Confessions of an imperfect being

Practice. Practice. Practice.

2010-10-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

Camel Pose:

My nemesis. When I am at yoga class, this is the pose that freaks me out.

Chaturanga? No problem. I love to move through sun salutations, starting in child's pose, my nose on my pink yoga mat, forehead to the floor, arms resting in front of me and pulling the knots out of my upper back. I move to table top, with knees bent, arms in front of me, everything in right angles, and into the first down dog of the practice. Our bodies pike in the air, hips raised, heels pressing to the floor, weight balancing between our legs and outstretched arms, evenly balanced between each of our fingers, spread wide, and the thumb. The instructor instructs us to breath and we do. Air fills lungs simultaneously before pushing through bodies and back out into the room.

From down dog, we step to the top of our mats, rise to flat back, foreheads reaching to the front of the room and backs flattening out along the spine. We tuck back down again and let our arms hang to our feet before tadasana, mountain pose. Our arms move in a circle to raise overhead as we inhale and look up, fixing our eyes on a point in front of us and slightly higher than eye level. Arms completely extended, we exhale and swan dive back to the floor, putting our hands on the ground as we step back in a straight plank before lowering down in a push-up, chaturanga, with arms bent to a ninety degree angle, tops of our feet on the ground, and then inhale as we move to up-dog, tops of feet on the ground, lower half of body straight, shoulders pushing back from our ears down our spine, and chest, neck, and head lifted. Eyes look up or are closed. Lungs pull in the air from the class. On the exhale, we move back into down-dog, toes flipping under, body piking, heels shooting back into the floor.

It all feels so good.

My body and breath work together. I know I will be stiff for the first two or three sun salutations but that I will get stronger, looser, more flexible. Each movement demands my happy concentration, my strong breath, my comfortable faith in the practice. Muscles heat with the effort. Knots loosen in my back.

This is my practice four years into my yoga hobby. So serene. So healthy.

Five years ago I tried to do yoga. I couldn't.

I was too bored. Too fidgety. Too restless. I wanted to do more exciting things, like run stairs and make my muscles hurt. Or twitch and jerk to the hip-hop beats of a dance class. I couldn't calm myself enough to slowly move through a practice. I didn't understand the point.

But my practice now is not without hiccups. There is still the dreaded camel pose.

I don't know what it is, but this pose creates such a strong sense of anxiety in me that I dread it every class.

The pose goes like this: you kneel tall on your mat and put your hands on your kidneys against the small of your back, then you walk your eyes along the ceiling as you look backwards at the wall behind you. Ultimately you release your hands from your back and put them on your heels.

The whole thing wigs me out. I feel so uncomfortable the whole time, or rather from the moment my head goes past the spot of looking directly up. Anything behind that vertical planes scares my body. I feel the anxiety well in my chest, down my neck, into my head. Panic flares. I start counting to ten rapidly. I forget to breathe. I quit the pose after 15 seconds and take a break, looking straight ahead while others in my class continue the pose.

I dread Camel.

What's interesting is that my instructors tend to say things during this pose like "This is a heart-opener, so it may cause you feel some discomfort. Feel the emotions that come up during this pose and then allow yourself to release them."

Having heard this so many times and having felt so anxious during the pose, I looked up Camel on the internet. I learned it opens up three chakras, or energy centers in the body, the root chakra, naval chakra, and heart chakra. The heart chakra, not surprisingly, is the center for love, compassion, and forgiveness.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised I have a hard time opening up my heart.

What would it take to open my heart?

In my last yoga practice, I felt anxiety when the instructor announced Camel pose, but then I decided to change my attitude. "I love this," I thought, "it's giving me a chance to practice a pose that's hard. What a great opportunity!" Of course I was half lying to myself, but also half allowing myself to change my attitude. I decided not to be fearful during the pose, to allow myself to be happy about however far I made it in the pose, to take a break if I needed to but feel joyful that I tried the pose.

I like this concept of working the body to open the heart.

Working the emotional part of myself to open my heart is a little trickier. I've been trying to be more pro-active about dating. Signing up for internets dating sites, going out for happy hours, trying out new possibilities, buying new "date" outfits. But I'm not sure that I'm really opening my heart during these outings. I feel like I'm going through the actions, but I don't know that I'm really open to romance at this point. I keep the walls up pretty well.

It's sort of a strange paradox where I complain about how nothing is working out, but I also am keeping every potential romance at arm's length. I don't even know that I'm doing it consciously. It's more like a subliminal red light preventing me from really plunging into a new relationship.

And I'm not sure how to change this. The emotional part, I mean.

I think the key is in yoga. For me, at least. I think if I keep working the physical body, the emotion will catch up. If I keep forgiving myself for my half-Camels, like I do when I cheat and go to my knees during Chaturanga, or when I am less flexible or strong for other poses, and if I can keep being open to that vulnerability, that exposure that comes from opening my chest and leaning back over my toes, I think the emotional part of my being will become more compassionate as well. I think I will be able to forgive the painful experiences of my past, the betrayals, the hurtful actions. I think I will be able to find love more easily, to feel more secure, to realize that opening a heart doesn't mean giving up control.

Like so many parts of my recovery, it is not knowing how that moves me forward. It is the desire to be healed.

Dear Inner Critic...

2010-10-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

Um, hello. I am writing to address a few concerns with you:

1) Please stop editing my rough drafts. I notice you whenever I'm writing. The way I start to write a sentence, but once I realize it will end with a preposition I delete it. The way I use too many adverbs in my writing and you chide me for not being more concise. The way I use transitive verbs as main verbs and you delete the entire sentence. This is not helpful in the generative stage of writing. Please. STOP.

2) Please stop censoring my topics. You are forever challenging me lately about what I choose to write about. You make me second guess my ideas. Doubt my intuition. Step away from the computer. This is the biggest problem. Because of you I am leaving my work. I'm choking up at the keys, all because you are so judgmental about my ideas. Please. STOP.

I realize there's some benefit to having such a powerful inner critic. For instance, once I get to editing all my drivel and assembling it into a draft, you will come in very handy. You will have so much work to do that you'll be pleased for weeks and weeks. But you seem to be a little too eager, interfering with the rough drafts, jumping into your role before it's time.

Please. STOP.

Just wait your turn, inner critic. You will have more to do than you ever imagined. But I need a couple more months. Just back off until December, ok?

Thank you.

Respectfully,

The left side.

Getting to the end

2010-10-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt about a cheetah locked in a basement, one I thought would eat my dog when he went flying down the stairs to investigate, but when I followed him, I saw they were playing happily.

I don't know what this means.

Maybe it means the things I am scared of are not as threatening as I believe they are.

Right now I'm scared of returning to the past. I'm scared of failing in the future. I worry about how it will all turn out. I worry about how I'll feel when I look back.

I can't wrap my head around the order of things and I don't know how it will all come together.

***

On Friday night I went running with a friend around the lake near my apartment for four miles. It was the first time I'd been running in weeks and I was not in as good of shape as the woman next to me who ran three miles every day.

At the end of the run is a hill that goes on for four blocks. Each step made me want to quit. My friend next to me was chirping away about life and the conference she had just been at for the afternoon, and all I could think was "don't quit; don't quit; don't quit." My lungs felt like they were recycling air without taking away any oxygen. I wanted the job to be over.

As I was contemplating quitting and pretending not to wheeze while my friend talked, I remembered running that same hill with another friend. She told me how her philosophy on hills was always to concentrate on the ground immediately in front of her, and not to look at how far she had to go, just to look down and keep moving her feet. One. at. a. time.

I stuck to this methodology and kept thinking about moving only one step at a time. Before I knew it the grade was easing. And before too long we were running down a small hill for the last two blocks of the job.

I had stopped thinking about the whole run and started concentrating only on what I was doing in the minute.

***

Last week at my COSA meeting, the first one I've been to in months, I flipped open the page of a meditation book to read an entry. It was on patience. On letting God work at a pace I didn't try to control or force. On allowing a process to work itself out in my life. One. step. at. a. time.

***

I don't know how this will all end up, but I know it will end. It will somehow get done and it will get done without me worrying about it. It will work itself out and all I have to do is keep pressing the keys.

One. step. at. a. time.

If you want to know what writer's block is like...

2010-10-02T13:02:00.000-07:00

It's hard to write about addiction.

I want so badly to finish this project and be done with it. I want to stop thinking about my divorce and sadness and addiction and pain. My forehead itches to be done.

But I can't quit yet.

And I can't write this.

I'm totally stuck.

June Carter is singing on my speakers and I'm thinking of the 12th step. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives. I'm thinking of the promises: No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

it helps others to share stories.

it hurts sometimes to revisit the past.

i know i will be done with this when i publish my book.

"Take breaks," said my instructor, "when it gets too hard."

But eventually the breaks have to end. There are deadlines. There is the need to be done.

Letters sit like bricks on my shoulders.

I don't know why I'm sharing this. It's not really a blog, more of a personal entry. Word documents scare me. It feels more comfortable to type in a small box. To post on a blog. Less permanent. Less threatening. There are only a handful of people who have this address. It feels safe and dark. Like a place I can confess that it's sometimes hard to write.

A confessional, says the lapsed-Catholic-girl. Duh.

It's just that I get bored of the trauma. I'm tired of telling the story. The only place it feels right to say it is out loud is at a COSA meeting or with friends. It feels current and important. In writing, it's feeling stale and repetitive. Like I've said this all before. Like saying it one more time is crossing the threshold, like forcing myself to eat everything on my plate, even the lima beans, and wanting to hide it all in a napkin or under the lip of my plate.

It's just that today I feel like I'm stuck in a small space with myself and I'm not really sure I like who I'm dealing with.

I don't know what it is that I'm scared of. I think it's that I made mistakes. I did things poorly. I didn't always communicate my needs like I needed to. That I sometimes end sentences with prepositions. That I snore when I'm sick. That I'm not perfect. That this chapter in my past was ugly and painful and messy and inappropriate and shameful and secretive. That I was weak and confused and sometimes at fault.

And this is step four. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

My problem, and I think my ex shared this problem, is that I so readily see the flaws. And it sends me into a rabbit hole. I fixate on the things I do poorly in life. I regret the bumps and nicks and chide myself for inadequacies.

I don't always do this.

Most of the time I realize there are two sides to the coin. I am compassionate, which is wonderful and amazing, but sometimes I am too compassionate and I sacrifice my own needs for others, which is troublesome. I am assertive about my needs, which is great, but sometimes I don't communicate that well- I explode or demand. I can't monitor the volume dial as well as I'd like.

I share my flaws with others, which makes me feel vulnerable, like an alien. Like a loner. I'm too exposed. I get hurt this way. I open myself up while others are building walls, storing ammunition, and plotting strategies.

Saying I have codependent tendencies. This feels like a strength in my COSA meetings. Outside of them, though, this feels like an admission to being a crazy bitch who will forever be trapped in bad relationships. My brain knows that's not true, but I am not Melody Beattie, I am not impervious to thoughts of my peers. I told a friend my therapist told me to buy a book called "Codependent No More" and she burst into laughter.

i feel insecure about saying it.

But the thing is-- most women I know have codependent tendencies. Especially those who would never admit it and who would judge the women who did. AND, to be honest, most "codependent tendencies" are actually quite amazing qualities-- to be compassionate, to care about others, to want to help, to put others before yourself... If you think about it, Jesus was probably the most codependent person in the world. Ghandi. Mother Theresa. Great people are codependent.

But, the problem, and I would suggest these great people never saw the problem, is that we cannot let other people's needs overwhelm our own. To be truly great is to be vigilant about one's self (no offense to Jesus, Ghandi, and Mother Theresa). But if you are staying focused on improving yourself, on taking care of yourself, your interactions with others cannot help but improve. You become more available by taking more time for yourself. You become a better partner by being honest about your own needs. You're a better lover when you say what you like, what you need, and what feels good, not when you pretend, you fake, or you do what does not feel right. When you set boundaries, you may lose people at first, but the people you later attract love you for your strength and feed off of that energy. You can still be compassionate, but you begin by being compassionate for yourself.

My biggest example of this is when I went through my divorce. I COULD NOT be available to my students every day. I called in sick more often than I'd like to admit (in order to deal with divorce issues, to grieve, to vomit, etc.). BUT, I was MORE PRESENT that year when I was dealing with my students. When I was in school I could give more of myself to my students and when I couldn't take it, I called in sick. It was the worst year of my life, but a turning point in my career as a teacher. Since then I think I've gotten even better, but it was the first year where I finally felt like I got it-- I got what it meant to be a great teacher.

And it was nothing I learned while getting my Master's.

To conclude--

Is there a conclusion? Is there a way to wrap up this messy essay of a post?

I don't know.

I don't know what will happen with my work. How it will turn out. If I'll be able to write the final chapters I need.

I don't know how it will all come together.

But at least I wrote. And I shared this with you. Whoever you are. My dear friends listening to me talk in the dark.

THANK YOU. xo

Barbie Doll Baggage

2010-09-12T20:02:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, the day after I returned to my apartment in Minneapolis after a three-week road trip out to Washington State, I decided I needed a haircut. It was August. I was going back to start teaching high school English in a matter of brief weeks. My hair looked droopy, shapeless, and both wilted and frizzy in the same minute. I had reached that odd point that occurs where I could go no further. I could not stand one more minute of my current hairstyle.

I made an appointment.

“So what are we doing?” asked Zach, the stylist available for my 2:00 appointment at Vizi’s salon just down the block. I had never been there before, but had passed the pinkish 1920’s style one-and-a-half story building on Hennepin Avenue many times. He looked at my reflection in the mirror while pulling my long blond hair down my back to see the ends.

“Well,” I said, “I’m considering donating my hair for cancer patients.” In fact, I had measured my hair at home with a tape measure by looking in the mirror and craning my neck to see where the blond ripples fell. My godmother died a year-and-a-half ago from Pancreatic Cancer and I had been growing my locks ever since. It was eight inches to just below my ear lobe, the bare minimum of donating

“But,” I paused, considering my personal life. “I’m recently single again, and, you know, the guys seem to like the long hair.”

The words sat like cold pieces of stone deliberately placed to line a walkway while I looked at the glare in the mirror that flashed at my eyes from the window behind me.

Zach shrugged and touched the top of my scalp, moving his hands down the blond threads. “That is true,” he said, clearly speaking for the heterosexual population of his gender. “It’s sort of weird, but true.”

I looked in the mirror at my wilted, frizzy, droopy, shapeless mass of blond almost-curls. And in this moment I had to face something other than my reflection.

I am a woman who has two master degrees. I read books. I believe in gender equality. I got a 30 on my ACT score, grew up getting angry with teachers who asked only the boys to carry heavy stacks of books back to the library, and never once hesitated to raise my hand during a discussion if I had an opinion on the subject. Both my parents were feminists. My mom worried about me watching Dukes of Hazard as a child because she didn’t want me to think that’s how women had to act, that all they had to offer was beauty. They didn’t buy me Barbie Dolls because, again, women are more than objects, more than beautiful playthings.

I am also a teacher. And I constantly encourage my female students to be strong and independent. I encourage them to think for themselves. It almost hurts when I see one who follows a boy around like an obedient robot.

“Really,” said the smarty-pants persona in my mind as I considered the eight-inch dilemma in front of me. “Are you seriously considering NOT cutting your hair just because guys like long hair?”

Despite all my positive feminist background, the truth is I was. The truth is I wanted very much to look pretty in my eharmony profile picture.

My background is not just the academic. There is a part of me that wants to be sexy. A part of me that wants to be attractive to men. A part of me that worries endlessly about my appearance, despite the fact that my brain realizes there is more to me than the image. It’s a dichotomy I have never been quite able to reconcile.

Which is perhaps why I married a man I loved and later discovered had a pornography addiction.

During the nine years of our relationship, our sex life went from hot to warm to tepid to lonely. Because he was my first love, first person I had sex with, I wasn’t absolutely sure about what was wrong. Perhaps sex-lives just slow down, I thought. Maybe this is normal.

When I discovered the truth, the hours of pornography on our computer, the $300-a-month cable bills, the nearly eight-grand spent on porn on credit card statements hidden from me for years, I realized it was not “normal.”

And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wondered what about me caused it.

There is a voice inside me who worries about what men think when they look at her. There is a part that notes what they pay attention to, what they seem to love. There is a girl within who is forever worried about the mirror, a girl forever analyzing, and condemning what she sees.

“I love when you have your hair down,” said my husband, “you just look so--,” and he paused to shrug his shoulders, shake his head, and raise his eyebrows.

Another man I dated after my divorce would pause while we indulged in the sensation of being wrapped in each other in bed, looking at my hair, touching it, gazing. “Goldilocks,” he’d say, smiling back at my eyes and surrounding me with himself.

All of this I wanted to ignore as I sat in the salon chair trying to decide what to do. I wanted to believe me, with short hair, was enough.

Zach waited for me to figure it out, lips in a line, hands on his hips. It felt like weights were on my shoulders as I considered my fears. And then a counterpart to the smarty-pants voice in my head, the vixen within, suddenly piped up, “Are you kidding me? Like we can’t rock the sexy bob.”

I looked at Zach. “Cut it off,” I said. “I just heard what that sounded like out loud.”

He laughed and grabbed his scissors, “and you were like, Hmm- I don’t like that bitch, right?”

I laughed (though bitch had never quite been the word in my mind) and he bindered my hair eight inches up, ready to cut it all off in a neat little bundle.

I held my breath and he started cutting. “I’m so glad you decided to do it,” he said. “This is going to look great.”

I didn’t know if it would look great or terrible or frizzy, droopy, and shapeless still. All I knew was that I was feeling lighter already.

I left the salon and the only word to describe me in that moment is buoyant. I was full of light and air as I returned to my apartment, tingling with the uncertainty of this new look, this new persona. I didn’t know if the men on eharmony would like the change, but I did. I felt like I could make light bulbs glow when they weren’t even plugged into a socket.

Then I reached in my purse for the ziplock bag that held my hair. I threw it on the dining table.

It sat there. Blond and bindered. Didn’t move. Just sat on the table.

Gross isn’t the word, but it was completely uninspired. Lifeless.

“That’s not sexy,” I thought, considering this part of me removed that used to hold magical powers.

“That’s just hair.”

And like that I realized that I was what was sexy about me with long hair. I was this glowing, floating, electrical little entity walking down Hennepin Avenue and this was just a pile of dead cells sitting in a bag.

All of the smart-girl rhetoric, the knowing that I was more than an image suddenly felt true. And while it’s a lesson I learned only after turning 32, and one I imagine I will have to learn again many times, it felt like a change had happened.

Like I didn’t have to go to the mirror to see what I was like.

A LONG entry-- too long for a blog!

2010-08-13T16:19:00.000-07:00

There are moments in your life when you stop and think- what the fuck just happened here?

I was reminded of these moments last night when I ran into a man at the Geo Duck bar. I had seen their signs during the past week for happy hour 4-6 as I drove back and forth from my Hood Canal cottage on various adventures on the Olympic Peninsula. "Geo Duck," I kept saying to myself- the reward for staying put for a day and taking care of the grading for the online course I teach, the one that pays the travel bills. It was a tedious process getting through the grading. I couldn't wait to go.

I parked my convertible at the Geo Duck and was eager to burst inside. I was missing my own local spot, the place where I happy hour with friends once a week. I missed being a regular. I was anticipating camaraderie, interesting stories, and fascinating characters. As I walked into the bar, though, I could tell I would not be taken in as a regular here. I wasn't sure how to register the looks and pauses in conversation as I went to the bar, but I decided just to cross my fingers and hope the wait staff didn't spit in my food.

Then I noticed the deck.

While the bar was a perfectly lovely dive, resembling many of my favorites, with pool tables and wrinkled men with long hair in tank tops lining the bar, the deck was lovely on a different level. The deck was in the open and miraculously sunny Washington air, situated on the canal, and I could see birds flying around the impending waters of the tide.

I went to the deck instead of the bar, watching critters moving around in the water. Otters? I wondered, but they seemed bigger.

I had the deck to myself and pondered the menu for a good fifteen minutes before going in to order my food (wait staff hadn't seen me) and ordered the Oyster Burger at the recommendation of the bartender. Another man had joined me on the deck about five minutes earlier and said to me when I came back to the deck, "Boy, I bet those waitresses must be swamped in there."

"Yep," I said. Of course I didn't want to be rude, but I could tell from the inviting way the man talked that he wanted to keep talking, and I was sort of content to study my phone, which finally had service, instead. He was probably 5'9" and overweight, maybe about 60. His face was as red as the plaid shirt he was wearing, and his rapidly receding hair sort of clung to his head. He wore green shorts and hiking boots over tall white socks.

I think I was nervous to engage with this man, not because of his looks, but because of the terse way he was trying to reach out. I couldn't imagine that he'd care to know anything about me but sensed that he maybe just wanted to discuss his own life for a living audience for a while. His first few comments were authoritative and decisive, sort of like the comments coming from a man who had already decided what was the correct way to live life.

But we chatted anyway.

He asked what I did, and I didn't hide it. I said I was a teacher and a writer, something that doesn't always go over well with people. Everyone tends to resent the fact that you have the summer off and then tries to figure out how you could possibly afford to travel on your salary (answer? lots of student loans and a part-time job in addition to your full-time career, plus no mortgage, no kids, and my hobbies are virtually free: reading and writing and running). I always have to bite back the fact that I spend part of almost every weekend on schoolwork, that Christmas break is a time for me to catch up on my grading, and that I take sick days in order to do my work. Never mind the week of training in the summer, uncompensated. Never mind the two Masters degrees. Never mind trying to do my writing. Never mind the other job. Never mind the fact that I used to clock in at 6:30 and leave at 5 each day, just to stay ahead. Not that it isn't good to work hard, just not for the amount I receive.

In any case, I didn't want to get into it with this retired state employee from Springfield, Illinois.

I tried to be brief, but he caught my attention when he identified the animals in the water ahead of me.

"They're seals," he said. "They like to swim in and rest in the shallow area."

Real seals? I thought. Not in the zoo? Not in a ginormous clump outside of the beaches of La Jolla? Just two or three adorable little creatures that had eyes like my dog? Perusing the canal on their own?

I let down some walls and began to chat in earnest, interested to hear about what else this man knew.

My oyster burger arrived and we were becoming friends from across the six feet separating our tables. Turns out he didn't judge me for being a writer, he instead recommended a book, written by the drummer in Genesis called Three Ways to Capsize a Boat.

"It's real exciting," he explained, "because he takes this job in the Mediterranean working for a sailing company without having any clue what he was doing, but then--" and here is the pause that won me over, "it turns into sort of a love story. He's got this gal back home and he starts to realize how lucky he is and that she is really a singular sort of woman. You know, since she puts up with all this, him running off for five months and all."

I perk up and we begin to talk in earnest and before you know it we are comparing divorce stories and our accounts with loss- he having just lost his daughter to a drunk driver and his 2nd wife in January to Cancer.

"You know, I knew it was coming," he said, "so it was different from Nikki (his daughter), but I don't know-- it was like walking out of a room and turning off a light. It was really something."

He paused.

He was no longer a red-faced retired employee from Central Illinois. Now I realized we were two people who had both been through the wringer. His story sounded a million times worse than mine, but I told him about my ex, about my cousins that died the same year, one of a blood-clot and another of Cancer, both well under 40. My godmother that died of Cancer later in the year. And I talked about my divorce.

"See, I think from what you just said, that there might be part of your story in mine," he said. "My ex-wife left and I had to go through all of that, wondering if I was man enough, trying to think what ways I failed. It was awful."

"There were just so many nights when I was on the bathroom floor, crying," I confessed.

"Curled up in the fetal position, right?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said, although really it had been more like being in a ball on my knees clutching the fibers of a red shag rug.

"See," he smiled, letting me know he had done the same, "and men aren't s'posed to do that."

For the first time in that moment I thought of the privilege of grieving. In my divorce I had hid the grieving from people, of course. I tried to function like a normal human. I went to work most days. I only cried in the bookshelves once or twice during computer lab duty. But I never felt like less of a woman for crying.

In this moment, it occurred to me that our society is really fucked up about grieving.

This man and I talked and he relayed how agonizing it was to deal with the legal system, like in the case of his daughter, when you are reeling from an unexpected loss.

"It's like, you walk outta there, and you ask yourself, what just happened? And you're angry. For like a whole day. You're just angry. And you take it out on the people around. And they have no idea."

I agreed whole-heartedly. When my split happened, not only was I reeling from the trauma of divorce, and reeling is really the only word for it, being led by your sadness in a whirling circle through the air pulled by your grief, your anguish, your hollow core, but I also had to learn the legalities of divorce on the fly, AND step up to an addict not pleased with the current situation.

"I watched my best friend turn into my worst enemy." I told the red-faced man.

In this moment I remembered a conversation with an old friend-- "One of the hardest things," I said to her, referring to the complicated way our divorce pulled at all of our mutual friendships, "is that no one knew what was happening. Nobody knew he was leaving pictures out from our wedding when it was my turn to stay in the house." I stopped, but I thought about the way he would also text me every night just as I was falling asleep. Messages of guilt. Pity. Love. The way he would be cruel when we met to discuss how we would proceed with the divorce. How he'd compliment me but then shame me. Blame me for caring only about money when we both knew it was the lies that drove me away. All of this in addition to the roller coaster of guilt I was putting myself through already.

I will always remember how a friend left a message on my phone after my ex decided not to move out of our house when I told him I wanted a divorce, forcing me to find my own place or exist in an impossible state of cohabitation.

"Hey Katie," she said over my phone, voice full of light air, casual. "Depending where you are and where you're staying, I thought you might want to carpool for Kat's birthday."

That voicemail sent me into a rage. Depending where I'm staying? Did she understand that I was homeless and still paying half the mortgage? That I went from being a woman to a child living on my parent's couch, or my friend's condo when she was out of town? Did she understand that there was a bag in my car full of clothing? That I showed up to teach high-schoolers pretending I had a stable roof over my head?

But how could she know? She was someone I used to see 2-3 times a week, but even so I had never shared with my friends what was really going on in my marriage. I had never shared that my ex looked at porn all of the time, probably every day, from the time I left for work until the time he left two hours later. This is only what I knew of his porn habits at the time. It didn't count the $300 cable bills each month, or the charges on his credit cards over the years. Or all the times he acted out while I was coaching or grading at a coffee shop. I didn't tell people my ex didn't want to sleep with me. I tried to figure it all out on my own. We continued to act like the perfect couple in front of our friends.

So why should I think she would suddenly be aware of the manipulation my ex put me through? Of the homelessness? The utter shock of having my life turned upside down?

***

I confronted my ex about his pornography addiction in June of '06. The lying had become too much. I was finding a slew of addresses hidden away in the back files of our computer and I was disturbed. One site was a database of any type of sex you could imagine, including things as "benign" as threesomes and blondes, but ranging to more explicit scenes with grandmothers and teens, peeping toms and rape scenes. Another site was a teen website-- Carrie Sweets. She offered birthday wishes to her most loyal supporters (the paying customers) and teased all of her "fans" by trying on new outfits, sucking on lollipops, and dancing in the corner of her bedroom. Based on our computer histories, my ex visited this site every day.

When I confronted my ex, he agreed that he had a problem. I gave him numbers for resources that might help. He nodded and said he'd look into it.

What hurt the worst about learning about his addiction, was learning about porn-addiction in general. I had never heard of such a thing. I had never thought porn could turn into an addiction. It was something I had protested at age 11 with my parents and fellow Catholic church parishioners when an "Adult" store came to our home town, but by college I knew it was something most boys had on the files of their computer. Some of my girl friends even got off on porn and watched it with their boyfriends or husbands.

I didn't know it could be an addiction.

And worse than that, all of the resources on the internet that I had found, save for a fairly straightforward website by the University of Minnesota's Center for Sexual Health, were religious websites urging me to be a good Christian wife, to believe the pornography had nothing to do with me. Urging me not to leave him, my marital partner.

"Fuck you," is what I thought when I read that. "You add up the hours your wife spends watching porn, compare it to a part-time job, and tell me it's not about your dick."

I was dealing with what you might call the "anger" stage of grief in this moment.

I couldn't stand that patriarchy in these websites. I couldn't stand the dismissal that was given to a woman's feelings. I couldn't help but believe that the men writing these sites would feel different if it was their wives who were bound by pornography addiction. NOW I believe that the pornography addiction had nothing to do with me personally, but THEN I felt hurt, betrayed, rejected, stupid, and ugly. And it hurt to hear a male voice tell me not to abandon my husband in this state. What did he know about it anyway?

***

The unfortunate thing now is I can't help but see how my own image of myself, my self-esteem, got tangled up in all of this.

I have never and will never look like a porn star. The girls in the computer videos had perfect hair and cute faces outlined in thick black eyeliner. They had impossibly long lashes and impossibly hard looking breasts. Their mouths were outlined and covered with a shiny coating that circled into a perfect "o." They were shaved and in stilettos all the time. They were eager and bouncy and sultry and coarse.

I am sweet and innocent and silly and even sexy at times. I wear eyeliner and mascara and even stilettos occasionally, but I will never look like a porn star, no matter how hard I try. And frankly, I don't want to try to look like a porn star. But even if I wanted to, I'd have a hard time converting my girl-next-door innocence into sexual prowess.

***

My biggest dreams in life are that I will high-five someone driving (slowly) from the opposite direction on the road; that I will be able to teach part-time, write part-time, and host fabulous dinner parties in the evening; that I will have a deck divided into three sections- screened office, outdoor office, and sunny lounge-chair central; and that I will no longer care so deeply about my appearance.

One of the things I hate most about myself is my hang-up about physical appearance. It's something I can't talk myself out of believing. I look at my online dating pictures and worry that now that I wear glasses all the time, my potential match won't like me. I see the cellulite dimples on the back of my thighs and decide I am un-marry-able. I can't pass a mirror without seeing something I hate.

***

When I was a freshman in college for the first couple months, this mirror problem affected me. I would look in a mirror and immediately see my flaws. As a result, I couldn't stop looking in mirrors and cursing the parts of me that I deemed flawed. There were mirrors in our study lounge on my floor freshman year.

One day a guy on my floor teased me about looking in the mirror. He was from the very small town of Albany, MN. After he caught me I blushed and he said, "Yeah, there was a really pretty girl back home who used to look at herself in the mirror all the time, too."

Apparently he thought I was pretty.

It's not a very likable position to complain about how men think you're attractive, but I will say that the drawback for me whenever anyone has complimented me has always been that I don't see it and that I live eternally in fear of when the magic will wear off and the man who once called me gorgeous will see all the things that I see: the cellulite, the bloated belly after eating, the occasional detestable hairs that materialize on my chin or my nipple, the snoring, the I'm-too-skinny, the I've-gained-too-much-weight, the face that doesn't seem as young as it once was.

I can't stop comparing myself to the cutest girl on facebook, or even to my own pictures of myself in the past. What I was then was cute and what I am now is not acceptable. It doesn't matter when I'm looking at pictures, or that pictures this year will be the ones I wish I looked like next year. This is always the thought: what I am is not enough.

"Have you worked on that with your therapist?" a co-worker and friend asked recently while we were jogging during some down-time on a work conference.

"We didn't exactly get there," I said. "That was more like the refining-stage and we were in the triage-stage."

***

Of course, being married to a porn addict did not improve my self-esteem complex.

But on the other hand, it may be that it's pushing me to deal with it. I grew up listening to my mom complain about her weight all the time, I remember when people stopped calling me "cute" and when it went from all the boys liking me in 2nd grade to only the weird kid liking me in 3rd grade (coincidentally, this was also the time when I got glasses). I worried that I wouldn't be able to kiss boys when I was wearing glasses in middle school. I believed brides didn't wear glasses, and I was reinforced in this theory when I had to take off my glasses to act the role of Laurie, bride-ultimate, in the musical "Oklahoma!" in 8th grade. Brides didn't wear glasses. Cow-girls didn't wear glasses.

Just before 9th grade I got contacts, but I also grew about 4 inches taller than I had been in 8th grade. My body didn't fit. I was a size 0 tall, practically an impossibility. Girls would harass me in the lunch line and ask how I could even walk on legs as skinny as mine.

I can remember only three time periods in my life when I felt confident about the way I looked. The first was any time before age 7. The second was a week camping in the Boundary Waters in norther Minnesota after 9th grade, when there were no mirrors to look at and the boys with us still flirted with me despite lack of make-up and showers. And the third was the latter half of my freshman year in college and the beginning of my sophomore year. I don't know why exactly, but I just suddenly realized I thought I looked good and any guy who didn't was missing out on his chance to be with me.

I don't know what happened to that woman. I'm sure the porn whittled against my confidence, and now that I'm dating again, I'm thrown once more into a state of uncertainty about what men think of me, but without the body I had when I was 18. It's not that I see no merit in myself, it's just that I feel uncertain about the way that I look, or more precisely, that any man would want to be with me based on the way I look.

***

This past weekend I stayed at a hostel in Bozeman, MT, and chatted with a French man named Jeff who was 29 and traveling with his father before reporting to Chicago to teach Utopian literature to college students at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He offered me a couple beers, we discussed 1984 and Orwell, I attempted to use the little French I remembered from high school, and before long, after heading out to the bars with our new friends from the hostel, this Frenchman developed a crush on me.

"But what do you like about me, really?" I asked as we were kissing in my private room later that night, before I kicked him out for the evening, and before things "got out of hand." He had just told me that he was surprised, he had never anticipated meeting anyone like me on his trip.

He ticked off a couple comments, saying he liked talking with me about books, he admired what I was doing, I looked gorgeous in a cowboy hat, I had been through tough times, and, he added "you're completely adorable."

"Not all the time," I responded, in a way that belied the truth of a few beers, "sometimes I snore."

He laughed at this remark and said it further proved my adorable-ness, but later I reflected it was sort of defensive comment. I get nervous with men because I don't believe they will accept my flaws. I want to offer a disclaimer on the first date: I snore, I have detestable hairs that pop up in unwanted areas, there's cellulite on the back of my thighs and it's bound to get worse, some day my boobs will be sitting next to my belly button. If you think you can handle that, then we can go on a second date.

I want men to see the worst before they start making declarations of affection.

***

This is funny to me because even though I married a porn-addict, he never said one negative thing about the way I looked. Furthermore, I never cared a bit how he looked.

He was not the type I was typically attracted to, to be honest. He was tall and skinny, I liked his broad shoulders, but he was not really muscular. In fact, when we got married he was probably 30 pounds overweight, had a belly, and the love-handles he's had his entire life. He had a great sense of style, delicate features, turquoise eyes, and I grew to love his height, but he was losing his hair, and didn't get haircuts regularly. He was pale. He wore glasses later in our marriage. He had blackheads on his back.

None of these things mattered. I can't think of one minute I wasn't attracted to him or one minute when I thought, this man is not good enough for me to want him in bed. On the contrary! I loved him, his body, his soft belly, his blackheads. It was a special delight of mine to pop his black heads while we lay in bed together.

So looks aren't that important to me. I mean, yes, there's a fundamental, requisite phase in which attraction is necessary (during this phase my ex was admittedly skinny, with great haircuts, and had exceptional taste in hats). But I never would have stopped loving him after that period just because he gained a few pounds, lost a few hairs, or grew hair in unwanted locations.

I don't know why standards for myself are different.

***

What I most hope for in this world (besides the office-deck, the high five, and the awesome work/dinner life) is that any daughters I have will not question their value based on their looks, and moreover, that they will not have me modeling self-destructive, hostile behavior about my own looks.

***

I have been trying something on this vacation out west. I have been avoiding make-up. And, when I pass mirrors, I look in them and say, "Maybe this is beautiful."

The Frenchman seemed to enjoy the make-up free version of myself, but it's not him that I'm worried about--it's me.

I had a silly fantasy when I was 15 or so that I would some day go to the laundromat looking totally disgusting and meet a man there who would tell me I was beautiful, that I was perfect just the way I was. We, of course, would live happily ever after.

Now I realize I don't need a man to fulfill this fantasy, in fact, a man never CAN fulfill this fantasy. What I need is for me to say I'm beautiful, that I'm perfect just the way I am... flawed, imperfect, and dotted with cellulite dimples.

***

I don't know how to get to this new realization, but perhaps the simple act of wanting it to be true will set the wheels in motion, moving the right direction.

***

When my ex and I talked about my his addiction, in June of 'o6, I actually had drawn out a list of pros and cons to our relationship. I knew we would be fine. I told him I loved him.

Two months later, I found out about the credit card debt while sitting in a mortgage lenders office.

"And of course, there's this 14,000 debt on this credit card," he said.

"Uh, no," I responded. "I didn't know about that."

We both paused and it was clear I had entered dark waters. The mortgage broker recovered in a manner that now makes me delete his group emails that show up in my inbox: "Oh, well, here's the number you can call to clear up any confusion." And he continued to tell me how much we could borrow towards our new home.

So there were issues beyond image. There were financial issues, issues with lying. Throughout the course of the fall of '06 and the spring of '07 we would move into a new home, and I would ask my ex if he was still looking at porn.

"No, baby," he would say, "I saw the look in your eye and I had to quit."

Or he'd get mad at me for asking in the first place, lashing at me with defensive hostility.

When I found another $1200 cable bill the first weekend of August, 07, I realized my gut was right. He was still lying. WE could not change if he could not help but lie about his addiction.

A week later I said I wanted a divorce.

***

"Well," I paused on the deck, turning to the red-faced man. "My story is a little different in some ways to yours," I said. "My ex was an addict, to pornography, but I think a lot of the elements are really the same. I went through that too, the rejection, wondering if I was good enough..."

He nodded and pulled a chair up to my table. Before the waitress could take away the remaining food on my plate, I was telling him about the whole thing.

"And, do you think he's doing better?" he asked me. "I mean, obviously you are. Or you wouldn't be doing all the wonderful things you're doing. (I loved the red-faced man for this.) But do you think he took advantage of this and changed?"

"I don't know," I responded. "But I don't think so. I did A LOT of work during our separation. I went to COSA..."

He looked at me.

"Codependents of Sex Addicts."

He nodded

"And I went to my own therapist once a week, and the two of us even saw a therapist to work through the divorce."

This part of my life that I usually keep intensely private came tumbling out of me. I was telling this man about COSA, about how I had slunk into the first meeting I attended, so ashamed, and thinking, how the fuck did this happen? How could I possibly be going to a meeting for co-dependents of SEX ADDICTS??! It felt so sordid. Embarrassing. Impossible.

But what I learned at that meeting is that there were amazing women going through the exact same thing as me, whether the sex addiction took the form of pornography, or paid escorts, or phone sex, or multiple affairs, or even child abuse. Amazing women married men who used sex to soothe the aching rage in their bones. Women like Elan Woods and Sandra Bullock. Women like me.

What I love about COSA and what I have learned about myself in being "a co-dependent" is that there are no absolutes. One of the promises in the program says "No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others." Nothing is absolute. There are degrees. There is a scale. Maybe I am a co-dependent, but only I know where that places me on the scale.

A codependent enables an addict. She puts others' needs ahead of her own. She might lie or cover up her spouse's issues. She might retaliate against her spouse through emotional manipulation, through guilt trips. She might be the bitter counter-part to the fun-loving addict who presents only his best face to the world. But there is a scale and there are qualities that merit consideration.

For example, typically co-dependents feel a great deal of compassion for someone. In my mind, genuine compassion is an extraordinary quality. It is good to be compassionate for people. It makes me a better teacher. However, the typical co-dependent ultimately lets this compassion turn into enabling. Kindness out of fear or shame are acts of codependency. When I let my 8 year-old brother choose Chuck E. Cheese for MY 16th family birthday party, this was an act of codependency; I put his needs for fun above my need to celebrate in a grown-up way.

I know I have a lot of compassion for people. I LOVE that I have compassion for people. What I do now is be careful that my compassion does not overrule my own needs. I watch out for my blind-spots.

There is a scale for every behavior.

I don't know how far down the scale my ex went. I know there was a lot of money being spent each month on porn. I know he lied to me nearly every day. I know he stopped wanting to have sex with me. I know unlisted number frequently showed up on our caller id. I know he developed a strong interest in running and going to the gym. Beyond this, I don't know where he was on that scale of sexual addiction.

I also know that addiction of any kind stems from pain. An addict turns to a source to soothe pain, and I know my husband had plenty of this growing up in his family, despite how kind his mother and stepfather were. I won't go into all of his details, the secrets he shared with me in confidentiality, but what is commonly known is that his biological father disappeared with no warning during his senior year, skipped every basketball game, skipped state, skipped graduation, skipped acceptance letters to a D2 school, and in my opinion, this was the least of his father-deficient offenses. In fact, in my opinion, this was almost a blessing.

I think that's part of why I fell for my ex. That was my compassion leading me to ignore certain issues, like my ex's silence when his father died a torturous death from cancer. Well-intentioned ladies from the small college town where his biological father ran a pizza shop and was beloved by the kids at the schools, would call our house and leave guilt-ridden messages for my ex. He never responded to them. We visited his dad. His dad mocked my ex and belittled him in front of me while he was dying. And then he died.

And my ex could never talk about this.

***

Years later, when I discovered the credit card bills were not just for my ring and college living expenses (as my ex had told me) I found out that there were pornography charges each month, but that they were highest around the anniversary of his father's death, which happened only two weeks before our first anniversary.

***

Once when I tried very hard to pry for more details, beyond what I knew about the emotional abuse my ex had suffered from his dad, I asked him if he had ever talked about the whole situation with his mom.

"No," he replied, trying to end the discussion.

"Not even now?" I asked, "now that he's gone?"

"No," he ended the conversation. "Sometimes it's best to let the dead stay dead."

***

This is what I mean about how our society is fucked up about grieving. The red-faced man felt guilt and insecurity about grieving, like he wasn't a man. I hid my griefs from my friends throughout the course of my marriage. My ex turned to sex, or pornography, as an adolescent to cope with his splintering family and the pressures he felt to win approval from his dad (I think).

If we could all just be sad when we need to, maybe these problems wouldn't get so big.

***

Addiction can happen to anyone. I will never be so naive as I was when I was in my early 20's as to think that what happens in the past stays in the past. It doesn't. We all have our issues to work out. Issues that can turn into opportunity or disease.

I just hope I have a chance to work all the way through my issues, that I can look happily at myself in the mirror, before I have children of my own.

***

The red-faced man and I became fast friends at the Geo Duck bar. I felt his loss. He felt mine. We traded book titles and wished each other luck.

He asked if I was publishing any of my material or sending it to magazines.

"No," I said, "I want to make sure I really like my material before I send it out. I've really just been working on my craft for the last few years, trying to get it right."

"The reason I ask," he said, "is that some of that stuff can really be helpful, you know, to read other people's stories, even if your craft isn't perfect."

He paused and looked at me, wiping his mouth, "It's the emotion that's really powerful. That's what counts."

Ok, I thought. Here goes. How can I set my compass to anything else?

And so it goes... (an homage to JT)

2010-07-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

It is with some remorse that I'm writing this blog.

The circumstances are happy. I just had $5 mussels at my favorite place to write and Paula Abdul's "Cold-Hearted Snake" is playing in the air. There is a $4 glass of Sauvignon Blanc by my side and a kindly Somali math teacher who keeps trying to talk to me at the next table over. Not a bad evening as far as evenings go.

However, what was supposed to happen this evening was a date with the construction worker I wrote about two blogs ago. The one who was adorable and sweet and the opposite of a slimy banker I met through e-harmony.

Unfortunately, he is dropping the ball.

Despite the fact that he planned the movie night, and that he has been texting and calling me reliably and calling me baby and honey, I have a very ominous feeling that since nearly two weeks have passed since we hooked up, this movie night might not happen after all.

The problem isn't that I think he's rejecting me. The problem is, I'm feeling disappointed.

There may be any number of reasons he's dropping the ball, including the fact that he's been doing manual labor for 12 hours at a time in July heat and humidity, but at the end of the day, I'm not making excuses for him. Time will tell, I suppose, but at this particular time, I'm feeling disappointed.

What is just a little bit silly is that while I am certainly disappointed because of the plain and simple fact that I'm attracted to this man and would like to see what would happen on a second and third date, the main reason I'm disappointed is that it's just so anti-climatic. It doesn't make for a good blog. I was all set to thrill my audience (of four) with the wonderful details of a wonderful night with a wonderful guy, sort of the end-cap to a journey.

I was ready for my Eat-Pray-Love moment.

The beauty of the narrative arc. Coming full circle. Leaving one relationship, surviving the trauma, pulling myself out of the wreckage, and then-- poof! Adorable blue-eyed boyfriend at the end of the rainbow.

Damn.

Maybe only Elizabeth Gilbert is entitled to those endings.

But now Will Smith is singing Summertime, and there's a drop of wine left in my glass, so I guess I cannot complain too much. I can only keep going.

Maybe the truth is that whether there's a relationship or not, there are still questions, there is still uncertainty. Whether this man and I slid into a relationship or apart from each other and back into dating outer-space, we would both still have questions and issues and worries and needs and we would have to negotiate all those road bumps if we were together, just as we still have to negotiate them on our own. Life doesn't have happy endings. Life keeps going. And thank God that it does, if we're lucky.

A friend of mine posted on facebook that while he was going camping in the Boundary Waters but could not help thinking of a friend, a high school alum of mine whose 10-month daughter is battling for her life against a blood infection. He asked that we all "appreciate every breath we take and pray for her." Who am I to deny that request?

The truth is life is complicated. Life is beautiful. The truth is two servers are dancing to "Dance, Baby, Dance" David Bowie's song from the Labyrinth. The truth is I'm lucky to be here. Each breath is a gift.

There will be more dating adventures. There will be more stories. There might be some resolution, but there won't be happy endings. If I'm lucky, there are just more and more happy beginnings, happy moments, and happy dancing to silly songs playing on the radio in my favorite place to write.

Painting Lemons Gold

2010-07-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

A list of dreams:

1. To high-five someone driving a car while driving my own car (slowly) in the opposite direction.

2. To own a convertible.

3. To teach part time, write part time, and host fabulous dinner parties in the evenings.

4. To one day be able to pay someone else to do my laundry.

5. To drive across the country on my own.

It is a great honor for me to share with you that I have recently made one of those dreams come true and am working on my second.

This weekend, I went back to my hometown, Fridley, Minnesota, a town that made into the top three in Minnesota for underage illegal alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use when I graduated back in 1996. I never loved my hometown in high school. There was a nasty vein of redneck racism that ran through the school for a year. Clothing, status, and popularity were as important there as they were at any school, and while I was voted Most Friendly my senior year (that's right, the Friendliest Fridlian), I still felt isolated and excluded most of the time. On the fringe of belonging to many groups, but still feeling lonely a good deal of the time. I had to work through my own teen angst and disliking my hometown fit in nicely with this mode of existence.

Now, however, I feel a certain sense of pride for my hometown. It's so much easier in hindsight to love and understand the complicating factors causing me to feel isolated but act outgoing, Kris G to walk around like a bad-ass with a chip on his shoulder, Erik W to be on a compendium of chemicals during art class, the "rat-pack" putting on a hyper-masculine appearance at all sporting events, sitting in the front row, and mocking poor little color guard performers who drop their rifles during the half-time show of the basketball game (me). All of these things make sense in hind sight.

In a way, I feel a certain amount of love for even the businesses in the area: Dave's Sport Shop, Miller Funeral Home (with its fluorescent pink neon cross hailing as a beacon from Hwy. 65, the highway that splits a shallow man-made lake into two boggy, weedy ponds), Biff's bar, and Friendly Chevrolet.

Ironically, I went to Friendly Chevrolet this weekend to scope out a convertible. I test drove a '95 Chrysler Sebring with a missing bumper. It was not my dream car. My dream car was written on a piece of paper in my purse: 4 door, V6, under $16,000, relatively new, front wheel drive. Turns out there was a two-door on the lot.

I tried to play it cool with the salesman, but he had my number. I saw the car and immediately thought of the Renee Zellwegger line from Jerry McGuire: You had me at Hello. You had me at hello.

I did manage to hold off on buying the car immediately however, and came back a whole two days later, met with their trade-in guy, who was surprisingly a Fridley alum, one who had graduated a couple years before me, a wrestler, I think, and had married his high school sweetheart.

"Yeah, we just bought a house out in Ramsey," he said, a suburb 20 minutes north of Fridley. "It's not Fridley, but we were able to get a pretty nice house for the money. Now's the time to buy."

Turns out it was the time for me to buy, too, though a much more impractical purchase.

The last thing I pulled out of my '01 Nissan Sentra was a sticker from one of my favorite white rappers, part of a group called Atmosphere. One of his albums came out in 'o8 and I still had the sticker from the packaging. It was a lemon and his album title scrolled across the back: "When life gives you lemons, you paint that shit gold."

I took the sticker with me. In '08 I was a wounded recent divorcee. I couldn't imagine making the best of the lemonade served to me. But I liked the saying--you were not simply "making lemonade", you were Painting that Shit GOLD. Emphasis on the verb. Emphasis on the noun. Capitalize the adjective. It seemed like such an active reaction to a difficult situation. It wasn't someone making do or trying to get by, it was someone asserting themselves, claiming a new version of the original. A saying to keep for the next car. My brand-new (one-year used) convertible.

In Minnesota, there are a million reasons not to own a convertible, especially if you are a teacher. I pulled up that day to my brother's house and he immediately teased me by saying, "Wow! They must pay teachers a lot more in the Robbinsdale district."

My mom began questioning me on where I'd park this car (since I didn't have a covered garage) and I could see her mentally observing the two doors and thinking that there was no room for babies in that car.

For me, though, driving the car was like being let in on secret. And the secret is this: one life--do it up.

It occurs to me that it's not so hard to have the life of my dreams. What is hard is deciding to make it the life of my dreams.

I have made a lot of decisions that the pragmatic folk in my life cannot comprehend. I took a year off of work to go back to school. I travelled to Europe on a credit card. I bought a convertible. I'm driving across the country alone and renting a cottage for myself for a week. A lot of people, people with IRA certificates, mortgages, and savings accounts, think that I'm being frivolous. They think I'm wasting my money or recklessly throwing it away.

I think I'm doing what I need to do to make this life work.

It's a different type of risk-management, one no banker would invest in, but here's the thing: I lived my life by the rules for 30 years. I got married, bought a home, sold it, bought a bigger home, saved money to buy furniture, gave up little indulgences to finance my husband's car, worked as a coach even though the hours pulled me away from my dream of being a writer. And what happened? It all disappeared. Any equity evaporated. The furniture sold on Craig's list for a fraction of the cost. I took on debt from a house sold in a floundering market. I keep putting money towards a retirement plan, but would I want to stop working? Not if working means teaching part time, writing part time, and hosting fabulous dinner parties in the evening. I think I can make my life what I want it to be. And so, with just a trace of guilt, I bought a new car, the one of my dreams.

"Fuck that," said my friend D when I told him people were questioning my judgement on buying a convertible, "if it's not their money they can't say shit."

We were drinking Jeremiah Weed and lemonade on his roof on Sunday afternoon, surveying the skyline of Minneapolis from atop his 7 floor building of sleek and trendy condos, discussing vocabulary lessons we would use next year, the men we had been trying to date all summer, softball, my car, among other topics, and swearing in a way that is delicious for teachers on summer break.

I couldn't put it better myself. Fuck that. One life.

Harmonizing...

2010-07-12T19:58:00.000-07:00

This weekend turned out to be pretty interesting in terms of dates.

Eharmony-2 was nice but not dazzling. I met the crawfish-farmer downtown where he worked. I call him the crawfish-farmer because he attended a crawfish boil over the 4th of July and was raised on a dairy farm.

"He's a boob man," said my friend Jay while I was at a happy hour on Thursday with him, my friend Amber, and his partner Brian.

"What?" I asked. "Because of the udders?"

"Yep," he said. "It's just programmed. He can't help it."

"Well," I replied, laughing. "He's probably going to be disappointed then."

Disregarding the ominous premonition, I spent an hour or so getting ready for the date. I showered and primped, straightened my hair, and put on a cute orange v-neck dress (over my A-cup boobs), the turquoise-stone-and silver necklace my mother had bought me while on a cruise, and some cute peep-toe snakeskin heels I bought for ten bucks at Marshalls. I arrived 15 minutes early. Parked in a ramp. Bought my first beer. And after he arrived chatted for a couple hours while he drank three black-and-tans and bought me a Finnegans. I graciously thanked him for the beer and he said sure, it was fair. I had driven to meet him and parked, and so it made sense.

As it turned out, the crawfish-farmer was interesting and in fact, the nephew of one of my mother's best friends.

"Did she go to the wedding in San Antonio?" he asked about my mom, referring to his aunt's son's wedding.

"Yes," I said. "In fact, she did."

"Oh yeah," he said. "I heard the whole story, how [my aunt] moved back and was reacquainted with her high school friends. I saw some old ladies dancing at the reception and everyone was wondering who they were."

It was not a good sign that he called my mother an old lady, especially when I love the fact that she, at 60, still loves to dance, but the fact that he actually said the word boobs twice in our two hours and looked at mine about four or five times, made me think he might not be the man I next want to marry.

Oh well. It wasn't too bad. He was interesting and fun to talk to other than that.

The next date seemed more promising. Eharmony 3 was a man who loved traveling and working out and spending time with friends. He suggested we meet for brunch on Saturday, and I was optimistic that perhaps it was because he realized from my profile that brunch was one of my favorite hobbies.

I spent an hour or so getting ready. Showered and primped, straightened my hair, and put on a short denim sun dress and a pair of silver, low-wedge sandals. I walked three blocks to the restaurant where we were meeting and grabbed a spot on the roof.

"Running late," he said in a text. "Traffic on 94 sucks."

I didn't worry. I looked at menu and asked for a water.

A group of people arrived and sat at the table near me. An adorable blond man with thick muscles, short blond hair, and pointy teeth turned to me, "You look lonely," he said. "Why don't you come join us?"

"Oh, I'm meeting someone," I smiled.

"Well, we have two chairs," said his friend, fair-skinned and cute, with a mop of tousled brown hair and just a few freckles on his nose.

"Are you meeting a guy or a girl?" asked the first guy. And he scoffed when I admitted I was meeting a guy.

I laughed and we chatted. They were from Oklahoma. I asked how they were enjoying the city of Minneapolis and they told me they were scared of the sushi and going to a concert.

"At a church!" said Oklahoma #1.

"The Basilica Block Party?" I asked. "Fun! I wish I was going."

"Look," said OK#1 a few minutes later, "I think you should just come join us. Obviously, this guy isn't any sort of a gentleman if he's late."

"Oh," I excused my date, "he's coming. He's been texting me the whole time."

And eharmony-3 did show up. He was 20 minutes late. He was also hungover. He joined me in ordering a $8-bloody mary, but he said he wasn't going to eat. He had already eaten at the hotel this morning.

I nibbled my chilaquiles, feeling silly eating in front of him alone, and we talked. He told me, from behind his Ray Ban sunglasses, about his job, how enjoyed banking and "working with the scum of the earth" by arranging the loans used by car dealerships. Then he talked about how he'd love to have a house on Lake of the Isles or Lake Harriet, adding that he had always thought about getting a cabin but figured the upkeep made it a poor investment.

The check came and after a few minutes I pulled out my wallet. "Well, here," he said. "Let me put this towards it." And he pulled a ten-spot out of his Coach wallet.

"Put the ten towards the bill and the rest on the card," he said, handing the waitress the check.

"Did she just take the bill?" asked a woman at the table near us when the waitress returned and put the check on the table.

The whole table was silent as I picked up the tab and signed my name. OK #2 turned to me and looked me straight in the eye from under his messy brown hair. I blushed and looked down as I signed my name.

I knew what he meant.

I walked away from the date feeling irritated. I had put my best foot forward and he had bombed. I decided in that moment I could never marry a man who didn't buy the first drink. Really how much does a man have to give if he can't make a bit more effort, show up on time, and buy a lady one drink. Eharmony 3 had said in his profile that he didn't want a woman who wanted to be taken care of, but to me this didn't exclude common courtesy. Especially if he picked the place and the time and talked status and pulled bills out of a designer label wallet. At least toss in a $20, even if you don't want to buy the meal. I started to think chivalry was dead. Men didn't care. But the good news was neither did I. Sure that man doesn't want to take care of a woman, but the truth is I don't need him to do so. I'm not looking for a man to pay my way; I'm looking for a partner who is considerate and kind, like I would be to him. What did I need with this guy? Why should I bother to impress him or hope he would call again?

He did call, or at least text, telling me it was nice to meet me and to let him know if I was "out and about" next week. I said that sounded good, but secretly realized I would not be letting him know if I "was out and about."

I wore the date dress out later that Saturday night. I decided I needed to erase the stench of the bad date from its fabric. I added silver heels, my silver bracelet, and new flower ring to my outfit and took it out to my favorite local spot to celebrate my favorite local bartender's two-year anniversary.

One drink turned into several more and before I knew it I was sitting with three other regulars, my friend Amber, and three cooks from the restaurant in an apartment nearby, waiting for our favorite bartender to show up and playing dominoes. I was sitting next to a man I have been thinking was cute for the last two years, and he had just admitted he had always had a little bit of a crush on me.

I tried to play dominoes and he tried to play footsie. I ended up being much better at footsie than dominoes and he ended up coming home with me.

The next day this blue-eyed construction worker surprised me by making the bed and cuddling and holding my hand and telling me he liked the pictures in my apartment and smiling a lot and texting me later in the day to wish me luck in my soccer game, after I drove him home around 2 p.m.

Earlier, I lay curled up in arms that morning and the what-ifs and oh-dears started running through my head. I was surprised by the events, not unpleasantly, but worried. What would happen next? What was I supposed to do? Was this a hook-up or the start of something more? And would I even want something more? And on and on and on until a little voice in my head said Stop. Just stop. Enjoy this moment. Enjoy being an adult being affectionate with another adult who is happy to be spending time with you. Stop worrying. You were safe and smart about your actions. Enjoy the moment. Who cares what chapter comes next. You are strong and you know what you want and you will be ok. And even if he doesn't ever want to hang out again, you know he respects you.

Chivalry isn't about making financial gestures. It's courtesy. It's making beds and invitations. It's being interested in her life. It's giving him a ride. Offering food and shampoo, if that's what's needed. My ex-husband was great at courtesy. It was just that his addiction prevented him from intimacy. I was good at courtesy, too, but I don't think I knew intimacy, yet. My next husband will be good both at courtesy and intimacy, and so will I.

Life is interesting. I don't feel bad about my choices Saturday. I would much rather be with the considerate construction worker than the slimy banker, even if it was just for a night.

But my hunch is it wasn't. He already asked if I was up for a movie night later in the week. :)

Book Title

2010-07-12T19:54:00.000-07:00

Bird in Flight

Totems

2010-07-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a little self-conscious about my writing, so indulge me while I ramble for a few paragraphs trying to find my string. Not that anyone is really reading this blog, but it helps me to think so. To think of an audience.

I am a woman who likes totems. Security items that reassure me throughout the day. My perfume is one. Sometimes I even carry it with me in my purse. Not a day goes by when I don't wear it, even if I'm just doing laundry and staying home.

A silver bracelet I bought for myself during my 5th anniversary to a husband I no longer lived with is another. It reads "What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us." I wear this bracelet like Wonder Woman's golden cuffs, a visible reminder throughout the day that I am ok. That everything will someday be better. I bought this bracelet without imagining how healing could happen, and now, two-and-a-half years later, I'm startled to see how far I've come.

As proof of the healing, I had a surprise encounter with ex. It was Saturday at 4 p.m. and it was steamy and muggy. Who goes running at the hottest part of the day? Me, for one. My ex, for another. I saw him first and was surprised, but at the same time felt it was sort of expected. He's bound to turn up and I've stopped having the anxiety I felt at these surprise encounters. My bowels no longer feel like they are going to drop out of my body, my hands have stopped shaking, I neither want to strike up a conversation nor feel the need to avoid him. I raised my hand in a casual wave. He shook his head in double-take recognition and said, "Oh, Hey Kate."

The whole thing was so casual I could hardly believe it happened. Even more surprising, I felt no anger. No anger for the broken trust, the loss of house and family and identity, the financial strain, the emotional trauma. In fact, I felt like the lucky one. Good luck, I thought, a little sadly, my book will be on the shelves in two years.

Writing about my ex is a tricky subject. I am not trying to maliciously hurt him or ruin his good name, but at the same time, I have a right to explain my experiences. I have a right to be honest about the truth. And I have no obligation to keep shameful secrets to enable an addiction.

Shawn isn't a bad guy. In fact, I was telling a friend over sushi after my second e-harmony date, just how great he was as a partner and husband. He was the good boyfriend, the one who called even more than expected, who treated me at least on our first few dates, who was kind and in a way dazzled by my capability. He kept the house clean, he did laundry, we had fun together, he made me pizza when I had to work late for conferences. He told me to sleep in during the summer, recognizing I had earned it during the school year.

It really wasn't a bad relationship, except for the lying, lack of intimacy, financial secrets, and, of course, all that porn.

But my point, is that I feel like I need to share both stories. I'm not out to get this man. I recognize all his beautiful flaws and hopeless perfections.

Passing him running around the lake was like noticing a wound was suddenly no longer stinging and tender, like a solid scab had closed the painful opening, and it was almost an interesting observation, like running my finger over the brown bumps on my knee when I was seven that covered the scrape I had gotten a week before from falling off my bike.

Another totem I wear today is a ring a friend gave me for my birthday. I journeyed out of my city to the suburb of Maple Grove where we drank mojitos on her deck and she and her husband made me dinner and sang Happy Birthday over a candlelit chocolate cake (complete with jazz hand motions). The ring is a large silver flower with 16 little sparkling jewels in the center. I love it because it reminds me I am loved.

I love it because I feel myself blossoming.

Down My Street

2010-07-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

Tonight I returned home from a sushi dinner with a friend on an outdoor patio near the lake by our apartments. She had graciously agreed to join me despite having already eaten in order to keep me company while I satiated my hunger that had been growing all afternoon. I had been on an eharmony happy hour with Jason, the crawfish-boil attendee who also runs marathons and was raised on a dairy farm. The date had been fun, but I was starving, and so little mattered until half a spicy tuna girl roll and half of a Temptation roll were lined up in my belly.

After the hunger waned and the sunlight fell, I dropped my friend back home at her apartment, and I picked up my dog from my own for a quick 9:30 stroll around the neighborhood, I began to think of things other than food and my recent date. I began to notice the world around me, the perfect July nighttime air, minus the humidity of the earlier part of the week. Nearly everyone else in my neighborhood, or at least everyone under age 40, had noticed the same gorgeous nighttime quality and were taking advantage of the weather in groups or pairs, or even alone on a bike.

My apartment sits across a busy street from a coffee shop. The streets behind this coffee shop wander towards a lake, and along the road are 80 year-old homes with yards, some lacking grass in lieu of sustainable indigenous plants and flowers. One home I pass daily has a delicate little arrangement of toy cars, plastic dinosaurs, and today I noticed a plastic hedgehog head placed strategically among the flowers. There are no children at this home, but I have often seen one of the two women who live there working diligently on her yard. My section of this part of the city is four blocks away from the action, the Urban Outfitters and Victoria Secret, the Famous Dave's that hosts live blues and swing dancing, L.A. Fitness, the Aveda Salon, the restaurants il gatto and Chino Latino. I often walk the four blocks towards the fun with my dog and then back, taking in the urban art on the way that's filled with irony and wit. Some graffiti bandits have sprayed tarantulas randomly over the sidewalks. Clever artists have added the words "Drop & Roll" to a stop sign. It is my belief that these same artists also added the words "Don't" and "Believing" to the stop sign down the block in the same thick black marker that looks like wet paint. This stop sign is the whole four blocks away from the giant sea mammal spray painted on a utility box above the smeary words "Oh! The manatee!"

So, it did not surprise me that in this neighborhood, I passed a group of urban hipsters standing on the sidewalk outside a rented home waiting for a cab. It also didn't surprise me that they began singing "Livin' on a Prayer" by Jon BonJovi at the top of their lungs. My dog did not approve and began huffing and snorting like an old man, which is what he does when he knows he will be scolded for barking but he wants to show his disapproval anyway. I, on the other hand, chuckled. In fact, I was tempted to hum a few bars myself, this being one of my absolute favorite karaoke songs.

I restrained myself and walked away from the karaoke group, and I began to think about karaoke. The most recent of my karaoke escapades involved a denim dress (the one I am planning to wear tomorrow for eharmony date #3), an old bus filled with vinyl seating and fluorescent lights, and a tribute to lovers of blue-eyeshadow everywhere: "Hit Me with Your Best Shot," by Pat Benatar.

I was attending a birthday party for a woman I adore who was turning 30, but she was really the only person I knew. While I love karaoke, I was not sure that I'd be able to sing on a bus full of strangers at 11:00 in the morning.

We actually did not board the bus until 11:30, though, in part because the birthday girl's sister, let's call her Kristi, was outside the apartment talking on her cell phone in her car.

"So, I think Kristi's going to ask you some questions later," said my friend after I hugged her a Happy Birthday.

"Of course," I said, knowing that Kristi, the mother of a three year-old and a on year-old, had found out a few weeks ago that her husband had been having an affair with one of their friends. Her life was upended, he wouldn't stop seeing the other woman, and now she was facing a divorce.

"Right now she doesn't want anything," my friend said. "She wants him to keep it all because she doesn't want anything to remind her of their lives together." I knew what she meant, and I knew how I felt when I left my ex, and how Kristi was probably feeling the same way.

I knew I'd be happy to talk to Kristi, to sympathize, to share my story, and when she got on the bus, this strawberry-blond 35 year-old mother of two. A woman wearing a denim dress with a heart-shaped neckline and an A-line skirt, and that matched her round-wide blue eyes. I liked her immediately. "I'm Katie," I said, looking at her to see if the name clicked, "I work with your sister." Recognition showed in her eyes, and I knew we'd probably chat later, after a couple drinks.

After an hour on the bus (plus a mimosa and a bloody mary), I did get up the courage to sing in front of a bus full of strangers. Part of me was doing it because I love karaoke, and another part was just sheer stubbornness not to let my anxiety stop me from doing something fun, but as I started to sing Pat Benatar's song, the one I had chosen on a whim because "Livin' on a Prayer" wasn't on the bus's playlist, I started to feel something more.

Suddenly I was really believing the words.

"You come on with your c'mon's; you don't fight fair. That's ok, see if I care. Knock me down, it's all in vain, I get right back on my feet again. C'mon- hit me with your best shot!"

I started shaking my hips a little, making a pouty face, shimmying my shoulders, and I gave those lyrics my best-throaty-blue impersonation (the one that got me a slightly-better-than-chorus role in my middle-school's production of "Annie" back in 6th grade). Suddenly I just wanted so badly for Kristi to know that you do recover. That at some point you smile and it doesn't feel forced. That you do get back on your feet again, and you sometimes even sing loudly for a bus full of people you don't even know.

Later Kristi and I would talk and I would feel my eyes welling up with tears for this beautiful woman and wanting somehow to make it so she wouldn't have to go through the experience.

But even more badly, I wanted her to understand that my divorce was the worst, but also the best thing to ever happen to me.

****

This is what I was thinking about while walking my dog through my neighborhood, watching a black bat move like a cursor across the story of the sky.

Sorting through the Muck

2010-07-06T20:22:00.000-07:00

As I was talking with a friend in the writing program, I was telling her all about how there are so many things I DON'T want to write about anymore. The list goes like this:

1) My divorce

2) Being married to a sex addict

3) Being sad about my divorce

4) Being confused about being married to a sex addict

5) Shawn

6) Sex

7) My sexual experiences

8) My anger, my sadness, my grief

9) My experiences with harassment

10)Loneliness

11) My divorce

12) Being married to a sex addict

I think this is fair. I've been pretty wounded for a couple years, and I think my body is ready to heal. Ready to forget. Ready to bury the past.

For some reason I feel like I should be over this loss. I should move on from this awful topic of divorce. I sense my family, my friends, the men I've been on dates with, and even my own pragmatic self urging me on to the future, leaving my experiences in the past, in the silence.

But, the true version of myself, the writer, the thinker, the optimist within, knows I must worry this subject into extinction. I feel like part of what pulled me into a relationship with a nice man who had an addiction, were some of my own blind spots. We matched like puzzle pieces fitting together. He wanted a woman who wasn't aggressive, wouldn't push for intimacy or even sex. I wanted a man who felt safe, who wouldn't pressure me to have sex, who would treat me politely and not get into fights. Ultimately, though, maybe he sensed I'd eventually hold the line, force him to confront his addiction, at least for the first time. Maybe I sensed he'd force me to assert myself, to set boundaries, to put my own needs first for once.

Personality traits are a two-headed coin. I love that I am compassionate, but the flip side of that is that if I'm not careful, I put others' needs ahead of my own, that I rely on others to take care of me.

Here is a silly example of what I mean:

When I was turned 16 my family let me choose where we were going for dinner to celebrate. My youngest brother who was 7 at the time desperately wanted to go to Chuck E. Cheese. So, for my sweet 16, we went to Chuck E. Cheese.

I don't really remember the experience, but I wouldn't be surprised if I felt sorry for myself after the meal. I was relying on someone else, my mom or dad, to step in and say that Chuck E. Cheese was a ridiculous choice for a 16th birthday.

Compassion. Duty. Fear. Shame. These are the buttons that have pushed me to be fake-nice at times.

Now I love that I can be genuinely compassionate, and I'm aware of whether I'm acting in a genuine manner or because I'm trying to do the right thing, be the good daughter, the good big sister, the good wife, the good teacher. I'm aware when I'm being kind because I'm afraid I won't be accepted.

Truly, I am a genuinely kind person. I don't think I'm fake very often. I think I used to be scared into trying to woo people to accept me, into being a pleaser, but I think I'm pretty good at curtailing that behavior now.

Here is an example:

I set a goal to greet all of my students when they walked in the door this school year. Not because I wanted them to like me, or because I thought it would make me a good teacher, but because I wanted to respect the light within each one of them, whether that light was shaded by the pain of adolescence or not. It sounds corny, but in yoga, the saying "Namaste" means the light within me recognizes and honors the light within you. I love this saying. I try to bring that attitude to my meetings with people, and especially my students. This doesn't mean I don't discipline students or set boundaries, but I try to see them as whole people, flawed and perfect, as I do so. As Plato said, "Be kind to everyone, for we are all fighting a great battle."

This afternoon I took a nap and I dreamed of my ex-husband. I was trying to pick out an outfit and we were both staying at my parents' house at 6275 Kerry Lane. He kept following me around, trying to see me naked, asking me to pick out his outfit. It was very strange. And disturbing. I remember feeling like I just wanted to be away from him.

Then he asked me if I had ever even loved him.

My heart broke again. I tried to explain, yet again. I tried to tell him how much I had loved him, how much I had put into our relationship, how I wanted more than anything for it all to work.

But he started to get "slippery" and I knew I had to leave again. Slippery is a term often used in recovery programs for codependents of addicts. It's recognizing this sort of manipulative and deceptive line of reasoning that turns black and white concepts gray. It's Shawn using guilt, logic, sympathy, and cruelty to coerce me into staying with him in our sad marriage. It's a baffling place to be as the partner to an addict, I would get so confused in our arguments. I would forget things and get lost in his reasoning.

In any case, even in my dream, I left again.

I think I dreamt about him because I've been bracing myself for the fact that he is going to get married again to a woman that is not me. In my dark moments I wonder if maybe I was the problem in the relationship. If he could truly be happy with the girlfriend he's been living with for over a year (as I've heard from others). I wonder if I dreamed the whole thing, the porn addiction, the sadness, the loneliness. Maybe I was the problem after all.

But I have the credit card statements. I have all of my journal entries. In my heart I know he is not in recovery. I remind myself I was with him for 5 and a half years before I really started to question the slight pulling away I had sort of been feeling for a year.

Sometimes I feel like I look like the wreck. Like I am the one dwelling in tragedy. Reliving a past that doesn't matter to anyone else. But in my heart I know the work will pay off. Trudging through the darkness, making it through the woods, and sorting through the muck, painful as it is, will make my future so much clearer.

I will die happy and uplifted, knowing I did the best I could with the time I had.

Happy Moments

2010-07-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

Recently I asked one of my match mates on eharmony.com to name one of his happiest memories. We had made it to "step three" and I wanted to ask a question that hadn't been made up by a god-like computer database. It was a question I asked off the top of my head.

"What is your happiest memory?" asked Lana, my dating coach, when I told her the question I had posed.

"Well, obviously that would be wearing matching overalls to a house party with you when we were freshmen in college," I responded, referring one of our most amusing recollections of freshmen year at the prairie-town school, the University of Minnesota, Morris.

Picture this, two girls in beige Union Bay corduroy overalls over baby blue polo shirts knocking cheerfully on the door of an upper class men house party. The going cover charge for a house party in Morris at the time was between $3-5 a cup, depending on who was throwing the party. Sometimes girls got in for free. The owner of this particular house and coordinator of this particular house party opened the door, looked us over, and after consulting with other people in the house finally decided we could come in if we paid a $10 cover charge. Bewildered, we returned to our car in the frigid early December weather of Minnesota to put our coats back on, the ones we had left in the vehicle so that we wouldn't have to worry about them while at the party, and drove on to the next location, self-esteem shaken, but not crushed.

We both laughed at the memory, and while this is a great one in the collection of fond moments in my mind, I don't know that I could quite call it my happiest memory.

Yesterday was the 4th of July. I met up with "the poker group", the families of the dads (including mine) who have played poker together since college, since they all went to the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. I went on a pontoon ride on McCarron Lake, (while visiting the Bob McCarron family), played with my adorable nephews, ate a lot of chips and salsa, drank a frozen, sugar-free margarita, played a round of bocce ball, stayed for the annual cutting of my mother's special "flag-fruit-pizza", and then politely excused myself from the group my family has spent the last 28 years with on July 4th. I told everyone I was going to watch the fireworks with friends.

I lied.

I went home and I worked on various little odd projects around my house. I walked my dog out into the balmy weather, admired the sun setting, the air so warm and thick it felt like a shawl on my shoulders, and returned to my apartment to the sound of rockets exploding the air. I didn't watch a single one.

For years, my happiest holiday after Christmas was spending the 4th of July with the poker families and playing with my "poker cousins." Jessica and Melanie were the oldest girls, almost too old for me to even fathom. Sometimes they just liked to sit with the adults, hang out and eat. Marjie was a year older than I was and sooooo cool. She read Stephen King books, and was gregarious, and magnetic, and joked with all the dads and watched sports. I was next after her, a quieter, creative girl who loved to make up the stories of what we were "playing" while we hung from our knees on the top rungs of the octagonal playground set the Voelkers had in their back yard on E. 6th St. in St. Paul, MN. Mary came after me, two years younger, a curly-brown-haired girl that would join in on any game laughing, and Sarah, who loved Buddy Holly was after her, and then Annie, who was dramatic and sweet and flirted with Nate, my brother, the sports fanatic who was next in line. After him came Tom who broke his leg one summer and survived a sailboat overturning when he was four, and then Kathy, Mary's sister, the one with golden curls who loved everything girly, and then Jim, and then my youngest brother Mark, both of whom competed in the "who's louder" competition and tormented the poker dads with water balloons and jests. I think all of us kids teased Ray about being bald mercilessly. We held mock-Olympics, water-balloon fights, piano recitals. We played seven-steps, freeze tag, water-wars, and told ghost stories. We ate cheeseballs and sat in the Voelker's basement watching Sixteen Candles and not understanding any of it. Then we'd change into jeans, put on the bug spray, pile into cars and drive to the Capitol of Minnesota, in downtown St. Paul. We'd pick out spots on the lawn of the giant domed building to watch the fireworks, back when they were free, and spread our our fuzzy plaid blankets before reapplying bug spray to our ankles and necks. When we got older, Marjie and her cousin Molly would point out the couples "having sex" on the lawn. We'd play frisbee, play more tag, and wear ourselves out until the moment a voice came over the loudspeaker singing "I'm Proud to Be an American." The show would leave little squiggly lines on my eyelids when I closed my eyes and my ears would be ringing. The littlest kids would cry and cover their ears. But I loved it. I loved the vibration in my heart, the exhalation of twilight into darkness, the white chandelier hovering closer and closer above my eyes as I lay on my back and watched black puffs of smoke float on a navy blue sky.

When we left we'd trot with our moms behind the dads who carried the youngest kids on their shoulders, above the crowd, down the streets, over the bridge, to the parking lot, where we all said our good-byes. I would lean back in the car and pretend to fall asleep on the drive back to our suburb, Fridley. When I was young my dad would carry me up the stairs.

This might be one of my happier memories.
Almost as happy, or maybe happier, were my July 4ths in my 20's.

For six years, my fiancee and then husband and I went with our college friends up to Bayfield, Wisconsin, where we took camping to a new level. The first year we grilled steaks in the Indian campground just outside of Bayfield, carried toilet paper into the woods to go to the bathroom, and took a little 14-foot sailboat out onto the water of Lake Superior. The first year it was just us and one other couple, then gradually we invited more people, and instead of taking one vehicle and a sailboat to Bayfield, we took three or four vehicles, two kayaks, a sailboat, and about four cases of Corona to Bayfield, and then to the ferry that took us to Madeline Island where we camped at a state park. The four or five couples on the ferry would toast each other with an open bottle and a lime wedge and we'd lean out onto the water and fantasize moving to this area, this little island, this escape from the world.

The weather was almost always hot, 85 or 90 degrees, and the water in the great lake was probably 50 degrees, so we would play frisbee up to our knees in the frigid water, beer in one hand, frisbee in the other. We'd set up a tent on the beach, haul down our three water vehicles, bring two or three coolers, and sometimes people would even buy drinks from us. I would bring a book I'd never read, preferring to chat, or play frisbee, or kayak around the hook of the island out to the giant rocks of the shore down the way. You could see the bottom of the lake to 20 feet and the rocks looked like giants had arranged a sort of underwater landscaping scene. Too cold for weeds, the lake was a turquoise in the shallow lip that extended about a hundred yards from the southern shore of the little island, and dark blue once you moved beyond that shelf. Again we'd go out in the little sailboat, and I thrilled to dodging the mast swinging when we would "come about." The friend that owned the sailboat taught me, almost, to sail by myself, challenging me to take the tiller and the strings the moved the sail sooner than I felt ready. We'd bring a Nalgene bottle of some horrible drink or another, usually gin and tonic, and the trip would turn into this heady adventure of water and wind and leaning this way or that, and trimming the sail to stop the luffing, and catching a breeze and flying out on the lake, water splashing up on my stomach and toes while we leaned backwards towards the blue to stop the boat from capsizing. We'd return to shore, my legs wobbling, and I'd jump out into the knee-high cold water, before walking up to the scalding hot sand, collapsing and asking for the chips.

Breakfasts were my number one sport on vacation. I would usually be the first one awake at the camp and would attempt to quietly work on the necessities, coffee being the main priority. Later, Dave would start cooking. Eggs, pancakes with peanut butter and syrup, bacon, and Paul would make bloody marys. I think I ate more at these breakfasts than I usually did in a week. Then Shannon and I might go for a run through the woods, before returning back to our group. Even with the added run, I'd still be the first one in my suit, practically dragging the rest of the team with me to the beach for our day of frisbee and relaxation. If it rained we played drinking games under the screen tent.

On the fourth, we made our way to the ferry landing, near The Burnt Down Bar and set up our folding chairs in the sand while the sun set. I took pictures of boats intersecting with a giant orange orb lowering into purple water, of pink-reflection water lapping the shore. Andy, the geology major, would describe the geological principles of each of the stones lining the shore. We filmed silly videos and said stupid things and wandered to the ice-cream shop for giant cones. I'd wear a hoody sweatshirt and lean up against my husband, or sit next to him and touch his foot with mine. Sometimes there were tense moments with him on these trips, moments where I saw a crabbier side of my husband, probably the side of an addict in withdrawal, but not during the fireworks.

The fireworks were nothing compared to the Taste of Minnesota, but the drama was greater. A crackly voice would come over the loud speaker and start reading the preamble to the Bill of Rights, then one firework would go off. Then the speaker would give us a little history about our forefathers. And another firework would go off. Music would begin and one by one fireworks were set to certain chords and crescendos. It was a very deliberate show, but the finale made up for the theatrics. It was as if the show's pyrotechnic could no longer contain himself during the charade of the Great American Firework Script and suddenly took matters into his own hands, sending up all the rest of the rockets in a streak of glory before the Madeleine Island police could haul him away riding buck on a bicycle. I'd hold Shawn's hand after the show, his long fingers, his smooth fingernails. We'd sit in the back of someone's SUV and he'd make a stupid comment, I'd roll my eyes, but be very, very happy anyway. Maybe sometimes, during the sad years, I wished one of these other men had been my husband, one less complicated, one that understood me better, but at the end of the day, Shawn and I were a team that knew each other and saw the world around us in the same way. Eventually his shoulders would be against mine, his arms around my body, hugging me at the waist.

I loved these July fourths on our little island in the middle of Lake Superior.

So last night, as the sun started to drop, and without warning it was already 8:00 at night, I suddenly couldn't be there for the fireworks. I couldn't be with my nephews when I used to watch fireworks with my husband. I couldn't be with the family of my youth when the family of my early adult years has somehow vanished like sands under a north shore wave.

There are no more trips to Madeleine Island and there will never be trips anymore like that.
There are no more fireworks at the state capitol. I am no longer watching for my brother atop my father's shoulders.

I am without tradition this Independence Day, waiting for the next phase to begin. Waiting for my next happiest moments.

Dating like it's 1999...

2010-07-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

When I first started dating again after my divorce, there were all sorts of new technological advances that had developed since the last time I was dating... 12 years ago (!), back when I was 20.

Dating in my late teens and early twenties went something like this...

When I was in college, a boy might become interested in me by reviewing the pages of the "freshman shopper", the freshmen edition of the school paper at the small, prairie school called The University of Minnesota, Morris. It was part of the "main U" (University of Minnesota located in Minneapolis), but had not nearly the numbers. While the main U had nearly 50,000 students, including graduate programs and the St. Paul campus, Morris had less than 2,000 and the town had less than 5,000 people in it, many of whom were Mennonites and resented the rowdy, liberal students the college brought into town. I remembered feeling apprehensive about the number of sheep I saw on campus property as my parents turned our mini-van off of Hwy. 28 when I was arriving for my freshman orientation. Later, I would discover that the stabled horses on campus went out to graze the apple trees in the pasture located right next to the soccer field where I practiced. One day five horses got loose on the field during practice. I had a sprained ankle and could only stand and watch while my teammates chased them down to bring them in.

In the freshman shopper at this school was a compilation of all the photographs of freshmen who were tricked into sending their senior picture to the school and writing three of their hobbies on the back. I was one such freshman, who dutifully sent her picture in, believing it might be sent to my roommate or my orientation group leader for some sort of get-to-know-you activity, and thus choosing my "ugly" picture to send in because it was the one I least wanted to give to my real friends, the high schoolers who attended Fridley High (and some of them certainly were high, believe me). I wrote on the back "Soccer, Swimming, Dancing." I had censored my original third selection "Reading" because I felt it was too nerdy. I was determined not to be nerdy in college (even if I was in real life).

Little did I know that my "ugly" picture would be put smack in the middle of the school newspaper to be perused by older students before the first few house parties of the year. "Oh yeah," I heard on more than one occasion after telling an older boy my name, "I saw you in the shopper." Mortifying.

So while a boy might initially become interested through perusing the shopper, it did not guarantee any sort of communication. In order to actually talk to a boy, I could strike up a conversation with him at a house party and either tell him my full name so that he could look me up in the campus phone book, give him my brand-new email address (something I had never had before), or tell him my phone number, since for the last two years now every dorm room had its own phone instead of one for each floor at the end of the hallway. "It's 6518," I would say, listing off the four digit campus extension and adding, "65, like the age you retire, and 18, like the age you're an adult," a clever mnemonic device I had conceived in order to help the drunk boys remember after the house party was over.

Of course, there was one other option, which was to get sloppy drunk, make out with a boy at a house party, and then invite him over to my dorm room if my roommate happened to be out of town, (which was often, since her boyfriend still lived back in Watertown, South Dakota). We would make out on my roommate's bed (she had the bottom bunk and it was just too awkward to climb up a ladder) and I would always say, "but I'm not sleeping with you."

"That's fine. I wasn't expecting it," they'd almost always say. (Really, I've made out with some extraordinarily respectful individuals, not at all like what we learned about during the "safe sex" and "no means no" talk we all got during freshman orientation.) Then in the morning, the situation would become awkward. Either I liked him but he wanted to avoid me, or vice versa.

Make-out sessions very rarely led to relationships for me, though for many people at Morris a good make-out session was a sign of instant couplehood.

Provided I was actually going out on a date with a guy, the course followed a very different route. He'd eventually call me or email me and ask me out on a date. I wouldn't be able to think of anything to say other than "Sure." And then he'd cook me dinner in his dorm kitchen, having banished his floormates from the room for the evening, or he'd pick me up and take me to Alexandria, a town 45 minutes away that boasted a Chinese restaurant and current movies. On the worst of these occasions, the drive was painful, me attempting to make small talk with a very shy and sweet individual, but one who took me to BURGER KING for dinner and then made me pay for my own meal. I felt no chemistry for this individual and the Burger King expedition was a nail in the coffin.

Very few, if any, of these "real date" situations led to a relationship for me at Morris, either, though again, it was like insta-relationship for other couples.

If I were home for the summer, the dating scene took on a new form. Dance clubs were a part of the way to meet boys. I would go to teen night with my friends and we would pay our $3 cover charge and buy $1 waters all night. We'd check out the boys and smile at the ones we'd like. We'd speak in girl-talk to each other with eye-brow raises and head nods, letting each other know if the guy dancing behind us was cute or not.

If I wasn't into a guy, I'd perform the "t" move, meaning I'd position my body to be perpendicular to his whatever way he moved and thus, the only part of me he could rub up against would be my hip bone. This deterred most boys after attempting to get closer once or twice and they'd look for friendlier territory. If I liked the guy, I'd either face him while we were dancing, or allow him to grind on me from behind. (As I just chaperoned a high school prom three months ago, this methodology still seems to hold true.)

Then, after maybe a half an hour of sweaty dancing, we'd try to go get some water and scream a brief conversation at each other over the bass. I might even give him my phone number. If I did this, it was a week of anticipation, wondering if he'd call, and when he did, of course, he'd have to get through my mom, or dad, or brothers if they answered the phone first. Many a time I'd try to sprint down the hallway in my basement where my room was to be the first one to answer our phone, the one in the basement laundry room that was a beauty out of the early 1970's complete with rotary dialing. I'd have to really think about if I wanted to call someone while sticking my finger in each little number hole and pulling it up to the top of the circle. It was very exhilarating.

When I did actually talk to a boy, after first screaming up the stairs to my family, "I got it!" I would be almost as physically involved in the conversation as I was mentally. I would sit on the dryer, I'd kick my mom's sewing chair, I'd walk down the hall as far as the curly receiver cord would let me. I'd lay on the hallway floor and run my fingers through the tough bristles of the cheap downstairs carpet. I'd kick my legs up on the white walls of the hallway scuffed with black marks of my brothers' hockey equipment that they brought into the "sports room" after practice, an unfinished sauna room lined with cedar started by the people who owned the house before my parents and I moved in when I was 2 and-a-half.

All of this was very exciting and once in a while, after a hour long discussion about nothing in particular, a date would be planned.

But, again, very few of these dates or phone calls led to a real relationship, though I'm told they did for other people.

In my awkward early dating career, I really only had one big relationship (with the man I would go on to marry) and a couple of brief practice relationships. I think part of this was my own fear of relationships, and part of it was the lore I had built up around the legend of parents' relationship. They had met at a party during which my dad said to himself "she's the one," and my mom said to herself, "he seems like a nice guy." Four months later, they were engaged. Eight months after that, they were married. Thirty-four years later, they still are.

In my mind then, there was ONE relationship in everyone's life, and I believed my marriage was it, the relationship that would last until I was in my 90's.

But that was not to be, and sadly, or at least two years ago I thought it was sadly, I'm back in the world of awkward dating. And there are all sorts of technological advances that have made it more and more complicated, like facebook, and texting, and things I never even had to worry about back when I was 18 and the most anyone really might have was a pager. One of my friends had a cell phone to be used "only in emergencies!" because each minute was "really, really expensive!"

Through the last two years I've been awkwardly navigating the whole technological dating world, asking myself questions like "to text, or not to text?" But it's time, I've decided, to enter the final frontier: online dating.

I have decided to experiment with eharmony this summer, for one, because I actually have time to pursue this kind of adventure right now (there's a lot of homework involved), and two, because I suddenly realized I might not always be single, and how silly not to take advantage of this while I can.

It has been quite an interesting experience. I log on each day to review my "matches", profiles of men sent to me by a database playing God. Then I decide to either archive, contact, or simply leave the men in my homepage. "What happens to the archived men?" my dad asked when I explained the system to my family.

"They just hover in bubbles, like on SuperMario [for Wii-the new one], crying 'Help me!' until Katie lets them out." We all laughed, and I have to say, there is a certain power that comes with deciding to archive someone.

"It's not mean, is it?" I asked when I archived someone because I just wasn't that attracted to his pictures.

"No!" said my friend Lana, "It's normal! It's just like at a bar, the process of elimination."

And plus, there is just no way to contact everyone. I can only imagine how things could pile up if I wasn't checking my matches each day!

After the initial stage, there is a four-step process. First you send each other multiple choice questions, then you send your list of "Must-Haves and Can't Stands." If both of you are still on board after that, you send each other three short answer questions, and finally, you are allowed to email each other.

"Chompers," as Lana and I have fondly dubbed my first e-harmony date, (because he wrote in his profile that he had braces, 'the metal kind that most people have when they are 10' but that he was hoping for 'a nice set of chompers by the latter part of the year,') I have discovered was sort of an anomaly. He jumped right to step four and proposed we meet for a drink. We had a good time and swapped amusing stories about our families, and then, three days later he sent me a very polite email explaining that while he had had a great time, he had also been on a couple dates with another woman and he wanted to be exclusive with her. "I joined eharmony because I wanted a serious relationship," he wrote, "and for me, that couldn't happen if I was dating more than one woman at a time." It was so nice, and so filled with integrity, that I became even fonder of Chompers and decided we had been on the best first eharmony date ever. I wished him well and returned to my six matches a day.

The first time I got to step three with a man, I have to admit, I almost broke out into hives. The questions were serious! "Besides love, what one trait do you believe successful couples have?" and "If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?" and finally, "tell me five random things about yourself." The first question was the one that really caused me to sweat. How serious was this? What kind of commitment were we making? This was with Brian, or "Cheese-lover." I contacted him because he included cheese in his list of five things he couldn't live without. But, after making it all the way to step four, I suddenly stopped hearing from him.

No matter. What I like about eharmony is that I feel like I'm getting over the concept of rejection. I contacted another one of my matches, named Joey, who I was just swooning over. He was so cute, looked kind of manly, was in triathlons, said his daughter was something he couldn't live without, and here's the kicker, said he was looking for "someone who wants something serious." I contacted him and showed his picture to Lana, my dear friend and dating coach.

"He looks like Wes," she said.

Perhaps you have heard the new song by John Mayer, the one called "Friends, Lovers, or Nothing?" I would say this aptly describes my relationship with Wes. And we are firmly in the "Nothing" category as he no longer returns my calls.

I would like to say I simply ignored the comment, but with all the maturity of a seventh-grader I instead said, "Yeah, except taller and smarter."

Not that height is a "big" factor me (ha ha), but I imagined the 5' 8" Wesley would be chagrined to know I was dating a 6'1" version of himself, and so mentally I felt I had scored a point. And the smarter comment refers to the adage I coined this year in my 9th grade classroom when I would turn to the girls I was teaching after we watched the 9th grade boys hump each other and try to hit each other in the balls during the first couple minutes before the bell rang, "Boys are dumb." They would nod, and I felt like real learning was happening.

Here's the thing, it's not about me if a guy rejects me, it's about him or us or timing, but really, I am still quite a fine person. It helps me to remember that "boys are dumb," a comment I don't believe literally, but one that reminds me not to take dating so seriously or so personally. When it finally works out, it will be great. Until then, no fretting, just more surfing.

This is why when adorable Joey never responded and eventually "closed" me as a match, (sort of like death to an eharmony match, because you are never allowed to communicate again--Ever), I was not upset.

"But why would he close you?!" asked my dating coach, just the sort of unconditional supporter you need in the dating world. A woman who can't imagine any man not falling madly in love with me while I too quickly see all of my flaws.

"Oh, well, I just think it's probably because he met the woman of his dreams a month ago and now he's being respectful and closing all of his matches," I said, having no clue if this was the case, but choosing to believe that it was.

"Oh," she replied, "that's nice of him. I guess that's ok."

Whether Joey closed me because he met the woman of his dreams, or he didn't like the Kentucky Derby hat I was wearing in my first profile picture, or he thought I was too tall, or he didn't like that I did yoga, or perhaps he was against the dog I mentioned in my list of hobbies (as in I like to walk my dog around the lakes), it doesn't really matter. It doesn't change who I am as a person, which is the woman who "loves spicy food and dive bars, going out for breakfast with friends, curling up on the couch in front of candles, and singing Bon Jovi on karaoke night." I think that woman sounds great, and like a lot of fun, and if Joey doesn't that's fine.

Especially because Jason, who likes to go running and is going to a crawfish broil for the 4th of July, wants to go out for drinks next week! :)

Watching Porn

2010-07-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

On New Year's Eve, a bunch of my college friends got together to wave goodbye to 2006 with skewers, hunks of bread and veggies, and vats of bubbling cheese. After spending an outrageous amount at an actual fondue restaurant the year before, we were determined to do it better and cheaper on our own.

It was a night of hilarity and laughs. Very few, if any, of the women there were pregnant (we were all married couples ranging from 4-8 years in wedded bliss) and at least one bottle of Hendrick's gin was consumed with small amounts of tonic water and thin slices of cucumber resting on the surface. This in addition to the champagne. And the beer. And the wine. Our host, a who liked to keep parties rolling along, made a play list of classics from our "back in the day" years. "Bust a Move" was one of the songs playing, along with Keith Sweat's "Twisted", and of course, a variety of Michael Jackson's hits. When "P.Y.T." came on, there was a lull in the ferocity of the party and in general people were simply sipping and chatting, but when that song came on, I started dancing in place, glanced across the room and saw my lanky husband bobbing his head in his chair and singing along as well. "See!" I exclaimed, moving across the room to perch on his knee while he rested his hand on the small of my back, "this is why I know we are perfect for each other."

It felt true. It felt like we were two people who danced when no one else was. Because we were so in sync when out on the town, I felt reassured, like the problems I felt drifting into our lives when we were home alone didn't exist, that they must be imagined, something only I felt because I must have a contentment disorder. I must be the type of woman who looks for problems where there are none.

Now, I realize I was looking for reassurance that our lives were fine because they weren't. I wasn't imagining problems. But I just didn't know the truth. I thought it was bad that Shawn looked at porn, but then I could argue against myself. I thought he had an addiction, and even he thought he had one, but he told me he was done, that he had quit. What choice did I have? He looked me in the eye and said it was done. I could choose to believe my husband wouldn't lie to me and ignore the nagging feeling in my gut, or I could choose not to believe him and instead feel crazy worrying about what was true.

All this and we were only three weeks in our new home. I was working full time and going to grad school. I just wanted to have fun at New Year's; I wanted to stop thinking about the problem.

But I couldn't. I would encounter sexual innuendos at every turn. My coworkers who teased me when Shawn and I moved in with my parents, joking that we'd have to put a sock on the door when we wanted to have sex. I blushed fiercely, not because it was true or I was embarrassed my parents might think we were having sex, but because we weren't having much sex. I was pretty sure my husband wasn't attracted to me.

Even this got confusing, though, because he reinforced my self-esteem, told me I was attractive, and clearly enjoyed when his friends flirted with me or told him he was lucky.

At New Year's I was sitting cozy wedged between two of my girlfriends on a couch and we were talking in low tones about sex with the men (our husbands) drinking tonic and gin at the basement bar. Emily was giggling about watching porn with her husband, a woman who was always open about her sexuality and who seemed to me to be the definition of Healthy when it came to sex.

The porn question came seeping back into my mind. If porn was healthy, was Shawn healthy? And if Shawn was healthy, what was I? I thought about the times I had suggested we watch CineMax together as an experiment, one of my many attempts to persuade my husband to want to have sex with me. Could it be he was the normal one? Was I just uptight about his habits?

"Well, what about if one person is watching porn in secret?" I asked, wearing a short-sleeved, body-hugging black sweater lined with silver threads. I felt Emily's arm against mine as we leaned back on the couch.

"Oh, no," she said, without a hint of hesitation. "If it's secret, it's dirty."

I nodded. Relieved. But I didn't explain why I asked. I kept my secret.

What troubles me now, three years past separation and into recovery, is that Emily, wise and healthy as she is, doesn't get to be the judge on what is acceptable and what is not. Emily can decide for herself what is acceptable. I can decide for myself what feels right. There isn't really a quota for what it takes to be a sex addict, there's no rule about how much porn you have to look at before it "counts" as addiction.

"It's like this, I think," said a friend of mine recently at the bar I visit for happy hour about once a week. "Addiction is when something takes away from your life. So, the guy that shows up smashed to work and loses his job is an alcoholic. The guy that drinks every night, gets up in the morning and adds whiskey to his coffee, but shows up every day on time and does his job, has a drinking problem and might not be living his life to the fullest, but he is not an alcoholic."

I don't know that I agree with this definition exactly, but I see his point to a certain extent. Addiction is a slippery topic.

I'm not sure how to handle the subject of pornography. "It's such an interesting topic," said one of my peers from class. "I mean, it is the internet." [Add research later]

The feeling I fought against when waking to the realization that Shawn had a problem with pornography was the feeling that everyone looks at porn. I'd broach the subject tentatively and my girlfriends would dismiss it as something every guy does once in a while. My sister-in-law said she knew there was porn on my brother's computer (ew!), and even my mom told me that my dad used to get Playboy magazines (double ew!). "Of course, I made him get rid of them when I moved in," she added. Both women told me this after finding out about Shawn's addiction. They didn't understand. I had never told them. It was the secret I'd been keeping to myself for three or four years.

Every man I knew in college had at least some porn on his computer, and they would amuse themselves by showing each other images. I still don't understand why guys look at porn together. It is completely beyond me, but I realize there's some sort of amusement factor there, especially, it seems, at the college level.

[Add research about the highly addictive nature of internet porn]

And it is addicting. When I was starting to realize Shawn's compulsion to look at porn happened more frequently than I imagined, I would trace the history files on our computer. When I confronted him, he started erasing the history, and I found the temporary files in our computer still held the downloads and links he'd visited. I would trace his steps through the internet, and I hate to admit it, but I would start to become fascinated myself. And sickened. And not totally unaroused. It is erotic and arousing to look at naked people having sex. It is fascinating to absorb the different links and channels porn took. It is sickening to see how porn reduces people: sex with Asian women, sex with teens, sex with grandmothers, with blonds, with brunettes, with redheads, gang-bangs, big dicks, tight pussies, black women, rape scenes, blow-jobs, cum-on-her face, look-up-her-skirt, watch-her-change, watch-her-beg, give-it-to-her-hard.

One site was just a spreadsheet of choices, and because my husband never told me what he watched, I assumed he watched the worst. I saw the rape scenes and thought about how one time he put his hands on my neck, though not hard. I saw the scenes where she begged and thought about how I would talk dirty to him to try to turn him on. I saw the scenes where men fucked teens and I thought about the girls I taught in high school.

I lost myself in that internet porn for hours, just trying to figure out my husband. Feeling pretty horrified.

I still don't know what he looked at on the internet. I probably never will. Maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Maybe it was worse. I know he went to one site everyday, Carrie Sweets, teen tease. She would change outfits and dance for her "fans" and tantalize them with her journal of daily events, like sucking on lolli-pops, trying on swim-suits, getting sweaty out in the sun. There was even a birthday club where she would send a birthday wish to her most loyal "fans" (the ones that paid a subscription) on their special day.

I know he purchased porn through cable television and that often the bill would be about $300 a month. I know he also bought dvd's from some company called Adult DVD empire. I know unlisted numbers showed up frequently on our phone. I know one of the other sites he visited frequently was a peep show site where you could chat with the strippers. I only know all of this in hindsight, through my sleuthing. By looking, finally, at the credit card statements he would never show me, the cable bills he hid from me when he got the mail.

I wish I hadn't had to be so sneaky. I wish I wouldn't have had to spy. At the time, I was a good-girl who got married when she was 24 and assumed it would be for life. When things started to feel distant and he wouldn't tell me what was going on, when he would say he wasn't interested in having sex because he was full, or tired, or busy, or whatever, I started to wonder what was going on that would drive so much distance between us. When url addresses popped up unbidden when I searched for grad schools, I began to get concerned.

First, it was the secrecy. "Just put a post-it on the computer when you look at porn," I said. "I hate the secrecy. It makes me feel gross."

But I would still find porn.

"Did you look at porn today?"

He'd confess and look remorseful.

"How come you didn't just put a post-it on the computer?" I would ask.

"It's embarrassing," he'd say, or maybe he'd just shrug.

I'd let him off the hook. We were too happy otherwise. He cooked, he cleaned, he was affectionate in public, he took care of me. He was attractive, he dressed well, he listened to great music, had great taste in books, loved eating at great restaurants, and was a receptacle of interesting though somewhat trivial information. He was generous and bought drinks for other people. He could break dance. People were forever telling me how lucky I was.

Porn shut me out of his life. His compulsion to watch porn caused us financial debt. His absorption in this "hobby" caused him to lie to me daily.

I'd call that an addiction.

In the end it was the lying that drove me away. In a way I thank God that he lied to me. Had he been honest, I would have stayed. I would have "helped" him through his "sickness." (For better or for worse, in sickness and in health...). I would have been the good wife.

But when I found out there was yet another $1400 cable bill in August of 2007, after he had told me weekly that he had quit looking at porn, I knew there was nothing I could do. I knew we were not in it together. I knew it was beyond anything I could control. So I quit. I left. I walked out the door.

A week later we were separated.

A year after that happy New Year's to welcome in 2007, I celebrated the birth of 2008 by myself at my aunt and uncle's condo in Florida, 10 miles from the beach. I cooked lobster. I cried. I drank wine. I ate chocolate. I bought myself a cute nightgown and a beautiful bracelet. I went to the beach. I wrote prayers on shells. I drove my rented convertible up and down the coast. I felt the sun on my skin and the wind through my hair.

I did not think about porn.

I don't know what will happen with me and pornography. "Look at you," said my wonderful red-haired motherly therapist. "You're so much stronger now, you know you wouldn't let a guy into your life who looked at that stuff."

But I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it's a deal-breaker for me, or simply something I would want to be completely honest and open about with my partner. Internet porn is out. Done deal. Something I can't stand because it can so easily go from silly to disturbing. But some porn, the silly kind that I feel quite certain was filmed in a studio and not someone's bedroom, the kind that is played on CineMax, can be sort of stimulating and might be fun to watch with someone else. But I'm not sure. I'm still not sure how I feel about porn.

What I do know is that I won't ask Emily, wise as she is, about what is right for me when it comes to porn. That is a decision I will make for myself.

A tribute to my cousin Andrea, with thanks to the poet Mary Oliver

2010-07-01T20:46:00.000-07:00

Hospital tape leaves a gray sticky residue that seems impossible to get off the skin.

I know this because there is a line of it across my arm right at the elbow joint, where it was used to hold a cotton ball to the spot where a kind nurse stuck a needle into a vein while I was in the ER on Sunday. I warned her my veins were tricky before turning away to avoid the sight of a needle going into my skin and sucking out my blood.

"They just like to wander," she said.
"Well, that's ok, I guess," I said. "So do I."

She laughed. And I am realizing I am letting my thoughts wander right now. I thought I had this essay mapped out. I thought I knew where it would take me, but now I'm not so sure.

I'm feeling overwhelmed. And awestruck. I have just returned from the ER for the second time in a week, but this time it was for my dog, a 17 pound yorkie-poo named Friday who had tiny lacerations in his eye from visiting the groomer and getting soap in it. It's funny. I debated less about bringing him to the ER than I did myself, having been told by a woman at the nurse's hotline that I called that I should see a provider within four hours because of the injury, the bruise, on my head that I don't recall ever getting.

I have had concussions several times in the past, and migraines that have left me speechless, nauseous, and sightless, so I have visited the ER a couple of different occasions for brain trauma. This didn't feel like trauma, but the nurse sounded concerned. I thought of my cousin who died nearly two years ago. A freak blood clot working its way through her veins. She was 33. I would turn 32 in two days. I weighed the cost of an ER trip on my left hand, and my cousin, her beautiful life ending in a moment, on my right.

I went to the ER reasoning that I would have even less money if I were dead.

With my hound, I listened as the vet tech told me the cost of a visit and simply said, "Ok." There was no hesitation when he said it was better to take care of eye injuries right away. I just wanted my dog to be better.

Sometimes I think it's easier to love others, even if they are small, furry, and weigh only 17 pounds, than it is to love ourselves.

"Why didn't you call?" asked one of my friends on Tuesday night as we were celebrating my birthday with a few other friends. I had driven myself to the ER, a fact that caused my doctor to roll his eyes and smile, especially after hearing I only called the nurse hotline because I wanted the ok to play soccer that night, that the only dizziness I had felt was when I put the ball on the tee at my 8:30 a.m. golf game, and that the only possible moment I thought I could have bruised myself on my head was perhaps while swing-dancing the night before at the local VFW after riding a karaoke bus to celebrate a friend's 30th birthday.

Why didn't I call a friend to give me a ride? "Because she's stubborn," said another friend, a man with a white eyebrow, "and too proud to ask for help."

I nodded to this comment. It's true. I have such a hard time asking for help. I feel this is especially the case as a single woman. At least for me. When I was married, of course I had no problem asking my husband to help me. To do the things I couldn't do, like drive me to urgent care when a post-soccer game migraine had me lying on the bathroom floor with a towel over the crack under the door to keep the light out of the completely darkened room. But as a single girl, it's harder.

I did call my parents, though. And a dear friend. "Lan," I said while waiting in the lobby and trying to calm down so that my blood pressure would drop from the shockingly high number of 202 over 127 that it had just read a minute ago. "The only thing I could think when the nurse told me to go to the ER was 'I can't die. I have a book to write!'"

"Yes," she replied. "I am so glad you went. I know you are ok, but you are just too precious. The world and I need you!"

Her comments made me smile and made me feel loved, but strangely did nothing to lower my blood pressure.

"Someone just got moved to the top of the list," said a nurse in the other room when the woman who had taken my blood pressure reported I was still off the charts. The ER was busy and there was a shortage of beds, but apparently when you have crazy bp scores, you become a priority customer.

After a barrage of tests done by extraordinarily kind people, complete with witty senses of humor and everything, I was pronounced O.K. but told by half a dozen people that I had high blood pressure.

"Yes, I keep hearing that," I said and smiled at a red-faced middle aged nurse named Jim. He went over my post-ER directions of health care and smiled at me from his round face. After I changed out of my hospital gown and back into my normal clothes and emerged from my curtained bed, he pointed me in the direction of the lobby, sensing my disorientation and smiling when I left.

It was a relief to be ok.

I drove myself home on a gorgeous June evening, up France avenue and past Lake Calhoun. When I got home I greeted my yorkie-poo and we went for a walk to the lake, he stopping to make friends with every group of people and furry creature that was joining us for the beautiful Minnesota sunset that evening. Sailboats dotted the water, weeds broke the surface into the air, and an orange sun painted the sky pinks and yellows and blues and purples with large water-color strokes.

Friday went up to a group of three Somali women and pulled me along behind him. "What a cute dog!" they exclaimed as he snuggled into their laps and gazed up into their eyes. He is such a flirt.

We left and rested under the shade of the tree, Friday panting, I thinking. My cousin rarely leaves my thoughts this week. She had a dog, a pitbull who she loved. She was 33, blond, and had been through a lot of interesting life chapters: from high school valedictorian, to fashionista, to grunge music-maven, to girlfriend-of-a-druggie-who-had-a-son, to debt-stricken ex-girlfriend living in Vegas after the boyfriend took advantage of her, to woman pulling the strings back together only to hear her mother was dying of terminal cancer. And then she got a blood clot. And she took a nap. And she called her mom. And her mom told her to go to a neighbor's and call for help because of the mysterious leg pain she felt. And she walked out the door, pitbull on leash, and collapsed on the steps. A neighbor saw her and called 9-1-1 immediately. Her phone was still on. Her mother was still listening. The dog ran away. There was commotion. The ambulance arrived.

They couldn't save her.

"It was probably a blood clot that traveled to her lungs," said the doctor taking care of me, the one who had grabbed my toe when he told me everything would be ok, "and then it stopped her breathing." He was quiet for a moment and I appreciated his bedside manner, which only furthered the crush I had developed when he grabbed my toe.

But I couldn't stop thinking about my cousin. And I can't stop.

I remember telling a friend over buffalo wings on my 30th birthday how angry I was. We were sitting on the outdoor patio watching traffic pass on Hennepin avenue. I wanted to blame someone. I wanted to blame her dad. I knew her mother was terminally ill and I knew her father had always been too hard to live with, too hard on his only daughter. To me, it was as if when her mother died she would be an orphan. It almost felt like she chose to die, rather than be without her only ally.

This was grief talking, of course. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. I just wanted my cousin not to be dead. I wanted her to be alive.

I remember her burial, though I've blocked the funeral out of my memory. I remember the soggy ground, the smell of fertilizer and grass and prairie flowers in northern Illinois. I remember the smell of earth and the sound of birds flying overhead. The early July heat. The air pressing down on us and the heels of my shoes sinking into the earth. I remember the sky was bright blue and the grass was impossibly green. And I was still angry.

Life is so short. And life is so beautiful. Even the burials are beautiful. And the trips to the ER are filled with startling beauty in the jokes of the technicians and smiles of the middle-aged male nurses. And I am glad I took care of myself. And I am glad I took care of my dog. Because when all is said and done, we only get one chance to do what we want with our one wild and precious life.

Our Happy Hour

2010-06-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about the hat I wore to the Kentucky Derby this year.

Shoot, let me tell you about the whole adorable outfit. Head to toe.

The hat was large and floppy, drooping dramatically over one eye when I bent the brim a certain way. It was straw, lined with black dye for about an inch of the brim, a black flower, perhaps a hibiscus or peony, perched on the crown. The dress was a white halter dress with large black and yellow flowers and a black sash tied around my waist in a bow. The skirt flared slightly over a black netting rimmed with black ribbon and fell just above my knees. The shoes were black patent, rhinestone sprinkled, peep-toe wedges with a straw heel, same color as the hat, and I carried a black patent bag. I wore an antique necklace around my neck that I found at a flea market about fifteen years ago with a best friend. It is silver flowers that interlock and each flower holds a blue bead in the center of its petals.

It was a good outfit.

Today, in the humid June weather of Minnesota, 90 degrees, 52% humidity, I decided the hat was in order again as I was going to walk six blocks with friends for a happy hour at a Tex-Mex bar. I couldn't resist putting together another outfit, and dressed in a spaghetti-strapped v-neck black floral sundress, the same peep-toe wedges, same hat, and same black patent bag. It was pretty cute, despite the cleave sweat beading between my breasts, the sweat pooling in the small of my back, and the perspiration popping up on my cheeks under my eyes.

Dampness aside, my spirits were lively as we walked to our destination, two dear buddies and I. We discussed the details of my impending date with "Ryan", an e-harmony suitor who likes golf and wears braces hoping for "a nice set of chompers" later in the year. As I am new to the online dating scene, the discussion was light and fun. I, this silly woman wearing a big floppy hat, was planning a summer of whirlwind dating and casually archiving potential "matches" if they didn't seem to be my type. Then I told one friend about how the other had taken me on the best date I'd been on in a year- how she called twice to confirm, picked me up in her sweet ride, and dazzled me by bringing her own bottle of Sauvignon Blanc to dinner at Origami, our favorite sushi place. Our friend teased me about how she was disappointed I didn't put out and I laughed and said that was more of a second date sort of thing. We also joked about how, on the date, I told her about the very nice man who was my boyfriend, and who was now no longer my boyfriend. She was shocked, having not seen me in over six months, that she had missed the event. "How's Katie?" her husband had asked after our date.

"She had a boyfriend!" said my friend. "And he's gone. They went on trip and everything. Apparently I don't see Katie that often."

Which is fine. We love each other and it doesn't matter that sometimes our busy lives pull us in many directions. The point is we were laughing and joking about the events in my life. We were having fun.

And we continued having fun over margaritas and guacamole, and we continued having fun when our fourth friend joined us, and we continued having fun when she ordered a Sprite, and we continued having fun when she told us she was pregnant. And we started talking about babies and childbirth and labor and the adorable things children do and the trials of motherhood. And it pains me to say this, but I stopped having fun.

I love my friends who are mothers. I love my friends who are pregnant. I love hearing about their stories, about the great moments, the tough moments- really everything except the painful moments (I don't handle medical stories well). But unfortunately, due to the combination of two nights in a row of women saying they were pregnant (two at my book club the night before), two hours of talking about babies, and two drinks over our happy hour, I was bumping up against a sadness I never admit to myself.

I want a baby. Some day. But right now it feels like that day will never come.

"I can't even let myself go there," I said to my friends, "because it just isn't even remotely a possibility right now." I dismissed the possibility of kids like I had no feelings about the subject. They nodded and we returned to talking about babies, me piping in with a story about someone else I knew just so I wouldn't be completely silenced in the conversation.

We continued talking and laughing. "I mean, who else would have a pregnancy chart in their purse?" said the new mom-to-be to the rest of us. She explained what it was to my other non-mother friend and when she asked how it worked, she promised to figure out when the non-mother-married friend would be fertile and when she would be pregnant.

"Would it tell me who the father would be?" I ask, leaning in and looking at the chart. They all laugh. And I laugh. I am still telling myself I don't want kids. I am not ready to bump into the truth.

We say good-bye to new mom-to-be, a woman who went through a miscarriage in the fall, a woman who will be an amazing mom, and a woman I am genuinely happy for when I hear the news.

As we walk home, I want to be just as sincerely happy as the two women I am walking with, two college roommates, one a mother and one not. But I am starting to realize I can't. "You guys," I say, two hours of baby talk and two drinks later, "that was reaaaally hard." Before I know it, tears are filling my eyes underneath my big, floppy hat. "I just can't grieve one more thing. I already lost so much. I can't think about the fact that I don't have kids." I want to stop talking about it immediately.

"What are you doing?" I asked myself as my friends consoled me and reminded me that life just takes different time frames sometimes, that I don't need a man to have a baby, and that women have babies well into their forties. "You're walking around in this ridiculous hat, going on stupid dates with men who don't care about you and wear braces. You're playing dress-up. You're a failure. No one wants to marry you."

I wiped away the tears and we switched topics.

When I got home I cried. Not because I want a baby. I cried because I both want and don't want a baby. In my mind I know this is not the time, I know that there are things I must do before I give myself to a child. I know that I would not have wanted to deal with co-parenting children with a sex addict. I know that I don't want to be a single parent, that I would never trick someone into fathering offspring. I know that I am blessed to come home and be needed only by a small dog. I worked 60-70 hours a week this spring between my full time career as a high school teacher and my part time gig as an online instructor and I was taking a grad school class. And I dated someone. And I was writing. And I was spending time with family and my wonderful nephews. There is no way I could have a baby right now.

But there is a part of me that feels like life isn't fair. That of all people in the world, I deserve a baby.

Right now, I think my book is my baby. "It's not what you want," said my adviser when I met with him to discuss my thesis, a book-length manuscript. "It's what the book wants." He was speaking sympathetically about my resistance in hashing up the past, in telling my story, marriage, divorce, and recovery.

Sometimes I think I say too much in my writing. Right now, for instance, since my two dear friends are among the ten people that read this blog and I worry they will think I was upset or didn't appreciate them. Or when I look back at the graphic scenes I've revealed about my sex life and think about the people who will judge me for revealing my truth. Maybe it's ridiculous to be this vulnerable. To be this open. To risk hurting feelings of those I love.

But I think I'm doing it because I'm strong enough to be honest. I'm not talking about babies to guilt trip my friends. I'm not talking about sex to get attention. I'm talking about my life and my experiences. I'm talking about my truth, about learning a secret that destroyed my former self and gave me something so much richer in return. There are sad moments. There are moments I wish dearly to be a "we" or a "family." But without a doubt I know I am stronger and happier today than I ever have been in my past, and I know I will be ok. I'm ok where my life and my writing leads me. And I guess I'll have to leave it at that.

So if that means I wear floppy hats to cheer myself up once in a while, so be it.

My Blow Job Essay

2010-03-13T19:51:00.000-08:00

It's strange to write this essay. I am not even sure how to begin or what I want to say. I just know the title came to mind and I thought, yes, that is an essay I need to write. And yet, I cannot help thinking of who looks at my blog, what they might think, how they might judge me for talking about blow jobs and sex and all the sordid details of life with a sex addict.

It's a topic I am reluctant to address at times.

It's hard, now, two years after the divorce that was final on 2/15/08, to make myself remember what my past was like, what my 20s were like.

I have memory problems when it comes to sad moments of my past. The events disappear like being erased by the sands of an etch-a-sketch board, a soft-shaking and they unzip from the screen of my mind almost as they are occurring. If I do not write them down right away, I lose them.

"I think you'll do a reading for Joanne, just like you did for Andrea," my mom said to me in March of 2009, the weekend after my g0dmother died. We were driving down to Port Byron, Illinois from Minneapolis, MN, for her funeral. A breast cancer survivor, she had gotten her final death sentence the April before: pancreatic cancer, six months. She made it eleven.

"What are you talking about?" I asked. In July of 2008, my mother, father and I had made the drive to Port Byron to bury my second cousin, Joanne's daughter, who had died while calling her mother, complaining of leg pain, a blood clot. Valedictorian who spiraled down through bad relationships, financial trouble, depression and substances, had hit bottom in Vegas and was making her way back up into the world. She was three and a half years older than me, 33 when she died. She had been the cool cousin I looked up to, the one who played strange music in her room to a strobe light and talked on the phone for hours to her friend. The one who wrote me letters in perfect handwriting about the Guess jeans she had bought, about shopping trips, and her new cat Hillary.

She couldn't be dead.

"I didn't do a reading," I said to my mom. I remembered the awful drive down, the hot drive back, the nausea I felt in the hotel room, standing in the cemetary, feeling the hot humidity caught between the blue sky and the yellow earth, the weeds and cattails in the ditch across from the road pushing up into the sky, the birds darting across the skyline, the moisture I could smell coming up from the earth. Fertilizers, decay, a soggy earth baking under the July sun. I remember standing under a tent, thinking it wasn't fair that her life end this way, that she be dragged back from Seattle, Chicago, Vegas just to be pinned under the thumb of her conservative farmer relatives. I blamed her dad.

We went out for dinner at a restaurant and I remember staring at the menu and feeling sick. A burger. Your cousin's dead. French fries? Your cousin's dead. Pass the ketchup. She's gone.

I remember the wake, the pictures, the cheerleader, the model, the new pit-bull, new friend, her mother. Joanne, in a wig and too much blush, held my arm but didn't cry. She would be gone within a year and she already knew it. Maybe Andrea knew it too. Maybe she knew losing her mother would make her something of an orphan. So she went first.

I'm probably not being fair, but this is how I felt. This is what I remember. I blamed her dad.

But I don't remember reading. I don't remember the funeral. I got to my godmother's funeral eight months later and the church felt familiar. The shape of the room, the look of the altar. I couldn't place it in the neurons of my mind, but I remembered the drive from the funeral home to the parking lot.

I didn't remember giving a reading.

When I told my mom that I had lost the memory, that I couldn't access it, that I had somehow erased it, she nodded sympathetically. "It happens."

Why do I bring this up? It's because it is so important for me to write the details I remember still before they slide away. I want to remember because it was nearly ten years of my life that I spent learning about addiction, and that I feel like things happen for a reason, and I feel like I have learned and grown so much and that maybe others can learn and grow too by way of shared stories.

This is why I'm writing about blow jobs.

It's an essay about sorrow, unfortunately, but let's start it with compassion. Let's start with the catlyst for this essay, the encounter with the ex.

My ex-husband, the one I met when I was 18, started dating when I was 20, married when I was 24, and divorced when I was 29, moved four blocks away from me when we divorced. We live in Uptown, Minneapolis, the trendy yuppie-granola section of town, filled with lakes and bars and restaurants, and outdoor apparel shops that have replaced decades-old small family-owned dive bars. I run the lake. He runs the lake. Today I saw him when I was running the lake. He was walking with his new girlfriend, cute as a button, stocking hat pushed down over dirty blond hair. Both were carrying coffee cups and walking towards me as I finished the 3.5 mile lap around Lake Calhoun.

As usual, I did not look my best. Running pants on, University of Minnesota, Morris hoodie pulled tight over my head and tied under my chin to keep out the unexpected cold of the Saturday morning in March. My hands were balled under the ends of my sleeves and I knew without needing a mirror that my skin was pink verging on red and that sweat was beading on my forehead, upper lip, and under my eyes.

He looked good-looking. Six-foot-three, blue eyes that captured the clouds of the day and spit them back out in a flash, the slightest lines edging his thin face. Hat on to cover the receding hair line. Down vest over broad shoulders. He walked like he was half-listening to his girlfriend, the cute-as-a-button woman who was clearly venting during their walk.

I saw him see me. Then he stared at the lake as if something really interesting was out there and nodded like he was considering an important matter. But I wasn't scared. So I continued to watch him as I puffed along, sweaty and pink. At the last second he glanced at me; I felt a swell of sad love fill my being and though I don't think my eyes watered, they do now as I write this, and I smiled. I smiled because I can't pass my ex-husband on a running path and pretend he doesn't exist.

He tries. Pretends he can't see me. And in this way I know he still grieves too.

I feel sorry for him.

I can't imagine she knows about his addiction. What do you say to someone when you admit you are a sex addict? That's all behind me know. Six hours of surfing a day, but it's over.

And sex addiction is so easy for many people to dismiss. Porn floods our culture. Affairs are commonplace and not seen as a cry for help. When a friend said, "with complete sincerity, I don't care about Tiger Woods's extra marital affair, his 'sex addiction' or his apology. Take it to the Maury Povich or Jerry Springer show" on his facebook page, I couldn't resist commenting. I sent him a message explaining that it was my belief that people suffering from any type of addiction deserve compassion and firm personal boundaries. He responded by mocking Tiger and pointing out that the DSM-IV psych book didn't recognize sexual addiction as a legitimate condition.

Nine years of my life. Not recognized as a legitimate condition. Belonging to the Jerry Springer show.

This is why I want to talk about blow jobs.

How important is sex to a relationship? When Shawn and I first started dating, first started having sex, we were in a long-distance relationship. I assumed our sex life was healthy because we had a lot of sex when we would see each other. I didn't feel scared the first time we had sex; he was my first. First boyfriend, first lover, first husband, first love.

How does one decide to marry a sex addict? At the end, blue comes to mind. The end of our marriage was blue and black and vacuous. The space between us in bed crushes me still today. We would lie next to each other and lie to each other. "I love you, baby," he'd say.

At the end, we had sex maybe twice a month. I would attempt to sleep with him about eight times a month. His penis would be flacid and limp. I would rub up against him, arch my back, nuzzle my mouth against his pants, undo his belt, look up at him from under blonde hair and pretend like putting his cock in my mouth was the most amazing experience of my life. Lick, suck, press here, gaze up- like magic, I knew how to make him hard. We'd fuck for a minute or two. I'd pretend to get off. Then I would slide off of him, go back down on him, lick, suck, press til he came. In this way I reassured myself that our marriage was just fine.

The time in between sexual advances on my part- and I tried so hard to be enticing, wearing heels and one of his shirts when he came home from work, strewing clothing and underwear on the stairs of our townhome and waiting in bed naked, pouncing on him after we came home from the bar, from a night out with friends- we spent making dinner. We were great at making dinner. He'd chop, I'd sautee. He'd set the table, wash the dishes, I'd make the dessert, put napkins in napkin rings. We would have friends over. We'd cook for ourselves. We'd sit at the table or in front of the tv. We went to movies. We went to bars. We went to plays. We went to the Farmer's market. We never fought. We talked politics. We talked movies. We talked dreams and he pretended to encourage me. We talked music. We went to concerts. We watched movies at home and I'd fall asleep; so tired from my job. We were great when we weren't having sex.

It was my job that allowed him flexibility as an addict. I would leave at 6 a.m. I would pull out from the garage of our suburban townhome and notice a blue glow from the bedroom. He'd wake up when I left but didn't have to be to work until 9. Later I would start to notice his porn use, I'd know from the url addresses and the history that he was looking at porn from the time I left until fifteen minutes before he had to be at work.

Later I would find the credit card statements: $14, 000. It was school, he said, your ring. I'd see the records a year after my naive trust and realize it was dvds purchased from the same adult video empire, this on top of the $300 a month cable bill. I don't know where he kept them. I think there was a closet at work that he used to keep his stash. The addict has to hang on to the trophies.

And I see him as two people: Shawn and the addict. It was Shawn who looked ashamed when he saw me run around the lake today. Shawn who felt remorseful. It was the addict that would lie to me. "I saw the look in your eyes and I knew I had to quit," said the addict. Earlier, as I was waking to the concept of addiction, he'd say, "But how did you know?" addict eyes all soft when I confronted him about the internet porn use. I told him, stupidly, and thus the addict learned how to better cover his tracks.

So why does a girl marry a sex addict? Because he didn't pressure me or force me to do anything that felt scary. Because maybe I had problems with intimacy as well. Because lots of sex meant good sex in my 20 year-old mind. Because I used to love making him have an orgasm, because there was a certain thrill in being able to give him a blow job that would make him get off. Because we would have sex on the floor of his parents' living room while they were asleep, because I gave him a blow job in the car while his brother slept in the back seat. Because we had sex up against his truck in the cul-de-sac where he lived. Never mind that I felt empty during the experience, look how passionate this was. It must be love.

Plus I said, I do. The good girl in me believed that meant forever. That meant convincing him to love me, trying so hard to be what he wanted. Posing, arching, gazing, sucking. I could make him want me. Sometimes it worked. I could keep trying.

Do I give blow jobs today? This is not an essay about my current loves, my current relationships, but I do. I have. I refused for over a year, but I have relented and at times I will at least give head. I don't gaze. I don't fawn. I don't pretend it is the most amazing experience of my life. I still enjoy causing a man to have an orgasm, but I am much more selfish. I don't fake orgasms. I don't pretend to get off. I don't scream. If anything I keep my orgasm to myself. An orgasm requires a certain level of selfishness. A selfishness I lacked in my marriage and in lacking this quality, overgave and enabled an addict.

I have learned that what I cannot tolerate is that blue-black-vacuous feeling between a man and myself in bed. I have learned that sexual intimacy is about more than frequency, more than theatrics and face-paint.

I am compassionate towards Shawn, though a part of me still hates the addict. I believe our dinners were the way we made love. I believe our conversations were our intimacy. I believe he wishes he could have thrown away his addiction, the addiction he told me began at 14. I believe he wanted our relationship to work just as he wants things to work with his new girlfriend. I believe he wants to think he is different. I believe he wants to forget what happened.

Sometimes even I doubt it happened. How could a man possibly look at that much porn? Not want his wife? "It's definitely not you," said a guy at a bar when I told him my story. When I see him walking with his new girlfriend I question myself: did it happen? Did I make it up? Was it real?

It was real. It exists. It's a real problem. Addiction soothes pain and sex-addicts numb out through whatever method works. All of us dance on the edge of an addiction, whether it is work, or sex, or drugs, or booze, or antiques, or gambling, or music: we all have our escape from the loneliness that fills heart blue-black-and-vacuous.

We don't need the DSV-IV to tell us whether or not our problems exist.

Fictional Essays I've Been Scribbling in Between Buying Gas and Groceries...

2010-03-08T20:14:00.001-08:00

Part I. --The Next Town

In one of the many episodes and adventures with the imperfect being, she finds herself confronted with an age-old nemesis.

Our story tonight begins with the imperfect being, who, having newly found herself in the beginnings of what looked to be a safe and healthy relationship with a safe and healthy man decided she could not a imagine a happier place in life. Perhaps, she pondered, this was it. She had found it, a place she could exist forever. Perhaps she had finally found herself on the right track, with ticket already purchased, sitting next to Mr. Nice Guy and smiling while they waited for the train to the town called Happiness&Contentment.

But it happened, as it always does, that just as the imperfect being was packing her suitcase and imagining her journey to the town of H&C, that she met an untimely intrusion from her age-old nemesis--Favorite Mistake.

Picture this: bar-close, post-dancing, post-party, post-cab-ride, the imperfect being suddenly finds herself opening the door to her apartment accompanied by favorite mistake, a nemesis so familiar he felt comfortable. So seemingly benign, she forgot the danger. He helped himself to glass from her cupboard and poured water from her Britta pitcher into her new flower mug (the one a friend gave to her with intentions it be used for hot-chocolate with a nice guy on a cold day). It was only then that she realized her mistake. It was not Mr. Nice Guy drinking out of her nice guy mug; it was the favorite mistake.

What was imperfect being to do? Would she rid herself of the nemesis or would this episode become yet another re-run with the favorite mistake?

Luckily, the imperfect being had had a stern conversation with herself early in the evening and pre-bar, pre-dancing, pre-party-and-cab had given the vixen within strict instruction not to sleep with the favorite mistake UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

But favorite mistake was not so easily dissuaded from the mission. What followed was a slightly inappropriate and excitingly dangerous scene that no doubt one could place in both the categories labeled "Unhealthy" and "So fucking hot!!!" Think Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Dangerous. Destructive. Hot.

The imperfect being argued with the favorite mistake. She swore at him, he ripped off clothing, she lashed out at him, he reasoned with her, and finally- she drew a line in the sand:

"Fine, tell me you love me and we can have sex."

The room grew silent and stopped cartwheeling. Favorite mistake looked at her in a blue-green lock-down stare. A year passed and she did not blink. Did not waver.

We all know his answer.

And after he left the imperfect being felt suddenly the silence and darkness of her room empty of her nemesis. She had refused the favorite mistake. She still held her train ticket to Happiness&Contentment.

***

Later, following this episode, the imperfect being will sit in the train station and look at her ticket to Happiness&Contentment... and, she will hate herself just a little for wondering what town the train visits next.

Part II> Who I Don't Write:Memories...

Who have I left out of my writing?

In thinking of this question-- of course, my father jumps to mind--the words almost flinch as I let them out onto the page and the only way I can even allow myself to mention he does not surface in my work is to plug my ears, listen to my own breathing, and imagine I am at the bottom of the FMS pool. It is 5:30 a.m. The lights are sleepy and glowing under the blue surface of the pool and the lights in the room are still turned off so that above the surface is gray and tired. Here I can let these words out.

I do not want to think about why I do not write him. I do not want to ask these questions.

In the past I have done much writing about my father. Writings like snap shots taken at birthday parties, the glow of candles flickering in anticipation of breath, candles that dance in the breeze of a song. Writings and letters and cards and poems. All so happy and perfect. Girl. Father. He smiles tears in her direction.

I only say this now because as I look at the list of other life characters I omit, I see... well, men. There is something so secret about writing about men. And instantly I'm working out a pattern. Even Shawn. I have been writing him elegies, or us elegies for a marriage lost now for two years, but what do I write about him? How do I even know where to begin? I write about my grief. My loss. I don't know that I actually write him.

The new non-boyfriend rattled me this weekend. We had been out all night and he said something about how we didn't really know each other, not yet.

I stopped.

I mean, we have our little routine.

I tensed.

No, no, I mean- I like it. I like what we have. Chemistry- that's what I mean. We have chemistry.

I can't quite let this go. Routine. We don't really know each other. The words pull at my arms as I try to move forward. Could it be that I am the problem? That I can't know men? When I think there's a connection, well, what is there?

And look-- I've done it again. Set out to write about the men I leave out of my life, set out to describe my father, and all I do is dance around these stories. Sidestep the land mines.

I stay in the shallow end. So afraid of what is in the deep end of that pool.

What keeps me from going there? Am I simply scared of being teased? Is the shy girl within just keenly sensitive and perceiving that to like men, to talk about men, is not allowed?

I am nine and the doorbell rings on dark-blue snowy Thanksgiving evening. For me.

"Is it a boy?" my uncle Jerry, the one who sometimes thinks he is my godfather and who I see maybe once a year, teases me.

"Actually," my dad clears his throat, shrugging, "ah, it is."

The spotlight lands on my face and I feel it grow a little hot. I walk to the door in a dress that has a black and white taffeta skirt and a black velvet body. I am pretty sure there is a red bow in my long blond hair, which may be curled since company is over.

My neighbor stands at the door and I am mortified by the significance of this event. And excited.

A boy means something different. It's not allowed. Not yet. But it makes me special. That he's at my door and all my family sees a boy has come over to talk to me.

I get the book he came to borrow for an assignment that he will not need to complete as school will be cancelled on Monday from too much snow. He looks pained for having intruded. We barely talk on Tuesday in school. He returns my book. It is nothing.

There is no significance to this event. I am still wading in the shallow end, watching the lights dance below the surface.

Part III. What I Write When I Don't Want to Write Pain...

I want to write about his adorable face when he's totally calm and holding me in his arms--eyes closed, romantic, a poet. I want to write how he played music, how he is a little thoughtful and remembers my schedule and calls when he knows I will be around, and how he is also just a little insistent, pushing up against me on the couch, pulling my dress up higher, higher, running his finger across my thigh, pressing on the shape of my hip bone, and sighing at the touch of my bare leg.

So smooth, he says.

Just like you, I say.

He laughs.

My awkward Romeo pulling off my too-tight tights, asking politely if we should change positions, after a night out on the town asking if I would go down on him

Don't do it if you don't want to, baby. I just think it might facilitate the process.

His room, my refuge, is blue. Dark blue walls, white trim, a room that suddenly seems filled with light in the mornings. A room where I woke up after the night I met him wearing the pajamas he offered me when I said I was not going to sleep with him. A room where I thought: I like it here.

There is a tree outside that fills the space of the window and a yard that sits on the top of a steep hill so that there is the illusion of no nearby neighbors--only stillness, the city skyline, and a train yard below the tree and hill that you can easily pretend doesn't exist.

That tree's going to fall on this house and kill me someday.

He says this from below our two dogs, the golden retriever, his, and the yorkie-poo, mine, who are wrestling with their usual ferocity. The retriever raises his paw from the ground, swiping at the yorkie-poo's face. The yorkie-poo, in turn, dive bombs the retriever from his vantage point on the bed like a WWF wrestler.

I laugh at his comment, watching as my small dog leaps off his back.

Labels, titles, chapters, and sub-headings...

2010-02-15T06:41:00.000-08:00

"So I think I'm just going to start calling you my girlfriend."

"Great," I said to the man laying next to me, vastly relieved that we were simply going to choose our own labels for things in our tenuous new relationship with each other, "And I think I'm just going to call myself Not-your-girlfriend."

I giggled and he laughed, and I realized I was finding myself in an awkward stage of infatuation and revulsion. Despite my best efforts, I was falling into that strange stage of infatuation where even the sight of an unsightly nose hair causes swooning because of its vulnerability and exclusivity. And I was also finding myself in a state of revulsion where side comments about being exclusive, or answering yes when a co-worker asks if you have a girlfriend were causing me to break out in a sweat.

Girlfriend.

It's a label I've held only one other time. A label that led to the disintegration of self, the creation of a new married version of my identity, a label that ultimately led to my personal ground zero and one that I've struggled not to want for the past couple of years.

Girlfriend means danger. Girlfriend means losing me. Getting hurt. Feeling sad. Being lied to. Convincing myself to love him.

At least this is what a tenacious little fighter inside me is saying. Watch out! You know how this goes. It can only lead to pain.

While I appreciate this overprotective little voice for wanting to keep me safe, I am trying to have a conversation with her about letting go of old information, trusting my instincts, and opening my heart to possibility.

***

After our third date, this man beside me said to me, "You're the only person I've dated that I've really liked in a long time."

I paused upon hearing this, filled with anxiety and fear.

"Is that weird?" he asked. "Should I not have said that?"

"No," I answered carefully, "you should always be able to say how you feel." But then, in the darkness of a few seconds, I felt a swell of anxiety push up a sentence that I couldn't hold back.

"But I have to say, I'm a little gun-shy of anything too serious right now." The words spilled out and I held my breath. I had said something that might have hurt this man's feelings, a man I thought I might like, and despite the fear I have faced from childhood about speaking my truth, causing problems for those I love, I had done it. I had said how I felt.

"Oh, me too. Totally throw that out there. I feel the same way," and he explained how after the end of a big relationship in his life he had closed himself off, shut down, walled himself off from possibilities of new relationships. He had known what it was like to be scared of getting hurt again. "But," he went on, "I just have realized that you have to put yourself out there. You have to be vulnerable."

And it's true. It's no good to be closed off forever. As I tried to explain to the protective, anxious voice inside my head, there is no danger in a relationship. I can trust my own instincts. If things don't feel right, if I worry that he's lying to me, I can ask. I can explain my fears. I can end the relationship. I can walk away if it doesn't feel right. And maybe I will feel sad, but sadness is not permanent. It doesn't last forever. Sadness is replaced by joy and joy is replaced by loss and loss is replaced by acceptance, and by appreciation, and by love, and then, suddenly, in an unexpected way, joy returns.

It's no good hiding from life. I would rather go out and hold his hand, see where he leads me.

And so I returned to the conversation with the man laying beside me, to the giggling and laughter, and explained my label of Not-your-girlfriend.

"It's like goldfish," I said. "You can't put the goldfish in a bowl too quickly."

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"You know, when you buy a goldfish from a pet store you can't just throw it in a fishbowl."

"You can't?"

"No. You have put the plastic bag in the water, let the water get to the same temperature as that in the bag, let the goldfish think about things for a while, check it all out, and then you let it out into the bowl."

"So you're the goldfish?"

"Yes."

"You should have explained that with minnows. That would have made more sense to me."

"Minnows?"

"Yeah. We lost so many minnows when I was a kid."

More giggling. More laughter. Joy, unexpected.

***

This past weekend, no real labels determined, but time spent together, I was telling this man about my adventures in Minneapolis parking, relaying how I had run out to my car to move it at 5:30 in the morning after waking to the noise of snow plows and finding a ticket on my dashboard reading "tow immediately." After rescuing my car from the plows, I parked my car on one side of the street, worrying about the vast quantities of snow lining the street, but taking my chances anyway. An hour later, realizing I was still on the wrong side of a snow emergency, I was back out into the morning to move my car again, only to find I was stuck. I explained how two still-drunk party revelers had approached and had offered to help, giving up after 15 seconds saying, "It's no use. Go home, little girl. Just give up." I hadn't bothered to explain the complexities of Minneapolis snowstorm parking to them, but had waited until they walked down the street, got out of the car, and using gloved fingers, dug my way out of the snow bank, rocking the sedan back and forth and emerging, victorious, from the snow.

"Adventures of the single gal continue," I concluded to my new non-boyfriend.

And that's what I realize I'm holding onto- it's not that I'm so resistant to the term girlfriend as I'm clinging to the term single. I like taking care of myself. Part of me cursed the fact that I had no boyfriend to call after finding myself severely lodged in a pile of snow, but a bigger part of me was proud of myself for finding my own solution. Part of me, after moving into my new apartment, lamented the fact that there was no boyfriend to help me haul my stuff into my new space, but another part of me felt free, liberated, safe in the knowledge that I will always be able to take care of myself and that I am a resourceful, independent woman who is going to have a happy life whether or not I find a permanent man in my life or not.

I will make my life what I want it to be.

So it's not so much that I'm scared of moving ahead with this man, or that I'm scared of the outcome of the way a relationship works. Maybe we will last six months. Maybe we will last six more weeks. Maybe we will last forever. Maybe not. It's ok. It doesn't matter. Either way I will be safe. Either way I will find happiness.

In my mind, I'm not quite a girlfriend yet. I'm a single woman dating one man exclusively.

And I'm falling in love with the new label.

Joy, unexpected.

Blonde Moment, with Apologies to Paulo Coelho

2010-01-21T19:01:00.000-08:00

In The Alchemist, a book my ex-husband recommended to me because both he and his grandmother liked it, a book I now teach to juniors in high school, a book about following dreams and pursuing personal legends, there is a prologue I have never been able to figure out.

In the prologue, the Alchemist reads a legend in which the Greek character Narcissus falls in love with himself and withers away, so transfixed by his own reflection in a nearby lake that he cannot leave. But the legend does not end with Narcissus' transformation into a flower. It ends with the lake transforming from freshwater to saltwater after weeping for the loss of Narcissus.

"Well, he was very beautiful," say the woodland nymphs.

"Was he?" asks the lake. "I only cry now because in his eyes I could see my own beauty reflected."

And the Alchemist, upon reading this, thinks to himself, "What a lovely story."

I have never quite been able to figure this prologue out. I understand that alchemy is about transformation and the novel is about transforming into something greater than what you were, and about connecting to the pulse of the universe, but this story seems out of sync. It seems to be a story about vanity. A lake so vain it doesn't miss what was gone, but only the reflection of itself.

It's a thought that worries me.

A thought much like the worry love causes me. In my mind, all miracles are somehow linked. If love exists, it must mean God exists. But how can God exist? If we are merely particles buzzing with energy in a world so filled with practicality, how can God be real? And if God cannot be real, as all logic dictates, how can a romantic soul-mate kind of love in this universe? We must be just x's and y's linking with other x's and y's in a frenzy to find the right phermone. How can anyone trust the little voice inside saying yes or no upon dating someone? Shouldn't love, in this world of practicality and energy, be based on decisions, compatibility, and values? Can't we train passion to follow logic? Fend off heart-ache for friendship?

And if that is true, as it must be, why do I so stubbornly resist believing it?

Sigh.

But back to the prologue. Maybe it's about the idea of reflection? Of seeing something of ourselves in others? Of seeing God in surfaces shiny like bus windows and fragile as desire?

I am not sure I will ever be done worrying about the prologue. Or God. Or Love.

But the prologue strikes chords with me at odd times. This is what happens after teaching a book four or five times in a row. It seems to travel always with you. To ring bells at odd moments.

A bell rang in my mind upon reading an essay one of my students wrote.

Keep in mind, this is a student that brings a tornado of emotion into the classroom with her each day. A student who cannot avoid conflict with peers or teachers. A student who is as loud as she is angry, as loud as she might be sad.

We have butted heads. But now we get along.

In her essay, she describes the day her mother tried to kill her. She explains how her mother and mother's boyfriend were drunk as usual and how a disagreement escalated to physical blows. How she escaped and ran into the hall of her apartment screaming for help. How no one came or helped. How only the woman upstairs called her mom saying she didn't want her to go to jail, so keep it down.

She also describes how she went to the principal later for help. How, when her mom attacked her a second time, she went to her room and called the police. How she stayed in a shelter for teens.

She concludes her essay with a quote from Marilyn Monroe that reads:

"I'm selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I'm out of control, and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."

When I read her essay, feeling the weight of each syllable press into my heart, I came to the quote and heard a bell.

"What a lovely story," I thought.

Because a Friend Told Me I Should Be Writing More Blogs...

2009-12-29T21:02:00.000-08:00

It is December.

A million December blogs run through my head-- about a season so draining it frays nerves like split ends down strands of blonde hair, a season filled with memories behind twinkling lights, banks of snow, poinsettias, weddings, friends who remember the anniversaries you are no longer allowed to talk about, and who toast your anniversary of independence, and of realizing that that being lonely while single is so much better than being lonely while lying next to someone who cannot love you, because being lonely while single means only that-- that you are alone, while being lonely while lying next to the man you are trying to love and knowing he does not love you means (possibly? probably?) you are unlovable, and of secret December lives, and lies, and people dying, and birthdays, and Rudolph's nose lighting the way home from Grandma's house along every radio tower in St. Paul, and drawing with your finger against the frozen molecules of the car window, and your mom telling stories about how she worked in the 1st bank downtown and turned the flashing light that dots the skyline on and off, and on and off, because she didn't think you understood, at seven, what statistics meant. And a Santa who knocks on Grandma's door when you are three because he sees you waving in the window and hands you a wooden toy car that has wheels you can take apart, and later, how you learn no one knew who this Santa was, that he appeared out of nowhere, and how somehow you brought that Santa down the aisle with you in December, twenty one years later, and how now both memories slide along the ventricles of your heart with slow, easy, deliberate serrated blade edges.

This is my December.

There are a million December blogs that dance in my mind, like sugarplums laced with acid.

But the blog I will write is my December 29th, the day after yesterday. And today I took a step forward only to have to go back, but stepped forward again, and, after visiting the phone store three times in one day, after making friends with gay, Jewish salesman Bill, the Somali couple buying a phone from the Somali salesman who recognizes me by the third visit, and after somehow offering to bring lunch tomorrow, two days after yesterday, to everyone in the office, I purchased a new phone. Finally.

Today, December 29th, I abandoned the flip phone I had borrowed to replace a much loved and dramatic Blackberry with another. Which meant I had to reenter all of my contacts. One. At. A Time. Phone. Number. By. Phone. Number.

So what I learned was this-- in the middle of My December, my emotional mini-drama, my endless lists of school work and course work and syllabi and syllables, I pushed everything aside to sit on my couch next to my yorkie-poo, watch Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, and type digits into my phone one by one--that while the first ten minutes felt tedious, suddenly a shift occurred. I learned that entering phone numbers into a phone, remembering birth dates, figuring out birth years and anniversaries, brought all of these people into my living room. All of these happy memories and people got my undivided attention as I thought about them and their important dates and numbers. I couldn't help but feel happy as I thought about each and every one. My favorite numbers went into my phone, right alongside my favorite people.

And everything felt right.

And that is why I wrote this blog, this, the day after yesterday. This is my blog for December 29.

Everything just feels right.

The Day after Yesterday

2009-12-12T06:18:00.000-08:00

Today I am blowing off the mountains of schoolwork I am supposed to be grading.

Today is a slow morning and singing "Winter Wonderland" in my best lounge singer impersonation.

Today is addressing Christmas cards and buying groceries.

Today is yoga and holiday parties.

Today is remembering newspapers and coffee and French toast for two made with one egg per piece of bread, vanilla, cream, brown sugar and toasted pecans.

Today is smiling at the memory.

Today is making French toast for one and thinking it still tastes pretty damn good.

But Maybe Wear a Helmet

2009-12-11T20:01:00.000-08:00

There is something I have lost. Something that recently has gone out of my life. It is the something that lets me send words out into the world without care and with a sort of blind faith that somehow my fingers know better than my mind what needs to land on a page.

Thus, (to borrow a transition word from the list of transitions I gave to my 9th graders the other day), I haven't been writing much.

And for a couple months this was fine. I was busy. I was moving. I was teaching and going to school and applying for another teaching position and training for teaching online and getting sick every other day and THUS, thus- I left writing.

So now my fingers don't know quite what to do. They start. They delete. They second guess. They worry. They pause...

But today, well- today I was walking through my office at school, eyes glued to the assignment I was about to copy for the students restlessly awaiting instruction in the computer lab, when I slammed my leg right into a file cabinet with a noise that startled at least two of the three co-workers that were in the office at the time.

"Katie!" said one of these dear co-workers, "are you ok?!"

"Yeah," I replied, but in my head I thought no. No. Something is very wrong with this picture. What am I doing here? What has happened to my life? Obviously there is a reason my eyes have been causing me problems for the last two months. Obviously there is something I am not seeing.

"I'm fine," I said to my co-worker. "It sounded worse than it was." In my head, though, I was saying, "Nice job. How clumsy can one person be? Who runs into a file cabinet?" And a story a student wrote in a creative writing class I taught one year long ago came to mind, one that featured a teacher who tripped over cords and bumped into things. I sighed.

It wasn't until I bumped into my stove for the second time later on the same night that I thought of my blog, and the tagline about being clumsy and running into things in an adorable way.

Thus, now that I am sitting on the couch with my hound beside me, watching Julie and Julia and trying not to be envious of the blog writer in the movie who became successful by writing about recipes and cooking. I am thinking maybe I should stop being jealous of someone in a movie and start doing work of my own. I am thinking maybe I can be successful writing about collisions? Accidents? Embarrassing mishaps?

Since there is no telling how many embarrassing mishaps I will encounter in my life, no telling how many slightly painful collisions I will have, since I am bound to run into objects and people for the rest of my life, I might as well keep writing.

Thus, I might as well let my fingers run as they will.

And just wait to see what will happen next.

No pausing, no second-guessing. No more worrying.

From New Toy to Skin Horse--Comments on the English classroom

2009-11-10T05:39:00.000-08:00

Well- here I am. In a coffee shop. On a school day. Feeling like the world's worst teacher, yet again.

My body has been rebelling against teaching this year. It's only November and already I've called in SEVEN sick days this year, made a trip to urgent care, the minute clinic, two visits to my own doctor, and one trip to a fancy opthamologist in a skyscraping building downtown. Not exactly a personal best. But I want to put aside my rebellious immune system issues, the possibility that my body is telling me to quit teaching, and the pain I am feeling from a golfball sized pus-filled lymph node that is irritating the left side of my throat and making me squinch both shoulders up in a painful wince each time I swallow.

I want to put aside the physical for a moment and think about teaching.

I have to create an assignment for composition students for a course I am taking on composition and pedagogy. Conveniently, I teach composition and so this assignment will be pulling double duty for me- once when I turn it in for my grad class and then again when I use it on my unsuspecting students in a couple weeks.

I felt a little reluctant taking a grad school class on teaching composition while working on my MFA in writing, because, having already earned an M.Ed, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about teaching already. But it has turned out to be surprisingly helpful, and, even more surprising, I am starting to feel as though I am exiting the shiny, new toy stage of teaching and entering into the shabby, worn skin horse part of the profession. I don't profess to be "real" yet, as the Velveteen rabbit wanted to be in the story, the one in which he sought wisdom from the skin horse who explained about the passing of flashy, new toys. But I do think nine years in the profession has changed my thinking about what I do.

I began teaching as a shiny, new toy right out of grad school, one year after under-grad. I was a ferris wheel of activities and lesson plans and games and exciting things to DO in class. But I think now that I DO a lot less and my students are learning a lot more. Or at least I hope so. I'm learning more, anyhow.

So here are some thoughts and lessons I've been considering in my evolution to skin horse composition teacher:

1. It is better to not do everything but to do certain things really well. It's better to scrap the day's activity in favor of going over the one you gave yesterday. Students want to do assignments that have meaning and they will put more effort into it if they see the meaning in what you do. By going over the materials, you illustrate the importance of the assignment for them.

2. The less I am involved in the assignment, the more they learn. My view of myself as a teacher has changed--I am not the expert telling them what to do, but I am a scholar, asking what we can learn from what is in front of us. I see my students learning the most when I introduce materials and ask them questions, when I say "what can we learn from this piece?" and "how does the writer make her point?" rather than "This is what we learn," and "This is how the writer makes her point." I ask my students to come up with grading criteria for their assignments. I ask them to tell me what a good narrative essay should do. They have to engage more critically with the work and, hopefully, start to think like scholars, rather than as students waiting for instruction from the teacher.

3. Learn from them. I used to be so nervous to pass out class evaluations, and not without reason. Handing a volatile 17 year-old an evaluation form can be seriously devastating for a 23 year-old newbie teacher. Now I learn from my students by asking them to reflect on their own process as writers, or by asking which assignments were most helpful. I am more willing to change and less fearful about their reaction to me. My thinking has gone from "do they like me?" to "are they learning?"

4. Page requirements are for suckers. One lesson learned from the self-reflections I had my students do is that for many, the thing they were most pleased with was the length of their essay. The requirement had been to write a 2-5 page essay and one student wrote "I am pleased with the length of the paper. Usually I am at the minimum but this time I was right in the middle." As a teacher, I found I could actually care less about the length of the paper. And that, in fact, when the students tried to stretch their stories to make them longer, usually the writing became worse. The papers lost their focus, became too wordy, and contained so many details that there was no climax to the story. In the narrative essay, I found the papers that were about a page and a half long tended to be the strongest. And, furthermore, I decided that I didn't want my students to worry about the length of the essay for a second. I wanted them to think about content, voice, and organization. I scrapped the length requirement for future narrative essays.

5. Not everyone likes to write. As a writer, I found this shocking. Having never struggled for topic and being the sort who could ramble on and on for five pages just introducing my topic, it never occurred to me that some people might simply not enjoy writing or might struggle to think of what to say and how to say it. I grew up in a family where my dad was an English teacher and my mom, a businesswoman, loved writing limericks and poems and lengthy, comical Christmas letters. We discussed grammar at the dinner table. We wrote skits to perform at Christmas parties. I had no idea there was a whole culture of people who didn't enjoy reading and writing.

Having made friends with people more mathematically or business-world inclined, I have learned a new perspective. Some people feel frustrated by the subjectivity of English courses, by the hazy guidelines and criteria; there are no answer keys to say you are right or wrong: there is only the teacher with her red pen. Suddenly I could understand why students take the comments and grades on their papers so personally; they are personal. Of course, not to the instructor, but, if you are student who doesn't understand the concepts being explained, you aren't going to receive the comments written on your essay as anything but a message that you are inadequate in this world where other people belong and you don't.

6. Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. Plato said this, first of all, not me, but it is a lesson that has been the most painful for me to learn. As a new teacher, I took students' failures personally. Why wouldn't they learn? Why wouldn't they try? Why did they insist on failing? But there's always a reason and it usually has little to do with me.

For instance, there was the student I scolded in front of others for skipping class who stormed away from me in a huff. Months later I learned her two year-old nephew had just been beaten to death by her sister's boyfriend. Of course I had no clue, but I will never forget that I shamed her (and not too harshly, to be fair to myself) in front of other people while she was dealing with that. Or there was Tyler, the student who pierced his own eyebrow with a giant safety pin and promptly lost every assignment I gave him. Or Alan, a student who NEVER brought a pencil to class and would chew the ones I let him use for the period... and lose them before class the next day. Or Mary, a student who always dressed impeccably said to me when I asked about her failing grade "I don't know, I just can't concentrate. My dad and step-mom always fight, so I just want to hang out with my friends." Or Jereme, who said, when I asked him about his failing grades that his grandma, his only caretaker since his mom died the month before, had been hospitalized for a stroke and so he had to take over her dog-walking business while she was in the hospital.

No wonder he wasn't turning in his assignments.

7. Or else they are on drugs. Seriously. I've caught at least three kids using in my classroom over the years and I know that's just the kids dumb enough to get caught. Deals are going down in high school halls all over the place. But if students are choosing to be high in school, imagine how pointless they must see school in their lives. Some students will learn later on, some will go on to become addicts, some will have no long term consequences for their choices, but either way ultimately this is the student's choice.

I'm not really sure how this revelation fits into my personal pedagogy for teaching, other than to remember it is an element in the classroom that is never in the textbooks. When you are learning how to write a lesson plan there is never any guidance for what to do if your students are tripping, or stoned, or high out of their minds. And sometimes, when I am beating myself up for a being a failure of a teacher, for letting one or two of the children get left behind, it is slightly helpful to remember that one or two of them might be stubbornly planting their feet in the ground and refusing to move ahead with the plan. That it might not have anything to do with me at all.

8. Everyone wants to do well. Everyone. A peer in my composition class once told me that to get an F on an assignment, even one he didn't care about doing when he turned it in, was like "watching a video of being kicked in the face in slow motion." All students want to do well. All students want approval. All students care about the end results even if they show it by getting mad at the teacher, being hostile, challenging, demanding, apathetic, disinterested, or flippant.

This revelation has shaped the way I meet with students. I try to remember that their efforts on an assignment are their best efforts based on what they understood of the assignment. Even those students who waited until the last minute and rushed through it-- why did they wait? Why didn't they put more into it? Why did they sabotage their own efforts? What were they fearful of? What didn't they understand?

I have decided I don't want to be a teacher who crushes writers. I don't hand out A's but I try to simply remember to honor my students for their efforts and meet them where they are. I try not to shame or belittle my students.

9. You never know what they take with them. It's true. And especially with high school students. There are fewer pictures and cards made for high school teachers. Which is fine. Mostly it will seem like no one appreciates you. That is just the nature of being a high school teacher, especially if you have high expectations for your students and a reputation for being a little tough.

But sometimes a student will surprise you, and the student you thought cared less about school, will thank you for your efforts. Once in a while they will even buy you a shot, as a student of mine from my first year of teaching did when I was with friends at a bar downtown. He was a bartender and, in addition to giving me a drink, he turned to my friend and told her that I was the one of the few teacher at the high school who actually cared about what I was doing, the few that made a difference to him, a student notoriously late to class, usually inclined to goof off, and rarely inclined to finish homework. I would never have thought he would remember me any more than another student, Deshaun, one I worked with twice in an after school program and saw frequently in the halls.

Deshaun was frequently in trouble, mostly failing his classes, and often getting into confrontations with his teachers. I complimented his creative writing in the after school program and would ask him about the rhymes he was making up. Now he works at the Walgreen's by my apartment and is going to a community college in January. He greets me reverently as "Ms. Fuller" when he sees me and keeps me updated on his life, that he's working full time, planning to go to school, and getting his diploma on Monday at our high school because he finally finished his credits. I'm pleased he is succeeding now and surprised he remembers me; I never even had him as a student.

I'm telling these stories not to boost my ego for being an amazing teacher. (Well, maybe a little for ego-boosting. This is a pretty thankless job, so maybe I am just a little bit patting myself on the back for once instead of beating myself up for my many failures.) Mostly I am telling these stories to illustrate that teachers will hear the complaints instantly from the students they have pissed off, but that they rarely will hear the positive feedback. So it's a profession that requires a certain quality of faith, a certain skin horse toughness.

And finally...

10. There is nothing more satisfying than playing tricks on your students. It's so fun. On Friday I promised a taste test for an analysis unit we've been working on and I told my students we would be taste-testing broccoli, liver, and pig's hooves. For some dumb reason they believed me. Another classic joke is to write QUIZ! on the board on April 1st. They never catch on. Seven periods in a row- the joke works!

I say this because teaching can be fun, too. These are not mean-spirited jokes; they are harmless pranks and bring levity and life to the classroom. And, in a classroom where I will be largely unappreciated and teaching crabby students on drugs, I might as well amuse myself.

There are 800,000 variables I cannot control in the classroom (golf ball sized, pus-filled lymph nodes being one of them), but I can control my attitude. And I can find ways to amuse myself. To bring levity to the classroom. So I make bad jokes (for instance I asked my students which character in To Kill a Mockingbird said very little, which character said boo. Ha ha.) and I do not mock students, but I play tricks when I can. I tell my students embarrassing and amusing anecdotes about my family's obsession with jello. They don't laugh, but I don't care. It's not cool to laugh at your teacher's jokes when you are 15. Luckily, I am not 15. I can laugh at myself all I want.

So, an hour later into my sick day, I guess my conclusions are this: Am I an amazing teacher? Probably not. Am I a good teacher? Maybe. Am I doing my best? Yes. Have I learned anything in my nine years at this? Definitely. Is the journey from new toy to skin horse over?

Chances are, it's just beginning.

My October Paradox

2009-10-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

This morning I stepped out of my apartment at 5:45 in the morning into the just-frozen October morning to see the glint of ice on my windshield greet me. And despite the irritation I felt knowing I would have to begin a life of scraping my window now that I no longer live at the cushy studio apartment with the heated garage, I couldn’t help but notice the clear air filling my lungs, the belt of Orion gleaming in the black sky above me. I breathed in and also cursed the harsh beauty around me pressing the rubber straight edge of my window scraper against the film of ice on the glass.

An October paradox.

By mid-morning the frost was gone and by late afternoon I was wearing my hoodie without a coat out for a walk. But now it is night and I suppose frost is here again, just outside my door.

I just finished watching The Wrestler and so I cannot escape the idea of loneliness, of tragic ex-heroes of the 80’s, of men who end up alone clinging to their armor even as they realize behind it they touch no one.

My uncle died this summer. His grown-up biological children and stepchildren showed up like vets who had gone through a civil war of sorts, a bloodbath of divorce and abandonment that left scars that still smart when the weather isn’t right. They mourned not their father, but the relationship, the treaty lines that sent them scattering in different directions around the country. They wanted him back, it back, that life before the war.

We all did.

My once-upon-a-time husband lost his father to a similar war. I don’t know where his scars are or how they are doing now, but I know they must have ached when he rolled over in bed next to me years ago. I was no Nightengale, had no skills to treat his wounds, but I knew they were there, hidden below the surface. I could hear it in the tears he didn’t cry at the funeral.

My ninth graders just finished reading of Mice and Men and on a test I asked them to explain which theme in the novel was most important. “I think loneliness was the most important idea in the novel,” wrote one student named Patrick, “in the fact that it affected everyone in the story. I can relate to this theme because I have been lonely most of my life.”

“I think everyone has moments when they feel lonely,” I wrote on his test, because- what else could I say?

Loneliness crouches over me right now from the ropes at a ring. On this frost-filled night it is the wrestler in lime green pants and I am afraid that Mickey Rourke is about to “Ram Jam” me right into the floor.

I think this wrestler must visit other apartments as well. On Saturday, I went out for dinner with a man who said to me, “Don’t get me wrong, I love living alone. But I’m ready to have a relationship—it’s boring being single, and lonely.”

“What are you doing for Christmas?” asked another male friend of my mine on the phone the other day. His mom had been asking him about his plans and I think he felt the wrestler breathing down his neck when she did.

And these conversations make me worry because even in the face of the frost, even under the shadow of the wrestler, a part of me hears these comments as requests, as needs, and I want to hang up the phone and say good night early. The worry is not about these men. They are not saying anything wrong. They are being honest, which I like. What worries me is my own reaction.

“You’re kind of hard to reach,” said a man I went to a movie with this summer. “It’s hard to explain but it’s like there’s a wall around you.”

Am I one of the tragic ex-heroes of the 80’s? Am I clinging desperately to my armor?

I go to the place in my memory of funerals. Of armored knights on platforms in front of the people who tried to love them.

I am thinking of my uncle again.

He lost the war with some of his children. He loved them but couldn’t find a way to share that love with them. But he didn’t die alone.

In the end he adopted a third ex-wife’s daughter as his own and provided for her and her son, his grandson. He still spoke with his ex-wife (who was his daughter’s age), and her parents (who were his age). He still joked around with the people in his new life. He still pulled out a gun to shoot at rabbits in his front yard in Sauk Rapids. (A story shared that soothed the battle wounds at the funeral.)

I may have walls around me some of the time but I do not push everyone out of my life. There are people in my life with whom I can be completely honest, completely myself. There are friends who stop by for dinner, who help me when I need it, who call me every night at 10:02 to discuss the occurrences of the day. There are family members who are not perfect but who are as imperfect as myself and willing to learn how to connect.

Love is everywhere. It is all around us. Sometimes we mess it up. Sometimes we find ourselves fighting against something simple, we find ourselves fighting our own civil wars, but love never leaves. It is the starlight bouncing off the frost on a cold October morning, a beauty so harsh we aren’t sure what to do with it.

My Relationship to Pain

2009-10-13T15:25:00.000-07:00

Just below the orangish-red, newly painted toes of my pedicured foot, there is a puffy purple mark emerging.

I played soccer today. I played soccer during the 43-degree weather of a Minnesota October Sunday evening. I played soccer with a man who had a French accent and gray hair; a man who planted the entire weight of his body on cleats on the top of my foot.

I limped down the stairs tonight to let the yorkie-poo out.

This is not an uncommon occurrence for a soccer player. Even one who plays on a co-ed league for old folks, men over 35 and women over 30. Last week I went to school with a giant bruise on my elbow and a thumbprint bruise on my bicep. There was a purple olive on my thigh from a fist or a cleat. I don’t even want to tell you the number of toenails I’ve lost over the years to this game. Or the number of times I’ve rolled an ankle.

Many summers ago, my friend Emily once asked pointedly, lovingly, and mockingly, after seeing me hobble on yet another sprained ankle, “Do you have to play soccer? Would you like to just lay down on the ground while I beat you with a stick instead?”

“Would there be a way to win?” I asked earnestly, seriously considering the new sport, to the laughter of another soccer-playing friend.

I don’t know what my problem is.

I don’t know exactly what sort of crazy I am that makes me love this sport, makes me love the contact, the competition, the jostling and elbowing in front of the net. Why can’t I just be content to run? To swim? To move in a straight line without running into other people?

Ironically enough, in life, I find, I am trying hard to do just that—to move in a straight line, and avoid other people. I am finding myself so disinterested in men, at least the ones that are safe and doing all the right things, like calling in person promptly after getting my number, inviting me to dinner, and pursuing master’s degrees.

But then again, I am also avoiding the men not doing the right thing—the ones who are insincere or half-hearted or only half-interested.

I’m tempted, as the inwardly-introspective, prone to over-rumnination sort of person that I am, to focus only on the way I am disinterested in the nice guys who have asked me out. I am tempted declare myself masochistic- sadistically interested in inflicting pain on myself. I’m tempted to compare my dating life to my love for soccer, to classify myself as one of those women who loves bad boys and troubled relationships. I’m tempted to chastise and criticize and shame myself for bad choices and hasty decisions.

However, after careful consideration, I realize I am not shunning good guys in favor of bad. I’m not disinterested in someone just because he is nice. I’m also not dating a man who treats me like crap. I’m somewhere in dating limbo and mostly just waiting to see how things shake out.

Maybe I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want.

I know I don’t want to talk myself into anything. I know I don’t want to date a man because I feel like I should. Tell myself that he’s cute and other people admire him and I know he’s really a good guy. I would never want to be the woman some guy convinced himself to date and so I respect these cute, nice men enough not to be that girl convincing herself to like them.

I know I won’t tolerate being lied to, I know I won’t tolerate being treated disrespectfully, and so I know I’m not just drawn to the bad boys either. I know I want someone who communicates sincerely, who listens with his ears, his mouth, and his heart.

Some men I have dated have said they hear me, but I don’t always feel it. I have tried to talk myself into feeling it, into trusting them, but in the end, I just can’t. I did that for a decade once already.

So I have decided I am done arguing with my gut—I have decided to just accept that it’s right. I am not interested the men asking me out on dates, not because I am sadistically hoping for a man who treats me badly, but because nothing so far has felt right.

Thus I continue, in life, moving in a straight line, avoiding people, men, for the time being.

Maybe this is why I love soccer so much. Maybe the field is where I let the wild girl out- the one who loves the collisions.

Soccer has been showing up in my dreams lately. I’m taking penalty kicks on goals on a field of white carpet. I’m throwing the ball in bounds to myself because no one else is checking to me.

There is a woman inside me who loves fighting. One who loves puffy bruises below orangish-red, newly-painted toes. But she only seeks pain on the turf, or the field. Never after walking away from the game.

Maybe that’s because she’s been down that road already.

New Nest

2009-10-13T15:23:00.001-07:00

One of my many nicknames, my favorite nickname, given to me by my mother—a significant thing in my life, as my relationship with my mother is not always a peaceful one, and so it comforts me eternally to know always that at least she coined this most special name for me—is Bird.

Lately I’ve been in the mood for nesting.

And getting ready to migrate.

In fact, there are only a handful of nights left in my current roost, the studio apartment with nine foot ceilings, blue walls, bookshelves and granite countertops, where I’ve been living for the past two years. The place I moved into while under stress, under attack, during my divorce, during my personal ground zero moment.

At the time I wanted something safe and clean. The building was brand new. The hallways weren’t even painted. No one else had used my bathtub. I could see everything I owned from my bed. This felt comforting. This gave me peace. I felt safe enough to break apart. To weep on the bathroom floor until I was empty. To scotch tape my pieces back into place.

This place, this apartment, provided me with space enough to heal, no walls to hide emotions in other rooms.

But now-

Well, now I realize these four walls contain room enough only for me (and the yorkie-poo just barely). There is no room for other people in this space. Perhaps to visit. Perhaps to share a drink and a conversation. But there is no room, for instance, for a boyfriend in this apartment.

So I guess it’s time to move.

I don’t know if I’m ready for a boyfriend, but I’ve decided I’m ready for at least a bedroom. I’m ready for a dining room table and chairs instead of the four unevenly matched stools I bought for $14 a piece at IKEA. I’m ready for a desk in the second bedroom, a futon for friends who visit, a room entirely for curling up on a couch and watching a movie. I’m ready for rooms, living, family, and otherwise.

I visited the new two-bedroom apartment I will be living in—and by new, I only mean new to me because it lives in a building containing just three other apartments built in 1909- one hundred years ago. I stood in the living room wishing for different paint choices and getting used to the space. I picture this place full of life- full of other people- full of so much more than myself.

The mental nesting begins in the way of plans, my most comfortable tool, and leafing through catalogues, imagining what colors need to go where, picturing photos from trips decorating the walls. I see plants and rugs and a white enamel desk sitting in a room full of windows facing the coffee shop across the street. I hear music. I smell food. It’s like I can imagine my chosen family of various friends materializing in certain corners of the apartment. I am mentally buying a comfortable chair- one I would never want to get out of- to rest in the living room of my new place. The place where I want to not just stay, not just use to recover, but the place where I plan truly to live.

And in this mood, in the new apartment, I can’t help but feel that by finding a new roost, one big enough for more than just my sorrow, one big enough for my life, my joy, surely another person will appear in the space.

“Are you going to get a roommate?” a friend asked as I told him about the new two-bedroom place.

“No,” I say, “it’s not really big enough for a roommate. I mean, it’s big enough for something like a boyfriend to share it with, but not really a roommate.”

“Oh, so what, you have a boyfriend now?”

“No,” I say sheepishly. “But, you know, I figure I get the apartment and the boyfriend will appear eventually.”

“You’re planning ahead,” he said. “I like that.”

I do too.

Back at the studio, though, I think about the new spot and I wonder if I will be able to fill the space. What if there are no friends? No gatherings? No dinners? No boyfriends to make the walls of my new apartment burst with life? What if I wander lonely from room to room? What if I rattle and spin like a quarter through the empty, echoing walls, on the ancient, faded hardwood floors?

I can’t pretend that writing this has eased my mind. I can’t pretend that it makes me confident that I will suddenly be open to new relationships in my life.

But I guess I can trust the nickname. I guess I can trust those instincts stirring me to move and migrate, nestle and nest. I guess I can trust my mom knew me when she named me Bird. How do they find it? The place in the south where they need to fly? How do they know when it is time to leave? I’m pretty sure they don’t overanalyze it. I’m sure they don’t write lists and weigh pros and cons. It can’t be that they call friends and ask for advice. Or that they make appointments with their therapists.

I’m pretty sure they just go, just because something inside says fly. And so will I- not looking back over my wing.

The most heartbreaking blog yet...

2009-10-13T15:21:00.000-07:00

I’m being haunted.

It’s October, so I suppose it’s only fitting, but the haunter is not a ghost or phantom, sadly not a monster or a zombie.

Instead it is a pile of white papers all trailing me from dawn to dusk and even into the night. A stack of the 150 narrative essays from my five classes of high school students this year- my year after the sabbatical.

They are in my car. They are on my counter. They are at my desk at school. I can’t go anywhere without seeing this gigantic collection of personal narratives reminding me that grading needs to happen. I estimate it will take twenty-seven hours to grade the essays, these essays about getting a dog, falling off of a horse, stepping onto the basketball court, hitting a homerun. Giving birth to a son. Finding out a friend has died in a car accident.

Despite the fact that I am moving to a new apartment and still taking a class at grad school and working full time and trying to have a life, I need to find an additional 27 hours to get this work done. And the problem is that my body is rejecting my plan to dutifully grade these papers and get them back quickly to my students. It keeps getting sick. It took me three weeks to get over a cold. I’m losing weight. I carry this giant stack of essays like a pack of sins from childhood around with me from coffee shop to apartment to school and it weighs me down with its guilt. I feel like a stick, unsteady and anxious, carrying a burden that keeps me off balance.

It’s not a good situation.

Today I called in sick to work in order to spend eight hours grading these specters and writing comments in the margins, but my body had other plans.

“Lan,” I said last night to my friend. “I’m feeling so sniffly and I keep trying to pretend that it’s allergies but I think it might be another cold!”

“I think it probably is,” she said sagely, in an uncharacteristically pessimistic, yet pithy declamation. “I think this will be the year of the colds.”

And sure enough- this morning I woke feeling totally congested and miserable. I think the allergy my body cannot tolerate is my career.

My illnesses are not my only problem.

The other problem is that, unfortunately, I am a pretty good teacher.

I plan lessons, I design quizzes that build on skills we’ve worked on in class, I call parents, I post grades, I enter scores into the gradebook quickly. I design assignments that will be beneficial to students. I read what they write. I respect their efforts in my class. I greet each student personally when she walks in the room.

And it’s just killing me.

“How’s Cody Peterson doing in class?” asked my co-worker when I walked into the office at 6:30 am on Thursday morning.

“Pretty good so far,” I said, thinking of the cheerful, skinny boy who wears skinny jeans with sandy hair always in his face. The one I had put in the front row after he spent the first two days in class talking to friends. The one who lost his drafts of his essay and had to start over. The one who comes late at least once a week. Who reads clearly and competently, but softly. The one who raises his hand often and listens well now that he is in the front.

“Take him under your wing,” she said to me. “He’s a good kid and if he likes you he’ll do anything.”

“Ok,” I said, thinking about the many tasks I had to accomplish before class started at 7:20 and not really in the mood to adopt another student. There is already quite a collection living under my wing.

“He has a son,” she said.

He has a son? I think. Suddenly I am very tired.

“Yeah,” she said, “and he’s such a great kid. Last year was a lot of chaos and the mom wouldn’t let him see the baby, but things are better this year. Anyhow, we were talking about grades in advisory class and I asked him how English was going. He said, ‘I like Fuller. She’s really nice. It’s going good.’”

I nod.

“He’s happy in your classroom,” she says.

“Oh, great- that’s good to hear,” I say, but in my head I think I wish I was.

The truth is that even though Cody Peterson is a lovable kid, even though I am touched that he likes my class, even though I sincerely wish him success and happiness, I just can’t. I just can’t. I don’t know how to articulate this, but all I know is that I can’t teach without caring and doing a fairly decent job, but if I am doing a fairly decent job at teaching, it usually means I am doing a pretty awful job of living myself. I am getting sick, getting skinny, not writing, not sleeping. I am not well as a teacher.

I feel sad saying that.

Simply put- it is an impossible task. To teach students to write means thoughtful conversation one-on-one in which you are acting as coach/mentor/teacher and explaining complicated concepts like how to link ideas and be concise. In a room of 35 14 year-olds during a 47 minute class, I get one minute per student to do this.

Two years ago, as a teacher going through the battle of divorce, I was a safety net for the bleeding hearts. I cared so deeply for the kids in my classroom that this year they beam when they see me and greet me with a hug. I don’t have room to take care of more students if I also want to take care of myself.

Who’s taking me under their wing? I thought after the conversation with my co-worker. I need help! I’m a mess too-- I thought about the ways I fail to take care of myself, the way I skip breakfast each day, the way I sometimes skip lunch, the way I don’t get enough sleep. I thought about the unhealthy excitement of my weekend, the not-so-classy way in which I had repeatedly called a friend who pissed me off (at 3 a.m, and by repeatedly I mean about twelve times in a row), the way I continuously (adorably?) crash into my surroundings, the people in my life, and occasionally even stationary objects. Who am I to be a model of responsibility for my students? Who am I to be any kind of example? Who am I to be a mentor? To take someone under my wing?

I married and divorced a sex-addict. I attend a twelve-step program for codependents of sex addicts. Everything that I attained in my 20’s is lost. I have spent the last two years dredging up the skeletons of my past. I am clumsy and troubled and sensitive and honest. I’m not sure Cody Peterson would even want to be taken under my wing.

Thus I went to a coffee shop with my stack of papers and sat down to try to focus. I pressed on the sinus pressure on my face. I ordered breakfast. I graded an essay- I checked email. I graded an essay- I checked my bank statements. I graded an essay- I took an online quiz about whether or not “he” was more than just a friend. I graded a dozen of the papers and couldn’t do any more. I needed to eat lunch. I needed more cold medicine.

I need to accept my limitations.

I need to find another way to do this.

I love teaching, but it doesn’t love me. I see this in the way I am getting sick constantly. I know I need to write more. I know I need a new plan for a career.

I need to not be haunted by these papers anymore.

October Morning

2009-10-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

This is not the blog I intended to write. There is a better one about space and home and place lingering in my mind but I cannot access it just now. Instead I’m irritated. I’m really feeling cranky and so I must write to figure out why.

And I’m already bored with the problem but it’s still there- wiggling away in my brain.

It starts with an October morning of gloominess- weather sinking into the consciousness. Outside it is rainy and damp and gray and chilly and inside my head it is the perfect weather for curling up with a guy and watching movies… or for feeling sorry for myself that there is no such person in my life.

Thus, in this sort of self-pitying mood, the place where I feel a little lonely, I found myself annoyed when the loneliness was broken by the piercing chirp of a text message on my telephone, from a man I thought I had managed to get rid of months ago.

Perhaps I sound harsh.

But the thing is, six months ago he would text, I would get excited, we’d spend time together, then he’d disappear, and I would feel crushed, but he would eventually text again, and again, I would take the bait and get reeled in just so he could disappear. Again.

Hey!

Oh please, I thought. Hey? That’s it? Six months later you reach out with Hey?

How have you been?

And here’s where I get annoyed. With myself. I cannot be rude. I respond. He continues to ask questions. I am polite but I don’t ask questions back. I don’t prolong the conversation.

I’ve missed ya

Now I’m fuming. Not this game, I think. He doesn’t miss me. He’s lonely. And maybe it’s because I’m lonely too that I cannot tolerate his loneliness. His half-hearted attempt to connect with a girl who had been cute and fun and pretty easy to get along with and nice to meet out on the town six months ago. A relationship he hadn’t wanted to put much energy into at the time but now misses because the weather is getting colder and it’s harder to face winter alone.

I contemplate telling him that it’s nice that he says that but I’m dating someone. I am tempted to lie and be nice and take care of his feelings and not tell him how I feel which is that I’m not interested and a little annoyed since he is the one who walked away in the first place.

I still don’t understand my own anger. Maybe I’m angry because it feels so familiar, this constant reeling and pulling I feel from men, this game of drawing me close and pushing me away. Maybe it’s because this reminds me of my ex-husband when we were separated, when he would text me each night as I was falling asleep and need me.

I miss you. I love you. Don’t you love me? I am so sad without you. I thought we had something good. Look at our wedding pictures. We were so happy.

I would receive these texts and fall on my bed under the weight of his needs and emotions. I would feel so anguished, so guilty, for stating my needs. For walking away from an unhealthy situation. I would beat myself up for being so “mean” to this man who needed me so much.

Yuck.

Maybe I’m angry because it wasn’t just my husband who manipulated me with guilt. It’s my family, my co-workers, certain friends who can still activate my overwhelming sense of shame and duty. Maybe I’m upset because even though I stand up for myself and my needs now more than I ever have before, it still feels hard to do. It still feels like so much work. I still have to talk myself out of feeling like I’ve been mean, that I’ve been unreasonable.

I’ve missed ya

I run through several responses in my mind. I don’t think you really mean that, I write, choosing to be honest but not cruel. I have to get going. Talk to you later.

Have a nice day. What are you doing later?

By now I’m no longer worried about his feelings. I am wanting to not waste time on this particular conversation. Having dinner with a friend. Bye. And I resolve not to respond to any more texts. I’ve been polite but I’ve said I don’t have time to talk. I don’t need to keep responding anymore.

The thing is, I don’t have time for these conversations, with a guy I’ve dated or with anyone else. I don’t have time to feel like having needs makes me a cruel person. I don’t have time for the shame I feel for being myself. Toxic shame.

I’m proud of myself for setting this boundary, especially on a gray and gloomy day when it would be so easy to let someone into my life, even someone I worry wouldn’t ultimately treat me the way I need, just because he was cute and funny and pretty easy to get along with and nice to meet out on the town six months ago.

I’m realizing my irritation and my boredom with this problem is more about myself than the guy who sent me the text. I’m realizing the problem won’t leave me alone because I need to address it, but I don’t really want to, so I feel bored and irritated instead. I was getting mad at this guy for texting me because I felt like he had been disrespectful of my needs. But if I don’t own my needs why would he respect them? Why would anyone? I can’t ask someone just to be nice of his own accord. I have to make it clear I won’t tolerate anything else.

Brunch? I text to a friend. She responds immediately saying she’s busy but will call me later.

A little while later my phone chirps again. Hey! I’m planning to call you at 6, fyi. J

Thanks, I say to another friend, I will start the countdown. ;)

These are the people I want to make time for in my life, I think. This feels right. I need to remember that setting boundaries, while it feels hard, will ultimately lead me to a life filled with happier healthier respectful people in it. I need to remember it’s worth it to be strong around my needs.

Common Roots

2009-09-28T13:31:00.001-07:00

My hands are still shaking as I write this. When I lift my fingers off of the keys they tremble like a Parkinson patient’s or a former alcoholic’s. It’s because I just ran into my ex, ex-addict, ex-heartbreak.

I was not at my best.

I started the day knowing I needed to use the Internet to get my schoolwork done. After a half an hour of debating little details about which coffee shop to go to in my neighborhood, wi-fi connection, proximity, ambience, I finally decided on the usual one I visit on Saturday and Sunday mornings and set out, hair tied into a scruffy side pony-tail, blond bangs crimped from a bobby pin the night before and pushed to the side. Still in the stages of cold-recovery, I felt like my skin was blotchy and breaking out, my eyes were puffy, and my lungs wheezy and phlegmmy. I had homework to do; I wasn’t thinking about how I looked.

To add further to the back-story, I have been worried over finding a new place to live and searching frantically for a place to call home. Earlier in the morning I had looked at two apartments—one, sort of dingy and not that appealing, and the other cute, and friendly. Lots of windows. Top level. Details from the early 1900’s. Beautiful kitchen. Patio. Storage space. Free internet from the coffee shop across the street. A writer’s apartment. And of course, about $300 more than I felt I should be paying each month for rent considering my goal of operation-speedy-loan-payoff.

I was ruminating on my budget. Floundering over the details of rent and groceries. Trying to talk myself out of wanting the apartment. I was scolding myself for going out to dinner with friends and buying new pants and shoes for the school year. Time to buckle down, I thought. Time to be serious. Practical.

So of course, on this mucus-filled, watery-eyed day, this day of self-discipline and restraint, I step out of my car and see my ex and his new girlfriend sitting at a table on the patio right by the entrance of the coffee shop.

He doesn’t look up as I pass by his elbow, his ear, his backwards baseball cap, my leg six inches from their space. I feel my heart drown into the past, lost suddenly below the surface of the earth and trapped instead in a colder, darker space where ex-husbands brush by like the filmy white legs of jellyfish. I crossed the threshold of the coffee shop. I stopped. I can’t do this. I can’t walk past my ex-husband as if he is someone I’ve never met.

I went back outside.

“Hi, Shawn.”

He jumped in his chair and his eyes flashed blue and lit up like he was about to swallow me in his relief. “Kate!” he said. “How are you?”

“Good,” I said, as if I were running into someone from class, someone safe, someone I had not spent the last year and a half writing about in my essays. “I saw you and I was just going to walk past but then I thought that would be awkward. How are you?”

He said he was fine and smiled at me and then there was an awkward pause during which I nodded at the new girl before saying I had homework to do and heading into the coffee shop.

My fingers have stopped shaking but what stays with me is that right after we said hello, while my body was trembling and my heart jumping in alarm, I still felt stable, steady. I felt like me. I felt like I was light years beyond where I had been. Like I had no desire to be with him and like there was very little anger in our meeting. It was almost like he was becoming someone I might just casually say hi to, someone I might even hug, someone safe, someone comfortably located only in my writing and not in my life.

And because I am human, I could not help but note the new girlfriend. She was clearly not getting over a cold and throwing her hair into a ponytail. She was done up and darling, pushed up and pretty. I couldn’t help but think that she also looked like she was trying really hard. It looked tiring. It was like looking at myself five years ago.

Instead of feeling like the vaguely nervous, overly anxious, unassuming, unaware, and unsure girl I was in my past, I felt like the cool, cognizant, world-traveling writer that I am now. I felt like a woman who is living her own life pursuing her dreams. A woman not afraid to be herself.

I’m getting that apartment, I thought, after walking into the coffee shop.

I decided not to do the homework first. I decided to write, even though I had other work to do, even when he walked past me to deposit his coffee mug in a dish pan while I wrote about our encounter, and even with shaky fingers, smiling at the white flower ring I sometimes wear on my fourth finger, the one that no longer breaks out in a rash from my wedding ring.

It is only just now that I am noticing the irony of where we encountered each other—the coffee shop called Common Roots. Shawn and I have common roots. We shared our past, a trunk where two lives were encased in one. But now we don’t.

And I just love these branches that keep taking me towards the sky, so very far away from where I was.

A Change in Season

2009-09-28T13:29:00.000-07:00

You have to be kidding me, I thought, leaving my apartment the other day and noticing a shockingly “autumn” orange-leaved wreath on the apartment door kiddy-corner from my own. It is the only adornment on any of the doors in my modern and trendy apartment building. My building is the kind of place where marketing directors would decorate their advertisements for the community with phrases like “East meets West in simple harmony and clean lines” and “Life with Style at VillageGreen”. We have a community room. The leasing company hosts happy hours for the young and upwardly-mobile professionals who live here. There’s a Zen garden, for the love of God (or Buddha, I suppose).

This is no place for wreaths.

And what makes this particular orange wreath even more shocking is that it is the third in a series of wreaths to appear on the door. First there was a white-flowered wreath that made me assume the occupants of the apartment were either gay or grandmas. Second there was a green wreath of plastic pine needles, which I did not necessarily associate with summer, but now, with the orange-leaved wreath I clearly see that there is a seasonal pattern in the door decorations.

Of course since then I have learned that the occupants of the apartment are neither gay nor grandmothers. They are a ridiculously happy couple. The kind of couple that holds hands in the hallway. That goes to watch television together in the community room. The kind of couple that doesn’t reach out to neighbors because they are so happily involved in themselves. And their wreaths.

I hate that wreath.

What kind of a guy lives in an apartment with a wreath on the door?! I thought as I walked past. I’m sure I scowled as I thought it. All sorts of non-politically correct thoughts jumped into my brain, including, I am sad to say, “What a pussy!”

But, in my surprise at my own vehemently angry and ignorantly condescending inner monologue, I started to realize that I was really getting way too worked up about my neighbor’s apartment door. Katie, I said to myself, in order to address the unfounded amount of rage swelling in small waves in my inner ocean, why does that wreath piss you off? It’s just a wreath. Let it go. He probably loves her very much and knows it makes her happy to put the wreath on the door.

And with that I started to picture the life inside the door with the wreath. The life I hear only small pieces of when she, and I imagine it must be she, starts to play the piano they must have inside. Careful notes fill the hall as I walk past. I picture them holding hands in the hallway. They are quiet and polite when we meet in the elevator.

As these images flood my mind I realize that what I hate about that wreath is that five or six or seven years ago I would have been the one hanging it on the door. I would have been delighted in my new domesticity with my new husband in our new place. I would have hung the wreath on the door as if it were my hopes and heart that I was placing very high and in a special place. There. Love, Life, come visit us and be generous. We are just so happy. We are so in love. WE. WE. Whee!

I do not hate the wreath.

I do not hate the girl who hangs the wreath.

I might hate that I wasted energy on such a wee endeavor when there were more exciting avenues in life that I needed to explore. I might hate the girl I was, the one fixated on wreaths and scrapbooks and pasting memories carefully into frames. There. This is us as the perfect couple. There. That’s a picture of my happy family. There. Welcome to my perfect life.

Life isn’t perfect. It is so much more beautiful to me now that I see it for the wreck that it is. I am so infatuated with the mess that is life that I haven’t time to hang orange-leaved wreaths upon my door.

But…

maybe someday I will.

The End of August

2009-09-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

I reached up to put away my Aerobed after a wedding weekend full of bonding with women I love and as I stretched on my toes to put the mattress on the top shelf of one of the four closets in my studio apartment, four Fridley High School yearbooks came crashing at my face, nearly gouging my eye out with pointy corners. Luckily I deflected the fast-advancing yearbooks, but there was a lesson in the occurrence. Sometimes your past not only catches up with you, but it is plain gunning for your vulnerable spots, sharp angles and all.

This weekend, after a few months of joy in singledom, a genuine excitement over my independent life, giggling, even, as I walked my dog alone past couples and families, the past seemed to be gunning for me, taking aim as I walked in front of one of my dearest friends as she stepped up to an altar to say “I do”. And it seemed bent on shattering my newly celebrated independence.

I smiled for my friend during the ceremony because I honestly believe she and her man are made for each other, but as I listened to the readings- Corinthians, Ephesians—and heard the rhetoric about love being kind, and patient, and how through loving and helping your spouse you find real joy, I couldn’t help but think “Bullshit!”

It was really a low moment. The soundtrack playing was the Beach Boys singing “Wouldn’t it be nice” and all I was thinking of was the soundtrack to the Wedding Singer where Adam Sandler belts out a nice edition of “Love Stinks!”

And that, I realize, is what I am mourning two years into the end of my marriage. That blissful Beach Boys optimism. That belief in a kind love.

As I heard tales of the ex, his new life, new girl, from my old friends, I plunged from my single-gal high to a broken-hearted low.

“But that was two years ago,” said my dear friend as she listened to me lament the losses in my life. “Look at all the good things you have going on.”

“It was yesterday!” I said to her—and now, I realize I wasn’t talking about the lanky, basketball-playing man I married so much as I was talking about me. I was mourning me. I was mourning the loss of that girl who believed in an easy love, a romantic-movie love, an infatuation lasting forever.

I wouldn’t trade spots with the romantic girl I was in my 20’s, but I miss her. I miss feeling nothing but confidence and happiness at weddings. I miss thinking chance meetings might lead to real love.

I know the woman I am now is more cynical about relationships. I know she flinches when a man seems too excited, too eager in a relationship. I know even when nice men, really good guys, take her on nice dates and do nice things, like placing sunflowers where she will see them and smile, part of her cringes. There is fear, disbelief, in this woman.

“You’re like a girl I could marry,” said the lanky ball-player to the blond girl on their second date.

“This will be a long relationship,” the girl said to herself. “Just let yourself like him.”

The woman remembers this heady love, this twilight romance, this mutual desire for affection. And she knows it was ultimately, deceptively, false: empty. And so this woman is skeptical of good things, of fast infatuation.

I put the yearbooks back on my shelf without pausing to look at them, but I can’t help but think about how the past still affects me. Sometimes I am frustrated by the fact that I can’t make myself get over my loss, that I still feel sad at weddings, but then again, as I told my mom tonight on the phone, “I think it’s good I felt that way- I think if I didn’t feel upset that would be strange, like I was an alien or a robot, and I would rather be a human.”

People who love me sometimes want me to be over my loss. People who date me sometimes question my grief. But I am ok with how I am feeling. I think the sane response for me, after going through the biggest personal tragedy of my life, is to feel a little sad and cynical at weddings, and to be just a bit distrustful of things that seem too good to be true.

I lost myself in my marriage and found myself in the divorce, but change is never easy. Change is brave. Change is painful. Even when it is positive. And so I think it is ok that I am still, sometimes, sad.

And I also think it is ok that I am, often, joyful.

Suddenly I am feeling lucky again. I am back to rejoicing in my independence, in the freedom to accept my own feelings even though others want me to be over the sadness. The yearbooks are put away and I’ve got my past put back in a comfortable position. Time to return to joy.

From Inside the Mess

2009-06-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

I am surrounded by the clutter of my life. Literally my apartment is in disarray. This is the problem with living in a studio. It quickly erupts into chaos when life gets busy. There are receipts, itineraries, purses and bagels laying everywhere. Strangely, in a fit of what I assume must have been my creative-genius abstract absent-mindedness, a half-used roll of toilet paper has made it to my kitchenette countertop. I am hoping it is sleep deprivation and not dementia driving these toiletry wanderings. And I must admit, this chaos mimics my creative process—things often get messier before they get cleaner.

In any case, while amidst the clutter, in the seven hours I have between getting off my shift at work and leaving for a girls’ weekend away, I should be straightening, cleaning, righting my life, and instead I feel like I must be typing, pondering, and writing my life.

Last night a man who lives in my apartment building invited me to join him for a beer on our patio (let me mention I live in a somewhat strange, Melrose-esque building rife with singles of the upwardly-mobile persuasion). I agreed despite the fact that I knew I wasn’t interested in dating him.

“Try.” A voice inside me started saying, and she continued to point out that it’s time I dated someone seriously again. Did I want to be alone for my whole life? Did I think men would find me attractive forever? Did I ever want children and a family? This guy will be successful. He wants to be a patent lawyer. Just try dating him.

So I went.

And was delighted when I found the patio already occupied by two other friends from the building.

Pressure off, I leaned back and enjoyed my conversation with the three guys, all engineers (strangely), and my yorkie-poo.

“Your dog looks kinda smart,” said the future patent lawyer. “He picks up his leash when he runs so he doesn’t trip on it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He is smart. Too smart.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he understands commands and everything, but he has his own agenda, too. He’ll do what I say but then he’ll still try to get whatever it is that he’s after.” And, because I couldn’t resist the giant button in front of me, I added, “You know, he’s a guy.”

Thus began the teasing, the banter, the trading of stories from adventures in the weird world of dating. My dog became the butt of jokes after his girlfriend, a pug from next door, joined us while her owner was on the phone. “He’s definitely not sensitive,” said one guy. “But then again, no guys are really sensitive.”

Again the button was shining in front of me. “All guys are sensitive,” I said. My friend shook his head at me as if to say, “Oh, you-poor-naïve-little-thing.” But I continued.

“In that they all have fragile egos.”

“This is true,” he conceded. “But it’s because girls are so mean!”

We traded war stories from the battlefield of love (thank you, Pat Benatar) and I said good night, abandoning all the engineers and leaving them to talk about valves and thermodynamics, and basketball.

But I continued thinking about our conversation and about these men with their agendas and their fragile egos and their fears of girls who are mean and of my own fears and my own fragile ego and my own lack-of agenda.

I’m at a strange place.

I’m at home with the temporary clutter in my life. The confusion, the chaos, the roll of toilet paper in my kitchen. It all feels strangely safe. Uniquely mine. I’m feeling selfish, lately, and guarded. I have no agenda, when it comes to men. In fact, I’m avoiding anything I could potentially find serious. I’ve adapted this routine where when I need to I can find some sort of intrigue, some new adventure in the world of romance, but if I’m honest, it’s like wading into the ocean up to my ankles. I’m pretending to get wet but refusing to put my face under water.

It’s almost like putting on a sort of shell. To continue my water metaphor, I’m a hermit crab who trades up for a fancy pink shell when a sand crab asks her to dinner. We meet up, we each do a little dance, back and forth in the sand, and then retire to our separate worlds, leaving the dating shells on the beach and going back to the familiar.

And this feels safe. This feels comfortable.

What is really scary is being with someone I care about.

I think I might care about someone.

And so I am avoiding him.

It’s better, I think, to stay safe, right now. Or at least this is what the practical voice inside my head is telling me. The same one who told me to try to like the patent lawyer.

To get hurt by someone I’m not interested in is not the worst thing in the world. But to get hurt by someone I really care about? That is potentially devastating. That is what makes me raise my claws (back to the crab metaphor) and shrink back into my shell.

And how do I know I really care? (Believe me, that practical-girl voice does her best to make me believe that I don’t.) It’s simple (and ridiculous). It’s the first date. Or the first meeting. It’s knowing I didn’t feel at all awkward pouring out my guts and my life story to the man sitting across from me. It’s knowing I was (strangely) being myself, sans shell, when we first met. It’s knowing that even though I had no interest in dating (this meeting being only months after my divorce), I still wanted to kiss him, wanted him to kiss me. It’s the unexpected rush I felt when, somehow in playful teasing, he took off my sandal while we walking home, holding it inches in front of my foot so that I had to hop and protest in order to get it back. It was so silly and yet, I was flirting. I still can’t believe it. (The practical smart girl in my mind keeps telling me how stupid and corny this is, but unfortunately- it is also just what is true.)

Maybe it’s some sort of reverse-Cinderella fantasy. Didn’t the prince put the shoe on her foot? How appropriate that I would fall for a man who would take it off. But really, when I think of the dates I’ve been on, I realize I shrink from the men taking me out to dinner. I pull back. I hide. I physically withdraw. My knees were turned away from the patent lawyer on the patio and when his legs accidentally touched mine I moved them out of his way. I had a physical reaction to him. (Which is how your body shows you what you need, says another voice in my head, the one who pointed out the shingles and rash on my ring finger were a sign I needed out from my marriage months prior to the divorce.) In contrast, there have been moments of purely physical attraction where I have not exactly hidden from a man, not right away, but days or weeks later I did, and this has led me to realize that I have somehow adopted this belief that it is “safe” for me to connect physically with men who I am not connected to emotionally. Mostly.

Because there is this one exception. And because it scares me so much, I am avoiding the situation entirely.

There. Now I can turn back to the clutter. I can bring the toilet paper back to the bathroom. Put the bagels back in the fridge. Maybe I’m not brave enough to address the situation, but at least I’ve acknowledged it. It's time to get back to righting my life, now that I have spent time writing about my life.

Addressing the Blisters

2009-05-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

So I am sitting at a coffee shop next to a couple of intertwined hippie-children bumming their way around the country and some wholesome, granola-pretty people who "just love Jesus."

Suddenly I am wanting to write.

But, this is a false-start blog. I already began an entry that I immediately deleted. One about the creative process, my life and thoughts, how I wanted to write when I knew I should be completing one of the eight million tasks scheduled into my life between now and a little while from now, blah, blah, blah. I was bored with it immediately and deleted the whole thing.

And so, I randomly went to the google box in the right hand corner of my screen and typed in what felt necessary. Confessions from a sex addict.

Suddenly I was reading an account from a man destroyed by his compulsion to masturbate and buy pornography. A man who felt so guilty for his actions that he tried to avoid breathing around women in order to avoid inhaling the smell of their perfume. It sounded crazy. It sounded so sad.

And I couldn't help thinking--I married someone like this. Different of course, in many ways, but similar, too.

*****

Lately a rash has reappeared on my finger. My ring finger. It began two years ago around this time, three months before I knew I wanted to divorce my husband. My husband who bought pornography compulsively and lied to me constantly.

I haven't worn a ring in 22 months and my finger is still breaking out in a rash.

I have tried talking about this to people who might be helpful but no one seems to have any good insight about the matter. "Quit wearing your old ring," said a friend when I told him. "That's really weird," said a friend who is a chiropractor. "Are you allergic to your earrings?" she asked.

Of course I said no.

The thing is- I know why my finger keeps breaking out. I know it's because there is material that needs to surface.

It's not love.

Or at least, it's not love in the sense that tends to make sense. Not love in the sense that I want to reconcile with my ex-husband. Not love in the sense that I miss him from my life. I miss him, sure, but I have no desire to ever kiss him again. No desire to lay in his arms. I feel sad saying that and I miss laying in someone's arms, but I know I will never want to be with him again.

I know because when I found out he was still lying to me, nearly two years ago, I became immune to him. I didn't want his skin touching mine. I thought about trust before bed and woke up with the word severed on my lips. A word, hanging, suspended in the air, letting me know we had reached the end.

I trust myself to know when something is over. Every fiber in my body screeches to a halt.

And yet, the rash.

The frustrating thing is that this is my subject. I think this is the topic I have to sit with some more. And it is so frustrating because I so want to be done. I hate that I think about how sexual obsession affects people, both the people obsessed and the ones who love them. I hate thinking about how I compromised values for the sake of a relationship. I hate analyzing my own relationship to sex and intimacy and the patterns that originated in my own past.

Most people have patterns ingrained in their brain about sexuality by the time they are five.

I don't want to be the one to figure this out.

I want to be the one blithely living my new life. Forgetting my past. Going on dates. Wearing high heels and walking into the future. Smiling. Happy. Pretending the marriage, like my earlier blog, was just a false start. A random mistake. The accident of a very young woman. Maybe I was just too young to know better.

Instead, my itchy finger is reminding me there are still words that need to be said. The word severed came to me and hovered in the air, letting me know we had reached the end. But there are more words bubbling up in blisters between knuckles and fist letting me know I'm not done.

It so pisses me off.

Maybe this summer I will start to move on. Maybe I will write enough to get away from this subject. Maybe this summer my finger will heal. Maybe this summer, maybe...

well, I can't say what comes next.

The Clumsy Journey to Wherever It Is That I Am Supposed to Be

2009-05-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

Lately startling questions have come into my life.

One occurred while I was sitting on my apartment patio Memorial weekend drinking a beer after work and catching up on emails on my laptop, yorkie-poo at my feet. A friend, one I had been on a date with earlier in the year, joined me while waiting for his cab to come and take him away to a rooftop party downtown. He leaned in to me, open after a day of holiday drinking on a bar's patio, and said "Can I ask you a question?" I nodded. "Are you into girls?" I raised my eyebrows and shook my head. "Because I never see you with any guys. Why don't you have a boyfriend? It's time, you know? You should just try to trust someone. They're not all bad. One out of five. I'd say you can trust one out of five men. With women it's a little different. More like three out of five."

One out of five, I found myself thinking. Yeah, right.

Another question occurred when I was talking to a friend of mine about feelings and issues and concerns, etc, etc, (all of the stuff I am really awkward and uncomfortable with) and he said, in response, "Why are you so serious all the time?"

I bristled and steered the conversation back to the topic, but the remark stayed in the soft gray area of my consciousness.

And finally, at work, where I am currently a waitress, one of the regular customers stopped me as I was passing his table with a pot of coffee. This 70-ish gentleman moved his cup to the side of the table and said, "Say, I want to ask you a question. What do you want..." he moved his cup again, "to do with your life?"

As it was 9am and I was a waitress working on her second master's and holding a pot of coffee and just done with mopping the floor, I didn't exactly warm up to this question.

In fact- I didn't warm up to any of the questions. Who were these men to be asking me such weighty questions? Did I question their judgment? Their choices in life? Their decisions or lifestyle? No- of course not. What right did they have to judge my life? Or expect more from it?

As I thought about the questions more they irritated me even more. Why do I need to trust men again? Who says I'm serious all the time? Why do I need a plan for my life? And, more importantly, how is that anyone's business other than my own?

As I got riled up I started writing a blog in my mind about the audacity of these questions and the pretentiousness of the people asking them. The blog would end, of course, after analyzing this situation with a I-am-woman-hear-me-roar type of triumphant closing. Something like I like who I am and how I am content with my choices and I don't want a boyfriend and I'm not too serious and my life will be whatever it is meant to be and it will be perfect in that sense.

But then I realized the mental blog I had written would not work.

It was a lie.

The truth, if I dare to write it, is that I bristled at these questions not because of the people asking them. Not because I felt I shouldn't have to answer to anyone. Not because I had an answer to each of the questions.

I bristled because they are questions I ask myself. Or questions I would ask of myself if I were brave enough.

The truth is that I do want a boyfriend. The truth is that I am scared to trust again. The truth is that I do wonder why I have to so seriously analyze my life all the time. It is like I am hyperaware of all of my many imperfections all of the time. And the truth is I don't want to be like this. I want to go back to a life where I don't have to work so hard to be honest. Sometimes I think I might prefer the life of complacency and permanent mild dissatisfaction. Why not settle? Allow myself to drift into a relationship with one of the men I have gone on first dates with--the men with checklists who after a thorough two-hour interview almost visually decide things could work out between us. The men who are looking for a certain accessory to add to their individually crafted lives. It would be easy. I could stop feeling lonely. We could date and then live together and then get married and have kids and share space and exist in sort-of companion style life. All I would have to do is adjust to his life.

Or--I suppose I must look for another option--why not try to trust someone who does know me for who I am? Why not let someone see me as myself?

The truth is that this is the scariest situation of all. Because the truth is that I am the sort of woman who accidentally almost starts her paper coffee cup on fire while heating it up in the microwave. I am the sort of woman who rebels and adopts the mantras of self-help books in the same minute. I am the sort of woman who takes herself seriously, who worries about making the same mistakes over again. I am the sort of woman who would get into a car accident before she would share her feelings. I am the sort of woman who has a dirty shower and snores and feels confused and doesn't know what she's going to do with her life and trips sometimes over the cracks in the sidewalk and who wants to let someone into her life again but has no idea how to do it.

"Why don't you go talk to that guy?" my apartment friend said to me on Memorial weekend, nodding at another man drinking a beer and watching the baseball game from his chair. And so I did. Not because I was particularly attracted to him or excited to meet him (in fact I sensed a checklist from 20 feet), but because, when all is said and done, I am also the sort of woman who keeps trying.

It's bound to get easier with practice. I hope.

What I Am...

2009-05-03T21:13:00.000-07:00

What I am is sitting in my apartment and typing on my computer, eyes heavy from allergies and lack of sleep, body sore from soccer and running and standing eight hours at a time. I am tight-stomach sitting in my parents’ car on the way to a Twins’ game. I am strange dreams and strange sleeping. I am singing out loud in a coffee shop and cutting up my work, reassembling it in an updraft, a second draft, a current, a magic-wire I’ve plugged into, my wi-fi to the universe. I am smiling to earn money. I am smiling because I want to. I am sitting on a bar stool wanting every guy in the room to want me. I am sitting on a bar stool thinking there is not a single guy here that I want. I am looking at a stranger’s brown eyes and dreading my past. I am wanting so badly to see the future.

I am counting markers lining the lake where I run. Counting down the moments until the finish. Counting the couples walking past me. Counting the strollers. The groups of friends playing volleyball. Counting my single female friends— one.

I am worried about what I have said. What I have shared. What I have written. Who sees what I write. Who hears what I say. So many secrets spill out of corners. So much of me tumbles out into the world. So much held back for so long.

What tumbles out? You, of course. Ex-husband. And lately I realize maybe the until-death-do-us-part never even started until I left. You tumble out of my mouth in words, in front of friends, strangers. And it’s not that I want you back—it’s that by losing you I found me.

I guess I should thank you for that.

Words that Still Hurt:

Porn

Addiction

Lies

Good-bye

Family

Babies

Alone

What I am is lonely. What I am is scared I will never connect with a good man. Scared there are no good men. Scared I will forever fall into the trap of cute-fun-guys-who-sort-of-adore-me-for-a-time-before-they-ultimately-prove-they-can’t-love-me.

What I am is ashamed. Ashamed of being lonely. Of feeling sadness. Of being weak. Of being vulnerable. Of needing people. Of not being tough enough on my own. I am ashamed to admit I feel sad. Ashamed I can’t find happiness in the world alone. Ashamed I am not enough to keep people in my life. Ashamed that when I set boundaries, people disappear.

What I am is lonely-when-I-see-couples-with-strollers, but at least I am not lonely-when-lying-in-bed-with-my-husband. I am bruised knees and bruised feelings but I am also singing in coffee shops and singing at ball games. I am scared to want a relationship and scared I will never have one again. I am wanting to look at my past and dreading it. I am laughing and I am surviving and I am laughing and evading. I am smiling because I love you and smiling because I want so badly to be loved. I am severed and turning myself inside out. Or maybe just now outgrowing my shell.

You may not see it.

But this is what I am.

And so far I have no regrets.

What You Are Not

2009-04-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

I saw you running around the lake on Saturday. You were not looking at me. Or maybe you were, but not when I was looking at you, when I was seeing you jog to the left of me and when I followed your back into the distance. I was not trying to remember your breathing. I was trying not to think of the music on your ipod. Not noticing the clothing that you wore, the clothing that used to intermingle with mine in our dryer, on our limbs.

I was trying not to notice these things because you are not in my life. You are not in my bed each night. You are not walking in the door with a little smile on your face. You are not calling me goofy or teasing me for spilling and being clumsy. You are not walking with me in twilit evenings on new-family blocks. You are not telling me about the starlings who chased you on your run.

You are not in my bed but you are no longer missing from bed either. You are not lying to me. You are not lying to me. You are not lying to me.

I guess because you are not lying to me it makes me miss you lying next to me. I guess because you are not in my life, I cannot help wondering where in life you are. Where are you in this universe? Besides running away in front of me, being exactly where you should not.

Reviewing the Evidence

2009-04-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

How do I enter this space- this space I want to write about?

For weeks I have been contemplating a memoir selection for class. My Eureka!-moment suggested a structure built on a tornado of grief, swirling in and around the five stages grief I experienced and experience over the end of my marriage.

What I am finding is five stages can't hold my grief. Can't begin to address addiction. Can't possibly contain my story.

Thus- I am left without a stage, but with a thought. An elegiac memory. A picture of denial. Could they both be true? Could both exist truly at one shared instant?

The instant is a photograph.

Rather, a series of photographs.

Taken by my ex.

On my birthday.

In the series of eight photographs, I am wearing a black dress draping over my shoulders, nearly falling off and covering my thighs, but not my knees, my calves, or my bare feet. I am perched on the back of a black couch, legs outstretched. There is a person, hard to see, laying on the couch (visible by an upreached arm in the eighth). I am in front of a wall containing a window. There is a lot of light shining through the window (from a kitchen). It is in black and white.

[What is happening in this picture is that I am dramatically retelling the story of our 12-course meal at Allinea in Chicago where I went to celebrate my 29th, Golden, birthday with my best friend, her husband, and my husband. (He bought a suit. It looked like he should wear it to a funeral. But oh, he was cute to me.) After the dinner we went to a club. It is now about four in the morning and I am explaining our dinner, drunkenly, animatedly, to my best friend's sister.]

There are many things about this series of photos that makes me cringe. My nose, always, for instance, annoys me. It looks so different on film than I imagine it looks on my face. My hair is frizzy. My arms look beefy. My eyes have their typical photo-demonic glare. My chin is dissatisfying. The dress is not nearly as glamorous as I remember.

But, still.

If I may be vain for a moment, there is something I love about the me in these pictures. Something everyone in the room loved.

I remember being swept up in the story, in describing the deconstructed edibles, the shooters of celery, white chocolate, and horse-radish, the gelatinous Guiness squares laying neatly over beef, the bacon glazed and strung on a bow. I remember the life-love serum that was flowing through my veins.

I remember my friend saying to my husband, "Are you getting this?"

And he nodded, pointing the camera, still, in my direction.

He captured these images. He thought to pick up the camera. To frame my exuberance. My love.

Though there are ungraceful angles of my chin and my shoulders seem bulky, there are delicate gestures in my wrists and my ankles that allow me to fall a little in love with myself. My fingers gesture like pirouettes and my eyebrows are ballerinas.

I was happy in this moment.

This moment, 36 days before my life fell apart.

Of course, that is not the truth.

The truth is my life was falling apart. Had been. Maybe always was. My whole life- a collision course for August 5th, 2007.

And so, I ask of the picture--was it happiness? Was it love? Was it denial? Was it false?

****

There were many pictures that summer.

The pictures from the summer before were of a different sort. Pictures that stimulated me as I traced my husband's cyber-footsteps even as they nauseated me. Pictures that held me sometimes for hours as I backtracked over url addresses and scrolled through our history, our secret files hidden in other files on the computer.

The pictures of other women, of other women with other men, pulled my husband out of my bed at early hours and kept him watching late at night.

These pictures, pictures that moved, that spoke, that purred, that moaned, fed the constantly growing sorrow that eclipsed the love of two young people wanting desperately to make best what they could of companionship, of a sort-of love. Of a really-love.

Let's be honest.

****

Could my husband love me when he could only lie to me? Could he be intimate with me when his addiction was a crueler mistress than I? She was the jealous one. The one making him call every night. The one pulling him ever from me.

His body betrayed the one he answered to. But did it mean he loved her more?

****

How could both truths of this image exist? How could this be both a picture of my love, my joy and also my denial, my fear? How could he love me enough to capture this series and then love me so little it was no trouble for him to turn me out of the house when I said I wanted a divorce?

****

There is another image of that weekend. Another photo taken by my ex. In it, I am asleep to my consciousness. It is from the previous morning. I am lazy. Reluctant to roll out of the futon. I am unaware I am being photographed. My head turns down toward my left shoulder, my breasts under a pink tank top point at the camera, my right arm is bent at the shoulder and tucking my hair up around the crown of my head, my left arm rests, almost suggestively, against on top of my left hip bone. Again, my nose annoys me. Again I am dismayed by my chin. Again I see the love in this photo. The love that compelled my ex to pick up the camera and capture this image, his wife slow-weekend waking up.

****

This is why things were complicated.

This is why it was hard to leave.

Remembering Iran in Black and White, in Glaring Light

2009-04-01T20:35:00.000-07:00

John Berger, in his book Keeping a Rendezvous, a compilation of essays on art criticism and life observations, notes that "Painting brings home. The cinema transports elsewhere" (14), meaning that a painting is rooted in the sense of a shared setting between the viewer and the piece of art, while cinema serves to allow the viewer to escape her setting and journey out into the realm of the film directs her to, the surreal, the other-real, the historical-real. A movie moves, it transports, and it changes time, size, shape, and tone. A painting is absorbed whole, in a moment, and the leaps that occur around it occur not through the director's guidance, but in the mind of the viewer.

In thinking of this, I begin to see Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, as the memoir that most resembles film, while Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic memoir also about Iran, as the memoir that resembles painting. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi wanders, she reflects, pontificates, observes and moves closer to and away from the political and personal trauma experienced during the shifting regimes and fundamentalism polluting Iran from the late 70's. Her memoir, to me, hearkens the film Y Tu, Mama, Tambien. There are piercing rays of light bouncing off shores, boys too bright in cars, a woman in white on a balcony, a hut, shadows, dapples of light, a road, leaves. Mostly it is the lighting of the film that most resembles the memoir, the shifting distance and brightness, the way it hurts to look at it, and the way it makes everything hazy.

Nafisi frames her memoir around books. She splits her thoughts into four sections--Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen--books I would hardly associate with the restrictions felt by the tightening grasp of Iranian fundamentalism during the time period she observes. She writes about her encounters with her students, of their discussions of the text, and in between, of the atrocities felt in her culture as freedoms are stripped from the people, oddly, as veils are forced to cloak the women.

The balance in this memoir between personal and academic tips mightily in the direction of academic. Nafisi is a thinker, a fact she asserts herself when she says "I am too much of an academic: I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating" (266). She devotes one page to her terror over the bombings in Tehran when she was pregnant with her second child and says simply, "Tehran was the object of continual bombings and I had become hysterical" (171) but gives three chapters to a class period during which the class put the novel The Great Gatsby on trial as to whether or not it was corrupting society. She does not bring us into her hysteria. She brings us into her classroom.

In contrast, Persepolis, like a painting, brings to its readers an immediacy inescapable. Satrapi portrays no flickering lights. Her memoir is not angles of light shining too brightly, not hazy edges, shadows, or dappling spots on a landscape. Her memoir is black and white. It is instant. Whole. Visceral. Emotional.

Both memoirs, for instance, describe the suicide soldiers convinced to fight for the Islamic army in exchange for a tin key painted gold, the key to paradise. Nafisi describes this in prose. Distant, reflective, intelligent prose. Satrapi frames an image in two blocks of text, at the top: "The key to paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with their keys around their necks" and after the image, the line, "Mrs. Nasrine's son managed to avoid that fate, but lots of other kids from his neighborhood didn't" (102). More powerful, though, is the image, bodies convulsing upwards, lines indicating explosions, and fingers grasping at keys. Satrapi brings us to the horror she felt, without the eloquence, but with lots of guts.

The two memoirs couldn't approach their subject more differently, but there is, of course, good reason for that. Two women do not experience the same thing in the same way. The Iranian society registered differently in two different women who were at two different time periods in their own development and who had two different sets of coping mechanisms in order to confront the Iranian regime.

Satrapi makes it clear that her Persepolis is "A Memoir of a Childhood" and so the memoir hangs on the arc of her growth from childhood to adolescence, ending when she leaves Iran as a teenager to go to school in a safer place. The arc, the structure, allows her to naturally let the political events and her personal response to them shape the memoir. She conveys the experiences she felt as a child by going into that child's emotional make-up. She uses image to bring a sense of immediacy to the reader. She cuts the narrative to a skeleton and lets images convey the flesh.

Nafisi, a grown woman at the time of these political changes, cannot use the "coming-of-age" structure to build her memoir. She must find some other shape upon which to drape her story. Her selection makes perfect sense for her background. Frame it in books. Let the stories inform her story.

In a way, Nafisi has the much harder task. And her unwillingness to plunge into the personal emotions she felt is, in a way, noble. She focuses her attention on her students, on her magician, on her encounters with other faculty. She sees herself, clearly, as lucky and does not dwell on her own frustrations for long. Moreover, it is not hard to imagine that as a mother, relying on books for sanity saved her from giving over to the terror that she must have felt during a time in which terror became boring and so it makes sense that this became the framework for her book.

And so, the interesting question is this: which is better? The film or the painting? Womanly and reserved? Child-like and visceral? What is the task of the memoirist? What depths must the writer plunge to? Allow the reader to see?

Memoir, like art, has no rules. It may, in the future, have patterns, and even evolution, but at this point, there is no rule about what memoir must do other than be focused on what is remembered.

This is not to say that memoir requires no craft nor academic awareness, but only suggesting that memoir, like visual art, serves many purposes. Movies transport the viewer away from the present setting and into a new setting. Paintings bring the other setting to the viewer. Memoirs can do both and do so under the instruction of their writers.

For myself, (and I say this begrudgingly) I believe my personal writing must unearth the emotion. It must root in the muck. It must dredge up the dirty guts and reveal them to the reader. I don't like doing it, but there is a certain instinct in me questing for the barest truth, the autopsy of the memory.

We are the century born after Freud. We have adapted in ways Darwin couldn't have predicted. The emotional is not to be scoffed at. It is part of the evolution.

When We Write

2009-03-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

My last journal entry was 2/22/09 at 2:02 in the afternoon. That was over a month ago.

Prior to this journal-drought, I filled journals prolifically over the course of a year and a half, starting in September of '07, and filling up five and a half journals before this sudden, jarring stop.

Prior to this prolific-journal-period, I didn't journal. I stopped altogether. I was in an MFA program at Hamline University and yet I wasn't writing for myself. In the first nine months of 2007 there are only two entries. The first, written in January, a list of events along with corresponding months of every adventure, trip, or holiday that occurred since June of 2004, the date of the next most recent journal entry. The second, written in August I guess, though there is no date, is a three-page entry. On the top of the third page are the words "Can I love Shawn Again?" on the second, at the top of the page are the words "Does Love Exist?" and on the first page of the entry, there are no words. There is only a drawing, a collection of images representing the terrible personal crisis I found myself facing. I did not even have words to articulate my problems. I had only a few scribbled shapes, lines, questions marks, and, as I look closer at the image, I see there is one word. Trust. Crossed out so I missed it the first time.

It is significant to me to realize that after being married for a year and a half to my husband whom I had been with for four years prior to the wedding in December of 2002, I suddenly stopped journaling. We separated in August of 2007. Just before the flood of introspection began and I returned to journaling.

Mark Doty writes his memoir Heaven's Coast miraculously in the midst of and on the heels of loss. His partner ebbs out of life due to the increasing waves of illness that come crashing onto him from AIDS and Mark, somehow, picks up pen, and elegantly, records the journey. This both surprises me and feels natural.

His writing is marked by urgency, honesty, and a wish to preserve, to keep, to hold the twelve-year relationship he shared with his partner Wally. His writing anchors him in the relationship. It keeps Wally close.

In the prologue, Doty writes and rewrites, letting the reader see the rewriting. He says on page six:

If I write about it as if it's already done, that's because so much of it is--W. is less present, each week spends more time asleep, and is less and less capable of involvement in the stuff of mutual life. We're pushed into a different kind of relation.

Then he adds in parentheses:

(Those sentences were true when I wrote them, but this week he's much more alert--still unable to walk but ready to get out of the house, ready to shop for new shoes and

magazines...

This rewriting lets the reader see the progression and recession of the disease, the push and pull of the waves hitting them on the shore. It shows that the act of writing, of depicting, transcribing cannot but capture what is true in a moment, from an angle, and then let go of that image and accept the truth is new again.

For this reason, I find myself wondering why I am venturing out into this terrain of memoir and writing about what is personal. I don't like to do it. I lose all orientation in my personal writing. I lose my tight grasp of the control on the pen. I sense neither whether my writing is effective or of any importance to an outside audience, and for me, a highly critical reader used to grading, editing, revising, selecting, and critiquing, this is like being out in the deep purple water of the sea with no clue what swims below my thrashing legs.

My writing will not do anything but capture a momentary truth. And that only if I am lucky.

Doty likewise resists writing, a situation that manifests physically in back spasms and chronic pain. He writes on 132:

There is so much I don't want to write. I can feel the interior pressure of turbulence, latent feeling opened and invited in--out?--if I begin to speak directly about illness, dissolution, the end of my heart's desire, the wreck of love's body, the failure of medicine. There is so much there to--I begin to write "dredge up" but it isn't at all like uncovering something from which I have recovered, something far in the past. It's that there's all that grief and anger right there and I'd rather not feel it than look at it directly...

I can relate to this feeling. As I began to write last fall, in October of 2008, about the sexual addiction that started filling up my marriage, eventually drowning it altogether in February 2008, I noticed that my fingers ached. My back ached. My eyes hurt. Writing, an even usually that fills me with optimistic creative energy, instead drove me to my bed. I would write for 45 minutes and then sleep for two hours. The keys pounding me back to that place of grief I was working so hard to ignore.

Why did I continue to write about my grief? About my failed marriage ( a term that leads me to plot many more essays in my head even as I type it)? What compelled me to the writing when it felt so painful?

Doty, too, confronts the push-pull, suck-spew power of writing. His writing, an elegy for his partner, his love, I imagine, compelled him because he wanted to preserve his lover, make an altar of their love. This does not mean it wasn't filled with the weight of pain. He writes on pae 205:

To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of survivng, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to look was also unbearable. And so I'd write when I could, recording what approached like someone in a slow-moving but unstoppable accident, who must look and look away at once.

I am struck by the way he says writing was a way of surviving. In that sense, I feel like it is survival that draws me most to the field of memoir writing. A woman in one of my classes, after hearing yet another piece about my divorce, said to me, "You know, I've been thinking about your writing." I perked up immediately ready for some praise to assuage the anxiety I have about writing the personal. "It must be really good that you're doing it. Sort of like therapy, right?"

Writing as therapy. Definitely, at times. In my journal, when I finally came back to images, to lines, to question marks, and finally words, writing, I believe, saved my life. It was my life-preserver, the rope pulling me out of a sea of depression, a sea I fully believe might have swallowed me forever.

But what I am doing now is not that kind of writing. The comment stung. Especially as a critical thinker about writing, especially as someone who knows the tediousness of a particular type of narrative. I am not writing to soothe only myself. I am writing for an audience, though I don't know why. It is not meant to be therapy. It is not meant to be an account of the way in which I was wronged (far from it). It isn't really meant to be anything other than shared. I know I am writing for an audience, but only because I am compelled to. Only because I can't do anything else.

Again, I don't want to write about this subject, this, the most personal subject of my life. Writing about the pain of living with a sex addict, of seeing him choose pornography over me (a situation I now realize was not about me to him, but the pain of witnessing it definitely is what it felt like to me, not to mention the pain of realizing the choice wasn't even about me for him, that I was secondary, always, to his addiction) feels like returning to sea on the life preserver after making it safely to shore the first time. I know that I am safe, but I do not want to go back to the storm. Bad things happen out there.

Doty writes bravely in the face of death. He writes though it nearly kills him. As he writes about his final days with Wally, the foot-rubbing, the brief smiles, the simple "I love you, babe" he hears from Wally one last time, he asks, "How can this be written? Shouldn't these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in the hurricane?" (259). (Incidentally the tears are running now, down my cheeks.)

After Wally dies, Doty stops writing for a month. He stops.

Grief takes over.

So what I think is this:

We write when we are supposed to, when to do otherwise would mean destruction, when we know we need to; and when the writing would break us open, when we are not ready for the current world to drown, we stop. We wait. We gather our strength.

Then, when we are ready, we pour our story out into the world to swim with all the rest.

How it Feels Now--

2009-03-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

It is not often that the past runs right past you. But today it did for me.

While walking the yorkie-poo on a usual Saturday morning route, to the coffee shop, over to the lake, around the path, and back to the apartment, I saw my ex-husband run past me.

He lives two blocks away from me, so I know there is a fairly high likelihood of running into him. Literally. We both run circles round the lake near our places. Who knows? Maybe we're chasing after each other all the time.

Other images and ideas have been chasing me, too. Ideas I cannot string together into any real sort of coherence just now. Labyrinths. Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. Tunnels and holes. The idea of falling down the rabbit hole. Alice in Wonderland.

Twice today while at a book store, (pre-coffee shop), I felt my heart jump twice--the first in the entry way seeing a bargain book called the complete works of Lewis Carroll, with Alice on the cover, and later in the fiction section while browsing past the classics and catching a glimpse of Alice in Wonderland out of my periphery.

I feel a deep obsession coming on. And how appropriate--I leap out of a marriage with a sex-addict right into a literary obsession on the works written by a pedophile. One who wrote a legendary story about a little blond girl getting lost.

There is something to the idea of the journey of female and child protagonists getting lost in a world of fantasy, myth, and confusion. Doors change sizes. Scarecrows talk. A giant flying dog saves a young boy. A boy lives inside a peach and talks to bugs. A girl falls asleep in the opiate haze of poppies. A girl eats a cake and shrinks. A girl finds herself trapped in a glass sphere, a wild party, where no one looks like anyone she's ever seen.

The ancestors of these modern stories, the fairy tales, set up the archetype. Children crave candy and are trapped by a witch. A girl discovers her grandmother is really a wolf. A girl falls asleep after eating a poisoned apple. A girl is forced to marry a beast.

And further back. Psyche finds herself in a cave hidden underground, told by her husband that she can never look at him.

In all these instances the protagonist is alone. Separated from family. Separated from the world she knew. There is an energy of seduction. There is an energy of confusion. Disorientation. The surreal. The dangerous. The girl does not understand her enemy, but she knows that following the rules she used to live by will no longer work. The people, the creatures, around her do not operate as she has been taught they will.

I felt disoriented when I saw my ex run by. I recognized his breathing first, subconsciously, so that when I saw his back my thoughts were--it really is him! I couldn't believe it. He looked fit. He was running. He looked healthier and saner than the rest of world. I was at my crumpled post-Friday night best. Raggedy. Disassembled.

Could it all, divorce, addiction, really have happened? Did it need to? Why does he look so normal when I am still lost in a world of confusion? A world of strange shapes? Why do I feel like the one who's gone mad?

He ran right by me. No stopping to talk. Did he wonder at the dog by my side? About my new life?

He ran right past. Bent on a course he knew well and had planned out ahead of time. I continued my own wanderings, lost, I am sure, forever in wonderland.

A blogger becomes a server and channels Nabokov in her observations...

2009-03-03T18:43:00.000-08:00

Well- as a solution to a very concrete problem of lacking personal finances, this particular blogger went out and got herself a job as a server at a nearby restaurant located inside a grocery store frequented mainly by regulars of the elderly, Norwegian variety. They like their coffee black and strong, their lefse thickly buttered, and their seasonings--well, they don't much like seasonings.

As one of the experiences of a new server, I have had the chance to come in at 5:30 in the morning to open up the restaurant and get to know the customers, many of whom order the same thing every day. Lately I have also been reading Nabokov. Speak, Memory.

I know there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between working at a restaurant and reading the autobiography of a Lolita-writing Russian author, but because I am sleep deprived and waking up at 4:00 these days, it occurs to me that it might be fun to observe the "characters" I have met so far through the eyes of Nabokov- or at least give a sort of Nabokovian description as I interpret his aesthetic from his memoir.

Character #1: Older man, regular.

A man walks over to the counter upon which sit the coffee mugs, water glasses, utensils and various other necessities of the initial ritual of fetching a beverage for the customer. This man does not wait for the coffee to come to him, but walks right up and helps himself to a mug turning on the spigot of the regular coffeepot and grinning at me as I struggle to work the cash register and ring up another guest's meal, a particularly difficult moment for me and so he has me at a disadvantage. I greet the man, a man wearing jeans about ten years out of date, an old gray sweatshirt, and a man who, despite the beaked nose, gray hair (complete with morning cowlick) and skin tired of fighting the war on gravity, was probably once somewhat handsome.

I ask the man how he is.

"Do you really want to know?"

Of course, what I want is of little regard to this man who is intent, as evident by the gleam in his eye, of delivering a joke he clearly finds amusing. He proceeds, despite my protests that no, it's ok, I don't need to know and says:

"I'm ornery and horny."

And with that he laughs at his own joke (non-Nabokovian me laughs too) and walks over to his usual table, a round table in the back of the restaurant where he hangs out with his cronies each morning sipping coffee and complaining about the state of things in general, and in particular, the service at this restaurant.

Character #2: Woman at counter, ordering large turtle latte.

A woman with faded brown hair that falls lower than her shoulders and bangs that look like they have been pushed hastily aside in a rush to get out of bed and on with the daily routine approaches the counter, bug-eyed or bleary-eyed, it is hard to say.

I greet her, as bound by my new position as server, and ask how she is today.

"It's too early to tell," she retorts, clearly annoyed that anyone has the gall to pose such a ridiculous question at the god-awful hour of 7:30. She is such a woman who delights in crushing the enthusiasm in front of her, like she delights in squishing an ant when she sees one walking along the sidewalk slowly in front of her and she happens to be wearing some thick-soled pair of shoes, or perhaps her "outdoor" crocs- the pair that will not come inside, thereby trailing ant remains behind them.

I know she is this particular kind of sadist because her response to her own retort about it being too early goes something like this:

"I suppose you have to be here even earlier, huh?" (she grudgingly concedes that she is not the only one who has to face morning before it is light and I tell her we arrive at 5:30.) "Well, I saw on my calendar that I think it's this Sunday that we shift over to daylight savings. I guess you'll be getting here at 4:30, huh?" She walks away after smugly tilting her head toward the plastic lid on her drink and taking a big sip.

She didn't leave a tip.

Character #3: Delivery man, Ghiradelli chocolate-sauce delivery man

I greet the man walking confidently behind our counter wheeling four cardboard boxes on a dolly. I say "How are you?"

He says, "Better each time I see you. You know that's why I come here, right? To see your pretty face each time. You know that too, right? I know you got a man who tells you every day how pretty you are, or you better."

The man continues on despite the fact that I am looking away and working on the cash register again and other servers are rolling their eyes. Of particular note is the fact that this is only day three of my time at this restaurant; I have not seen this man, with his glasses and Ghiradelli jacket and black-and-gray curly short hair. He has never seen me either, so it is impossible to take anything he says seriously. Thus I turn my attention in my mind to the Mnemosyne butterfly, the species that I remembered not so much for the moment in which I caught it, but for the moment my Nanny, Mademoiselle O, sat on it and crushed its wings into six lop-sided and broken pieces. I don't pretend to assume their was any connection between the Mnemosyne butterfly and the Ghiradelli delivery man, but the thought serves merely to illustrate how disconnected I was from the conversation he was having with himself in my direction.

The End--of Nabokovian interpretation...

And now- the why of it all. Why did I choose to have a Nabokovian flight of fancy in thinking about the customers I have met? How is Nabokov different from me?

Well, there is the obvious--He was a Russian writer born in the 19th century before the crumbling of Tsars and Lenin's reign on the world who wrote well and hunted butterflies and grew up in a household full of dozens of dozens of servants all taking care of the personal business of his family. I am an American woman born after Vietnam and before Desert Storm part one who took karate and dance and was held accountable for washing dishes at a very early age. But beyond that-- how do we interpret the world differently? What have I learned from his autobiography? From my own life?

Aesthetically, Nabokov holds his reader at arm's length. His visual description of people and places emerges out of a bounty of details that appear on a page like an image beneath an artist's charcoal pencil. He lets us revel in imagery but resists approaching emotion in anything more than a detached and bemused sort of way, such as when he says of his time in college at Cambridge, "Emotionally, I was in the position of a man who, having just lost a fond kinswoman, realized-too late- that through some laziness of the routine-drugged human soul, he had neither troubled to know her as fully as she deserved, nor had shown her in full the marks of his not quite conscious then, but now unrelieved, affection" (261). It is a lovely passage, thoughtful and intelligent, but certainly not emotionally engaging. The emotion has been put in an aquarium and Nabokov is instructing his readers of its nature much like a tour guide would do in a natural history museum.

I like that about Nabokov, or at least I like it right now. My own writing has been much more the variety of bleeding onto a page as late, and my emotions are too raw to continue. I want a break. I am tired of describing the gut-wrenching pain of heartache and self-exploration.

Aesthetics aside, Nabokov as a server amuses me to no end. Me as a server depresses me a bit. I'm starting to think becoming a server for me, a woman with codependent tendencies and habits, is a little like sending a drug addict to work in a crack factory. How many times a day do I get to ignore my own boundaries in efforts to please the customer? How many times do I get to smile at a derogatory comment all in an effort to keep things running smoothly and also make a tip? Not that I don't understand the playfulness of the customers or the delivery men, but I feel myself slipping into pleasing-mode and away from the self-containment that Nabokov has in such abundance. Nabokov would make no apologies or accommodations for the customers, but of course, I do.

Perhaps that is why I choose to look at the customers from Nabokov's point of view. Even if in the moment I am wrapped up in being charming and smiling and laughing and putting others at ease, I can always come home and rewrite the scene.

Sentence Length (Despite the Failing Economy--Personal and Global)

2009-02-18T21:52:00.001-08:00

A million little thoughts are dancing in my head about writing despite the thunderous weights of the disasters that are our own personal lives that threaten to descend at any moment and squash my dancing filaments, (you know, the usual suspects--finances, fatality, failed romances, fuel depletion, etc.) And yet, ridiculously and miraculously I am thinking about sentences. And tricks. And love.

Today I went to my internship at a small but mighty publishing company, a place I love for its location within a building for artists and for its old-fashioned printing presses that are still used with honor and love, and as usual I felt a certain pride and excitement at being involved in "the process"--that magical germination of a manuscript from slush pile to bestseller. Granted-I mostly see the slush, and very rarely does a gem make it all the way to bestseller, but nonetheless--I honor my craft and I love the editorial journey. I thrill to examine manuscripts and determine what exactly would make it work, make it great, and make it sell.

Except today was different. Today I looked at the introductory pages of a work already well on its journey to publication and I was disappointed. There were many spectacular and brilliant aspects of this text, but for me the point of view was arbitrary and irritating. This is a subject I could ramble on and on about in a boring way for many paragraphs and it would probably matter only to me, and so I jump to a far more fascinating topic: sentence length, the subject of irritation for the other intern on duty. And of course, given the topic of all of my blogs, I must address one more topic: love.

(Hah! You think--how will she pull this off? A blog about sentence length and love? Just watch.)

Yes- LOVE and SENTENCE LENGTH. Here goes:

[the following is a play depicting the conversation about sentence length I had with Fellow Intern... the love comes later, in the third or fourth act]

ACT 1. Picture two erudite interns sipping caffeinated beverages. Neither wants to admit they are dismayed by the manuscript they are reading.

Intern me: So, what do you think?

Fellow intern: I'm not sure I even want to say right now.

Intern me: Yeah.

ACT 2. The plot thickens--the two interns begin to discuss language and semantics and syntax. Whoo-hoo!

Fellow intern: I'm reserving my judgement, but the language of a story is so important to me and there's just nothing happening so far in this work.

(to the author's credit, an author probably pulitzer-prize bound, we are only 26 pages in, and we're interns... what do we know?)

Intern me: Well, for me, it's the POV that is a problem. I felt like the language was ok; the sentence structure at least was engaging. The pace increased at times of action, you know, when the sentences stretched on and on forever, no periods in sight.

Fellow intern: Sure... I can see that, but it's just such an old trick, you know?

ACT 3. Stop. The actors on stage freeze and the lights begin to swirl. The phrase "old trick" echoes through the theater. As the audience, here's where you think about the words old trick and interject an interpretive dance scene of your choice. Think of a love triangle between writer, content, and form. Feel free to dress interns up in masks and feathered attire if you feel you must.

ACT 4. Here's where the action slows just a little, in Shakespearean tradition.

Intern me: Sure. Huh. Old trick? Hmm... Internal rumination occurs.

ACT 5. The dramatic conclusion! Brace yourself!

Intern me: Well, I'm outta here. Have a good afternoon!

Fellow intern: Ok. See ya. She smiles cheerfully.

*****

Ok, before the tomatoes start landing on stage, let me, as director explain that the most dramatic action, of course, happened off stage, in my mind, as I started thinking about old tricks and sentence length and love.

See, here's the deal-- sure, any writer can do what this writer did, let a sentence run on and on without a period in order to emphasize the drama and tension of the scene, such as a young boy getting beat up by resident gang members. The run-on sentence serves to enhance tension, suspense, fear, urgency, and horror. But is it done as a trick? Because it has been done before is it just a routine card trick? Is it just a tired old rabbit popping out of a hat, red-eyed from partying the night before?

True, any writer could use this technique. In fact, I could teach my Pre-AP 9th graders to use just such a trick. We could have a mini-lesson and workshop the idea in partners, and then individually they could imitate this "trick" in their own work. But here's the thing--all of the 109 9th graders in my charge will achieve a run-on paragraph; only 3-5 of them will give me chills. Those 3-5 kids who do it right aren't just on stage showing us a trick; they are performing magic.

I use the "trick" of run-on sentences myself. I like to think when I do I'm not using it as a trick. As writers we need to address the theory of our craft and acknowledge the responsibility as artists to push on the edges of what has already been established. We need to explore language; paint lexicon; play on the jungle gym of syllables and letters that make up our discourse. We need to avoid falling into common patterns; we need to avoid relying on "tricks".

At the same time, like staring at one of those magic pictures, we need to keep a trance-like gaze on our content and let the content dictate our form. If the content calls, truly, for a run-on-no-period-paragraph, it will let us know. It will demand it from us, authentically, and it won't feel like a trick to the reader.

This is the kind of love I'm talking about today: love for our stories, love for the amazing gift language is. And it is a kind of love that means relaxing the brain and letting go and feeling the story rise out of the page in whatever length sentences it desires, waiting only for our pen to add ink to its letters.

And of course, love between people must be like this too. Love must be relaxing the mind and letting the story unfold as it will.

(See? Told ya. Sentence length and Love. What now?! Yeah, that's what I thought.)

Freaky Friday

2009-02-13T14:19:00.001-08:00

You just never know how things are going to go. Especially while at a writing conference. In Chicago.

I planned to go to a panel at noon, another at 1:30, the art museum at 3:00, dinner at 5:00, and a reception at 7:00.

Instead, I took a nap through the noon meeting, showed up for 20 minutes of the panel at 1:30, went to Buddy Legend's at 3 for a burger and to use their wifi. Instead, little writing got done but I talked to the precocious and not-at-all shy daughter of a local headlining blues singer, chatting it up with a fellow AWP attendee, and watching SNL skits with the staff after wishing one person luck on applying to Northwestern and listened to them give each other shit.

It's a strange day. I think it will only get stranger.

It is Friday the 13th after all.

And I realize this is not only something that occurs while at a conference. This happens while writing, dating, existing, etc. And sometimes you have to look at the strange patterns that spring up in your life and try to make sense of them.

In my fiction I have a pattern: my stories involve parent-less children. Moms abandon daughters. Boys survive mom's suicide. And babies drop out of the sky, no parents to be found.

In my dating I have a pattern: guys without mothers. Some have lived through moms leaving after a divorce. One was abandoned completely. One sat in the doctor's office while his mom had an aneurism outside.

Today, being a strange Friday falling on the 13th, I am forced to examine these patterns. Just what is going on? I posed the question to a friend.

"Do you think they're looking for you to be a mother?" she asked.

"Or am I looking for an orphan?" I replied.

Both are equally disturbing.

Really frightening when I stop to think about it. Obviously abandonment is an issue in my life. I can't deny this--it shows up in my writing, my dating, my crying tendencies during movies like The Hotel for Dogs when orphan siblings are separated. I'm not really sure yet why this issue keeps coming up in my life, having been raised by two parents married for 34 years, but if there's one thing I know about my fiction writing, the issue will eventually reveal itself. I just have to be patient and keep noticing the patterns, keep asking myself why all of this is going on.

As for the surprising pattern of planned situations turning to surprising encounters at the blues joint down the street? That's easy. I just like to have fun.

Doing the Write Thing

2009-02-12T12:53:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here in a Caribou on Wabash and 8th street and trying to think of what to do, what to write. There are escapee writers from the annual AWP conference crawling all over the coffee shop and everyone is networking and strategizing and planning and selling and schmoozing and handing out business cards all over the place, all of this while buzzing on caffeine and the intoxication that washes over a group of nerds who usually work in solitary spaces when they suddenly encounter thousands of their own kind in the marble and carpeted Hilton in downtown Chicago. There are a lot of fragile egos all over the place.

Including mine, of course. Fragile ego, fragile sense of stability, fragile first foot-hold in this new world I want to become my life.

And I want to throw up a little.

Perhaps it is just the overstimulation and overcaffeination, but suddenly I feel like everything must happen now--my writing needs to hit the pages now--I need to find ways to fund my life through grants now--I need to make all of these connections with people now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. It must all occur now.

And yet, much as I compelled to figure it all out now, I find my wheels are spinning. Do I get my stories in shape to send out? Do I search for viable grant sources? Do I start adding bunches of people to my facebook account? Do I update my resume? Start a website? Update my blog?

The process overwhelms me.

And yet--what I have chosen to do, with this list before me and only 40% of my battery available on my laptop, what I have chosen to do with my precious time is write on my blog. My shoulders are dropping back into their normal place. My breathing is slowing. My stomach is unclenching.

And suddenly, now, as I am writing this, ignoring the tweeded-out writers that are chatting and scribbling around me, watching my fingers click over the keyboard, and watching letters form on the screen, I am understanding that this is a good sign. I am meant to write. Writing brings me clarity and relief and release from the insanity that is my life--my lack of routine, funding, constant companion, stable career, and on and on. I can come back to the writing for sanity. I can come back to the screen and find solace.

Here, now, in the Caribou on 8th and Wabash, I am starting to feel like myself again. I am starting to calm down. I no longer want to throw up. I have no idea how I will go from wannabe-writer to Writer with a capital W, but I think I must be on the write track.

Every Frog Has a Silver Lining

2009-02-10T11:44:00.000-08:00

So I was sitting with some girlfriends at dinner last night and as talk turned to my dating life I pulled up my sleeve to reveal something shocking to them all: a hickey. I have not had a hickey in over a decade, so it was traumatic to have to share this with them, but I was also bubbling with information about the crush who had been the one to give me the hickey.

"What happened?" asked one of my friends. "I read your blog on Friday. Last I heard you were..."

"Getting stood up?" She nodded with a smile. To which I replied, "Oh, that."

And so began our discussion of what has in a Minneapolis minute become the whirlwind of my dating life. In less than a weekend I have shifted my mindset about dating: no longer am I pining and whining and wishing and hoping. Now I am researching, exploring, trying things out, making observations, not committing to anyone and saying yes to most invitations--in short, when it comes to dating, I have become a guy.

Or perhaps a biologist.

It has occurred to me that the best tool in the dating scene is a certain degree of levity and amusement. Thus, I have given up the fairy tale, foregone the romance of movies, and stopped expecting the frogs to turn into princes. Now I just see them as frogs who will stay frogs. The question is what kind of frog do I want to hang out with?

In my research so far, I have catalogued a number of different species, with Darwinian zeal. There are the vile cane toads, that awful invasive species now poisoning everything in sight in Australia. To be on a date with a cane toad is to be looking for exits in restaurants. Then there's the garden toad--fairly harmless, but the kind of date that makes you question why you got off the couch and out of your sweatpants. My favorite amphibian to date is the shiny green tree frog. They are charming and adorable and have soft, white bellies, and occasionally they will even chirp in a moderately endearing way.

I have also learned, in my exploration of this amphibious species, that it's smart, sometimes, to give a frog a second chance. My frog from last Thursday, (not the hickey-giving frog, but the one that stood me up because I suggested it to him) contacted me all weekend, and so I gave him another chance and suggested we hang out Monday (post-dinner with the girls). Monday night came and so did frustration. In two hours of sporadic texting we could not come up with a plan to hang out. I was losing patience with the frog. I thought to myself--at least he's taking himself out of the running. Now I won't have to worry about how I will squeeze him into the line up. Like Darwin pointed out--a species must adapt or become extinct. There has to be a way to thin the heard in the quest for finding a decent frog.

Just as I was about to mark this strand of amphibian legally extinct in my observation notebook, he called. He proposed we grab a drink. I was already in sweatpants, and the vindictive side of me wanted to say no, but then the explorer side of me said--it's in the name of research! And so I went.

Here's what I learned: some frogs let you down and stay their normal lumpy, slimy selves; some frogs surprise you and put on a top hat and tap shoes and start singing "Hello, my baby, hello, my darling" just like the delightful little frog on the WB. This particular frog was just such a frog. He put a smile on my face and I learned all sorts of new facts about the species. In fact, this frog once did the worm in a chain with four other guys in high school during a pep-fest while wearing overalls and wife beaters with one strap undone. Such hilarious information is bound to make any good researcher smile.

Even when she gets home.

Even when she wakes up the next day.

Zombies and Vampires and Other Scary Things

2009-02-05T21:16:00.000-08:00

Well, tonight I got stood up.

Or maybe I stood myself up.

It's a little hard to say. A cute guy and I made tentative plans which I cancelled and then we rescheduled with trepidation for a dubiously late hour cocktail after my evening class. Class ended; we exchanged texts and I gave the cute guy two outs. He eventually took the out, and then I did what I always do when I'm slightly annoyed and disappointed, I made a joke and let him off the hook. He said he felt like a zombie and wanted to stay in; I said I preferred going out for drinks with vampires anyway.

I may have sabotaged the date from the start.

Then, I called my soulsister and together we analyzed the situation. He's busy. It's late. We planned the whole thing last minute anyhow. I cancelled our original plan. He probably thought I wasn't really interested. Of course it wasn't like he was standing me up. Of course he's interested. Of course things will eventually work out.

But the analysis didn't work. I still felt disappointed.

Never mind that I was a little tired myself. Never mind that I started thinking of all the things I could get done if I didn't go out tonight. Never mind that I know I am not interested in a lifelong sort of relationship with this cute guy. Never mind that I have other dates, other guys, other mild flirtations brewing in the future. Never mind that even if the cute guy did suddenly develop a devoted passion for me I would panic and worry about crushing him; I wouldn't want him to get hurt.

I still felt put out.

I began to rail against this guy in my mind. Just what was he thinking? I went out of my way to be ready to go out with him. Didn't he know what he was missing? Why did he act interested if he really wasn't? And he must be interested, right? Because if he wasn't.... well, then I'm uninteresting?

And so began the self mutilation. I must have said something wrong. I must have given off the wrong signals. I must not be so fabulous after all. If he's not interested in me, I must not be interesting to anyone.

Round and round my mind spun. Finally, it occurred to me stop. I realized I was using reason to fight off emotion. I was arguing my way out of feeling. I was pretending there was a catch, a trick, an equation I could solve to fix the problem. I was pretending not to notice the feeling that wanted out.

I finally sat down on the couch and let the feeling wash over me like a wave. It was sadness. And I stopped moving, became still, under its weight. Miraculously, the yorkie-poo who had been nothing but irritable and demanding all day stopped too and crept onto my lap. Together we were just still and sad for a minute.

Then I laughed a little, in a kind way, at the girl in my head who does this, the girl who beats herself up when something like this happens. The girl who thinks that it is her responsibility to keep people happy, keep peace, keep smiling no matter what. If someone is angry, it is my fault. If someone is sad, it is my fault. I determine my own worth by making people approve of me.

Of course, my brain knows this isn't true. And I've been able to let so much of this complex go. I can watch friends argue and know it has nothing to do with me. I can calmly sit in the middle of chaos while my mother goes slightly crazy preparing holiday meals. I can disagree with a friend and know that I do not need her approval of my opinion in order for it to be valid.

But I still get stuck with my particular strand of neurosis--peoplepleaseria-- when it comes to dating.

Tonight, yorkie-poo on lap, I felt my sadness and then I let it go. I chuckled kindly at that girl. I let her say her piece and then I hugged her and said, "honey, you're amazing."

And the scary thing is, I suddenly knew it was a little bit true. I felt another wave, a wave of certainty, wash over me. I suddenly knew that I am meant to experience these bumps, that I am meant to write about it, and that someday, maybe not too far away, I am meant to find that person in my life, that great love. I suddenly knew all this and I shivered.

And I don't know which is scarier, thinking no one will ever love me, or knowing someday someone will.

Blogging Blues

2009-01-30T13:16:00.001-08:00

I've been blogging inside my mind all week, but nothing has made it yet to the screen. In my head, I'm writing all sorts of delightful essays on how great life is going, how I feel like I've turned a corner in my life, how I'm enjoying dating casually again and feeling relaxed about whether or not I need a boyfriend in my life. Cohesive essays form in my brain. Images ripe with impact dance. A catalog of frogs, kayaks on ocean waves, Obama acceptance speech moment (Yes, We Can!) and so I THOUGHT today would be a great day to blog. I THOUGHT I would be able to stop writing whiny essays on grief and pain and focus instead on fun things, like making out with an adorable 33 year-old border patrol while in a northern city near the Canadian border.

Alas, grief comes crashing back. Or perhaps I should saying rolling. Rolling on the back of a diamond speckled white gold wedding ring.

Lately, my wedding gifts have been offing themselves. Crystal wine glasses have knocked themselves off counters, bowls have shattered in the dishwasher, my flannel pj's from my ex have been taunting my hound so that he has finally ripped a hole in them, and even my favorite pair of sweatpants, my ex's pair that was too small, has been volunteering for the position of wine-stain receptacle. It's a conspiracy. But one that I hope leads to healing soon.

I feel like once everything from my marriage is destroyed, new growth begins.

In this spirit, I decided that I must sell my engagement ring. Today. I have tried before with little luck. Two months ago I brought engagement ring and wedding band (purchased for $3800 in 2002) to Pawn America. Under the weight of depressed fluorescent light bulbs, in the stale air of smoke and despair, at the counter of dreams forfeited for immediate needs, John told me the pair of items was worth $360 dollars. I pocket the rings and left, sure I could find a better price.

One month ago I posted my rings on craigslist. I took pictures. I wrote a description. I clicked on the link. The responses I got were immediate (which was promising), unintelligible (which was confusing), and overly enthusiastic (which was immediately suspicious). I pictured myself showing up in a parking lot somewhere and being dragged by my ponytail into a trunk. I did not respond to any of the inquirers.

Today I went to Be-Iced, a store I had heard about on television that promised "three times more!" for my jewelry than a pawn shop. I contented myself with the idea that I might actually get six hundred bucks, I'd settle for five, and secretly, I was hoping for seven. I walked into the carpeted store, past an older woman with an oxygen tank beside her who was looking at diamonds stud earrings perched in gold settings and placed my two rings in a tray lined with black velvet.

"Now, I just have to warn you, it won't be worth nearly what you bought it for" said an older saleswoman with highlighted hair over her glasses.

"That's ok. I've already been to the pawn shop--I've already been shocked."

Turns out, Be-Iced offered less. A grand total for $339. When I said the pawn shop offered more, the saleswoman told me it was probably because they didn't have equipment good enough to "really scrutinize" the jewelry and "find all the flaws." She went on to say "It's sad, isn't it?"

I pocketed the rings again and walked out.

Here's what is sad about the situation. Here's what caused me to feel like cold water was running over me, like a warm flush was creeping to my cheeks, like my arms were being pushed into the ground. Here's what caused my eyes to blur when I looked at the numbers on the page she held in front of me next to that black-velvet-lined box: the ring was my marriage, it was my innocence, it was my twenty year-old heart bleeding away, it was my belief in God, belief in Santa, belief in fairy tale endings and white knights and men I could trust. That ring was a promise I made, a promise I failed to keep; it was failure. My biggest failure.

And a woman was standing there telling me it was worth $339 because of its flaws.

That was a phrase that always was a stab in the chest. Failed Marriage. Those words hold all the weight of the shame that I felt as I left my relationship and chose a better life.

I left Be-Iced. I ran some errands. I dwelled on my new dilemma. What is the value of $339? Three months of a gym membership? Three months of cell-phone service? Eight four lattes from Starbucks? Such a paltry amount for the weight of my love. "It's sad, isn't it?" Sad isn't the word.

As I drove from store to store returning things, I remembered how just over a year ago I rented a convertible while driving all over Florida. I love convertibles. I've always wanted one. My family has always discouraged me from buying one citing the weather, future children, and impracticality as reasons to steer clear. They are right, of course; a convertible is impractical. But then again, this is my life. I get to do what I want.

And so I settled on the idea of selling the ring to a pawn shop after all and starting a convertible fund. I pictured a mayonnaise jar with convertible pictures taped all over it. Three hundred and sixty dollars wasn't much, but it was a step. A promise. A commitment to myself. A symbol of my fidelity to my own dreams.

Renewed in spirit I drove to a pawn shop near my house, ignored the cars and traffic and sinking feeling I felt as I walked closer to the building, pulled on the door knob and... stopped short. Locked. Closed.

I was screwed.

Now the weight of my ring continues to haunt me: an item from my marriage I just can't shake. Should I give it to a homeless person? Throw it in a well? Drop it in a mailbox? Go back next week to try again?

I just don't know. I guess I just have to trust the universe. When, as with my pajamas, my crystal wineglasses, and my sweatpants, it is time for my ring to leave, I'm sure it will find itself a good way to disappear.

Lucky me

2009-01-15T17:47:00.000-08:00

Today the sun was shining brightly, and though it was less than zero degrees outside, I felt optimistic, productive, happy. I drove to a coffee shop, lost myself in a brief writing project, took care of looming deadlines, and talked to a friend who happened to be there at the same time.

I was planning to go to fitness yoga at 5:30. Or possibly soul grooves at 6:00. But at 4:30 I left the coffee shop and walked a block to the grocery store. At 4:50 I left the grocery store. The sun was dropping; the temp was dropping faster. I walked two blocks to my car and in that time decided neither yoga nor grooving was happening tonight. I would go home to my yorkie poo and eat dinner instead.

This was a simple decision, but there's something grander inside it. I choose what I want to do in my life. I answer to no one. I earn my keep and go where I want. I can choose to go to happy hour with friends, choose to pursue an internship, choose to study, choose to read, to sleep, to exercise, to eat, drink, or indulge myself in a manicure or massage. I can choose to replace debt from a mortgage with debt from an education. No one else is responsible for figuring this out. No one else needs to be factored into my decision (save the yorkie poo, of course).

I get to do whatever I want with my one, precious, wild life.

I am overwhelmed by the freedom in my life.

As I chatted with the friendly acquaintance I ran into he asked me what I was doing, working on, reading, writing, etc. I told him about a trip I am taking in the summer- a trip to Europe involving exploration, writing, and a class on creativity in Crete. Listening to myself I realized just how many possibilities I have at my fingertips and how many accomplishments I have already achieved. Last year at this time I remember thinking maybe I will take a sabbatical, maybe I will pursue an internship, maybe this, and maybe that. This year I have met each of my goals. It's like the destruction of last year has led to this magic reassembly of the life of my dreams. I literally can't believe how everything feels so purposeful now.

*****

Last week, another friend of mine told me about a woman she knows in Guatemala. This woman moved to the states with her family when she was four and lived here until she was fourteen. Then she moved home, met a man, devastatingly handsome I am sure, and he, when she was eighteen, convinced her not to go to college even though she was very smart, but to have a baby. With him. So she did. And he left her. Cheated.

So she left him. Moved in with her family. Taught classes at an English school. Met a British man. Fell in love.

Re-enter baby's daddy. Jealous. Persuasive. I love you now. That's over. She resisted. Wanted to move to England with love-of-her-life #2. Find a job in England. Pursue her education. Her family kicked her out. Make this work with the father of your child. Move into his apartment and accept what he gives you.

There are no opportunities for single women with children in Guatemala. There's no daycare. She is trapped. He got her.

*****

I think of this because this woman does not have the choices I have. And, while sometimes it feels like it might be nice to rely on someone else, to have someone take care of me, I realize that my right to provide for myself and choose my own path in life is a right that many women are denied in this world.

I don't need to feel guilty for being allowed by my society to pursue this right. But I need to recognize not everyone has it. I need to acknowledge that everyone who pursued a right previously denied to their demographic, MLKJ, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, and more, possessed a strength I can't imagine. And a strength that paved the way for my life today.

I am not nearly as strong as my heroes. Venturing out of marriage and stability and the expectations of my family and society has been one of the most rewarding and difficult adventures of my life. I don't think I am cut out to change social conditions in our world. It is enough for me to have changed conditions in my own life. I almost became a physical therapist to please my mother. I almost stayed in a relationship lacking intimacy and respect because I was trying to be good. And now- now, I feel like I'm setting out on the seas- not sure what I will find on the horizon.

It is disquieting, and sometimes fills me with anxiety, but ultimately I realize how lucky I am to be in this life.

Now the sun has set. I am at home. The dishes are done and put away. The temperature has dropped to 13 degrees below zero. It is 8:23 p.m. and the hours stretch out before me, awaiting my decision, my direction, my desire, my plan.

And what, I wonder, will I decide to do next?

*****

My life is what I decide it to be.

Oh Lucky, lucky, oh, lucky me...

InterTEXTual communication

2009-01-07T18:51:00.000-08:00

I have to write this blog.

I am an anthropologist who has stumbled onto a great find. A group of men are having a conversation at the table next to me and they are sitting around sharing and analyzing text messages they have received from girls. A man in a striped shirt is reading his texts out loud verbatim.

"I wasn't myself when I said that. I realize you are a great guy and I want you in my life."

His response? "I want you to leave me alone. Please stop texting me."

Then he reads, "Ok, but first I want to tell you one thing. I was just diagnosed as bipolar and I am starting some new meds today..."

The conversation is trailing off and I'm starting to feel like a snoop. But there is enough above to get to my point.

SOME THINGS SHOULD JUST NOT BE COMMUNICATED IN TEXT MESSAGES.

I am becoming more and more certain of this point as I stumble around in this new single life of mine. To think--I just learned how to text the summer of '07. Now I have sent thousands of messages including a few where I stuck my foot in my mouth, textually speaking, and have gotten pissed by off messages sent to me on my phone.

Texts work great for letting friends know where you are sitting at a ball game, for a quick reference to something funny or an inside joke, for an urgent, time-related message when it's inappropriate to use the phone.

They should not be used in dating situations.

I understand the temptation and have fallen prey to it myself. It's so easy to send a text. So impersonal. So harmless. "What are you doing?" or rather "What r u doing?" It starts a conversation without any chance of rejection, without having to worry about intruding on someone's life. You get a number--you send a text. It's like casting your line off the dock. You're not totally invested, but you're hopeful.

The problem is the waters become instantly murky if the texting is dating related. You pull in question and after question and while you want to throw them back, some of them are big ones that you have to keep. What did he mean? What is she really thinking? Is he kidding or joking? Why did I say that? Why did he say that? What the hell is going on here anyway?

I had an encounter with a guy a couple months ago and we ran into this texting dilemma. He would text; I would call. He would text; I tried to call. Eventually I started to text... and soon the communication fizzled out completely.

So- what did I learn? A relationship, even a pseudo-relationship, can't get off the ground if you can't make the occasional phone call. (Of course, this may be an oversimplification, but a good rule of thumb, in any case.)

I have learned the hard way about the no texting rule. I am embarrassed to admit that I have sent drunk texts, angry texts, and even texts "ending" friendships completely. Luckily the receiver of these texts was either a forgiving, true friend who accepted my apologies and laughed at my ridiculous behavior, or someone who probably wouldn't have stayed in my life for very long anyway.

Hence- a resolution: 2009--get on the line: text appropriately; live respectfully.

Pain--Loving Something When It Hurts

2009-01-05T22:41:00.000-08:00

I love soccer.

I love playing the game in 90 degree heat, in 40 degree cold, in rain, in the dark, and even when the wind is blowing against my team (thus making it harder to kick the ball at the net). I love playing and I love colliding with other players. I love being knocked to the ground and I love even more to knock others to the ground (or at least I did until I realized many of the women I play against are mothers or possibly pregnant).

But the sport hurts me.

I have sustained countless injuries that I wore with pride like a badge. Pulled quads, pulled calves, sprained ankles, a broken nose, and of course, lost toenails. Every season I would hope my blackened toenail would hang on through the summer and I would cover its ugliness up in red nail polish. All of these injuries irritated me but also made me proud. Each one was a badge. "How about you just lay down on the ground while I beat you with a stick?" asked a friend, exasperated by injuries.

"Would there be a way to win?" I asked.

.....

Pain in soccer is glorious and something that fills me with pride.

Pain in relationships sends me running. I am instantly ashamed.

.....

I was reading my book about the pain of abandonment and learned that the brain acts like a trauma victim when we are left by someone we love, or when we perceive we are left. Literally the body goes into panic mode: we are more alert, more observant, more prone to startling, and our brain records the pain and the event permanently into our neurons.

Hence, whenever an event reminding us of the trauma of abandonment occurs, our body again goes into panic mode.

How, I wonder, will I ever find my way into another relationship considering I am a trauma victim?

The pain of my last relationship makes me pull back from anything real and flinch at the first sign of trouble. It sends me back to old pre-marriage patterns of harmlessly kissing boys who are visiting from out of town once in a while and shying away when anyone seems too interested. It makes me flinch when the guy I really care about uses a dismissive tone of voice with me. It makes me want to build up the walls, hunker down, and put on the armor.

Funny thing. Armor-- amore... so similar in terms of letters. Do we need armor to approach amore?

I know my brain wants to protect me. I know it sets up barriers in order to prevent more trauma. What I hope to learn is that I am already whole. If someone leaves me, the world does not end. I am trying to learn that it's ok to take risks and to open myself up for a relationship. I am trying to learn to brush off pain in search of love.

Loving soccer is easy despite the pain. Pain in athletics our culture celebrates. Pain in relationships our culture denigrates. If someone is hurt by love that person is weak. But I don't have to buy into that. I don't have to buy into the glorification or denigration of pain.

I can just accept that sometimes it happens; we get hurt, we are injured, we have to take a break. But if we want to, we believe that the injury will heal. If we want to, we can still keep playing.