The Weird Kid

Sean hasn't had a work vacation in two years, not counting the time off for Smudge's birth which, I'd like to say, wasn't at all vacationy. It was screamy and scary and overwhelming.

Anyway.

Tonight we start the first leg of an awful, awful family vacation which has to be. Sean and I will be apart for two weeks, Smudge will be away from us for one week each (we trade her off on Sunday, without even seeing each other). It's complicated. It involves weddings and duties to old friends and a couple different states and cars needing driving across the whole goddamn country.

So I'll be out for awhile.

I really hope that maid of honor dress fits. I quit all medication two months ago, and well...cookies helped the transition. Cookies and lying face down and accusing random people.

I really hope I don't see Smudge's face as I walk away from her in the airport. Fuck.

I really hope...no, forget that. I know, know I was a moron to organize a camping trip with my family (the one I came out of). I just...shouldn't have done that. Even if you're getting a stick shoved up your rear in the most bucolic setting, baby, you're still getting a stick up your rear.

I refuse to poop in those campground outhouses. They terrify me. The stench and the blackness under the filthy rim and sounds....what is down there? I will poop in the woods.

I hope nothing bad happens while waiting in the Greyhound hub in Philadelphia, or on the Greyhound. Never been.

I hope the wedding toast I give in front of 120 wealthy wasps in New England will be shimmering and everyone will chuckle and I won't shake while I do it, nor accidently mention the time the bride had a threesome in Italy.

There is more. But...see you on the flip side.

Okay okay. I'm here.

Now, I think I just figured something out that just may ensure my marriage, and my contentedness with it. Forever on.

Get this. Name me an exception and I bet I can argue it.

All love songs. All romance stories, even the romances stories that are tiny diversions inside bigger stories. All romantic love on TV shows. All the love stories my friends have told me about in their lives. The oldest love poems written on lambskin in scriggly Latin.

One thing in common.

They. Are. ALL. Only about the beginning.

Love, as I have always understood it, as it has been shown to me, can only exist in the beginning.

I didn't know that.

If a movie has two characters that have been married for 17 years, it is not a love story. Unless they almost break up and have to start their love over again. That is why Beverly Hills 90210 was about the teen-agers, not their forever vegetable-chopping parents.

The love we had was unsustainable, and not because it was shakily built or inauthentic. And as I felt it shifting, shifting around Smudge and our aging bodies and libidos, our increased independence and our dwindling fears, I hated it. I wanted to have it back. I wanted to be drunk on him again, suicidal over him again, like I had been before. I thought, "This love is mellowing into a flat brown thing. We're doing something wrong."

But we aren't doing anything wrong. That first hot love, it will die. It must die if you have children, if you aren't manic-depressive, if you aren't co-dependent. And when it dies, you can only be miserable ("trapped in a loveless marriage"), flee, (have an affair, get a divorce) or embrace it. And look at your new love, the old kind, the kind that seldom burns with lust or imagined tragedy, the practical partnership, the marriage of brain and soul, the love held by flat characters in the back-ground of the novel.

And say, What do I have here?

Whatever you have, it's all you're going to get, unless you pick one of the other options. The other love is fireworks and fireworks burn hot and beautiful and very very fast.

The couple in their 80's, universally envied for their hand-holding on the porch, facing the sunset. They had to go through this, to get there.

Whaddya think?

To The Guy Whose Tree is in my Backyard:

Not an act of God, you weasel. It was rotten! Your tennants told you it was rotten! Asked you to remove it before it hit their house. Now, come get your goddamn tree and fix my fence! That fence was younger than my BABY!! It never even had a chance.
And don't think by not answering my phone calls this is going to go away, chappie, even if Sean is ready to give up. I've been off meds for weeks now and you cannot fathom how pissy I feel.

To My Book Club:

Look, I can accept you didn't like Lolita. That you didn't read it, that you thought it was both exhaustively boring and obscenely pornographic, (and to manage those two things at once is a pretty damn impressive achievment). I know, well, I know now, that most of you have been sexually mistreated in your lives, except, ironically, for the one lady whose brother is serving time for child molesting. Okay. Fine. You coulda told me that before you all agreed to read it, I'm just saying.
But I don't want to read anything by a Sweet Potato Queen. She's not a real queen.

To My Baby:

You, you're okay. You can stay. But you cannot scream in indignant rage because the dog doesn't let you straddle and pee on her. She just isn't into that.

To Everyone From High School Who Didn't Think I Was Awesome:

I'm writing a book. You're all in it, and I'm going to make violent child pornographers look like Robin Hood compared to you. Afterwards, maybe we can hang out.

The problem with being told you suffer from denial is that you can't deny it.

Therapist says she hasn't been trying to make me feel like an asshole these past months, at least not for recreational purposes. She has been trying to pull me out of denial.

I immediatly think of my sister, how she blithely, humorlessly makes fun of fat women, unattractive people, losers. Things I couldn't do, at the very least, because I haven't earned the priviledge. And my sister...she's fatter than the fat women and less successful than the losers. But she won't see that. Absolutely can't.

She's in denial, not me. HA.

I demand Sean tell me I'm great, good, above average. That he doesn't want to be fed meals, that he's happy that the clothes are clean no matter that they are piled on the floor, that the house is so much cleaner than I've ever kept it, no matter what it really looks like. And that eating out doesn't count or cost if the get the food from a drive-thru window, and since I buy clothes from Goodwill I am frugal, deprived even.

And that's just the easy admissions. God knows what I haven't faced yet.

So I'm viciously kidding myself and forcing him along and I fucking hate the truth and fucking hate feeling like a loser. Sometimes my denial gets me out of bed in the morning, lets me love my kid, lets me go to sleep at night.

Eight years ago our wedding photos came in the mail. I cried and cried. I've thrown most of the two full print albums away. Saved some pictures of friend's and family. Not of me. I was 5ft2, weighed 230 pounds, but no one had told me I was fat.

I didn't know.

"Feel it, suffer it, or you won't fix it."

Oh fuck off.

Toothbrushes are all ugly. As much pattern and texture as can possibly be incorporated into two colors on a stick. But what does it matter, it's just a toothbrush? Still I picked the only one, $.69, flat and solid-purple, that was nice. Because I'm going to be the kind of person that has a nice looking toothbrush in a nice bathroom.

I bought a piece of amber at a witchy-woman store, for $4. Not because I believe in it's metaphysical properties of cleansing and healing, but because it's beautiful and I can hold it and think about cleansing and healing. There is a difference. And I want to be the kind of woman who buys her lotions and metaphysically enchanted rocks at a witchy-woman store.

Then I faltered, at the lovely new playground with the rubber ground, built so kids can't hurt themselves, attractive to a certain kind of parent. I had first gone to the old one, with the wet wood-shavings and faded paint, but there was nothing there short and simple enough for Smudge to play on.

My faltering wasn't the thinking that I belonged at the old and tired playground, though I liked it there better, empty and green bushes and blackberries. My faltering was my increasing belief that the other parents, all thin, all young, all blonde, all pretty, all wealthy in appearance, were paying attention to me. Me in my over-sized smock of a shirt that I sweat in. Me in my dirty sandals. My hair and my double chin. And thinking...no they weren't thinking. Just aware of me, and that was enough.

And I'd tried that morning. I put mousse in my hair. I didn't know what to do once it was in there, though. It still eventually ended up in a bun on my head. I tried on three shirt, too, before settling on one that wouldn't show the shelf the jeans gave me. I guess I felt that "try" had resulted in "fail."

So keep trying!

I need more time. First toothbrushes, then people.

My body is growing past my control.

I wore high heels the other day, because no matter that I bought my first 3x tops to try and look good, I was going to try and look good. They were wide, comfortable heels. It took them five hours to become unbearable, raw on the pinkie toe, aching to not have to support my weight anymore on those tiny pressure points. In the last store I hobbled down the aisles, supporting as much of me as possible on the cart.

When Smudge threw my purse out of the cart, I watched it go. I had to wait, to get ready, before I could bend down to get it. I had to prepare for the hurt in my back and legs, snaps and twinges that wouldn't be actual pain if they weren't all happening at the same time. I had to realize that maneuvering around the obstacle of my own stomach in a squat was going to be unpleasant. And worst, rising back up again with only the unstable cart to hold on to.

But I waited long enough doing this, and a thin woman in a red dress picked it up for me, smiling at my baby. I was. so. goddamned. grateful.

I have eaten with great purpose for the past year, with the same self-pitying and brutal intention I used to cut my skin with in college. I knew it was destroying my body and all I'd worked for to learn to like myself. I'd answer my own worry with a "Fuck off!" and a slap. "You'll worry about being fat when you don't want to stab your own eyes out anymore."

Every medication I took is gone from my body now, after one vicious month of withdrawl, dizzy sobs and loathing. A blister, a fever, broken finally.

I don't know what will happen now that I can see stuff.

But I'm going to throw out the rest of the ice cream.

Probably.

Miserable stuff happens and I find myself hours from home last night, holding it together just long enough to go into Fred Meyer and buy wood and wieners.

I need these things because I'm planning on spending the night alone in a tent. That's how bad it became at home, all thanks to me.

I don't know where anything is in the store and I'm on the constant verge of a sob. I'm so raw I have fabricated telepathic connections with the other shoppers. Most of them are thinking how much they hate me, which is fair enough. I pass one girl in a tight soft blue shirt. She is curly-haired, and very fat, dimples in her elbows, cheekbones burying her eyes. I almost start to cry because I love her. I can see myself holding her in front of the bacon case, snuggling into her sad softness.

"Oh God!! You're fat! I'm so sorry you're fat. I'm fat too!! OH GOD I'm so sorry we're fat!!!"

I go to the most popular campground on the Oregon Coast because I feel safe there. They are full, of course, but I wait twenty minutes in the fog outside the ranger station to be given the special spot reserved for handicap people. After 7pm, they'll give it to non-wheelies.

And it's like I found a rip in reality, slipped through to a place that isn't tainted by myself. I am awake in that spot for three hours, and...I'm free of me for all three of them.

My fat girl in the blue shirt appears from a car, and walks into the yurt next to my site. She's angry at a drab young man who is barely there, "I don't see why I have to explain every little thing I do to you." Later she is joined by a little sister, practically a twin, but louder, and the three talk into the darkness about penises. How big the man's is compared to the hot dogs they are eating, what truly constitutes a "teeny weenie." Then the sisters begin a fart war, amplified by the hardness of the picnic benches. All in all I am glad I didn't hug her in the Fred Meyers. She probably wouldn't have offered much comfort.

On the other side of me a 16 year old with a fully formed man's voice has found driftwood that is a Magic Cudgel. He berrates his 9 year old brother throughout the night. "No, dumbass. You can't get me because I have the Immunity Gauntlet and you're going to need the Friar's Cowl to end the curse. Wait, no, okay now I'll be the Friar." He spins in a circle with his stick, driving into the dirt, "ENERGIZE! Prrrrurrrururu...okay now you're free." I think if ever someone needed to receive a cape for Christmas, it is this boy.

And I don't know what they're thinking of me. A woman who put up a tent and is eating wieners alone. Alone except for her fat dog who doesn't want to be there and keeps trying to jump back in the car. I think the reason I was so free last night is that I don't believe they were thinking much about me at all.

It's a tactic I need to try.

I had three polaroids of teenage girls posing sexy. I didn't throw them away with the birthday cards and the letters from people I don't like anymore. I set them aside for Sean. I am the best wife ever, is why.

"Here, naked underage girls."

I don't remember who the girl with the punk shaved side-burns grinding the rose stem in her teeth was, she only went to the Academy for a couple months. But the girl clutching the leopard print pillow in front of her was Steph. She looked a little like Jodi Foster back then.

"So, what is she wearing under the pillow?" Sean asked.
"Underpants."
"Oh." He was disappointed.
"No, I'm sorry. Not underpants. Actually I couldn't describe what is was because it was vibrating too fast to see clearly." Best wife ever.

Steph was a junior my Freshman year. That was the year I had spent reading Drew Barrymore's autobiography, "Little Girl Lost" until the binding broke. At 14 I had never been inside a 7-11. So I was amazed by Steph, and her stories of life in the underworld.

She had told me that she, before coming to the arms of Christ, had been a member of The Tong.
"What's the Tong?" I asked
It was if I'd asked how to wipe myself.
"You don't know The Tong? The Japanese Mafia? They are an extremely deadly organization. Serious shit. I was with them for awhile. They were my family when I really needed one."

I thought that was weird because the Girl's Dean, Mrs. Lemon, had just recently shown me the kitty that Steph's mom had knitted for her couch, as a gift. Kitty-knitting moms didn't seem the sort to hand off the their daughters to crime syndicates.

But I believed it anyway. Steph was hardcore. She'd done sex and drugs and crime and given it all up to go to boarding school in a Nebraskan beet field and love Jesus. Oh, but Jesus couldn't contain her.

It was her idea to try and replicate Calvin Klein ads with my polaroid, she who immediatly stripped off her bra and bunched herself up in the closet. "No, wait. Wait, there's a shoe in my ass, goddammit. Wait. Let me hold it like it's part of the picture. Just dangling on a finger. Like 'wouldn't you like to know what I'm thinking about this shoe?'."

She didn't make it through her Junior year. Around January she started talking with a British accent.

"I've spent sew much time with my Anglish friends I just cahn't shake this dahm accent!" She bailed by March, back to a life of glamor and danger. Glanger.

I only saw her once more, the following fall, when she came to visit with her "fiance," an older blond man who appeared to be entirely composed of grease drippings and anger. They rode a Honda. She waited until I was watching and then French kissed him with pornographic gusto. "Ha ha!" she said, her accent now taking on a more Brooklyn lilt, "You don't get to do that!"

But by then I'd stop reading my Drew Barrymore autobiography and had gotten very involved with Anne of Green Gables. So I didn't really want to kiss him, anyway. What I really wanted at the time was a petticoat.

Sean chopped up the photos of Steph before throwing them away, that same night, less the garbage man get the wrong idea. I wish I'd kept them. Wherever Steph is now, I am sure her life isn't as good as it was then, when she was pretty and 17 and scrunched up in that closet with a shoe gouging her butt. But I've been wrong before.

In the bathroom my clothes felt like a cruel rough rope harness and so I left a trail of them down the hall to the bedroom. I stood in front of our broken closet, naked, looking for something with as few seams as possible to put on.

These are black dog days. My husband taught me that term yesterday, telling me that is what Winston Churchill referred to his darkly depressed days as.

But Sean does things to try and heal up the black. Like yesterday.

He came to the door of the room where I was naked, announced himself as Gate Security, and leapt on me, demanding to know where I was hiding the drugs.

Part all-consuming hug and part tickle and large part pure lascivious manhandle.

"Where are they lady!! Huh? What are you storing in these two? Cocaine? Are the drugs up here? Or up here? Huh? So you think you're gonna fly Delta Airlines do ya?

Just as he was threatening to extend his cavity probe, our daughter hooted and Ewok-babbled her way into the bedroom, slapping tiny hands on my butt to help Dad with whatever it was he was doing.

I was laughing. Not my normal one or two-note laughs, not the long punchy "HA!!!" from an offensive joke on South Park. Those are the laughters that are left over in us because we grew up and the world got less sweet and funny, so now we laugh so show we're able to, instead of complaining. Now to be swung round and round in an airplane ride would make us worry about nausea and how bad we're gonna feel this in the morning. It's near impossible to get that good laughter back.

The laughter Sean gave me, that particular kind, from teasing and tickling, speaks to my most simple brain, and returns to me my first understanding of what joy was. He time-traveled my brain. I needed it.

A break for the black dog.