...Silva? No, something like that. It's still legal. You eat it and receive and intense, vivrant 10-minute acid trip before it leaves you. And we talk about how Extasy must feel, so warm and good all you want to do is rub the arm of the person next to you and smile.

I will not buy illegal drugs, because I am afraid of prison and more afraid my Smudge would be taken from me. Plus, I am a good mother and would not be if I were high.

My life is so good. I have a good solid life. I can't understand this yearning to gently escape it, every day.

I am drowning in my own skull.

I never considered myself "self-absorbed" because I thought that meant selfish. Plain, school yard, won't share my toys and want to talk about how pretty I am all the time, selfish. I was no more or less selfish than anyone else.

But self-absorption, that's different, isn't it? An inability to see the world except how you matter in it.

A friend answered my question, "what really pisses you off?" She said she was pissed off by women who try to artificially have babies past their fertile years and thinks it's awful for a woman to spend so much money just to replicate her own DNA. And she was also pissed off by people who were rude to service people.

But me, I'm only pissed off by things that directly relate to ME. Social trends and habits might irritate me. I think it's dumb that prostitution is illegal or that anyone cares about someone else's polygamy. But for it to truly matter...oh it's all me baby.

I get pissed off when people don't act like I want them too. I have a script in my head and I can't stand it when people don't say their lines right. I get pissed when people call me on my bullshit, as said bullshit is also part of the script. I get pissed off by my past and what I antic pate will happen in my future.

The only constant...

I piss me off.

Here I go again. I say, "I'm going backwards to start another one." But he said...oh he said something terribly good. Perhaps he likened it to gardening? Like, even if your goal is to plant redwoods it's still okay to tend your little garden, just because you like it?

No, that isn't at all what he said. But he had a good reason that I could come back.

Because I need it.