It was spitting Michigan sleet and I was tempted to change into sweatpants and curl up on my chair with dinner in my lap.

Sometimes, if I turned the antenna in just the right way, I could pick up Canadian channels. To me that sounded almost exotic–watching foreign television. But I’d worn a dress and heels to work, and all that wardrobe effort would have been wasted on another evening alone in my apartment if I didn’t venture out.

It was Ash Wednesday.  I needed Lent like detox.

I’d spent a long time searching for arrows in my life, guideposts telling me which way to go. Some came in the form of the lives I modeled:

 The vegetarian girl.

The young mother across the street.

The twenty-something who worked at my hometown music store, the one who steered me toward Joni Mitchell.

Some came in what I thought were signs:

A “C” in Sophomore English meant I had no future as a writer.

The boy who treated me badly meant that others would too.

Some came from others’ expectations…my family, teachers, professors, friends.

I looked to them to tell me where I was going, and more than that, who I was.  There had been years of living a want-to life.

I’d talked to my mother earlier that day. She told me the trees back home had started to bloom.

I cried,

hungry for Spring,

ready for change,

sick for home.

I sat by myself in that church and let the familiar words wash me clean.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

After the Gospel a woman stood and approached the lectern.  She clearly wasn’t a priest but on that dreary Detroit Ash Wednesday I heard the voice of God through her West Virginia accent.  It was a gift.

In that service I was home.

That day I learned the difference between looking for myself in others and listening to the voice inside.

Looking, listening.  Searching.

I still get lost on the path to finding.

I save the moments, though–like the unexpected Appalachian voice in a Michigan church.

These moments are crumbs along the way.  Bread.

I take them and eat, well fed for the day.

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

Read Mary Lauren’s original post and comments at My 3 Little Birds, a blogging spot she declares a pillow fort.   Follow her on Twitter and Facebook for even more of her MOMents of Motherhood.

{Pick by Story Editor Robin Dance :: @PensieveRobin.}

I am flying down the highway that Ralph and I used to travel, groggy with humidity and third-shift obligations, on our early ay emm returns from work.

The sunroof is open, my window down, and my elbow is propped up on the door. My hand, fingers slightly splayed, is upright and barely cupped into the streaming wind. The air is moist and near-cold. I imagine it splintering through my palms and wrists, crucifying me. Crucifying me to this mountain.

Sometimes I think the red clay taste of this place, the sting of fire ants on naked toes, will never leave me.

Photo Credit

Double lines, broad expanse of fields to my left, chicken houses and horse trailers and apologetic farms to my right.

A caution light, a sign with a large, stark black + and I swing into a right turn, slowing significantly. A pebbly road paved with what I’ve always referred to as ‘gravelcrete’ is seated between trees that could masquerade as rows of the blackest of monoliths if only their bumpy tops did not give them away. The sky above is still impossibly blue, even though the sun took its’ leave of the horizon two hours ago. It is strewn with bruised indigo clouds that don’t even pretend to be fluffy. They are as flat and as stretched as the road before me.

Hung low, hovering barely above creaking power lines is something that I immediately recognize as not a star. No star has a vivid ring of afterglow like that.

Is it Venus or Mercury? I was never any good at the planets; the one I am on is perplexing enough.

A left turn and another left turn finds me in a darkened rural parking lot. Car idling, I kill the exterior lights and mash one of the interiors, splashing light across my crotch and thighs. Her Automobile Holiness. Our Lady Of The Nighttime Park.

I’ve unbuckled my seat belt and am digging for my laminated and spiral-bound 5? x 7? notebook when a large truck pulls up and points it’s bulk at my door. Fucking cops and their obnoxious compulsion for shining the loudest light possible into your cranium….

I swivel my head to face the rumbling diesel monstrosity, keeping my body decidedly forward, and squint-scowl into the glare. I am hoping that Deppity Dawg is disconcertingly reminded of The Exorcist somewhere in the back of his Roscoe P. Brain.

After what seems to be a rather blinding eternity, boyfriend gets outta the light-bedecked truck and approaches my car. Never mind the fact that I am sitting in a circular sort of drive and am pointed toward the road, which would allow me to bolt at any second. Der. He asks me what I’m doing, and I vascillate between three responses:
1) Jump outta the car and wave my notebook, then eagerly open it and begin a dramatic reading from any of the notes/unfinished pieces there. Bow deeply and grandly upon completion.
2) Click away at my pen in a mad sort of fashion while staring straight ahead and tell him that I am busy composing my suicide note, after which I plan to plow a bullet through my grey meat with the big, BIG firearm currently under the passenger seat.
3) Tell him the truth.

I opt for number three, because if/when I go back to the big house, I want it to be because I was acting crazy for a valid reason and/or cause and not just being crazy for the sake of the in-your-face irreverency that I am so darned fond of. The last time I went to jail it was really no fucking fun, because all they let me and about 20 (standard overcrowdedness) other women do in the 20? x 10? common area was clean the shiny-painted cinderblock walls overandfuckingover for hours on end while listening to a cornpone gospel preaching station. (Some of the other chicks actuallyfought over the opportunity to clean the bathroom, I shit you NOT.) Not to mention the fact that when I was inprocessing, they couldn’t find matching duds in the appropriate sizes (laundry was out or somesuch), so I was walking around in an orange-striped top and green-striped bottoms (they color-code the stripes for the severity of your offense). I suppose this meant that I was mildly dangerous from the waist up. At any rate, I felt that I looked like a pack of motherfucking Fruit Stripe chewing gum. w00t!

So when Officer Howdy Doody asked me what I was doing, I simply told him that I was out for a drive and pulled over because I thought of something I needed to write down. Then I waved my notebook and pen for emphasis. He explained to me that there had been a lot of vandalism as of late (ehhh…hicksville and the kids want kicksville….ehhhh….) –why, some of it had occurred in that very lot– and they were “tryin’ to keep a handle on things and take note of comins and goins”. So of course he deems it necessary to see my license and I oblige.

He seems to be taken aback that the photo represents me with blue hair, so then I push my luck only a minute bit and direct his attention to where it states that I have blue hair and blonde eyes (I was a mischevious, sneaky bastard at the DMV that day, lemme tell ya!). I then tell him that look simply did not work for me, and I decided to try things the other way around. He informs me that I look better with blonde hair and blue eyes. I tell him that my mother agrees wholeheartedly. I then offer to show him my favorite tattoo, but he declines and bids me a lovely evening, as he is comfortable that I am on the up-and-up.

After he drives away I settle in to capture briliance on paper and then painfully realize that I cannot for the life of me remember the phrase that I pulled over to write.

For fuck’s sake.

I sigh and pull back onto the blacktop, but not before reminding myself to not bother about pulling over anymore. I should just keep on doing the knee-driving-at-90-MPH-and-furiously-scribbling thing that I have favored thus far.

Jett Superior is a writer, an artist, a mother and pretty much my favorite animal. Read her original post here, follow her on The Twitters, and like her on Facebook.

{Pick by story editor Shannon | @MrLady}

Today my mother was tired when I stopped in to visit, to take her downstairs to lunch. And while many a day I will coax and cajole, force her to rouse herself, to rise to the occasion, today I didn’t. I let her be.

Do you know why? Because I was tired, too.

So I didn’t make her make an effort, make her rise and dress, put in her teeth. I did hand her her hearing aid, however, to make conversation less about shouting and guessing.

And then I laid down beside her on the big, now half-empty bed and held her hand.

And we talked.

About the little things; about everything and nothing.

I told her how we had just this morning measured Ethan, to find he had grown a full half-inch in a month.

She patted her head and mine, proclaimed us both lucky in our luxuriant curly hair.

I talked to her about Jacob. “He’s still autistic, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yes, that’s for certain.”

Her eyes soften, wishing there were something she could do, finding nothing.

“But he’s doing well? He’s in a good school?”

“Yes, Mom, very well, and a very good school. He wants to see you. I’ll bring him by soon.”

I haven’t brought Jake to see my Mom since I put her cat Willie down last week. For a quite a while before that even, as he was growing quite frail.

Jake loved that cat, will have a hard time with him gone. I’m not ready to handle that. Not yet.

“Haven’t found me a man yet, have you?”

“Nope, Mom. They’re either too old, too young or too… dull.”

She nods in agreement, knows my father will be a hard act to follow. Yet, still, she longs for companionship.

We lay side by side, a short arms reach apart as I know she had lain for 51 years with my father on many a morning and evening (and, in their later, retired and tired years, an afternoon, too) talking about everything and nothing, the easy rhythms of intimacy.

I know this well in my own life, with my husband (though in these frantic years of still young children, our quietly together times are much fewer and farther between) and with my son Ethan who jealously hoards his bedtime talking time with me, needing so much to process his day before releasing it to slumber. (Not an easy sleeper, this one, not at all.)

I held my mothers hand. We talked of this and that, and then we drifted off into sleep; took a little nap, side by side, our fingertips a bridge from daughter to mother.

“I’m going to be 89 soon,” she’d said, “Imagine that.”

“I can. I do. I’m no spring chicken myself, you know.”

“I plan to make it to 100.” Then, shaking her head, “Not likely.”

“Why not?” I asked “Why not?’

She smiled.

We napped.

I woke first, slipped my hand from her now lax fingers, stepped into the kitchen to do a little cleaning up after my formerly fastidious mother who now sees no dirt.

Came back to wake her, to say goodbye. (There were groceries to purchase, children to retrieve from schools.)

But first I sat softly on the bed, gently clasped her hand once again, leaned over to gaze at her barely lined, still youthfully smooth face; whispered quietly, beneath the threshold of her dimmed hearing: “Why not, 100? Why not?”

::

Read the original post on The Squashed Bologna
Subscribe to The Squashed Bologna via RSS or follow on Facebook
Follow Varda on Twitter

Story Editor: Heather King ::: @HeatheroftheEO

I just came from breakfast with my Fodder Father at his regular haunt—The Pancake House. We meet there often and each episode follows a similar script:

I drive in the parking lot to see his car already stowed in one of his three usual spaces, park my VW station wagon alongside his Ford sedan (he’s a labor arbitrator, he buys American).

Even when the waiting area is full, the proprietors wave me back “Your Dad’s waiting for you,” and I see him sitting with a cup of coffee, maybe working on the crossword with his reading glasses on, wearing a plaid flannel shirt or short-sleeved button down depending on the temperature. Regardless, he has his check book and a pen in the chest pocket.

After greeting me with a smile and a hug, he marvels over LTYM and this whole internet business. He inquires after my kids, my husband, or my girlfriends he’s known since we were actually girls, and then updates me with the latest casualties from The Saddies.

We often order the same thing; a half order of pecan pancakes and black coffee.

He peppers the rest of our conversation with not-so-quiet observations about other restaurant patrons:

“Is that baby Hindu or do you think that’s just a scab on its forehead.”

“I don’t want to ruin your breakfast, but I have one word for the toddler behind you: Drool.”

He relays moments from his recent work travels:

“These two guys behind me on the plane start singing—well, chanting–and so I ask them why are they chanting? Is it for fun? For religious purposes? What? And they say we just like to chant and I say great. Just what Madison needs! More chanting.”

I double-check “You actually said that to them?” and yes, most of the time he did actually say that to them.

Dad flirts with and teases the waitstaff. Once Mildred tickled his chin after warming up his coffee. This, right after my Dad told me way too much about a pair of 50-year-old women who tried to pick him up on a flight. I’m not sure whether the idea of two women trying to seduce my Dad, the likelihood that they might’ve been serial killer-dominatrices trying to lure him to his demise, or Mildred’s blatant coffee overture–troubled me the most.

He turns 70 next week on Thanksgiving. So odd considering he’s only 43. These regular pancake breakfasts, along with his spontaneous weekend 20 minute stop-overs to see the grandkids, feel like well-worn and dependable routes etched on the map of my life. But—like a childhood full of walks to and from school–the seasons, the time of day, and color of your tights vary. Sometimes my kids join us, sometimes my Dad chooses a half-order of Eggs Benedict English muffin well-done please, and sometimes he muses aloud how it’s tricky enough to recognize someone you haven’t seen in 16 years, but especially when they’re wearing a blonde wig on their head— all while said person may or may not be within earshot.

As much as I loved living in Chicago for 10 years, I always yearned to come back home and raise my kids alongside my family and friends on these familiar and metaphorical streets. We moved back home to Madison in 2006, but if you analyzed where I put the mileage on my car since then, a vast majority were probably spent on the 7-minute drive between my house and my Mom’s.

My Mom and my regular rendezvous also follow a somewhat predictable script. Instead of pancakes, we drink overpriced coffee-house drinks while Four eats more than his share of courtesy candy. We have a late afternoon glass of wine and process about life, while the boys watch Cartoon Network or play board games nearby–all set to the tune of an assortment of ridiculously delicious artisan cheeses. We laugh at ourselves, my mom apologizes again for all the traits I got from her. I compliment her on something I like that she’s wearing and within minutes or days she insists I keep it.

Last night Seven asked me “Mom? When I go to college will you draw me a map so I can get back home?”

I hope by the time my son becomes a young man, that map is already worn with comfortable and familiar paths. If I do my job well, he’ll want to explore secret passageways, and set out to chart his own course. Inevitably he’ll look for short-cuts (we all do). But like his younger brother’s auto-pilot to my bed many nights at 4 am, I hope home remains the true north on his compass—whether that “home” is here, someplace else he settles with his own family or friends, or The Pancake House. God willing it’s here.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Ann Imig is a humour writer and the the creator and National Director of Listen To Your Mother. Read Ann’s original post on Ann’s Rants, subscribe to her blog here, and click here to follow @annsrants on Twitter.

Featured by Story Pick Editor Amy Turn Sharp

“It’s time to exercise, baby,” I call to Buttercup. “Did you want to play or workout with Mama?”‘

She’s in the playroom she has dubbed her “magical land,” but immediately joins me at my side and waits for the DVD to cue up. “Are we going to get healthy and strong?”

I smile. “Exactly.”

When I was a baby, my thighs were so chubby that one of my aunts used to eat them like drumsticks. It’s a story I heard often when I was growing up, usually told with the requisite giggles from my mother and a pinch on my legs from whomever else was within reach. I thinned out as I grew, but I never thought myself skinny. Instead, “big” was how I classified my body. “Big” because I was five feet tall at eight years old. The same height as my mother and almost every other adult woman in my family. “Big” as in not dainty with curves that snuck up on me when I was 12 and muscle definition that would have put me in the “athletic” category. But that word didn’t exist in the Spanglish craziness my family resided in. Instead, children were scolded for not finishing what was on their plate and reprimanded for needing to watch what they were eating, usually in the same breath.

I remember very clearly the day my father noticed my new set of hips. I weighed 156 pounds and stood 5’6” tall. I wore a size 10 and only now realize I only thought that was a bad thing because my mother never shut up about the size 6 she could still squeeze into after five kids. If I could wake up with that body today?

A’ye, M’ijita.

My father, who stood no taller than me, pinched the curve of my hip.

“You need to lose some weight.”

I started making myself throw up after watching a news special about a woman caring for eating disordered girls in her revolutionary treatment center. The point of the special was to enlighten and educate on the dangers of eating disorders and the needs of those suffering. I took it as a how-to manual.

Sometimes I wonder if my actions are the cause of the body I see in the mirror today. The hypoactive thryroid. The polycystic ovarian syndrome. The number on the scale. I was skinny before when I thought I was fat. Just because I was the only set of ethnic hips in the sea of curve-less white wonders I went to school with, I thought that meant I needed to better control what I was eating. And because I had failed at being an anorexic previously, the consolation prize was closet bulimia. If I didn’t have the control to not eat, I could at least force my body to get rid of the evidence.

I should have just opened my eyes.

My daughter is three and often confused for a five-year-old. She’s built like her father’s side of the family; tall and lean. My nickname for her is “Little.” And I skip the word “fat” when it’s included in any of the books I read to her.

“She’s so big for her age,” strangers often say when they realize how young she actually is. I always smile and gently correct them, whether or not she is paying attention.

“Yes,” I say, “She’s very tall.”

We eat clean; no processed sugar, no processed foods, and are gluten free, to boot. For dessert she’ll choose watermelon over an ice cream sundae. (At least for now.) And because I can’t control what the rest of the world says or what she will hear, I try to side step any of the emotional triggers adults verbalized when I was a kid.

If she refuses to eat a meal after two bites of food, instead of force feeding, I simply ask if she would like a cookie. If she says yes, I tell her that she has room for more of her meal first. If she says no, I believe her and take her plate away. I never criticize my own body in front of her. And I never diet. Instead, we all eat what’s best for our bodies.

And exercise?

Maybe the truth behind the sweat and the time commitment is that I would like to lose a few more pounds and firm up my muffin-top belly. Maybe I’d like to feel as beautiful as my husband tells me I am (and sometimes, I do). But I’ll be damned if I say any of that out loud to a three-year-old who thinks it’s funny to arch her back and stick her belly out after a good meal.

We are exercising to get healthy and strong.

And one of these days, after saying it enough to her, maybe I will believe that myself.

Pauline Campos writes the personal blog Aspiring Mama, edits at BookieBoo.com and rocks a wikid awwsome #mexifro. Subscribe to Aspiring Mama, and follow Pauline on twitter.

Story pick by Shannon / Mr Lady

(photo source)

We went on a special date, just Louise and me. She crawled through the aisles of the bookstore and I slowly meandered behind her, reading passages from crisp, unspoiled novels I knew I wasn’t going to buy. Maybe someday.

She talks a lot, when she’s alone with me. She points to things and tells me about them in her funny, amazing language. When something surprises or delights her, her tiny hand flies to her mouth and she chews on her perfect little fingers.

We came home to an empty house and I sat a carton of blueberries on the floor between us. My hands were clumsy and imprecise, picking up toppling handfuls and eating them without discretion. Louise, with her dainty, pointed fingertips, thought carefully about each berry before she chose it with an attitude of satisfaction and ate it, all by itself, like it was the most special and singular blueberry on the planet.

So much thought and care goes into chewing and swallowing a single blueberry when you’re one years old.

Some children from my daughter’s school, their mother is dying. So, we swoop upon them with love, making lists and baking lasagna, doing things that don’t matter, but they mean something. They mean, “We are mothers, too and we couldn’t imagine how scared and sad you must feel, to be leaving your children.”

Lots of people talk about how a child should never die before a parent. I believe it’s true. It would be a grief so complete and unbearable, I have no way to fathom it. And, I also can’t imagine what it would be like to wake up tomorrow if I might die before the year was over.

Every movement my daughters make is holy. Little fingernails, they’re so small you can barely believe that they’re real. Tiny crescents of mud beneath them. What would my life be, if I understood that everybody dies. I pray they will be old and settled when it’s my turn, but still. I will never be at peace with knowing they will breathe and eat and think and move around in the world, when I can no longer see them. They need me for everything. Without me, they couldn’t survive. And the amount I need them supersedes their neediness by mountains and thunderclouds, by river mouths and inlets. The way I love them is the way rain permeates the earth, filling up everything that was begging, and the earth sighs.

“Everything has a last day.” I read this on a blog today. A little boy said this about life. I almost can’t take it, he’s so smart and right and beautiful.

So, I’ll be spending the week at the beach with my family. There will be restaurants and shopping and we’ll all be stuffed into a bedroom that was made for a single person. There will be book lights and bubble wands and special, sugar cereal, just this one week per year. But, there will also be salt on the wind and a fat moon dangling above us while we sleep. Our summer congestion will be healed, I hope, and so will my sense of feeling like we’re all too big for our lives. The ocean has a way of making me small and unimportant, like death and love are all a part of things, and that I know what I’m doing, just because I’m a person.

I’ll bake and cry into the pen’s ink when I write, I hope you all are making it, out there… and my children will reach for the glow of our doorbell while I’m rushing them inside and out of the heat. We will all die someday, and it’s probably the right thing to do.

Amanda is a mother of two beautiful girls living in Pittsburgh. Her writing is stunning, a visceral thing that moves you to your core.
Read the original post at Last Mom on Earth
Subscribe to Last Mom on Earth
Follow Amanda on Twitter
Follow on Facebook

Featured by Story Editor: Heather King

i dream that i can write them grown,
to color and brazen bloom.
words like rain offer sudden life
to deep and buried truth.

drought has no place here in dream-dirt,
all is fecund soil.
the heat of plowing fingers, warms,
rewards the constant toil.

the sweat is sweet.
it sings of spring.
surprises emerge from weeds.

in dream and wake, roots grab hold.
stories lie ripe, begging to be told.

it’s time to go a’pickin’.

Story Editor – Heather King ::: @HeatheroftheEO
The original post can be found at Dear Abby Leigh
Follow Abby Leigh on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS

Last week I read A Million Little Pieces and this week I’m re-reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Bell Jar. All three are about mental illness . . . and so it’s been a theme for me, these past two weeks…insanity. In truth, it’s been a theme for me these past few decades.

I spent some time in a mental hospital during my senior year of high school. I’d been a horrible bulimic for eight years and therapy wasn’t helping, especially since I spent most of my therapy sessions discussing how fine I was and how lovely the weather was. And one day during my Senior Year, I ate too much at lunch, and I thought I was going to die. Because to me . . . full = death. But I couldn’t find a place to throw up. And so finally, right then and there, in the middle of the Senior Hallway, I decided I was not fine - not at all. And I walked into my guidance counselor’s office and I said: “Call my parents. I need to be hospitalized. I can’t handle anything. Someone needs to help me.”

Here is a picture of me that was taken the week before I was hospitalized. I’m there in the Blue Suit.

I was a student government officer to a class of close to a thousand. An athlete, too. Relatively pretty. Smart. Seemingly confident. My Senior superlative was “Leading Leader.” In this picture I was co-hosting the Homecoming Pep Rally for the entire high school. Wearing the corsage to show I’d just been nominated for Homecoming Court.

People who need help sometimes look a lot like people who don’t need help.

And so that counselor called my parents, and they came right away. And they found a place for me to get help. I often think about what that day must have been like for them. Maybe they desperately wanted to say No, No it will be okay! Not a hospital! We are your parents! We can fix this! But they didn’t. The moment I became brave enough to admit I needed help they believed me, and despite the shock, the pain, the stigma . . . they gave me the exact help I asked for.

I’ve never written about my hospital stay before, because a whole lot is fuzzy, and I can’t get a real grip on the memories. Back then not many specialized eating disorder hospitals existed, so the one I went to was a real mental hospital. There were only two of us on the unit with eating issues, the others were there because they were mildly schizophrenic, drug addicted, depressed or suicide risks. Many of them had violent tendencies. I do not remember being afraid of any of them. I do remember being afraid, in one way or another, of most of the people in my high school.

There was one man on our unit who spoke only in numbers. I ignored him at first . . . it’s hard to know what the appropriate response is to “Twenty-one ninety-six forty NINE?” But one day I decided to take a guess. “Fourteen?” I responded tentatively. I remember his facing changing from empty to surprised to happy. Then back to empty, quickly. But I definitely saw happy, for a moment there. That taught me to try, at least once, to speak each person’s special language.

There was a sandy haired girl who always hung her head so low that I never really saw her face. I do remember what her arm looked like, though, because it was sliced up like a pre-cut ham. I saw it up close because I held her hand once when she started crying during a therapy session. She pulled it away at first but then she offered it back to me a few moments later. I remember that her hand was very cold, but it warmed up after a while. I don’t remember her name. I do remember her story and it was very, very sad. She was right to be crazy.

There was my roommate. I will call her Mary Margaret. Unable to speak with my little Sister, I allowed Mary Margaret to take Sister’s place for the weeks I was hospitalized. We whispered long into the night, every night. Mary Margaret was from a tight knit, fiercely loving family too, and we wondered aloud for hours how we ended up in that room together. One night, very late, we wrote vows that said we promised to take care of each other forever. We both signed the vows, with crayons because we weren’t allowed to have pencils. Mary Margaret made me promise not to eat the crayons. I told her maybe she should. We laughed. Mary Margaret was eighty pounds during her stay. She used to hide her food in her huge sweatshirt at lunch time and sneak it to me when we got back to our room. Mary Margaret and I saw each other once in the real world and then never again. We did not honor our vows to take care of each other forever. I’ve never looked for Mary Margaret, I’ve never even Googled her name. I’m too afraid. I know the survival statistics for anorexics.

There was art therapy and dance therapy and group therapy. It all made sense to me. The things the other patients said made sense to me, even though they weren’t things that my peers in my real life would have ever, ever said. Everyone had to listen to each other. There were rules about how to listen and how to respond. There were lessons about how to empathize and where to find the courage to speak. All the lessons made sense to me. I enjoyed them much more than my high school classes. They seemed much more important to me. We learned how to care, about ourselves and about each other.

There was the field trip we took to the art museum in Washington D.C. W rode into the big city on a small bus, we mental patients. We had a special appointment time at the museum, our own private tour. Because there were other groups and we weren’t to mingle with the normal people. I remember thinking that was probably best. We had a rule that we would all need to hold hands. In a long line. Like an extremely motley and sedated Conga Line. Throughout our entire tour.

I remember wondering why Mary Margaret and I had to hold hands with the group. We were relatively well behaved. We’re people pleasers, we bulimics and anorexics. I thought maybe our therapists were concerned that I would run away and attack the diners in the cafeteria and that Mary Margaret might run away with me and stand there and starve.

Then I remember walking by the museum cafeteria, and seeing twenty slices of pie revolving around on one of those buffet lazy susans. And I remember suddenly feeling very grateful that my hands were being held. I felt safe.

That’s what we all wanted. Safety -someone or some structure that would save us from ourselves, from the strange real world that others seemed to be navigating so flawlessly and we just couldn’t, at the time, for whatever reason.

And I remember trembling the morning of my release. I remember knowing I wasn’t ready, and knowing I had to go anyway, because I would never be ready. Because inside the hospital was so much easier and safer and surer than outside the hospital. And I knew I could get much too comfortable. Much too safe.

Because it all made sense to me in there. And that was a little confusing.
I’ve never done this before, but I’m going to go ahead and publish this without editing it first. I’m afraid that if I edit it at all, I’ll edit out all of it.

: : : : : : : : : : : :

Read Glennon’s original post here.

Subscribe to Momastery’s RSS Feed.

Glennon invites nice people to stalk her on Facebook and Twitter.

: : : : : : :

Another brilliant discovery by Story Editor Robin Dance :: PENSIEVE

A few months ago, Kathryn spent a day collecting rocks. She collected maybe three dozen of them from around our neighborhood and placed them all on our porch. Most were small, only a few were bigger than my fist, but despite the fact that none of them looked in the slightest bit out of the ordinary to me, Kathryn told me she selected each one for a reason. Each one, she said, had something special, some unique quality that set it apart from the rest. So I sat down next to her on the top step of our front porch and she told me about them. She told me about each rock individually, asking me to recognize and confirm the differences that she saw, to affirm the uniqueness of her selections, and in doing so, affirm Kathryn herself. Affirm her uniqueness. It was one of those special moments a dad shares with his daughter if you define special moments by skull-bashing tedium.

Oh my god that girl uses a lot of words. And she just keeps using them and using them.

When Kathryn was younger, it was I who talked to her about everything. I filled our time together with a running monologue of anything I could think of. A lot of it was high-minded and ideological, like what she could be when she grew up or the proper response to handsome princes who might imagine her to be in need of rescuing, but much of it was just stuff I was saying to keep my brain from crusting over with the same dried shell of spit-up to which most of my clothes had already succumbed.

I told her about the water cycle and about social justice. I told her as much as I remembered from my philosophy classes, about Schopenhauer’s delightful pessimism and how the Platonic ideals were crap but they were important crap. I explained crock pots and told her the secret to my brisket dry rub. I told her words and phrases I knew from other languages. I told her there is magic in the world and she didn’t need to look any farther than a bottle of sunscreen for proof of it.

And Kathryn listened. She drooled and listened and filled herself with the words I spoke.

In her, the words multiplied. They grew and begot more words. And then they came out. A hundredfold. Gizmos turned to gremlins, besieging the air, ridding the world of silence.

However lately the words Kathryn’s been using have been hard to hear. These past few months Kathryn’s medicines have been speaking to us through her, and they haven’t been saying nice things. They say things that eight-year-olds shouldn’t say, putting voice to feelings that it’s not fair for eight-year-olds to feel. And it hurts. So now we are starting to pull back on the medicines. We have seen the seizures, we have seen the medicines, and we are choosing the former. It is a grotesque choice.

But

four mornings ago I set a dish containing five pills next to Kathryn’s Bite-Sized Mini-Wheats. Today the dish contained just two. And for the first time in a long while, I did not begin my day feeling like I was making a mistake.

Let the sparks fly.

::

Brian Sargent kept the inspiring, funny, and gorgeously written dad blog, Looky, Daddy!, until August of 2009. He can now be found on Twitter @awrightbrian. Read the original post here.

Story pick by Editor Shannon/Mr Lady

(photo credit)

The hum and whoosh of an industrial-strength air conditioner have accompanied every exam I can remember taking. They have laid their strains in an insistent ritornello with infinitely subtle variations, little waves and vagaries of sound that can only be detected in a room dedicated to silence, such as this one. Thirty-one heads bow over laminate desks that gleam dully under the unwavering fluorescence of the overhead lights. A deep breath and, with it, the eternal aroma of the classroom: the blue book, which smells, somehow, like other blue books and like nothing else, mingled with the dry, slightly acrid scent of a photocopied essay prompt.

I am sixteen, and the woman at the front of the room is from the University of California, administering a practice placement exam as part of the college preparatory program. At the back of the room sits Mrs. Juhasz, the steely, sharp-eyed Language Arts teacher known for demanding excellence. She is always willing to help me untangle the perplexities I find in the works of Dostoevsky, Dreiser, and the other companions of my extracurricular hours, and yet she has no doubt puzzled over the general indifference with which I greet her actual assignments. In spite of my stubborn determination to work through a daunting personal reading list, in class I am often undisciplined, uninterested, too self-assured and only occasionally earnest, usually preoccupied with boys and friends and the things I will do in two short hours when the final bell rings. But today the prospect of college, of the first plunge into the waiting world, glimmers before me. My stomach will not stop writhing. My fingers are cold, my ears hot. We are told to begin.

I read swiftly, an excerpt from a Jamaica Kincaid essay about the estrangement of growing up as a black Antiguan under British rule. A story about alienation, set in an unfamiliar world and spoken in an unfamiliar voice. I imagine hot sun on my skin, picture Britons trying to coax shrubs and prim English gardens from the Antiguan earth, remember, through Kincaid’s vivid words, a life I have never experienced.

My fingers crease the flimsy cover of the blue book. The pen feels deceptively light and insignificant. Without knowing what to write, I write anyway. My first words are tentative, my first sentences laborious, my first paragraph a rash of scribbles and hesitant half-words. But soon enough, thoughts are streaming onto the paper and I am following them. The snicks and scrapes and slashes of my pen and the tiny creaks of the paper as it is reshaped by the violence of my outpouring–to my ears, filled with the roar of silence, these sounds are like the leaping voice of the violin. I swim in a sea of words. I gather them in baskets and spread them on the shore to dry. I pause to admire them, triumphantly.

But my triumph is foredoomed. Halfway through the exam, I recognize the hot, shrinking feeling behind my eyes telling me that one of the terrible nosebleeds that have plagued me since childhood is imminent. In helpless disbelief, I leave my exam, leave my words, leave my belongings, and consent to be led to the nurse’s office. My chance to meet with the college evaluator is gone. My own body has somehow betrayed and embarrassed me.

The following week, when the tests are returned and the scores analyzed, I sit sullenly. When Mrs. Juhasz calls me to her desk after class, I slump into the chair, unwilling to meet her eyes. Your exam couldn’t be scored like the others, she tells me, because it was incomplete. I nod dumbly, sure nothing she can say will mean anything to me. But I asked the professor to evaluate it as if it were, she continues, and he gave it the highest mark. You were one of two students in the class to earn this score. You’re a remarkable writer, and he asked me to tell you so. I think you are, too.She looks at me intently, with concern, as if there is more she wants to say, more she wants me to understand. I thank her, gather my belongings, and leave to meet my friends.

I could not absorb her words in that moment. And yet, when I look back from the space of more than twelve years, I can see the powerful influence they’ve wielded over me. I wish I could say that they shook me from my foolishness and indecision, and inspired me to work harder, but their influence was far subtler than that. At a time when I felt muddled and aimless and unsure, Mrs. Juhasz told me I was good at something, and it was a little, tiny thing I could treasure and hold onto.

It has stayed with me, all these years, and that little tiny thing has turned into a career. I remember it, every time I hear the hum and whoosh of an industrial-strength air conditioner, laying its strains in an insistent ritornello with infinitely subtle variations, little waves and vagaries of sound that can only be detected in a room dedicated to silence.

Read the original post
Subscribe to Zizzivivizz by RSS or by email
Follow Sharone on Twitter

Story Editor: Heather King ::: @heatheroftheeo