pretty dumb things

being read, my rights: or filling in a blank, part 4

Late last April, I received an email from an unrknown sender. That in and of itself is hardly that surprising; the email address was the one connected with this blog, and I frequently get emails from readers. Many readers write to tell me how much they like my writing; I like those emails the best. Some write to tell me things more disturbing or amusing; you can read some of their e-missives here on my blog. More than a few write to inform me whenever I overlook a typo or employ a malapropism; I often appreciate that, though sometimes I just feel a titch annoyed.

What joins my readers together —the one who wrote me last April, the ones who love my writing, the ones who hate it, the ones who want to fuck me because of it, and the ones who want to correct it—is a sense that they know me. They have read; therefore they know. It’s a common phenomenon. Writers, especially those of us who tend toward the confessional, create an intimate relationship with their work and then with those who read our work. You yourself if you regularly read my blog, or anyone else’s, most likely have a picture of me in your head. You might imagine what I look like, what I sound like, and perhaps your picture extends to what I’d say or think in response to something you say or do or like or would like to do. You probably feel like you know me.

You don’t.

the dad who came in from the cold: or filling in a blank, part 3

My biological father knows no boundaries. This concept generally has positive “climb every river/ford every stream” cultural connotations. The person who knows no boundaries is free to be the best that he can be; he can think outside the box; he can dream the impossible dream, fight the unbeatable foe and bear the unbearable sorrow. He is free to be you and me and he knows that’s it’s the eye of the tiger and the cream of the fight. He is a survivor.

Maybe that’s all well and good in the many gladiatorial arenas of life, but it’s absolutely completely utterly wrong when it comes to parent/child relations. Parents need to adhere to boundaries. Children like them. And I realize that this need for a deeply etched limning line doesn’t vanish over time; it remains into adulthood. Because now that my biological father has found me, I really wish he would erect some firm fences and just shut up.

My relationship with my biological father remains in that strange netherworld of emails. I feel reticent to give him my phone number, for he has yet to show me that I can trust him, and after being absent from my life for two-score-and-four years, he bears the burden of proof. Some of the emails he’s sent me have been really helpful and informative. He has told me his family’s medical history (aside from the bi-polar, it looks like pretty smooth sailing into superannuation for me). He’s added four spicy flavors to my already heady ethnic stew (in addition to my being French, English, Dutch, Welsh, Luxembourgian, Scottish and Belgian, I found out I’m also Spanish, Irish, German and a smidge Apache).

There’s no underestimating too the tremendous gift—traumatic and vertiginous as it has been—that my biological father has given me in choosing to make contact with me. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll reiterate it until I’ve fully processed the idea, but much of my muddled interior life and my exterior muddling through life has been predicated on my father’s abandonment of me. His return has a fantastic psychic presence that, like an anthropologist with a giant and difficult find, I’m only now beginning to be able to look at. My biodad’s return into my life has been huge and weighty, a selcouth thing, his return has both lifted a burden and placed one on me.

Of late, this heavy enormity comes from my birth father’s apparent complete inability to discern the difference between the information he should tell me and that which he should not. Over the past two months, my biological father narrated his two near-death experiences, his sexual molestation at the age of twelve, his sexlife with my mother, his predilection toward premature orgasm at the age of seventeen, and his experience of hearing a close friend commit suicide on the phone. Some of these things I could see his telling me when we know each other better. Most of these things, I can’t see him telling me ever.

What has become increasingly clear as glass to me over the past two months is how deeply my biological father’s contacting me is about him. He did it a week before his 65th birthday. He has used me as a confessional. He has asked me perhaps four or five questions about me. He has imparted exactly one memory of me. He has told me nothing about his wondering about me over the years. He has made this correspondence consistently and nearly unremittingly about him.

I can understand how he would find it difficult and painful to write about the first time he held the infant me in his arms, or how he might find it hard to summon words to express the ghost-presence of me in his life. I can feel compassion for him and his absence and his presumable ache. I can’t, however, take his confessionals any more.

I also have had a really hard time trying to figure out how to explain boundaries to my parent. How do I tell him that I don’t want to know about any bodily emissions of his, with perhaps the exclusions of sneezes and hiccups, ever, and I especially do not want to know about orgasms. No child wants to know about her or his parent’s orgasms. I’m no exception. And how do I tell him that while I appreciate the trust implicit in the stories he’s chosen to tell me, I don’t want any more. I have enough mental anguish of my own. I don’t need to be the near-anonymous repository of my biological father’s.

My biodad glows with an unfathomable glamour. Already wrapped in the generally shiny patina of daddyhood, this particular father is fiercely smart, rather handsome, emotionally intense and possessing of a seductive history. My biological father, you see, was a spy. He can’t tell his history with total impunity, for he is contractually obligated against doing so. He will always be out of reach, making his absence from my life yet more tantalizing.

I can’t help but think that his life of espionage, of which I know but the tiniest orts and scraps, makes him extra special confessional now. I find, however, that I am losing my taste for secrets, no matter how tormentingly esculent.

a tale of two fathers, or filling in a blank, part 2

Yesterday, I did something I’ve done 36 times before and I did something I’ve never done before. These two things were pretty much the same, and yet they were radically different. Yesterday, I wished both my stepfather and my biological father a happy Father’s Day.

My family is not big on the greeting card holiday. We usually bow shallowly to cultural expectations in general, and Father’s Day (also Mother’s Day, the 4th of July, Valentine’s Day, and just about every other non-religious holidays, as well as some religious ones. However, we do go all out for Thanksgiving. We love Thanksgiving a lot) is no exception. A phone call in my family suffices. I don’t have to send presents or cards or barbecue forks. Though sometimes I will.

Yesterday, I phoned my dad, my stepfather. Happy Father’s Day, I said.

“Thank you,” he replied.

No, I said, Thank you! My voice was exuberant and somewhat less tinged with irony than I’d expected. Apparently, the emotion was genuine, a response I get from time to time and often surprises me at my most expectedly sarcastic. We chatted for about fifteen minutes about my freelance life and his plans for the day, and then we hung up to individually do what we were going to do.

Yesterday, before I called my stepfather, I sent an email to my biological father. I don’t have his phone number, and he’s already told me about his dislike of the phone. My email was rather brief. I thanked him for getting in touch with me, I wished him a happy Father’s day, and that was about it.

I have yet to hear anything from him.

Since first writing about my biological father’s decision to write me, I’ve written very little about him or our correspondence. Part of my decision not to write about him stems from my continued uncertainty about how I feel about him—to say that his reemergence in my life threw me into an emotional tailspin would not be an understatement—and part of my decision comes from the fact that he reads this blog. I’m deeply ambivalent about his reading my blog. I’m proud of my writing here. However, I know that while reading my writing may make a reader feel like he or she knows me, the reader doesn’t. This writing is just a part, a moment of time, a pretty fragment of my life, and I’d prefer it if my long-absent father didn’t think he was getting to know me through this writing. Not to mention the extreme ick-factor of his reading my smut.

A couple of weeks ago, my biodad wrote to me say that perhaps he ought not to read the explicit portions of my writing. I took the opportunity to tell him that I’d prefer it if he didn’t read any of it, and while I was at it, I set down a few other boundaries. I told him that his flat-out denial of abusing my mother and abandoning me was problematic for me, as was his often highly confessional emails wherein he narrated deeply painful portions of his life (I forbear giving the details, though they are shocking). I told him that as I’d been the wronged party in our relationship, I get to decide how much access he gets to my life, when and how. I told him that while I can forgive him, he needs to earn that forgiveness, as well as my trust and access to my life. Finally, I told him that in return, I would treat him with the care and respect with which I myself would like to be treated.

I received not an answer from him, but an answer from his partner of 28 years, a woman. I don’t need to divulge the contents of the email; simply the fact that it was not he writing back to me suffices. It was not a response engendered to make me feel comforted, to make me feel understood, or to make me feel as if my words resonated; it was an email written to exonerate my biological father. I feel angry and hurt by the words my biodad’s partner sent to me, but I also feel resigned about having written what I wrote. I have no question that what I articulated to him is both fair and what I need; I was feeling torn up inside with every new profoundly painful revelation my biodad wrote to me, and I had to put up a picket fence for my own protection.

It has been tremendously difficult parsing this situation—often, it has been nigh unto impossible inhabiting it. I have so many conflicting emotions that my psyche sometimes feels like  a battle zone. My inner child wails for her daddy; my inner teen slouches and scribbles in black ink her fantasies of deliverance; my adult self tries to calmly assess her needs. I see the three-ring circus of myself, its big tent bobbing with primary-colored wishes and freaky clowns and a tight-rope walker trying not to fall into the roiling mess below. It has been exhilarating and nightmarish. It has simply been a little too much.

Today, I find it hard realizing that I’m a bigger adult than the man whose DNA I share. Today, I find myself wishing he’d just grow the fuck up. Because otherwise, he’ll lose forever his chance to grasp—however fleetingly, however imperfectly, however incompletely—what he missed out on for almost four-and-a-half decades. And so will I.

UPDATE: Apparently, the batteries in the biodad's computer died, so he didn't read my Father's Day note until today. His response was quite tender and showed unusual sensitivity. Plus, he promised to respect my wishes and not read my blog. Color me a return to sunny yellow: the shade of the cautiously optimistic.

more than kissing cousins

When I was twenty, my matrilineal side of the family held a family reunion at a small lake in Wisconsin. This small lake wasn’t chosen at random. It was a small lake exceptionally particular to my mother’s mother's side of the family. Every summer of my grandmother’s childhood, and into her adulthood, all of my grandmother’s family gathered there in morphing globs and bands—my grandmother and her brothers and, later, their spouses and all of their kids would summer there, spread out among three structures (one house, one cottage and a very large barn-type garage),  all under the watchful gaze of their father, my great-grandfather.

In lots of unacknowledged ways, they all saw the lake as the wet loins of the entire sprawling family. Everyone—and eventually me as well, brought along by my mom—sailed and fished on the lake, bathed in it, took day-long walking trips around it, and swam across it to prove adulthood. It was an idyllic spot, and one canonized in my child’s imagination, this pointed fairy house nestled in the center of magic woods, dappled by sunshine by day and spark-lit by fireflies at night. After my great-grandfather's death, in a vexed decision over his will, the house and the grounds were sold to one of my grandmother’s brothers, who was married to a woman who at best mistrusted her husband’s siblings and at worst disliked them outright. The reunion could not be held at the house on the lake, so it was held near it at a small college campus. The lake anchored us.

Early that summer of my twentieth year, the summer of the reunion, I got pregnant. It happened on the carpeted floor underneath the dining room table of the guy’s parents’ house. He wasn’t a boyfriend, just a fuckbuddy, and we fucked there on the floor without protection. I warned him. I could get pregnant, I said.

“Let’s make a baby,” he said, and not believing, or not caring, or hating myself in superfluity, I assented. I let him fuck me protection-free (it was the very early 1980’s, when the worst I had to worry about was pregnancy), and indeed I got pregnant. I had the abortion less than a week before I was to go out to the family reunion.

“No swimming,” my Health Advocate admonished me before the procedure, and perhaps after as well. “And,” she said, “no sex.” Not for two weeks, she said. I agreed, and as I did, I felt the tug of the matrilineal lake, even though it was still hundreds of miles away. I left for the reunion at the lake just three days after.

It would have been a tough trip even without the recent abortion. My mom was extra brittle and glittery; her nerves were almost visible in her dieted-to-70’s-thin perfection.  A couple of years later, she would confess to my father that she’d been having an affair for the past few summers with a man whom she had met at the matrilineal lake when she took her yearly vacation there with my grandmother and baby sister. In retrospect, my mom’s anxious shimmering made sense. But no question the recent abortion made her inexplicable shimmering worse, if only for me.

So naturally, what with the pressure of the big family, and my mother’s glitter, and my secret, within two days I had thrown my Health Advocate’s swimming proscription to the summer wind and let the lake buoy me. And within another day, I was fucking a cousin.

Technically, he wasn’t a cousin. Technically, he was a second cousin once removed or some other mathematical relationship. At any rate, he was the son of my mother’s cousin, which still made him a relative, but one distant enough to marry legally. Which was something my mother said repeatedly that week.

Everyone knew about our affair. Everyone knew we were fucking. I’m not sure how it happened—either the affair or people knowing. I probably told one person and he probably told at least one person and then as salacious news tends to do, it spread through the group in a kind of telepathic wildfire until everyone who was related to anyone knew that we were fucking.

It’s odd. I have a very capacious memory, but the only thing I can tell you about fucking this kid, who was about my age and from California, who is married now to a woman who is completely unrelated to him, and who has a couple of kids, is the time I didn’t fuck him.

In a campus teeming with relatives, it’s pretty hard for two kids to find a place to indulge in a little adolescent long-range incest. We did what we could and swam for it. We swam out to the large square raft that bobbed in the water about 100 feet from shore, and while we made out on it, our saliva swirling in each other’s mouths along with the slightly slick-sweet taste of lakewater, we just felt too exposed there, too much like we were copulating on a broad white stage. We knew everyone knew, but we didn’t need to give them visual evidence.

So we swam to the nearest sailboat, but given that neither one of us had the upper body strength to pull ourselves out of the lake, we gave that up. We tried, too, fucking in the water, holding onto the raft’s ladder, but lakewater makes a poor lubricant. Wet and frustrated, we left the lake and we undoubtedly screwed somewhere. I just don’t remember where or how or what it was like.

When I think about my cousin/cousine tryst of that summer, I find this slow worm still twirls in my gut. It’s not so much my fucking a distant cousin. It’s not even so much that I did it with all of my family’s knowledge. It’s more that I did it even though I knew I shouldn’t—and not because of the nominal blood-relationship taboo, but because this fucking could, and would, hurt me in my raw post-abortion state. And because I did it because I felt so lost, so alone, so burdened by the pain of that under-table fuck and its ensuing mess, and so much like my only recourse was to stick my chin up, give a defiant Fuck You to the world, and pretend like I didn’t hurt, like I wasn’t afraid, like I didn’t feel alone, awash and drifting like some small piece of tender debris, in the ebb and flow that was family.

filling in a blank, part 1

About two years ago, when I was just beginning to write my pretty dumb things, I was simultaneously considering trying to get in touch with Larry, my birthfather. I used a people-search service to track him down, and I found some information that seemed to point to the man whose DNA I share and whose last name I own to this day. I wrote him a letter. After writing it, I felt uncertain about what I wanted from him. I couldn’t parse it out in my own mind, and so feeling at a loss as to how to understand my own desires, I posted the letter here and more or less shelved my desire to find him.

This past week, he found me.

Last Wednesday began like any other normal day. I woke up. I turned on my computer, as I always do. I fumbled toward the bathroom, pausing to feed my cat. I peed. While brushing my teeth, I opened my Firefox, and while flossing them, my email.

That was when normalcy came to a skidding halt. In my email, the account I use specifically for this blog, was an email from an unfamiliar address; its subject line read, “if you’re Chelsea Girl, your message has been received,” only instead of “Chelsea Girl” was my real name in all of its six-syllable legality. Slightly freaked out, I opened the email and read it.

It was from my biological father, whom I’ve not seen since my mother divorced him when I was under a year old. He found me through this blog.

I don’t know how much of my blog my birthfather has read. I haven’t asked. In fact, though we have in the past five days corresponded a few times, I have yet to ask him a single question. The very act feels beyond me. I don’t know where to start, and I think I fear that once I start I won’t be able to stop. There is a flood dammed up behind a fortress of psychic walls, and I neither know how to siphon off a small potable bit of it, nor do I know that I were I able to that the full weight of it wouldn’t crash down and smother me.

Wednesday, the day I first heard from Larry, I spent in a fugue state. I felt a centimeter away from catatonia. I felt disoriented and buffeted about by a great swirling emotional maelstrom. I felt a short distance from crying at every moment of the day. Today, still, tears remain a hand’s breadth away. If I give in, if I allow myself to experience the full swell of the emotional tide inside me, I would sob uncontrollably. It’s something I just can’t yet allow myself to do. I fear I wouldn’t stop.

If you’re not adopted, if you’ve never been abandoned by a parent, if you spent your childhood without losing a family member, you are not going to know what I’m experiencing. But if you have, you do. And it’s beyond intense. Where I’m sitting “strange” looks good. How I feel is as if I’ve been submerged in an industrial-sized vat of What The Fuck! How I feel is beyond my words, and I’m pretty good with words.

It is beyond metaphor. It is beyond name. How I feel is a screaming cacophony of intense and conflicting emotions. How I feel  is simultaneously my four-year-old self wishing romantically on a star for her daddy and the forty-four year-old self I am now who knows that wish is impossible: I have no daddy; I will never have a daddy; that daddy time has come and gone for me and all I will ever have is a blank space where daddy should have been.

How I feel is simultaneously elated that this person has found me, that my decades-old hope of having my birthfather appear before me—sudden as a dream—in person, in letter, on the phone, how I feel is elated that this hope has suddenly and electronically come true. How I feel is apprehensive that before me waits this stranger of whom I am undoubtedly part—his allergies are my allergies; his migraines are my migraines; his bi-polar is my bi-polar; his syntax is my syntax—and I don’t know what he wants or what I want and how can I trust him. How can I believe in him and how can I not?

How I feel is confused, and not merely because there is this man presents himself to me, and though I don’t know him, he is much me as my mother is me. I feel confused because I look forward to his emails, because I want to throw myself at him in a thoughtless headlong rush, because I want to share myself with him on a silver platter, because what I feel is most like the excitement I feel when I am falling in love. Because I fear I’ll fall in love with this man  with whom my mother fell in love, and look at how that ended. Because this love is weird and crazy and inexplicable and I fear it’s as much a testament to my childhood desire for a daddy than it is to my adult wish for context. It is weird to feel for my unknown father what I most clearly have felt for a lover, and even though my therapist tells me it’s normal, it feels beyond bizarre.

How I feel is as if this blank that I know, and know well—its emptiness is comfortable to me, its emptiness has defined me, its emptiness has weight and meaning—how I feel as if this blank is getting filled in, and that is deeply disconcerting. My absent father has always felt to me like those shadow blasts on the buildings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, left as fragile humans vaporized and stolid buildings remained. His absence has always been palpably present. I am who I am because he abandoned me. I have made choices predicated on his abandonment. I have seen myself a certain way because where I was supposed to have a father, I had a bright and shiny outline, a limned body-shaped space.

Who am I as I fill in this blank? Who am I as I see myself reflected in this mirror of this eerily familiar stranger? And how do I begin to negotiate the distance that separates us?

I have no answers. I’m not looking for them, not yet. I’m just feeling what I feel and talking about it a lot and waiting patiently, waiting without waiting, like a Zen koan, for the time when something, however small, makes sense.

somewhere between crisis and epiphany

Last week, at some point early Wednesday morning, I had a moment wedged somewhere between existentialist crisis and emotional epiphany. I couldn’t sleep. I often can’t sleep. Sleep eludes me. I wish I had cable television those nights when the sheets wad up like troubled brows between my thighs. I don’t. I lie there and fret and count my ragged breaths and imagine my jangly energy as blipping hot pink dots shooting sparks out of the crown of my head, the soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers.

It doesn’t work. Sleep evades me. It acts like it owes me money. It’s wily, my sleep, and I stalk it like a drunk hunter, as I blunder through the underbrush of my consciousness. It’s frustrating. It burns irritating and red the next day when I suffer benign aphasia, grasping at the air for words like “nonconformist” and come up empty handed. Sleep and I have been at odds.

Last Wednesday was one of those wadded up, irritable-making infinite moments, one of those times when I hung on the precipice of sleep, waiting to tumble, watching for that invisible slide, and sticking there on the edge like a stage-struck cliff diver. I got that moment, though, that moment of crisis/epiphany, and that ain’t nothing.

Mired in immobile sleep chase, I felt a thought flicker-flash my mind. What if I didn’t write my dissertation, I thought to myself. What if I chose to leave the Ph.D. program? What would that feel like? The answer was this: good. Pretty fucking good indeed. I saw, perched on the vista of my wide bed,  a twinkling panoramic view of my life unencumbered by this thing I hate to write; I felt a burden drop from my body. I could envision the wide fertile guiltless space upon which I could write the stuff I wanted to write. I saw a life I wanted.

I sat with the idea for a couple of days before I really started mentioning it to people. It’s a big deal to leave my Ph.D. program. It means bidding good-bye to nearly a decade of working toward this goal that I find now I no longer want. It means that should I find I made a mistake in my adieu that it would be very difficult for me to take it up again. It means repaying my student loans, which, trust me, is no small feat.

Then I started talking about it, and each time I did, I found my certitude fortified. I started in a tremulous, almost giddy voice. I found my voice stronger with each iteration. And for the most part, my people have been really resoundingly supportive. They believe, almost to a one, that I’m making the right decision. They see that I’m wicked prolific when I write the stuff I want to write and I’m sere as the Mojave when I’m not. They see me for the person I want to be: a writer.

I have, then, told pretty much everyone in my life, my parents being the most recent. I had a talk with my dad on the phone last night; he called me back late for him—around 11:30—and I was nervous telling him. I thought he’d be bitterly disappointed.

I’m leaving the program, I told him. I’m not going to get my Ph.D.

“Aw, jeeeezzz,” my dad said. “How come?”

I explained it, explained it all—the crisis/epiphany, my realization, my increasing writing employment, my support from writers and from friends, my plans to make ends meet—and as I talked my dad got more and more excited.

“Well,” he said, “you’re making a living doing what you love. How can I argue with that?” he said and laughed. He was catching my giddy writer infection. He asked me what book projects I had in mind, and I outlined the first one, a memoir piece based in part on some of the writing I’ve done here, and then I outlined another, based on my “Spandex and Lucite Shoes” strip series. I spoke, he listened; he asked questions, I found myself to my horror tending toward euphemisms like "intimate". Then my mom came home, and I repeated the whole story to her.

This morning, as I was walking my dog, I realized, Oh my god, last night I told my dad  I was a stripper. That I’d worked as a stripper was a fact from which I’d always cosseted my father. My mom has known for a long time; in fact, my extended family knows about my ecdysiast past. But my dad, I’ve never actually broached the subject with him. I just carefully enabled his willful and implausible denial. Sure, I had friends who were strippers. Sure, I looked like a stripper. Sure, I had inexplicable caboodles of cash like a stripper. Sure, all of that would seem to point to my being a stripper, but why rip the old man out of his non-stripper daughter fantasy?

It always seemed a pointless act to do and a place I didn’t really want to go.

But now the naked cat—meow!—is out of the bag, never to be shoved back in, claws raking the air, spit flying, hair upraised on the back of its neck, and I suppose that my father will learn to accept more of me, as I have learned to accept more about myself. Which, of course, the writing has helped, and helped immeasurably, me to accept. And, sure, it certainly wouldn’t hurt if the story sold. There is nothing like a bright shiny by-line to make a story stand up all proud and pretty-like.

Not surprisingly, I've been sleeping exceptionally well of late

my grandmother's left breast

October has been breast cancer awareness month. My favorite local independent coffee purveyors has run a special of a raspberry mocha latte. It comes with pink whipped cream on top, and some percentage of the sales goes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Pink abounds here in Gotham—on wristbands, on posters, on lattes—to raise money and awareness of this serious disease that affects around 200,000 Americans a year.

My grandmother had breast cancer in the late 1950s. It was just one flavor of an extended buffet of cancer that my grandmother suffered; she had skin cancer too, due to being treated with radiation for her acne in the twenties. She’d had part of her nose and part of her lips removed because of cancer. In that operation, she’d had skin drawn up from her chest like a sheet, like Bazooka Joe’s turtleneck, to provide tissue for the graft that would replace the cancerous skin she lost.

My grandmother would, after that skin cancer, retain a vampiric pallor. She eschewed the sun, hiding her face under giant bonnets and her body in long-sleeved garments, even in summer. She would apply her blood-red lipstick with a little brush that rotated magically out a slender gold cylinder. She always felt self-conscious about her loss of lips. The vermillion, she would say, cannot be replaced, and then she would close her compact with a snap. (She would be pleased to know that now it can. Now they replace the red of the lips—the vermillion—with other mucous membranes, It helps patients to be a girl, for doctors just replace one set of lips with the other.)

When my youngest uncle was around eight, and about four years before I was born, my grandmother found out that she had breast cancer. In those days, a radical mastectomy was spectacularly radical. Not only did oncologists remove the breast in its entirety, but they also removed the pectoral muscle underneath it.

When I was a child, my grandmother had waist-length hair that she would wind into a mysterious French twist with the aid of a couple of dozen hairpins and a bookcase. The pins were necessary to secure her long hair into its inside out and upside down place. The bookcase was necessary for her to prop up her left elbow while she did it. Having lost her pectoral muscle, she couldn’t raise her own arm long enough to complete her complex hirsute ministrations, and she found the shelf on the bookcase my grandfather had built the correct height.

I had known from a very young age about my grandmother’s cancer operations, just as I had known about how my grandfather had had Scarlet fever and it had led to his partial loss of hearing. My family was medically inclined, and we discussed every disease in explicit terms. There was no sugar-coating of illness or of bodily processes. We did not believe in euphemism.

I had held my grandmother’s prosthetic bras and wondered at them, as I had held her tiny lipstick brush. They seemed both alien, because of the specificity of their purpose, and familiar, because they smelled like my grandmother, or she like them. In any case, she and they were inseparable in my young mind. It was all powdery smelling like the Heaven Scent in her bathroom.

When I was twelve, my grandfather first left my grandmother, took up with another woman, filed for separation, and then killed himself. It wasn’t an easy sequence of events for anyone. It was made more complicated for everyone because it was during this time that I hit puberty. Plus my mom was pregnant with my sister. It was a black comedy of the cycle of life, really, and it was the first time I saw my grandmother, always a tower of
strength and one of the few solid centers to my world, was rocked, shaken and stirred.

My grandmother grieved for a long time after my grandfather hung himself. I imagine she grieved for him, but she also no doubt grieved for her life that was now unutterably changed, the years she’d spent with him in tight-lipped stoicism, the choices she’d made for so long, and her youth that she had not misspent in the slightest. When she finished grieving, which meant that she no longer arranged her work schedule around watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood wrapped in a cardigan with a wadded Kleenex in her hand, she cut her hair and got a life.

She discovered she liked dancing, or rediscovered it, anyway. She found out she liked strawberry daiquiris. She expanded her bedroom and had a hot tub put in it. She went hot-air ballooning. She joined groups, like Parents Without Partners, and she started dating. We would, in my late teens, arrive at my grandmother’s house and find a hand-lettered sign on a rectangle of pantyhose cardboard warning us that she had a “visitor.” She dated men younger than her 60-something.

She told a story that she was making out with a new boyfriend. She whispered to him that one of her breasts was prosthetic. Not missing a make-out beat he replied, “Just tell me which one, and I’ll concentrate on the other.” She was delighted.

When I was 21, my grandmother had a series of heart problems. At first, she had a heart attack, and this precipitated an open-heart surgery. My mother was white-lipped with the stress, but I took it in stride. I called my grandmother in the hospital and asked her what she would want me to bring her. She told me that she wanted some copies of Playboy and Penthouse because she “wanted to see girls with whole bodies.” I didn’t really understand her request, but I complied.

I bought them, and I felt happy that I could do something for her that my mother could not. It was, apparently, inappropriate to ask one’s daughter to bring porn to you in the hospital, though it was equally appropriate to ask one’s granddaughter, or to ask me at any rate, and so I did bring the magazines, demurely shrouded in a brown paper wrapper.

It was, that visit, there in the yellowy-lit hospital room, the one and only time I ever saw my grandmother’s mastectomy scars. My grandmother, looking very frail and small on her big bed, asked me to rub cocoa butter on her  new scar from her open-heart surgery. She slowly peeled down her hospital johnny, revealing her angry red vertical incision that divided a white flat expanse of chest on her left from a breast that looked a lot like my mom’s breasts on her right.

I’d always had a fear/fascination with that missing breast. Like the way that Freud’s uncanny draws a person in with its inescapable misplacement, I was a girl equally drawn in and repelled by that space. As it turned out, it was…nothing. Just skin. And not scary. Just skin.

I spread the cocoa butter on the scar, chatted for a while with my grandmother, and left to go do something I undoubtedly then felt was infinitely more important, though now I don’t recall what it was.

A few months later, my grandmother died from a stroke. After her death, we found a giant dildo wrapped in a Chivas Regal bag under a pile of her Orlon cardigans. We also found a packet of every drawing, every book I’d written, every card and every letter, bound carefully together with a piece of string. I don’t know what happened to either the dildo or the packet.

My grandmother taught me many things, many too many to enumerate here, and many too tiny and trite to mention. Some things she did teach me, and they weren’t things she intended to teach me, are that beauty is where you find it, that joy is when you make it, and that pleasure, especially physical pleasure, is a basic human right.

And that bodies, conventionally whole or interestingly missing, are nothing to fear.

death in vermont*

The horror of it is that you can go home again. The Thomas Wolfe truism, echoed ad infinitum like a plaintive call into an endless canyon, is that you can’t. The idea being, I suppose, that in the same way that Heraclitus averred that you can’t step into the same river twice, being that neither you nor the river is static, that home is fixed in a past time and a different place, and that once you have left, you cannot return to find the thing the same. You and the home have changed.

This idea, though, is bullshit. The problem is that when you go home, you find yourself sucked through some invisible and yet palpably present space-time continuum wherein you are exactly the same person you were when you were nine, fifteen, twenty-two, and simultaneously the person you are now.

Everything has changed and everything has stayed the same, you find, giving you a cerebral cortex whiplash. At least, you do if you are me.

I don’t go home to Vermont very often. I was home recently because my mom had a great big fat cancer scare—it  turned out after several anxious days and a series of stains of her biopsy, not to be cancer—and my parents wanted me, rather unfathomably, to be there with them.

It should be beyond fathomable unto self-evidence why my parents would want me there with them. It should be so because families naturally band together in times of scary adversity, giving support and love to the people who know them best and forgive them most. It should be so because we expect that this kind of freaksome potential crisis to cause us to circle the familial wagons and to provide the possibility of earnest, heart-felt campfire conversation that the quotidian struggle of life does not.

Somehow, it’s easier and more appropriate to give emotional confessionals an unfettered flexi-lead when the hounds of calamity are baying at your door. 

For these reasons—familiarity, comfort, earnestness, caring, and so forth—it should feel completely understandable that my parents would want me at my mother’s bedside when she woke after her biopsy, groggy and slurry, her worry lines erased by an Atavan cocktail, and when we trouped press-lipped and clammy into her doctor’s office the next day to hear the boggy news, and when, after hearing the ambiguous diagnosis, we attempted to reconstruct the news and fit its tumory sprawl into a neatly defined “good” or “bad.”

But, see, this all only makes sense if one assumes that my parents talk to me, and they don’t. They don’t ask me questions. They don’t inquire after the progression of my dissertation. They don’t ask me how I’m feeling. What I’m happy about, or sad. They don’t ask about Donny. They do ask about my dog. They do ask curt, compressed questions about the state of my health. They ask about the weather.

When they are together with me, as at the dinner table, they more or less completely ignore me. They converse together—my dad discusses something about work; my mom talks about her garden or a relative. They don’t, however, include me. And this occlusion is exactly what I grew up with.

I have said before that my sister, who is schizophrenic, is a ghost in our house. But me, I’m a hologram. (And it feels to me that a hologram would give a cold comfort, yet they want it. And I willingly give it to them.)

My sister has the aspect of a malevolent spirit. I have a flickering three-dimensional substanceless corporeality. I have all the outward signs of physical presence, but put your hand out toward the shining light of my shoulder, my midriff, my face and there’s no there there.

And while this incorporeality is nothing new—I grew up being soundly, distractedly and affectionately ignored—its current state is suffused by these pretty dumb things. My parents know about my blog. They don’t read it. They know about my strippery past; my mother acknowledges it; my father does not. They know about the writings I have been doing that are tied to my dumb things.

("Dumb," of course, means "speechless" as much as it means "stupid." I am only as ironic as I am earnest.)

And my things are the great big herd of elephants stamping their pink feet and trumpeting loudly in our dining room, the television room, the car. They fear my body, my bawdy, and they want to hear nothing that might possibly potentially lead to a discussion that would infer that I a) have sex  b) write about it c) might be good at either. (They fear too the boogeyparts of my past. My depression, my suicidality, my irreverant self-destruction. For when I'm home, they are their former selves too. Which, I suppose, means that they're feeling the clanking vestiges of their past days press on their unconscious as much as I.)

I sit there between them, my mother and my father, scared of their impending mortality. I note their aging faces, their wearied bodies. I feel a mixture of fear and fascination. I find myself speechless in their combined juggernaut of denial. I wonder what I could say.

Please listen to me. Please pay attention to me. Please notice. Please. Stop. My small nine year-old, fifteen year-old, twenty-two year-old, forty-three year-old voice says. And they carry on. Not listening, frozen in their fear, captured like a gnat in the amber of their love, or whatever.

I was home again. I have been home again. I will be home again, love it or not, or both together in equal measure and gut-splitting force.

Thomas Wolfe was a pussy.

_____________________________

* "Death" being a metaphor and literary allusion. No relatives were harmed in the making of this pretty dumb thing.

momscare update, part 2: shwarma

The latest results of my mom's needle biopsy of Thursday last indicate that her tumor, Benedict, is benign. It is, apparently, a tumor of a kind whose name sounds a lot like "shwarma," if "shwarma" were a tumor and not a food and ended in "noma." However, my mom would like me not to divulge the actual diagnostic term here on my pretty dumb things, for reasons best understood by her.

My mom will still have to undergo a deeply invasive surgery to remove Benedict, but she has been reassured that this kind of tumor almost never metastasizes, nor does it reproduce systemically. Therefore, once Benedict is gone, he's gone for good. He will not, however, no matter how homonymic the name, taste like the roasted lamb delicacy.

Thank you again so much for all your warm wishes--I've passed them on to my mom-- I'll be sure to check in to let you know how the surgery goes.

And now...back to the carnalicious fucking fun...

momscare update

My mom doesn't have cancer. But she also doesn't not have cancer, so the preliminary results of her biopsy tell us. What she does have is a softball-sized fibrous tumor of as-yet nonspecific origin growing at an alarming pace in her belly. Nestled behind her right kidney and adjacent to her spinal column, this tumor needs to come out.

That's what they know.

What they don't know is what the tumor is--benign or malignant--or what it means--whether it's its own little entity unto itself or part of a larger, potentially systemic, condition. The news then is somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, my mom doesn't have the lymphoma the doctors had initially diagnosed her with and therefore doesn't have to start chemotherapy forthwith, which is what we all expected. On the other hand, she is going to have a big operation deep into her gut that will be at the very least quite painful. The good news is that in taking out the tumor she might be quit of the whole problem. The bad news is that in taking out the tumor she might not.

(In my typical lugubrious humor, I have named the tumor "Benedict." I'm not sure my parents have found this helpful. You'd think they'd be accustomed to my Addams-familyesque sensibilities by this point, but they still seem to sigh and keep themselves from rolling their eyes.)

We all remain in wait-and-see mode; we all remain cautiously optimistic. My mom says that she feels a bit relieved in not having to start chemo immediately and most likely keeping her hair, but she also continues to feel anxiety about the big what next. My dad is mostly monosyllabic with the stress. My sister is completely checked out. And I'm dealing as best I can, which meant last night completely breaking my diet and eating an ice cream sandwich and four fun-size Almond Joy bars, the kind you give out for Halloween and judging from their freshness probably were bought by my parents for that purpose.

I always knew I'd have to wrap my mind around my parents' mortality at some point. I must say that this knowledge of inevitability hasn't made it much easier. Writing about it here, however little I have, has eased the anxious burden a bit.

My mom doesn't know any of you, and I know few, but both she and I thank you for your support, your hopes and wishes and prayers and light and other metaphors of warmth.

kissykiss,
chelsea girl

the less good time

Yesterday, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. It looks to be more the small "c," less scary cancer, but it's still cancer nonetheless. It's all making me a bit heavy in the heart and a bit less amorous in spirit.

You'll have to bear with me while I take it a little easy here on my pretty dumb things.

In the meantime, feel free to avail yourselves of my copious archives.

kissykiss,
chelsea girl

my father/my self

I used to warn you, my readers, when I wrote sex stuff. Now I'm giving you the heads up that this piece is not sexy. If you want sexy, read this, my smut index. If you want to know the woman behind the behind and the polyamorous libido, read on.

Yesterday was my birthday; it was also my father’s. Not my birthfather, the man I haven’t seen since I was pre-verbal, the man my mother left, divorced and never saw again, but my step-father.

The name of my step-father, my father, really, as he is the only father I’ve consciously known, is an adjective. It is an adjective so perfect, so eponymous that it is only with great restraint I forbear giving it to you. And forbear I must, though I find myself at a loss because now I don’t know what to call him. Like Bart with Homer, I’ve always called him by his first name.

I may refer to him as my father, but I’ve always called him ------. He becomes like God, this way, this un-namability, and I don’t really want to make him God, but there we go.

for my friend in pain

This is a letter to a friend of mine whom I love and who has been depressed and suicidal lately.

Dear friend,

You’re sad and you feel like your life is pointless, not pointy, not pointed. Rather, it's formless and blobby.

Your life feels round like a mind’s picture of a black hole. You stand on the side of your life’s cartoon manhole and you stare into its abyss. You avoid cliffs, elevator shafts, spelunking expeditions because their embodiment of the metaphor is just too overwhelming and tempting.

I know how you feel, as you know; I know all too well what it feels like to not recall life’s light. I know too exactly how futile it is to have someone tell you that you’ll be ok, that life is worth living, that this too shall pass, that this overwhelming, all-consuming, cannibalistic loneliness will be filled in like the figures of a child’s coloring book and that you will feel whole. I know you feel this resounding emptiness, and it’s ok.

I know that when you’re feeling as low as blue as down as dark and bitter as the grounds of yesterday’s coffee you won’t hear any of that I’m ok/you’re ok, everything you needed to know you learned in kindergarten, chicken soup for the middleaged’s soul, Khalil Gibran bullshit. You can’t. I can’t. And it’s ok.

I know that any number of people will tell you that suicide is not the answer, that you are loved, that you will be missed, and yadda yadda yadda, and while they are right, right as rain, I know you can’t hear them. And it’s ok.

It’s ok to feel the way you do. It’s ok to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; it is not, however, ok by opposing end them. And here’s why:

When I was twelve, my grandfather hung himself in his apartment. No one knew about it for a couple of days; my mother found him, her father, dead, hanging by the neck, and mildly decomposed. I remember well the night my mother found her father dead, for he was supposed to be joining us for dinner and I had cleaned our house in preparation of his arrival.

What came through the door instead was my livid mother. (Livid, you see, is an especially apropos word here; it means both “ashen” and “furious.” Rarely are words quite so perfect. My mother, upon discovering the pallid body of her father, was livid.) It was bad.

It gets worse, it always gets worse, and here’s where: my stepfather’s mother had killed herself when he was twelve. So his little family psychodrama got to be played out all over again in new little family. History repeats in all conceits, or in some of them, sometimes, anyway.

I saw my mother, my step-father and my grandmother (she had been separated from my grandfather) cope with the fall out of this suicide and it was hard for the pubescent me. They were all very, very, very angry. Seething and hurt and guilty. And so much so that they had a very hard time communicating anything at all.

My grandfather was a taciturn man. Half deaf in one ear, he communicated better with his wood-working hands than he did with his half-muffled words. I look back on him now, on my childish memories of him, and I see a man who had the aspect of being imprisoned in his silence. Which is very interesting, because if his suicide did anything, it increased the silence around him. Dead he was not only himself silenced, but he in effect silenced the jabbering noise of my living.

They were all so angry and pained they stopped speaking. It was a year teeming with ghosts.

I can’t tell you what to do or what not to do, but I wish you would step away from the ledge, put down the gun, spill the pills into the toilet and flush. I wish you would get some help because it’s very, very hard on those of us you might leave behind. It’s selfish of me, really, and I’m ok with that.

I’m not being altruistic here. I don’t want to have to live on with the knowledge that you killed yourself, that the meniscus of your pain broke from its force and you died from its overflow.

I beg you: Take up arms against a sea of troubles by doing something Hamlet couldn’t do: pick up the phone and get some help. You have to live inside your head for your whole life, all the time, every day; it might as well be a nice place. You wouldn’t look at your broken toilet and berate yourself for it. You wouldn’t wonder what was wrong with you that you couldn’t get it to work. You wouldn’t suffer by having no working indoor plumbing. You wouldn’t cry and feel you were worthless because your toilet was broken.

You’d call a plumber.

I know a thing or two or a thousand about depression. I have the scars on my wrists, I have the fun hospital stay to recount, I have stored in my memory files the fearful look of my parents’ faces when they think I’m close to the edge. And here’s what I know: I feel most depressed when I’m angry at someone I have loved.

I’m thinking you’re probably very, very angry right now to feel the extraordinary pain you feel. Talk to a professional trained in helping angry people. It will help.

And get some good drugs. There are lots of drugs that help people become unstuck from the prehistoric sludge of their bad brain chemistry. Find someone to prescribe you some that work for you and yours.

And write. Start a blog. No one has to read it. Just write. Write anything. Write a list or two or three thousand. It doesn’t fucking matter, really, just write. Trust me: catharsis is write.

And in the meantime, remember there are things that bring you joy, even in this desolate well you’re residing in.

Here, let me give you a list:

1. Cartman singing “Sailing Away” or “In the Heat of the Moment”
2. Miniature golf
3. Your nieces
4. Downloading free music in a quasi-legitimate fashion
5. Burritos
6. Cool new retro sneakers
7. A hot skinny chick with a really nice rack
8. Rollerblading
9. Bill Murray
10. Baths with smelly metrosexual bath products
11. The beach
12. Boogie Nights, especially “Feel, Feel, Feel, Feel the Heat”
13. Plaid shirts and boxer shorts
14. Photography
15. Macchu Picchu
16. Shuggie Otis
17. Vintage watches, stereo equipment, cameras, or whatever old shit it is you’re into these days
18. Napoleon Dynamite
19. The Cyclone
20. Dogs
21. Everything But the Girl
22. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love you, man. Get a therapist; get some good clinically prescribed psychopharmaceuticals; get your lanky ass writing.

And stick with me until we grow old and gray and have to remind one another of our sordid pasts, our loves lost and found, our battle wounds and our slow-burning smiles.

Yours. Truly.
Chelsea Girl

an ode for Cyndi and Tweet

As if I’d just downed some veritaserum, I announced to my mother on the phone that I had started a blog. I even gave her the webaddress. I am now wondering about my relative sanity, in both meanings of the word “relative.”

I don’t know why I did it. In fact, I’ve been asking close personal friends if they had any idea what might have motivated me.

“Drugs?” offered Becky.

No.

My mother asked what I wrote about. I told her my life, my family and sex.

“Why sex?” she asked. Because it’s important to me, I told her.

“Did you write about what I said about clean hands?”

No, Mom, I had not, I said, but I will.

So here is a blog about onanism. And my mother. And my best friend, Becky.

Just to get it out of the way, I do not think about my mother or my friend Becky when I touch myself. Not together, not separately. But there is a relationship here, so stay with me.

I don’t have a family who passes much from generation to generation. There is a Hepplewhite table that used to hold our mail and telephone and now resides in my uncle’s log cabin in Wisconsin. There are some pieces of furniture and some sculpture that my grandfather crafted that are spread across three states and the respective homes of his four children. There are some Chinese vases and antique chopsticks and so forth that my great-grandfather brought back from China when he and his brothers taught English there.

And there are three pieces of matrilineal wisdom.

My great-grandmother said, “It hurts to be beautiful.”

And in many ways, she is right. High heels are painful. Working out—if you do it right—is painful. Push-up bras, yup: painful. And too people judge you if you’re too pretty. But that kind of pain is like OUCH! And my wallet is too small for my fifties.

My grandmother said, “Never pick your nose in the car because other people can see.”

True enough. They can. And what is more important is the far-reaching implications of this maxim: you may be in a private space, but that doesn’t suggest that other people aren’t aware of your bad behavior, so therefore you need to be aware and make choices accordingly.

I’ve never picked my nose in a car. Never. Not even in the dark.

And my mother said this: “It’s ok to touch yourself as long as your hands are clean.”

True that.

But the implications here are greater than the sum of the parts of this piece of advice, and the parts here are pretty good. You should not—especially if you’re a girl, and I am—touch your cooch with dirty digits. However, what’s even greater here is my mom’s blank cheque to masturbate.

She was in effect saying, hey, have at it; it’s yours.

And that, my friends, is pretty cool.

Now to put this female “mmm she-bop,” “oops, oh my” permissiveness within an even larger matrilineal perspective: when my grandmother died, we found buried under her carefully folded Orlon pastel cardigans, enclosed in a Chivas regal bag, a dildo of gigandenormous proportions.

Grandma was a size queen.

More power to her. I don’t know what happened to the dildo. I suppose I could ask my mom. I haven’t found it around her house, but then I stopped snooping in my mom’s drawers when the contents of my own became more interesting.

I bought my first vibrator, with my high school friend in Vermont who reads this blog, let’s call her Julia, at Spencer Gifts when I was 16. Loved it. Loved it with a white hot burning passion until it died several years later.  Then I was without a sex toy of any kind, inexplicably, for many years. Silly, silly me. Making do with my own—freshly scrubbed—hands.

About twelve years ago I bought a dildo, which led to a vibrator, which led to one of those Japanese contraptions that have a little vibrating woodland creature attached to a belly-dancing Janus-faced figure in the shape of a cock.

I rocked that for many years, with many, many orgasms, and then, inexplicably, it died.

It was a sad day when, I pushed the button and…nothing. Sigh.

I went to Toys in Babeland to replace it. I was seduced by a much flashier-looking silicone number, lipstick red and designed within an inch of its life. I took it home in great excitement, washed it, inserted batteries, took it to bed with me and…no good.

Not built for my girl.

Damn. $84 down the freakin’ drain. What do you do with sex toys that don’t work?

I’ll tell you: you give them to your friend.

It’s washed, I told Becky. Just dip it in a little bleach, and you’re good to go.

Because, as my mother always said, it’s ok to touch yourself as long as your hands—or toys—are clean.

Go ahead, stitch it on a pillow. You have my permission.

on jones 3

As of Sunday morning, my sister Ella  is back on a locked ward. My father told me that he had received a phone message from her late Saturday night on his voicemail that was, in his words, a “quiet call for help.” He said that she had said nothing that indicated immediate danger to self or others—the litmus test for functioning sanity—but that in his mind, he had heard Ella ask for him to step in.

So he did, accompanied by a policeman, early Sunday. And the decision of the cop was that Ella needed to be placed in a safe environment, the locked ward at our local hospital, Jones 3.

This is not Ella’s first stay on Jones 3. I have visited her there before, have consumed some kind of fruit beverage, have engaged in truncated conversation with her on the picnic table that constitutes the living area of the ward, have seen her nun’s single bed, and have met her staring wild-eyed roommates.

The locked ward, as if it needs to be said, is not a joy-filled place. Unlike the maternity ward, the glass observation walls do not display humans embodying hopes and dreams. Rather the opposite, really.

I know this not merely from visiting Ella in her communal isolation. I know this because I too have spent time on this same ward.

For me, it was a quick journey, one I’ve never—and hope never will be—repeated. But in the cold January winter of 1987, I spent a week or so on Jones 3, or its equivalent, I think at that time it might have been Jones 7, maybe not, the memory is a sometimes slippery eel. I was there because in a two-week span I tried three times to kill myself.

The first time was the most damage inducing. I slit two vertical lines up my wrists. I bled a lot. And scared at the sight of my own blood, I called the police who took me to the emergency room. A doctor stitched me up and asked me if I was trying to hurt myself.

Um. Yeah.

But I talked my way out of a stay that night.

A few days later, another try, this time less flashy, more flesh woundy, and the doctor asked the same question. Was I trying to hurt myself?

Uh. Yeah.

But I talked my way out of another stay.

A week later, I tried to hang myself in the shower.  I began to lose consciousness and in what is one of the weirdest experiences in my life, I found myself in a kitchen in what seemed to be the 1930’s. I found myself having a conversation with an old black dude. I didn’t know him, but I felt I did and for some reason—because the conversation I was privy to in that fleeting deep-south mirage had nothing to do with my life or my death—I realized that this end was not what I wanted.

I managed to get my toes on the corner of the shower, hoist my self up and slip my head out of my noose.

I called the cops again and I went to the hospital. And I stayed.

Freedom may be just another word for nothing left to lose, but I love it. I have never been married; I have never even been engaged. I have no children, and I’m thinking that every year I shuffle on it’s less and less likely I ever will. I have never owned anything that I couldn’t lose without a lot of emotion. Actually, unless you count my dog. I’m not convinced I own my dog, but if one were to characterize that relationship as one of ownership, he might be the only loss I would cry a lot over.

I do have close relationships with people, but even they can’t get too close. I have intimacy issues.

But I prefer to say I like my freedom.

In a psychiatric ward, you have no freedom. It’s not merely that you can’t walk out the door when you want—though you can’t—it’s that everything you do is scrutinized, noted, analyzed, categorized, pathologized, and then recorded in triplicate.

Nothing you do or say or wear or think is your own special snowflake uniqueness. To the powers that be in a psych ward, you are your diagnosis. My diagnosis, if you care to know, in 1987 was Borderline Personality Disorder, the same diagnosis given to Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Wurtzel and the woman who wrote Girl, Interrupted.

It’s not a pretty diagnosis. Look it up.

And, really, if you were reduced to your own dysfunction, how would you feel? How would you act?

I felt trapped. I knitted a lot. I waited until they’d let me go. I suffered through some of the worst therapy I’ve ever received. I tried to make sense of my life. I had a painful family session with my parents. I ate free ice cream.  I told a therapist I couldn’t work with him. I bided my time.

In 1987, there wasn’t the array of psychopharmaceuticals we currently enjoy. There just wasn’t a drug to treat my depression with, so I didn’t get any, and within a week or two they released me on my own recognizance. 

But not before I read my chart. After much protest from the Jones 3 Powers That Be.

“You won’t understand it.” They told me.

Try me, I said.

“We really suggest you don’t.”

I know my rights, I said.

“We feel it best if you did not.”

I get that, now hand it over, I said.

I read it, and it was some fascinating reading. I wouldn’t suggest you yourselves become a danger to yourself or others just for the dubious pleasure of having your behavior noted by strangers 24/7 for upwards of a week and then reading the record of your mental state as observed by others who don’t know you, but it is quite the experience.

It was not, as they say, a meeting of the minds. It was more like Rashomon than Gaslight, but it still wasn’t a happy narrative.

Today was a beautiful day. I went shopping with my very good friend Becky. We went to Century 21 and I found pink Justin cowboy boots on sale. We made fun of silly couture, like these Hollywould shoes decorated with fishing lures and this pair of Plein Sud transparent beaded pants and this filmy flimsy Gautier garment of no discernable genre. We ate dumplings. Later, I booked a trip to visit my friend Mattman in Florida. Then I went out for dinner with another girlfriend.

I was free. And it was good.

My sister right now is not free. And my parents aren’t as worried as they were before they knew exactly where she was and what she was doing, but they are still worried, especially my dad.

My sister’s experience on Jones 3, the parents report, is good and bad. What is good and what is bad? I asked. They didn’t know, they said. They had only heard “good and bad.”

But her state is this: she is schizophrenic, and all of the efficacious drugs currently available will give her debilitating side-effects. She remains caught between the Scylla of her illness and the Charybdis of its treatment.

Our state is this: if you know something we don’t, tell us.

That’s my quiet plea for help.

the ghost in the house

My sister has gone off her meds.

My sister is twenty-nine, a certifiable genius, and a schizophrenic. Acting on the advice of her doctor, my sister stopped taking the drugs she had been on since October, 2001. She had developed a condition resembling the precursor of Tardive Dyskinesia, a side effect of anti-psychotic drugs where you lose control of your jaw and tongue. Your jaw clenches; your tongue moves like a worm, lolling around in and out of your mouth. Your face grimaces. Your arms, legs, fingers, toes, even your hips and trunk, betray you, doing a little Saint Vitus dance of their own.

So essentially, my sister, whom I’ll name Ella, has two very bad choices: go back on the medication and accept that her life of relative normalcy is over, or stay off her medication and accept that her life of relative normalcy is over.

Except that when you’re schizophrenic, you’re not really doing a whole lot of acceptance. If you’re anything like my sister, what you’re doing is marinating in a paradoxically anxious and ambivalent fugue, unable to think through any line of thought because you can’t hold it in your head long enough to see it, feeling a welling rise of paranoia and shame coupled with anger and weariness.

You enjoy nothing. You connect with no one. You exist in a state of near panic and near rage. You shut down, in short, because to keep on going is to run the risk of doing something that will hurt someone whom, in your memory at least, you love.

Which is what my sister did do, in the Fall of 2001, that got her on meds in the first place. Finally.

Ella had her first psychotic break at the age of seventeen. She was taking a year off from school, studying in a student exchange program. In Naples. With a family who had major problems. There was, apparently, a lot of stress. And Ella snapped.

My parents got worried when they went to Italy to visit her. Within a couple of months, Ella came back; she spent a night with me here in Gotham before my parents took her home to Vermont. She was a shadow of herself; she didn’t speak; she didn’t smile. She didn’t connect. At all.

Ella went into a locked ward, for the first time, but not for the last.

Over the next couple of years, Ella tried to take advantage of her scholarship to Williams College, but she couldn’t. She had another break and another stay in the hospital. I forget the exact chronology, but eventually she was put on some medication that made her fat and hairy, but nominally functioning, and she went to college at SUNY in Ithaca. She got very close to graduating, and then she freaked.

She went back into the hospital. In and out. In and out. I lost count.

She decided that she couldn’t go back to school, and my parents let her live at home. Ella tried to do…something. She volunteered at the PBS station. She did some kind of ecological job. She tried to work, but ultimately she almost always ended up being fired or quitting because of her anxiety and her tiredness.

My sister is eleven years younger than I, and she had many, many advantages that I did not. The daughter of my mother and my stepfather, she had two parents from birth. She had a mother who stayed at home and took care of her, who spent summers together with her on vacation. She had ballet lessons. Her parents, unlike mine, even though they were the same people, checked to see if she had done her homework, supported her in her schoolwork, and were proud of her grades.

I didn’t get that. For one reason or another, I more or less raised myself.

Ella was a gorgeous, smartass kid. She was precocious and she pissed off the teachers in our very rural grade school. She skipped ahead a grade, in part because she was just that smart, but also in part because, I think, they just wanted her out of there. My sister had a stellar high school career filled with accolades and boys and extracurricular activities. She sang. She ran track. She was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist. She was a Johns Hopkins gifted student. She was one smart, accomplished, composed, funny, pretty, witty, sparkly cookie.

After her first break, she became a ghost.

First she was a ghost in my parent’s house. Then she ran to Boston and just became a ghost. She lived in homeless shelters. She called when she felt like it. She was a lot like a drug addict—except she has never done drugs, but for the ones prescribed to her. My parents never knew when, or if, or how they would hear from her. She played one against the other, first preferring my mom, then my dad, always mad at one or the other, always able with a kind of emotional laser to inflict pain with fantastic precision.

For she is a genius, lest we forget.

Finally, my father gathered her from some shelter/bad roommate situation/fugazi living arrangement and brought her back to live with them in Vermont.

Then things started to really go bad. She became violent. My mother wanted her out of the house; my father stayed steadfast to his promise to Ella that she would always have a safe home with him.

She began acting out, running away repeatedly to have my parents collect her again and again. Stealing the car, going to Boston. Stealing money, hopping on a bus and coming here to visit me in New York.

I remember when I got the phone call from my father that Ella might be on her way to see me. It was just after 9/11, and the air was still redolent with the smell of smoldering electrical wire and bodies. I was in the midst of preparing for my Ph.D. comps. My sister had been on a rip of being particularly bitchy to me. I could feel for her, but I didn’t want to take care of her.

And I felt guilty.

I felt guilty because it had always seemed she had had it so freaking easy, and I had resented all that she had just…gotten. I felt angry at her for exhausting my parents, consuming their lives, requiring every moment of their attention, and I felt guilty for that anger too. I felt guilty for feeling she was an imposition.

I dealt with the situation, not well, but it’s tough to argue logic with a schizophrenic in full-on psychotic mode. My father came to New York and collected her.

A week later, she assaulted my mother. My mom watched her daughter being led away in handcuffs.

In many ways, it was the best possible outcome, and I believe that Ella in some unconscious manner had incrementally escalated the family drama to the point that my parents would have no option but to throw her out. And force her to get help.

Which is what happened. My father, a lawyer, made some phone calls and Ella got a conditional probation. She got on good drugs. She went into a halfway house. In time, she got a job and an apartment. She became lucid, happier, connected.

I got my sister back. I felt very lucky.

When I was home we did things together that normal siblings do. We went for coffee, we saw movies, we shopped. We talked about boys. It was good, and even though she sometimes found her hands pointing inexplicably, Ella seemed good. Happy, even. Or if sad, it was a garden-variety healthy sadness. She was no longer a fractured ghost; she regained her self, her identity, and she was in the process of coping with all that she had lost out on in her decade of illness.

And now…she’s gone again. When I called her a couple of weeks ago, I heard the old anxiety in her voice. She told me she was tired. I accepted the explanation. She may have been tired, but she was also relapsed.

Again.

May I hope for a small miracle? Something to steer my sister safely between the Scylla of schizophrenia and the Carbides of her medication? Something that will let her return to herself? To my family? To my anxious, wearied parents? To me?

gone daddy gone

This past weekend, a woman from Wilmington, North Carolina came into the store where I work. I’m sure this is not an isolated phenomenon. I’m sure that I have, at different points in my life, run into several people from Wilmington, North Carolina. It is, after all, a kind of big small city (population almost 75,000), with a reasonably young population (median age 34.1), and a good-size, good college (University of North Carolina, Wilmington). These statistics don’t make Wilmington much different from many biggish small cities, including my own semi-home town of Burlington, Vermont.

What makes Wilmington, North Carolina special is that my father lives there. And I didn’t know that until a week ago.

A short while back, I made the decision to contact my birth father, a man whom I haven’t seen in over forty years. This decision has been long in the making, though the actual moment of committing to it was fast and rash, as many of my commitments are. I was on the phone with my mother, who has told me almost nothing about the man whose DNA I share. She had written a family newsletter for a desktop publishing class that she’s taking, and I—and my sister—had been conspicuously absent.

“Nice newsletter, Mom.” I told her. “Very pretty.”

“Thank you.”

“So. Uh. Do you have any children?”

She laughed.

“I didn’t want to make it follow… I moved backwards and forwards through time… It’s more for my teacher,” she said.

“Those are three incomplete thoughts, Ma,” I said. And then I listened to her wriggle around a bit on the phone over her decision not to include her family in her family newsletter and in the midst of her wriggling, I decided that I was going to find Larry, my birth father.

My father has always been a conspicuous absence, a palpable absence, in my life. I know tiny crumbs of information about him. I know his name. I know his mother’s name. I know that my muscular and curvy body resembles his, and not my mother’s tiny, little, flat-assed, bird-boned body. I know that his mother was a radio actress in Chicago. I know that after my mother divorced him, he went into a sanitarium, as they called it back in 1963. I know that at one point he had decided to become a minister. (I do not know what kind, nor do I know if he actually did it.) And I know that he beat my mother. And I know that he probably abused the little infant me.

I also know that his absence has shaped me, has indelibly colored the way that I perceive the world, has reached like a long masculine arm from time beyond memory and pushed me and pulled me and made me act ways I haven’t been able to explain until recently, especially with men. I know that my loss of him has been permanent, that nothing will ever give me a father, or a whole family, and that I continue to feel seismic shocks of this loss every time a man exits my life.

And I know that it’s time for me to deal with it all.

So I did what we of the information age can do. I went online, I plopped down ten virtual dollars, I entered his first and last name and the year of his birth, and up popped a phone number and an address. I found a pen and I wrote these pieces of information on the closest piece of clean paper I had at hand; it happened to be an envelope containing my birth certificate. Sometimes life does a better job at symbolism than art.

And then, as if I’d been transported back in time to a six year-old me, I imagined some kind of idyllic and immediate epiphanic moment where in some kind of slow-mo, soft-focused, Dr. Phil-orchestrated father-and-daughter reunion my deep black well of loss and pain was magically…healed.

And then that picture went poof, and I was left with figuring out what the hell I want from this man, and how I might go about getting it.

I’m sure I’d like a medical history, and that, given its clinically emotionally pristine state, is not so difficult to ask for. It’s the other stuff that causes me troublement. What is it I want from Larry, for that is his name. Not Lawrence or Laurence. Larry.

Recently, I’ve become aware that I have often looked at people for some reflection of myself, some kind of reassurance that my understanding is their understanding, that my joke is their joke, that my pain is their pain, that my perception of the world is shared by them. I guess that in an ideal world, I’d like to recognize those parts of myself that I don’t see in my mother in him, in Larry.

And yes, I’d like him to fill in the family history that my mother has so willfully not. And yes, I’d like him to give his story of their divorce. And I would like to know if he hurt me, as my mother suspects he did. And I'd like him to tell me that none of it was my fault.

But perhaps most importantly, and most pointedly, I’d like to know why he never fulfilled my childhood fantasy and tried to contact me. Why I didn’t ever get a card or a letter letting me know that he thought about me from time to time, that he hoped that I was well, and happy, and growing up to be a strong, interesting and capable woman.

Why he remained so adamantly absent, so oxymoronically concrete a cipher, and whether this decision—or these series of decisions, really, for I can’t imagine that the thought never crossed his mind in forty years never to contact me—bothered him.

And then I hope for something he can’t give me. I hope that someday I won’t feel so bereft when I lose a man—even a man who wasn’t so very good to or for me—from my life. When all I’ll feel is the loss of that particular man at that particular time. And not the continued crushing weight of a little girl growing up with no daddy.