Enough Hats for Everyone

Penny dreadfuls

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Today I had to pick up valentines for my kid's class because somehow we ran short and there's nothing more heartbreaking than not getting a valentine. Or so I thought. I stopped at a drug store while I was out picking up liquid medicine from the vet that smells like chicken if chicken were left in August heat for a day and then pureed into a translucent ooze. This medicine is like a vile valentine for the cat that says "Even though this cost $52 and you still sneeze wet sneezes in my face while I sleep, I think you're just purrfect."

While paying for the valentines, I chatted with the cashier, a lively, older woman with short hair and thick glasses. She seemed surprised that fifth graders still exchange valentines and told me a crushing story about an anonymous valentine she got in fifth grade that basically said "You're ugly."

She described it as a big valentine printed on cheap paper, and it cost a penny. Google told me it was a Penny Dreadful, also known as a Vinegar Valentine, which were popular in the 1930s and 1940s:

Back then, one could buy a Valentine for a penny at the local five and dime store. A better quality paper Valentine cost two cents and included an envelope. There were also Vinegar Valentines in sheet form that cost three cents in the 1930s. These were sent to people in order to make fun of them. The messages were called Vinegar Valentines because of their sour or acidic messages which were intended to "bring one down a peg."

It amazes me that a 65 year-old memory can still cause pain like her penny dreadful did. She said she still remembers the way her heart sank when she saw the oversized card in her small stack of valentines. When she got home, she cried and cried while her father patted her back and told her "I think you're as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor."

May your Valentines Day be more sweet than bitter and may all the jerks who sent anonymous penny dreadfuls have to lick envelopes with terrible tasting glue for eternity.

Balboa's dogs

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:58:00 +0000

The dogs of Vasco Nunez de Balboa

(this is not how it happened...I swear)

When I was 10, I had to come home in the middle of the best sledding day in the history of the midatlantic states to finish a book report on famous explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa. It was exactly like that episode of The Simpsons where Mayor Quimby declares Snow Day: The Funnest Day in the History of Springfield while Bart sulks inside, only Bart didn't have to do a book report on Balboa so my experience was much worse.

The only thing I remember about Balboa is that he and his crew were forced to eat their dogs in a time of great hardship. Of course I worked this into the book report but my mom made me take it out because it wasn't a "key point". At that point, I declared it the unfunnest day in history, though it's been trumped since then.

Lately this memory has given me some comfort as I see my oldest daughter struggle with school. She's a bright kid and she's creative and enthusiastic, but she's not academic. I say this like I say she's tall for her age and has brown eyes. It's a fact and only so much pushing and punishing will change that. Unfortunately, though, the educational system marches on, and at a faster clip than when I was her age.

It's some kind of karmic payback, but this week I've been pouring over metric conversion worksheets and adding fractions with different numbers on the bottom and other shit I have no idea how to do because the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I was no academic either, though somehow I flailed and flubbed my way through.

On weekends she normally gets a break, but she has a project due at the end of this month on some explorer whose name I can't remember, but I do know it's not Balboa, which is a shame because I could get her started. So we will work this weekend and I will tell her about my Balboa Incident so at least she knows she's not alone.

I wish I could convince my girl she'll be okay and that school is only one small slice of life. I wish I could tell her she is only learning math so she can one day teach it to her children. These are lessons she will learn on her own, some day.

Snapshot

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

The day my husband was laid off from his job, we went out and bought a new couch. We were going to take advantage of 0% financing until we got to the part of the credit application that asked about income. I was a stay-at-home mom at the time. Our oldest daughter was just a little thing then, a bald, chubby baby watching contentedly from her carrier with the blue-yellow print I can still picture even though that was almost eleven years ago. My god, the things we remember!

I can't remember why we chose that day to buy a couch. It sounds romantic to say we were laughing in the face of misfortune, but I think the purchase was premeditated by a growing disdain for the white couch we had bought in our first year of marriage from a furniture closeout place. Who buys a white couch? People without children, that's who.

So we bought our new couch, skipping the free financing and paying cash instead. We didn't go home with it strapped to the roof of our minivan. We picked out a custom order La-z-boy in stain-resistant dark brown with double-recliners and a drop-down drink table. I'm oddly embarrassed and proud that we still have that couch to this day. It makes me feel it was a smart purchase, though it felt reckless and frivolous at the time.

We put an ad in the paper a week before estimated delivery so we could sell our old couch. This was years before Craigslist became known as a quick and dangerous way to sell things. We thought nothing of letting a strange young couple into our home. They looked at our couch for less than a minute, not even turning the cushions we had carefully rotated beforehand, and made us an offer we couldn't refuse. Later that night, they came back and hauled away our old couch to its new home in their kids' playroom, where I'm sure it suffered many adventures and stains.

The problem with selling your couch before you get a new one is that you have no place to sit. This isn't a problem in the same way as "I have no job" or "I have to pay pre-Obama COBRA rates to keep health insurance for my family" but we felt it acutely just the same. We brought in a tan beanbag I'd had since childhood for me to sit on. My husband sat on the hard floor. Our baby sat contentedly in her carrier with the blue-yellow print.

It was during this couchless time that my husband suggested we update our photo albums. Maybe this tells you what kind of people we were back then. Maybe it just speaks to the simplicity of life for people who haven't been married or parents long enough to encounter real problems. One night we brought down several rubber tubs of photos and dumped them on the floor and sorted them into manageable stacks. The next night, we moved the stacks into albums in a roughly sequential manner. I looked at those albums again and again and felt a jolt of satisfaction each time.

For the next seven years, I stayed on top of the photo album situation. I took each roll of film to be developed once it was finished. When we switched to a digital camera, I ordered batches from Snapfish or Shutterfly and slipped them into albums so that at any point someone could know what our life was like. Pony rides and birthday parties and street festivals and easter egg hunts and lego castles on the family room floor and a bear at the base of our driveway and, later, a baby deer in a leafy gulley next to the driveway. Our albums were a real-time, perfect snapshot of our pretend perfect life.

What do you do when your whole life becomes imperfect? What do you do when even the perfect photos remind you of the not-so-perfect things going on just outside the border? Do you print them anyway or do you let them pile up and think you'll deal with them later until several years have passed and your youngest child loves looking through the albums, which by this point are so outdated she is only in them as a tiny, red-faced baby with clenched fists?

This final heartbreak was the catalyst to me sorting through thousands of digital images scattered all over the internet and in electronic folders named so cryptically I asked myself repeatedly if anyone even prints pictures anymore. What's the point when we can look at them on a computer whenever we want? I was really thinking this is way too impossible.

Maybe I'm showing my age or stubbornness or masochism, but I'm in the middle of corraling the last three years of photographs into albums. I have 251 pictures in a shutterfly box at home. Flipping through them, I realized I was still missing big chunks of time. Where were the pictures of our baby wearing a pink party hat and much of her first birthday cupcake? What about that trip to the cabin where my brother's family joined us at the last minute and we dressed the baby up in lederhosen and raced light-up frogs down the stream at night? If they don't make it into an album, it's like they never happened.

I will print the missing moments so they can exist alongside the trips to disney and the beach and the grandparents' house and even the dentist's office (part of the problem is I take too many pictures). I hope to find peace again as I page through all the moments that were too perfect to let go.

Pierre

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:31:00 +0000

The other night while reading In the Night Kitchen to our youngest, my husband and I agreed that Maurice Sendak illustrates better than he writes. I'm in milk and the milk's in me, indeed. But oh those drawings!

And that inspired me to find our Carole King soundtrack for Really Rosie, which was also a 1975 TV special that I can't find anywhere unless you count online for $50 on VHS. These days when I see VHS, it makes me think of an adorable but obsolete robot holding a rickety drink tray. He beeps and bumps into things so often that by the time you get your drink, there's only ice left. So I watch ripped up clips on YouTube and listen to the Rosie Really soundtrack I bought on CD almost a decade ago when I was going through one of my nostalgic spells. We have it digitally now because CD is VHS' slightly hipper robot sidekick.

Really Rosie is a musical with lyrics and animation by Sendak and music by Carole King. The stories are from Sendak's Nutshell Library, which is my favorite children's collection and we don't even own it. I'll get on that as soon as I'm done here, but my favorite story is that of Pierre.

Pierre is a small boy crippled by depression that manifests as weakly defiant behavior, such as sitting backwards in his chair and pouring syrup on his hair. Pierre's catch phrase - and, in fact, only phrase for most of the story - is I don't care. His parents clearly love him but have no idea what to do with him, and so they do nothing at all.

Left alone in the house with just his apathy, night begins to fall and a hungry lion pays a call (Sendak's prose at its most beautiful). The lion politely asks if he may eat Pierre, to which Pierre, at this point, predictably responds that he doesn't care. The lion goes on to clarify several times if Pierre is certain he doesn't mind being eaten, such as in these lines, which are my absolute favorites:

I can eat you, don't you see?

And you will be inside of me.

Long story short, the lion eats Pierre, but the story has a surprise happy ending. Check it out yourself some time. My kids love Pierre. Maybe it's his defeated parents leaving him alone all day - every child's fantasy and nightmare! Maybe it's the part where he pours syrup on his head. I know that resonated with me when I was small.

The victims in this story are also the villains: apathetic but obstinate Pierre...his loving but negligent parents...the ravenous but remorseful lion. Kids love seeing justice played out in simple, sharp sequence. As an adult, I appreciate the layers in this story, but mostly the beautiful illustrations and prose.

Browse Inside this book

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Running

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Every day I do 30 minutes of exercise, but it's all very old-lady like, so that's probably why I'm not cut and buff and ripped and all those hard words fit people throw around.

In the basement I have an elliptical machine I bought with my bonus check four years ago. It runs on two D batteries and I only ever put it up to level 3 because level 4 feels like trying to walk through sand up to my thighs. It slips off track if I use the arm levers, so I don't use the arm levers. I read and tread in small, slightly resistant circles for a half hour to work up a fine bead of sweat and then finish up with 120 situps. I know that sounds like a lot of situps, but I do them on a situp bench, which is like doing 10 situps on the ground, only it's easier.

My preferred exercise is a 30-minute 2-mile lap around the neighborhood behind where we live. It's the sort of workout your grandmother could keep up with, plus we would have a lot to talk about during our walks.

For about a month, I saw two white deer almost every time I walked. I only managed one fuzzy picture of one from far away, but I swear they were real. I haven't seen them in months, though I always look.

This is my favorite house to walk past. It's a hot mess of old cars, plus someone spray painted Ball Star on the basketball backboard. It's right across from a park where someone defaced a baby swing by painting a cartoonish penis on the front. To tell the truth, I never much noticed the penis until my older kid pointed out one visit that it was no longer there. Where did the penis go? So many mysteries.

Sometimes when I walk, I see moving trucks and feel like I'm losing a neighbor, though I don't know them and it's not even my neighborhood. Once I saw a man in his late 50s bring a box of loose this-and-thats out to a U-Haul trailer. I'd never seen him before, but I knew his house because it was the one with the dirtpile backyard and two mean-ass barking dogs tied up to weak-looking ropes. I transferred my dislike of the dogs to the man and imagined his wife finally had enough of his mean ass. I saw a pickup truck pull up and the man walked over with his box still in hand and talked with whoever was inside - an older couple - and I walked on because it was not my neighborhood or my neighbor or my business.

When I turned and got to the end of the next street, the pickup truck drove past and pulled into the driveway of a house I knew because I'd seen the guy walking his schnauzer before and both were very friendly. Days later, I was surprised to see this Peter Rabbit statue in the friendly man's yard because it used to be in the mean man's yard.

I wondered if their conversation had been about the statue.

"Jean told us you're moving out. Patty and I are just so sorry."

"Yeah, that bitch can go to hell. You want this fucking rabbit? If you don't, I'm going to break it into a million pieces and feed it to the dogs."

Though what kind of mean man has a Peter Rabbit statue in his yard? It is possible I snap-judged him wrong.

Maybe you think I'm too nosy, and this may be. At least I'm not like the neighbors who came outside to openly stare when police pulled up and walked to the front door of the house where an old woman lives. I'd seen her many summer nights sitting in a camp chair in front of a one-car garage, which was open and packed to the ceiling with crap. It was all stacked neatly, like some impossible game of Jenga because it was all real stuff like broken chairs and tea kettles and empty wooden frames and folded army tents.

The policeman wore a brown short-sleeved shirt and brown shorts. I had no idea policemen could wear shorts until that night. I was walking past - staring discreetly, not like those neighbors - but I saw the policeman talking and pointing to her open garage in a respectful, almost apologetic way that made me feel equally sorry for him and the old lady. Hoarders is my least favorite show of all time, outranking even The Beverly Hillbillies, so the whole short scene just about broke my heart.

Lately when I walk, I feel like I want to start running. Maybe it's boredom with routine (though the route has plenty of hills, so it's challenging) or maybe I'm anxious to get back and get things done (though the down time and fresh air are wonderful), or maybe I don't want to see any more heartbreak in things.

If I go by faster, things will look different and I will get a better workout. I'm ready for a change.

Just what I needed to hear

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Last night I went to an 8:30 pm meeting. I assume you know when I say meeting I mean AA meeting. I don't know why I assume that.

I kind of hate the 8:30 meetings, but my sponsor was chairing and I had skipped my home group meeting the night before.

The reason I hate 8:30 meetings came rushing back soon enough. A guy shared with the group how he used to beat up nerds who didn't drink in high school because he thought they were freaks. His words were simultaneously slurred and halting like he had a head injury, but still his manner felt more stand-up routine than heartfelt honesty. More than a few in the crowd gave him the laughs he was looking for.

There are too many young people with court-ordered slips of paper they need signed at the end of the 8:30 meeting. I have nothing to offer them at this point. I don't know who I hate more - them or me for needing to be at a meeting just as badly. I know I'm not supposed to judge others. I'm supposed to Live and Let Live, just like the oversized wall placard in trippy seventies font says I should. I also hate those placards right now.

Okay, here's the truth. Six months sober is a tricky spot for me. Two days before Christmas I was sitting on my bedroom floor wrapping presents when I burst in tears because I wanted one of the fancy beers my husband and I had always shared in years prior. It was kind of our thing at Christmas. Two years ago I wrote a blog post reviewing fancy Christmas beers and admitted even then that my notes were a bit dicey because I made them when I was drunk as a fucking skunk.

My present-wrapping tears were not about me really wanting to return to that state. They were about me still having that obsession with drink and being genuinely scared that I could still feel that way after six long months of being around booze daily and never feeling temptation that intensely.

When I talked to my sponsor days later about this (uh, I should have called her when it happened), she said "six months is a really tough time for a lot of people. I remember it's when I really woke up."

I knew instantly what she meant. It doesn't take long for alcohol to leave your body. Days maybe? It takes a long time for your brain to clear up, though. It took me six months.

In the early days of sobriety, I loved going to meetings. It was summer and I was still wrestling with a lot. I wasn't very happy and I was blaming everyone but myself. My kids were young and ever-needy and I had no time for myself. My husband and I were going through some things. I couldn't concentrate on anything and even paying bills on time took herculean effort. I sort of wanted to vanish into thin air, if you must know.

Meetings were an escape much like drinking had been before. It was a ritual I could look forward to all day, and it was always rewarding. If I was in a tight spot over something, I swear to god someone in a meeting would address that very same issue. It's not hard to believe in god once you start going to meetings.

I don't know when I stopped going to 8:30 meetings, but I found a better fit with older folks with more sobriety. Those people tend to go to earlier meetings held in church basements. Like finds like.

Last night when I returned to the 8:30, I took off my hat and gloves but stayed bundled up in my wool coat and scarf because the room was cool and also because, psychologically, I wanted the freedom to flee. My mind felt foggy and my eyes were scratchy from a cold my body can't decide if it wants to catch or fight to the death. Summer felt a million years ago and I missed it acutely even though I recently discovered it was, in fact, too good to be true.

And you may already know my love of epiphanies. I have at least one a month. Well guess what? Some guy raised his hand to speak and not only used the word epiphany but shared that his was that he hated meetings at the moment like a girlfriend he'd grown tired of, yet he realized he could never fully break up with AA. My eyes stung with tears because here was this young guy with spiky hair using bad analogies just like me and struggling with the very same thing as me. The speaker - my sponsor - laughed and said "you sound like you're right where you're supposed to be."

I know if I stop going to meetings, I'll drink again. I know this in my heart. It won't happen right away, but over time I'll stop thinking about the hangovers and how I just wanted to disappear. My tricky brain will revise history and I'll think "maybe I can do it right this time" even though I never was able to before.

And the first time I pick up again, I won't get drunk. I'll savor the warmth in my head and I'll say "oh how I missed you" but I'll drink so little that I'll wake up the next morning and be able to go out without fear of vomiting. I'll maybe drink like this a few times and say to myself "see, you big pussy...no big deal."

But right now I know that will only last for a little while and soon enough I'll find myself right back at hopeless because that's how alcoholism works. I'd heard for years that alcoholism is a progressive disease and I never understood what that meant until I knew too well what that meant. A normal person, of course, will have no idea what I'm talking about. You normals are so cute because you don't count down the minutes until you can have your first drink of the day. You don't wake up in your yard, curled next to the dog, and still somehow think you have your shit together because your nails are perfectly manicured.

Oh, and I think I'm going to start a recovery blog. I've seen bloggers I loved following drop off the face of the earth and wondered why, and now I get it. I'm going to keep my recovery blog a bit more anonymous, so if you're interested in following, lemme know and I'll send a link. If you've read this far, you must find drunks and crazy people as fascinating as I do.

Before and Later

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

When I was 12, I was addicted to the My Problem and How I Solved It column in Good Housekeeping. I devoured it every time we visited my grandparents because my grandmother was the only one I knew who subscribed and also because I was doing the sullen pre-teen thing where I hated talking to people. My 10 year-old is doing this now, which is total proof that kids these days grow up faster.

The problems in Good Housekeeping were complex and sometimes vicious - think cheating spouses and domestic violence - yet they were always neatly wrapped up within a handful of columns wedged between ads for weight loss pills and cookbooks. Each problem had a clear beginning and end, and even that hairy in-between time of denial and struggle was somehow satisfying to read about. In short, women's magazines are filled with filthy lies and that's why I now only read the covers when I'm in line at the grocery store.

Well, sometimes I flip through to look at the Before and After makeover pictures when I'm in the waiting room at the doctor's office or the examination room, which also has magazines because this is where patients do most of their waiting anyway.

What is more satisfying than Before and After pictures? You take a frumpy woman who used to be vibrant and sexy before Kid #2 and layer her hair and dress her in a cute top with cinched belt, and then - and this is the most important part - put lots of makeup on her and show close-ups of this part because nobody appreciates foundation and eye shadow until they see them in action. And this sexy After with tawny highlights and too much lipstick is ready to take on the car line at school and possibly even the world, but, more importantly, she is fixed and she will stay that way.

So it is with new year's resolutions, which I don't bother to set anymore because is eat fewer cookies a resolution or just something I should get tattooed on my cookie-grabbing hand? If you've been on social media in the last few days, you've probably heard the regular gym rats grumbling about the new years' gym rats taking up all the equipment. And while I have more in common, time-wise, with the former, I still hate them for being so smug. Hey, you gotta start somewhere.

I find myself starting over, somehow. I picked up weight I lost two years ago and never wanted to see again. I started smoking again three years ago and gave that up again just yesterday, but christ, who knows how long that will last. In case this all sounds very pessimistic and melancholy, I mean it in an optimistic and hopeful way.

Just last Saturday I was supposed to clean the house, but felt tired and achy and like I was finally coming down with the nasty cold my kids had over Christmas. So instead I sat on the cool tile of my bathroom floor and organized drawers of makeup and Spongebob bandaids and impractically tiny barrettes plus much, much more. Afterwards I wanted to light a cigarette because it felt that good, plus I hadn't decided to stop smoking yet.

Before (top) and After (bottom)

Then yesterday I took my littlest kid for a haircut because I woke up Sunday and looked at her hair and decided that something must be done about it. I read once that a woman gets her hair cut short when she wants to assert her independence and grows it out when she wants to feel more feminine. When a mother wants to get her kid's hair cut short it probably means she's tired of not being able to comb through the sticky bits of food tangled within.

Before (left) and After (right)

My makeup drawer has never looked neater, and neither has my child's hair. I am as happy as I can possibly be at both of these accomplishments, which I now recognize to really be Laters. They are not final, happy endings. They are just-made beds that we will crawl into and muss up later tonight.

This is all fine. If I had one epiphany over the last week, it was that change is constant and nothing lasts forever, including good things and bad things and this is called growth and this is very good. I know, my epiphanies sound a lot like a dumbed-down woman's magazine.

I also realized that overdosing on vitamin C keeps a cold at bay if you do it early enough, but then I started feeling sick again when it was time to clean the house yesterday, so maybe the real epiphany is that I am sick of cleaning the house.

In any event, a Very Happy New Year to you. May this year be one you put to bed contentedly this time next year.

Twins

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Going home for the holidays means coming back with a car full of stuff you had no idea you needed. Part of you is certain you didn't need any of it since you'd gotten along just fine without fuzzy blue slippers and an embroidered Christmas pillow. Nestled in the same box as a pack of Happy Birthday napkins and broken dollar store cookies (thanks, Grandma, at least it wasn't a wrapped cat) were childhood toys I had mostly forgotten about until my three year-old dumped the contents of an old Caldor bag on my parents' basement floor while asking "I just need to see, okay?"

Smurfs pumping gas and skiing...Strawberry Shortcake figures that still smelled like you could eat them...happy meal toys actually capable of making someone happy...loose crystalline pink beads that looked painfully but unplaceably familiar. They all spilled onto the smooth concrete along with my old Clown Arounds, which I saved up for and bought at a toy store with these trees out front that dropped banana-shaped pods that my brother once handed to me on outstretched palm and said "here, smell this...it smells really good" and it did not. Not at all.

My favorite Clown Around was and always will be Ronald Reaclown. The 80s were really awful in the best possible way. And you see that fella in the background with glasses and male pattern baldness? That's Papa Clown. I had two Papa Clowns for some reason. I had duplicates of a lot of childhood toys. I had two of these fellas, when even one was too many.

I'm sorry for the old, blurry picture but I only have so much time for nonsense photography when I'm supposed to be interacting with family I hardly ever see.

My husband wandered downstairs after my kid had lost interest in the loose figures and mystery beads, as well as helping me clean them up.

"I had that same exact Garfield!" he said. "I saved up for weeks to buy it."

"Yeah. Me too," I said in a tone that implied "Don't even try to claim custody if our marriage ever sours...likewise I promise I'll never want your creepy Gacy painting even though it's actually worth something."

We came home with my Garfield (and Odie - of which there were two) and Clown Arounds, including the Papa Clown twins.

Poor Mama Clown had two husbands to deal with. Notice they both have near-identical wear on their noses and right shoes. Not sure what that's all about. Otherwise, Papa Clown on the right looks downright near-mint in comparison. Maybe he preferred less strenuous tasks like baking or folding laundry while the other Papa built Mama a new deck and replaced the alternator on the calliope. Maybe it worked out just fine for Mama Clown because her husbands were identical on the surface with inherently unique souls.

The next day, we were back at my parents' house and I gravitated towards a National Geographic with a set of twins on the cover. I played the game of "which twin is more attractive" because that's always fun and somehow easy to play. Then I read the article, which covered the most fascinating subtopic known to twindom, which is when twins are separated at birth and reunited many years later. Enter the fascinating case of the Jims.

The Jims were adopted separately as infants, raised 40 miles apart, and then reunited at age 39. Both Jims found they had married and divorced Lindas. They had then both married Bettys and named their sons identically except for a slight variation in the spelling of the middle name, which could have been one of the Betty's fault. Both Jims weighed the same and smoked the same brand of cigarette and drank the same beer and got the same headaches. Could this have been some great coincidence or was it proof that genes are unstoppable? More importantly, do we select our mates based on first name alone?

No matter the implications, I find great comfort in the Jims. They prove to me that we can only change so much about ourselves. The rest is just, well, us. If nature were to arm wrestle nurture, nature would not only win easily but would pin nurture's arm down gently and graciously because nature is not a show off.

The things we perceive as flaws about ourselves - our propensity to dominate a conversation or retreat into the wallpaper at a party, for example - are things we should instead embrace and harness for good. It would appear that resistance is futile anyway.

Six months

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

To you, it's the last day of fall or four days before Christmas or perhaps just Wednesday. To me, it is six months since I got sober. Part of me wants to celebrate, but how do you celebrate still being sober? Going out anywhere but to a meeting for the coveted 6-month coin could start me back at the 24-hour desire chip. That's like getting the candy cane card when I've already cleared Queen Frostine and the molasses swamp. No thanks.

People, places, and things. Those are the things AA warns that you'll need to change in the early days of sobriety. I was fortunate enough to have an almost non-existent social life, so this was not hard. I formed new evening routines so I didn't sit on the couch next to my husband and glare at his glass of wine. I exercised or read or went to meetings. I smoked like a fiend on my back porch. I drank so much coffee I mistook heartburn for a broken rib and, later, a heart attack.

Fortunately, I was also riding high on what AAs refer to as the pink cloud. This is the honeymoon period of sobriety where each morning you wake up fucking ecstatic to not be hungover and each night you go to bed with the peace of mind that only comes from knowing absolutely in your heart that you're doing the right thing.

They say your first sobriety is a gift, and I totally agree because it all just kind of fell into place in a way I don't feel I had much to do with. I know I was sick and tired of dreadful hangovers and feeling spiritually bankrupt. I remember telling my husband the Friday before I quit that I was done drinking after the weekend (but to leave me alone until that point) and he has been incredibly supportive ever since. I remember telling a friend, who gave me moral support the day I quit. It was a rough coupla days; maybe I'll write about it some time. But somehow I got dry and then realized I needed help to stay that way.

I got in touch with a friend I knew was in recovery. He right away said "hey, let's go to meeting" and he rattled off a few AA meetings in the area. I picked the only one I could make due to our hectic work schedules. It was an 8:30 pm meeting at what is affectionately known as "the clubhouse", an old storefront at the dead end of an industrial park. Seven days a week, six times a day, a mind-numbing number of strangers sit in plastic chairs with steaming styrofoam cups and listen and laugh and frown and sometimes zone out but always hold hands and recite the serenity prayer together at the end. There's a smell to the room that when I close my eyes and inhale, I feel like I'm at church if church were non-judgey. It doesn't feel like home, but it does feel incredibly safe.

I stopped going to the big 8:30 meetings because I found I liked smaller meetings much better. It took me almost five months to discover this, but I've been taking everything painfully slow. Someone at a meeting said they wished newcomers a slow recovery, and that sounded ominous at first. I'm still terrified of relapse, but I realized that's not what they meant. They meant take your time and let the process come to you in a way that feels organic, but don't expect it to be easy. Giving up something (or someone) you're addicted to is extremely painful. It will likely haunt you for the rest of your life. So far, though, all it's taken is reminding myself "you're doing this because it's the right thing to do." I should always be so lucky.

The pink cloud dumped me off about a month ago. It wasn't like in the cartoons where I looked down at my feet and saw I was only standing on cottony masses of air and then promptly plummeted to the ground (doing the little buh-bye wave at the camera first). It was more like I was floating real high at first - like so high I almost felt high - and then the cloud dipped down a little and I coasted at that altitude for awhile and it was still pretty sweet and I read from my AA book every night before bed. And then it dropped a little more and so on until it dumped me off, but it was low enough to the ground that I only just spilled my coffee and bumped my head on a rock, but not hard enough for a concussion. But I have coffee all over my shirt and a smallish goose egg on my head, so there's that.

What's next? Well, real life, for one. I have a lot of work cut out for me, flaws I need to address and fix. I also want to start to give back to the program that helped me immensely and asked for nothing in return but a $1 copay per meeting. Can you imagine? I recently became secretary for my home group and was told the position includes a special hat with horns, but I had enthusiastically accepted before they even told me this.

What else? I dunno. More not drinking? Hope so. I've gotten to the point where I no longer see a pint of beer on the counter and my brain says "that is your beer. drink it. it is getting warm." Now my brain sees a pint and says "doesn't that look good? mmmm. wonder what it tastes like. probably candy or sex or candy sex. or beer. delicious." I just tell my brain to shut the fuck up because my brain is a total dickhead sometimes and fortunately my brain knows this about itself.

Oh, one more thing I wanted to mention. The last day I took a drink was the same day Ryan Dunn drove his Porsche into a tree so hard it exploded CHiPS-style. Honestly, that had nothing to do with why I quit, but it's something I'll always remember. We live a couple miles from the crash site, so in the days that followed, masses of the morbidly curious clogged up traffic to gawk and take pictures of charred trees and leave behind teddy bears and probably bad poetry and at least one bottle of booze that I could see next to the shredded guard rail. Seeing that was a sober reminder that reckless actions can cause irreversibly dark consequences. I never want to forget that.

Ghosts

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:06:00 +0000

I saw a ghost once. Well, I'm pretty sure it was a ghost. The only reason I have doubt is because my ghost looked a lot like the man who taught french at our high school. I took spanish, and so barely laid eyes on this man, which is maybe further proof that I saw a ghost and not a vivid hallucination.

I was on a church retreat with my best friend when I saw the ghost. My friend was fixing her makeup in the tiny bathroom mirror of our cabin while I waited by the bunkbeds. I was telling my friend how badly I wanted a cigarette when I clearly saw a white-bearded man standing across from me. He wasn't there one moment, and then he was, leaning against the wall with his arms folded and one leg crossing the other at the shin. He had a bemused smile on his face.

When I saw him, words froze in my throat and I threw both hands up to cover my eyes. When I looked again, the man was gone. My friend and I went back outside to sit around the campfire and listen to more ghost stories. That's another reason I doubt I saw a ghost. I had been listening to ghost stories just before I saw an actual ghost who resembled the french teacher at our high school? The same french teacher I never had but who once fell off the stage in our auditorium and was hospitalized for some time because of a brain bleed? It all seems too coincidental, but who knows.

The only other thing I remember about that retreat is how we went to a sunny peak in the woods the next morning. It was a beautiful spot, remote and peaceful. We sat on rocks and wrote down the things we liked about ourselves and broke into small groups to share what we had written. I don't remember what I wrote, but I remember one of the chaperones shyly telling us she thought she her legs were her best feature. Then she clarified that she meant the lower part of her legs - her calves. No one said anything, but her correction made me feel sad. It also made me want to see her prized calves, as did everyone I'm sure. But it was late October and she was wearing pants, and so it remained as much a mystery as my ghost.

I don't remember what the dining hall looked like, which is odd because I can picture dining halls from much earlier retreats. I served my time in youth group when I was in middle school, and then tagged along on this retreat with my best friend because her parents made her go, and this way we could still be together to sneak smokes in the woods and talk about parties we were missing at home.

The concept of youth groups and church retreats feels odd to me now - cult-like, almost - but in those days it was like a more fun version of school with a whole new dating pool. We played touch football in fields and indoor polo with foam mallets and even went snow tubing one time. Then we broke into coed groups and theorized in excruciating detail what Jesus would do if he went on a date and someone went in for a premarital kiss. I could talk the talk, but those types of exercises were a constant reminder that I did not belong.

Each retreat, I inevitably had a secret crush. It felt a natural distraction to keep me engaged, a harmless focal point. One time, I was taken with Jim, who was outgoing and smart but broke my heart by dating Sheila. Though word got out that he didn't believe in premarital kisses, so heartbreak quickly turned to acceptance and I moved on.

It's not that I would have known what to do with Jim had he turned into a heavy petter the likes of which Jesus himself could not save. One retreat I remember laying in a rain soaked tent with three girls who were wide awake too because all our sleeping bags had turned into cold, wet sponges. We huddled in the middle of the tent to avoid puddles and talked about kissing. I was the youngest and still felt guilty about my first real kiss, which was too wet and long and on a well-lit front porch in plain view of my own house. Nothing about it had felt right. The other girls offered that maybe I wasn't ready for kissing yet, and I agreed, in theory anyway. The oldest girl was Jim's Sheila, and she shared in heartbreaking detail a date that essentially turned into date rape, and no one knew what to say about that. I still think about her and how she seemed more brave than beaten, determined to keep away from the kind of boy who might hurt her.

The rain dried up the next morning and we took our sleeping bags to a nearby laundromat, though mine always smelled like damp sneakers from then on. That wound up being probably my favorite retreat, a close second to the one where the minister's daughter brought along a small flask and three girls got as fall-down drunk as girls can get on tiny, burning sips of vodka. One girl kicked out a drop ceiling panel and another became convinced that her retreat boyfriend, who just wanted to play touch football with the guys, no longer loved her.

I can still hear her sobs of "Billllly!" and picture her weaving towards him on the grass, the memory like some poor ghost trapped in my mind. The mind is such an amazing, powerful tool.

If I were a ghost, I would never haunt a church retreat center. Though the setting is probably breathtaking and serene during the week when only ghosts linger.

Tearpots

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

The house I grew up in had a basement that my brother and I used as a playroom. We could play down there rambunctiously and not get yelled at because we sounded like a herd of elephants, an expression I literally heard dozens of times while playing things like school or stuffed animal dance party upstairs in my room. I really think they stopped building houses solidly in the 70s.

Our basement wasn't finished at the time, so the wooden ceiling beams and insulation were exposed. The floor was smooth, cold concrete. We had a set of trapeze rings that hung from the beams. Its yellow handles were wrapped in masking tape so I could get a better grip with tender, young hands. Its ropes were a thick, pliable braid of yellow, grey and white nylon.

Underneath the rings, I made sure to lay down two green, musty pillows too thin and long to have been old couch cushions but too short to have been mattresses. They mostly offered mental reassurance, though would have provided some buffer had I fallen while doing a skin the cat or hanging upside down, as I so loved to do.

One summer afternoon, I played on the rings in the basement by myself. My mother was directly above in the family room sipping tea and reading, or maybe she was in the kitchen doing something. Either way, only a thin floorboard and layer of insulation separated us. She would have heard me if I had cried out when I somehow got so intertwined in the nylon ropes of my trapeze rings that I was stuck hanging upside down. And I do mean stuck. I tried for some time to get myself untangled by swinging and rocking and then just mentally willing myself free, but none of it worked.

I hung there so long I felt the blood get heavy and thick in my head. I feared my eyes might pop out from the pressure, and this made me feel panicky and hopeless, which caused me to cry quietly. Tears leaked from my eyes, spilled over my eyebrows and forehead and then disappeared into my hair, which hung down like a wispy brown mop.

I don't know how long I hung like that before my mom came down to check on me. Was it five minutes? Ten? More? She later told me she worried because I was too quiet. She walked down the wooden steps and saw me strung up like a cat in a snare trap and helped get me down while asking "Why didn't you say something? Why on earth did you just hang there?" She laughed nervously about it, and I did too.

Why did I just hang there worrying that my eyes would pop out? Was it stubbornness, willfullness, pride, melodrama or masochism? What kind of pea-pickin' kid is afraid to ask for help?

I thought of that this morning because I've been having a rough couple of days. This time of year is a bitch. Can we all just dispense with the pretense and agree that the holidays are equal parts awesome and awful when you're an adult? In addition to the usual holiday stress, I have no idea how to accept help. I let stress build up until it comes shooting out like hot lava. This is not good either.

I have one more example of me being a weirdo as a kid that I want to share because it's similar. I blogged about him before, but I had a favorite stuffed dog named Henry growing up. I still have him and he still has his groovy green checked trousers. Anyway, one day Henry went missing from my room. I had been in a fight with my brother over something like matchbox cars or crushed styrofoam hats, so I was old enough to suspect him in Henry's disappearance but also old enough to know I shouldn't be so broken up over a missing stuffed animal. When I went to my brother's room to confront him, he denied involvement in such a convincing manner that I began to think I was going crazy or that my parents had intervened and taken Henry away so that I didn't turn into the kind of adult who blogs about stuffed animals.

When my mom called me downstairs for something, she could see that I had been crying. I can never hide that I've been crying. My eyes swell up and I get angry red splotches on my face as if I were having an allergic reaction to emotions. You'd think I wouldn't cry so much. When she asked me what was wrong, I said, "Oh I'm just being like Owl and thinking about sad things."

I was referring to a book where this owl loves tea brewed from tears, so he thinks up all these sad things to make himself cry so he can fill up his teapot. I know. Children's books are so weird. And that's what my mom said to me. "You're so weird."

I went back upstairs a little bit later and there was Henry laying on my bed in his green checked trousers as if he'd been there all along. The door to my brother's room was suspiciously closed. I swooped Henry up in my arms and ran downstairs to tell my mom how horrible her son was and how I really didn't have Owl's powers to create tears out of nothing. Though, clearly I did.

She laughed again and said "Oh you're so weird."

From Owl At Home

I choo choo choose you

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Have you ever decided on the title of a blog post before you knew what the hell to write about because the title was pure gold, baby, so you knew the rest would fall into place? Yeah. That.

Yesterday we took a train ride to a choose-and-cut tree farm. The train left at 8am but we got there at 7:35am because my husband's super power is promptness and mine is worrying, so together we can't fight crime or anything, but we can get a good seat on the train. Plus the train had donuts and coffee and hot chocolate for the children to spill on our jeans. Plus I've been getting up at 5am these days because my body decided daylight savings is bullshit. When you get up at 5am, 8am practically feels like noon.

So we boarded the Christmas Tree Express and took a magical donut-filled journey along the river and through the woods and past a swimming hole that I wish were my own, although I have no idea how to find it when not on a train.

As soon as we got to the farm, my kids were miserable because it was too cold and I forgot the two-pairs-of-socks rule that my prepared friend Jim mentioned when we were standing in the middle of a frost-covered wonderland of Christmas trees. I wasn't in the running for mom-of-the-year this year anyway.

We picked out our tree and my husband cut it down while the tears froze on my youngest child's cheeks like the saddest accessory aside from a misspelled tattoo. The frozen tears were like a bad metaphor for the heartbreak I feel killing a perfectly healthy tree each Christmas.

We're not ready for an artificial tree because is there anything better than the smell of pine and citrus from a fresh cut tree, plus the suspense of wondering just how many spiders and squirrels still reside inside? It's like the one and only time I went fishing with my dad and brother and caught a flounder and cried the whole time it flipped and flopped on the pier. But I'll be damned if I didn't change my tune when I saw it laying breaded and fried and perfectly still on my plate.

We found our tree and severed it at the trunk and dragged its carcass to be bound and tagged and loaded onto a flat car for the return trip. I had to pee, which gave me the perfect excuse to wander off while my husband took the children back on the train so their tears could thaw. I don't get much free time, but you give me 15 minutes to wander and take pictures of strange dogs and frozen leaves and that's worth two hours in heaven, maybe more.

This dog was all business, by the way. She let me get up close for the picture, but wouldn't make eye contact and then ran off purposefully like she had a goddamn job to do. I love dogs so much, even no-nonsense ones.

This is the picture I took just after I took a self-portrait, which I will not be posting because something was wrong with my phone and it made me look cold and old.

The train took us back the way we came past my favorite secret swimming hole, and we took our dead tree home and impaled it on a metal spike to make it stand upright again. Then we dressed it in garish, glittery costume and it made us so fucking cheery the tree almost didn't care it was cut down in its prime and thought "well, if it makes these humans so happy to kill me..." Although part of that happiness was directly related to the Stink. Stank. Stunk. portion of the grinch special we had on in the background, but shhh.

My day was pretty perfect in that mid-December kind of way. Before the kids went to bed, we watched the holiday episode of Wipeout and if Christmas cheer were glitter, I would have been like a stripper who ate all her body glitter for unknown reasons and got the hiccups. Christmas cheer was everywhere.

Later, when the lights were out, our elderly cat jumped up on the bed and sneezed repeatedly like he does every night, only this time my husband called out "WHO'S THERE??" And then told me "You should write a children's book about a cat who's a burglar and he always sneezes just as he's about to steal sweets, so he gives himself away." And this is why I chose my husband and I'm not sure why he chose me, but I wasn't worried about that when I drifted off to sleep with a dreamy smile still on my lips.

5:1

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

I always think of myself as a lazy person, but I don't really act like one. Sunday morning I went for a two mile walk, got to an AA meeting, made a picnic lunch and put together a crockpot dinner. All before 9 a.m. That's crazy, sure, but not lazy.

The walk and meeting were a treat to myself. They make me feel good and I have to squeeze them in where I can. Making up dinner in the morning also lets me relax later in the day. I'm a big fan of crockpot soups and a good loaf of bread. The picnic lunches were so we wouldn't have to spend $40 in a museum cafeteria later that day. I get freaked out about spending money this time of year.

Years ago when I worked for a company that used an EAP, we got a glossy newsletter in our mail cubby once a month with the sort of tips that make you say both duh and fuck that. Things like "set a budget for holiday gifts and stick to it" and "avoid over-indulging in food and drink at holiday parties by eating a small, healthy meal beforehand."

I always read it because a glossy newsletter always beat working, and that was where I first learned about the 5:1 ratio. This is the assertion that a stable marriage can be expressed mathematically: the ratio of positive to negative moments must be at least 5:1. A lot of other factors contribute to the success of a marriage, including not rolling your eyes at your mate when they speak. Contempt is the sulfuric acid for love. Go figure.

It's not rocket science, but still I've always had a thing for ratios. Lately I've wondered if the 5:1 ratio might apply to personal contentment. Like if I get up early to walk and hit a meeting and get dinner out of the way and save $40 on lunch, will it all even out if the rest of the day goes pear-shaped? And while I don't have a scientific answer to this, I can tell you how the rest of my day went.

We packed a lot into the day. We started out at the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, which we absolutely adore. Kids can operate a crane, dress like an astronaut, shop in a replica grocery store and pretend to eat at a pretend McDonalds. They can also put on a white labcoat and tell you to lay down on a table and shove a plastic probe in your ear. And then when you ask "Am I sick, doctor?" they can dismissively answer "I'm not a doctor" and then quickly give you a pretend shot.

On the old Wanamaker monorail - the pretend doctor who does not even pretend to be a pretend doctor is on the right.

We ate our picnic lunch and the kids sat inside the monorail that once traveled around Wanamaker's toy department many years ago. Then we got in our car and traveled downtown to Wanamaker's toy department, which is now called Macy's and by toy department I really mean a cramped hallway leading to the Dickens' Christmas Village. And by Christmas Village, I really mean a series of long lines in an overly warm, narrow tunnel that starts to feel like the belly of a hungry snake that you fear you will never make it out of in time to see the light show that plays every hour on the hour.

But we did make it out in time and watched the show from what we thought would be a good spot, but in fact turned out to be a partially obstructed view directly in front of a kid in a wheelchair. Which? Sadness all around.

This could have ruined our day, but it did not. We moved to a different spot and our oldest kid watched the rest of the light show and our youngest kid played happily in a rack of fleece pajamas. My husband and I drank in the atmosphere of an old-school department store where you swear you could tell a clerk you need a pair of roller skates for your nephew Joey and he would disappear into the back and return with a neatly wrapped box with a bow, plus a yellow delivery slip for you to sign.

After my husband maneuvered around a maze of oddly ornate columns in a cramped parking garage that I later learned used to be Wanamaker's Budget store where you could score lingerie for $.59, we admitted defeat but stopped short of resignation. We decided this was our first visit to Macy's and we learned the ropes and that's how it has to be sometimes. Next time would be better. And I actually believed this and I can't help but wonder if this acceptance came from the many positive things we'd already experienced earlier in the day.

It makes sense. If you're going to run yourself ragged this holiday season, at least take time to do things that make you feel good, like over-indulging at holiday parties. Then maybe you won't want to hang yourself with a Christmas sweater or wish the Baby Jesus had never even been born. See? I could totally write tips for a glossy newsletter.

Wizardry

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Can women be wizards? I consider myself a modern feminist who hasn't time to worry over what women can and cannot do because frankly women can do anything they want to do. They'll have to make reasonable sacrifices if they want to be a doting mother and career gal, but they can still use words like gal because no one should bog themselves down with the implied restrictions of a word that sounds more like a gutteral sound you might make if you were to step on a rake while barefoot.

So yes, women can be wizards. Because, yes, I am a wizard.

The other day I wrote an eerie, futuristic post about a world without internet and the very next morning the internet was out at my office. This caused unprecedented panic considering no one in my office needs internet to actually do their job.

Then, later that night, the internet went down at home. My husband spent an hour and a half on the phone with verizon and at some point blamed me for putting a hex on fios via my blog, which made me feel awesomely powerful like a wizard must feel every morning when she wakes up and thinks "oh, that's right...I am a mother fucking wizard."

Imagine the implications. If every futuristic blog comes true, I could write about a recovering alcoholic who goes to target to buy something slightly magical, such as glitter nail polish or clumping cat litter, and along the way finds an industrial-sized garbage bag filled with money and rainbow swedish fish.

The woman posts an ad in Craigslist's Missed Connections because if ever there was a missed connection, this is it. She gets a disheartening number of responses, and while a few people come close to guessing the dollar amount of a lot of fucking money, no one mentions the rainbow swedish fish, so she knows they are liars. In the end, the woman gets to keep the bag of money and fish with a clear conscience, and she can buy all the glitter nail polish she wants forevermore without feeling both silly and frivolous.

Glitter nail polish is favored by wizards of either gender.

I hope my wizardry doesn't apply to dreams because last night I dreamt I was taking a picture on my phone of a bear in a beautiful field of flowers way off in the distance and was attacked by another, much closer bear that I hadn't noticed because I was taking a picture on my phone. My dreams know me so well.

Library thugs

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was not only a Tuesday, but a rainy Tuesday. And not just a light rain but the kind of soaking rain that makes puddles you don't notice until it's too late because leaves cover them like tiger traps on the sidewalk. Yesterday was the kind of rainy Tuesday that made raindrops on the roof sound like ghosts bumping around in the attic.

Yesterday I also progressed to step 3 of 4 of weaning off my antidepressant. It actually hasn't been that bad after the initial episode where I threatened to dump all of my toddler's clothes out the window. And hey, I might have threatened that anyway because while my husband and I work great as a team in many ways, cleaning closets together makes me do things like threaten to dump our toddler's clothes out the window. Fortunately I realized this would only result in me having to rake up all the clothes from the yard and wash them. Above all, I am practical and also lazy.

Two plus weeks later, I have noticeable dizziness on mornings I'm due to take medicine, but I can still exercise and drive and go to work and stuff. But yesterday? I was kind of in a rough spot by evening. Everytime I moved, my brain foggily registered it happening a split second later. It felt like being drunk without any of the laughs.

Still I took the kids to the library after work because our books were due and a trip to the library is right up there with a trip to chuck e cheese because nerd apples don't fall far from nerd trees. While crouched in the children's stacks picking out a book about a rabbit that hates cleaning his room, I heard my baby say in her angry-sad voice "I not a baby."

I rose to see her standing on top of a chair, her toddler belly sticking out and her hands clenched into tiny fists by her side, her brow furrowed. The chair she was standing on was lined up with about ten other chairs so that they formed a sort of bridge between two couches. I knew in my heart that it was wrong to use library furniture as a makeshift bridge, but the library staff didn't seem bothered and, anyway, it was rainy and my brain felt like it was melting a little bit.

Two other little girls of slightly taller height stood on adjoining chairs. One had on a plaid uniform jumper and patent leather shoes. The other little girl wore polka dot rain boots, striped leggings,and a sweatshirt with a cat face on it. She had a pixie cut and big brown eyes, but I wasn't fooled - I can smell a thug a mile away.

Thugs sometimes smell like nicotine and meth, and sometimes they smell like princess-berry shampoo and fruit snacks. Polka Dot Rain Boots was so bold as to call my baby a baby again while I was watching from the stacks. She looked me square in the eye too after she said it as if she knew I had nothing left to lose and might pick a fight with a four-year old.

I looked around for precious little satan's mom, but didn't see any takers. Can you blame her? She was probably frantically searching for a book on knots so she could better tie her up during the day.

I looked over at my little baby - who? for the record? Is totally a baby. She's three and still says things like "I not a baby" for chrissakes. But? She's my baby. Nobody puts my baby in a corner but me, and then it's called a Time Out and it doesn't really work anyway, so I threaten it a lot but very rarely do it.

My baby was wearing her hurt scowl, but I realized somewhere in my muddled brain that I should just leave it alone. I knew I should be the bigger person - the adult, as it were. Life, after all, is full of hard knocks and lessons, and bullying is just one.

I could see that Patent Leather Shoes was uncomfortable with Polka Dot Rain Boots' name-calling of a younger kid right in front of a grown up. She looked at me with a combination of "help" and "oh shit". At that moment I realized it was too late - I'd already started transforming into a mother bear and it's probably how the Hulk feels every time his muscles begin to expand in such a way that they tear his shirt clear off but only shred his pants at the bottom, saving us all from the awkwardness of seeing too much Hulk.

Blame it on my overall state of fogginess and fatigue, blame it on the rain -- it doesn't matter why, but mother bear was ready to tussle.

I walked up to the chair where Polka Dot Rain Boots stood defiantly. I met her steady, steely gaze with my own but said nothing. Not because I didn't want to but because I didn't trust myself not to stick my tongue out, plus I couldn't think of anything to cut her down to size without getting arrested. I felt like a cowboy just before a duel if duels were held in the juvenile section of a library. The tension was unbearable in many, many ways.

Polka Dot Rain Boots, that little snot, gave what had to have been a calculated smile and asked me "Are you going to girls' night out too? I call it girls night in because we don't go anywhere and mom makes popcorn and we eat it on the floor in our sleeping bags. I like popcorn!"

With that Polka Dot Rain Boots grabbed Patent Leather Shoes' hand and dragged her across the row of chairs and together they fell to the library couch with the late 80's geometric print in a way that only very small children can fall without injuring themselves.

Smart move, Polka Dot Rain Boots.

The day the internetz died

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:10:00 +0000

This is a spooky science fiction piece set in the future.

January 2, 2012 -- This morning when I woke up there was no internet. I tried the computer in the office and then my phone and neither worked. I tried the netbook and the laptop, and those didn't work either. Then I tried the other laptop and the ipad and the other smartphone just to be sure. The internet is gone.

January 3, 2012 -- I just got back from the grocery store. Yes, I had to physically go to a store to shop. Madness! Anyway, it appears this internet outage is widespread. I'll not lie to you...panic is setting in.

January 4, 2012 -- Still no internet. I brushed my teeth for about an hour today with the electric toothbrush. It started making a funny whooshing sound at around the forty minute mark. It still works, but not so good.

January 7, 2012 -- Today while taking a walk, I saw this woman walking a little white dog in a hot pink sweater. And - this is the funny part - the woman was wearing a hot pink sweater, but I don't think she meant to dress like her dog because the styles were different. I took a picture of them, but I have no way of transmitting it to this legal pad, so just picture it in your mind's eye and know that it was funny. (the woman had sort of teased blond hair and wore a lot of makeup!)

January 8, 2012 -- Walked to the end of my driveway and shouted a status update. I don't know if anyone heard me and I revised it in my head for several minutes afterwards, but I guess it felt good. Just like old times. Good times.

January 15, 2012 -- I got a letter from someone I went to middle school with. Jean Gentilet. We sat at the same lunch table and once she pretended her dog had already taken a bite out of her nectarine and I believed her because she was such a good actress. Another time she shared her lipgloss with me and all I could think was "I hope she doesn't have AIDS" because AIDS was real big back then. Anyway, Jean sent me a friend request, so I'll mail a response tomorrow or the next day. I don't want to seem desperate.

January 19, 2012 -- The President addressed the nation today to tell us the internet is probably not coming back. He assured us the government will be going to press with new phone books, and not just those yellow-page booklets that are so puny you can't even use them as booster seats.

January 20, 2012 -- Went out to buy more stamps but the post office was all out. The clerk looked tired. Not sure where to buy a set of encyclopedias, but I'll ask someone else. I've started taking notes of things I remember in a notebook and Joe and the girls have gone in and made a few corrections/suggestions and this works fine for now. I think we're all going to be just fine.

smarter than any smartphone, damn straight.

Atlas

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:42:00 +0000

On Wednesday, my AA sponsor sent me a text that said Enjoy your first sober Thanksgiving :) which I read with a puzzled smirk. Later, I understood what she meant when I was so on the ball that I had time to reminisce about Thanksgivings past with my mom while waiting for side dishes to get hot and bubbly.

My mom said she now has a real appreciation for how seamless every holiday felt at my grandparents' house. On Christmas day, we would spill into their house and my brother and I were presented with our usual pre-coke glass of chilled V8 as if my grandparents had been sitting around, bored, with nothing better to do. Then we had shrimp dip and cheeseball and later a beautifully prepared dinner at a beautifully set table. By the time we had pie and opened presents and all the ripped paper was whisked away in trash bags, it would have felt like a well-oiled machine that no one had to mind if we had thought of it all.

I do remember bustling in the kitchen though. It was a tiny, dark kitchen that my grandparents used the hell out of. I like to think I inherited my love of cooking just by spending time in that kitchen. Maybe it slipped into my pores while I played with the lazy susan cabinet next to the sink. I used to make a game of spinning it with just enough force so that Mrs. Butterworth passed three full rotations without tipping over the toothpick holder. I spun Mrs. Butterworth around while my grandparents bickered over meal preparations in a manner that suggested they had forgotten I was there.

In my family, we have a saying that goes She married an Ed. Ed was my grandfather and he was quiet and kind and patient beyond what is customary. To the outside observer, he was a saint, though my grandmother sometimes called him Atlas in a tone that I might use to call someone A Big Jerk. I'm realizing now how complicated every marriage is. If you think you know a marriage that is not complicated, either you haven't dug deep enough or they're only in it for the tax benefits and health insurance.

My grandmother was like Martha Stewart in an era where maybe every woman was like Martha Stewart. That's what I imagine of the 50s anyway, at least in her social circle where the women belonged to card club and art club and, later, key club for their local Kiwanis chapter.

My grandmother was an excellent cook, and that is how she loved me. My grandfather loved me by calling me Kristybell and bringing me along when my grandmother sent him on errands for things like greenery and apples for the dining room table at Christmas. I imagine those stolen moments of AM radio in the car and grocery store muzak were the only peace he knew aside from sleep.

Atlas once got Hercules to carry the heavens long enough for him to gather golden apples that only he knew where to find. Atlas brought the apples back, but then realized he didn't particularly want his big old heavy burden back. Hercules sensed Atlas' dilemma and tricked him by asking him to hold the heavens for just a minute while he adjusted the padding on his shoulders, or something equally suspicious sounding. Atlas fell for it and Hercules took his golden apples and sprinted off.

At first, this story made me feel sorry for Atlas. Why should he alone carry the burden of the world on his shoulders? It also made me question his sanity. Why didn't he pick the golden apples and never come back? Was he really tricked by Hercules or did some part of him want the world back because he loved it or sensed a worse trap waiting in freedom?

Mythology seems as complicated as marriage.

My grandfather as a new dad, looking uncharacteristically somber.

Buy Nothing But A Cool Book Day.

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

A Snuggie? He's kind of already wearing one in all those paintings.

My husband was the one who introduced me to Buy Nothing Day. He grew up in the suburbs, just like me, but his upbringing or personality drew him to Adbusters Magazine, an anti-consumerist publication I found interesting for its often shocking images, but I couldn't relate to its radical message. If I had been a teenager in the 60s, I wouldn't have been a hippie. If I were a young adult now, I wouldn't be an OWS protester. It's not that I don't care, it's just that I don't care that much.

I'm not sure what makes some middle class kids activists and others zombie-like consumers. I'm not sure why I cited those extremes because, while I fall closer to the latter, that's not who I am. When I was younger, activism felt too polarizing - too black and white - with no room for the many shades of grey in between. Lately I've realized activism makes me examine my own behavior and make small, positive changes. Its stark white blends with black friday to make up a perfect grey I wouldn't have any other way.

On Friday, my family and I are going to shop at small, locally-owned businesses. While I would love to snag a fancy new vacuum cleaner for half price at Wal-Mart, I can't stomach humanity at its worst. Maybe I'm lucky too that I'm not that strapped, but is it ever worth it? The black friday deals people stampede for are for things like flat-screen TVs, which nobody "needs". While big box retailers employ locals and probably pay more, local businesses are the result of someone saying "hey, I have a dream to sell tye-dyed dresses and incense to college students" and then they actually do things to make this dream a reality! It seems kind and also a little wise to keep these people off the streets.

The real reason I want to shop local on Friday is because I don't want to be housebound with two kids on one of my few days off and it's really fucking hard to leave the house without spending money on something and Buy Nothing Day means buy nothing. Also, local businesses don't make their employees sleep through Thanksgiving so they can open doors at 12am Friday. A local business owner would say "What?? That's crazy!" because it is.

Also? I love our local downtown. It's small with only a handful of shops, including two precious gift shops that I have no idea how they stay afloat and a discount bookstore that had this Charley Harper book for dirt-cheap last year that I'm still kicking myself for not buying. Even though you're not supposed to buy Christmas presents for yourself.

This year I'm invoking What Would Jesus Do?

Would Jesus shove an old lady out of the way for an iPod? No.

Would Jesus stand out in the cold and rain with the masses waiting for Target to open? Yes. Probably. He would probably turn a roll of paper towels from someone's van into warm blankets too. Nevermind that question.

Would Jesus want a 29-year old Target employee named Seth to miss his once-a-year chance to celebrate family and togetherness in order to trick the masses into thinking there's any more than two bargain-priced flat-screen TVs on store shelves? No.

Would Jesus want you to support your local economy directly when possible, and would he want you to buy a book of art if the price is right and just call it a little gift to yourself from the J-Man? Definitely.

Emmett's Thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

For years, Emmett fretted over Thanksgiving dinner. The very first year he'd had his entire family over and cooked the turkey with the weird gizzard packet still inside. Who hasn't done that? you might ask. Well, Emmett's mother, for one. She threw her head back and laughed too loudly and practically sprinted to the living room to tell Aunt Harriett and Michael's newly pregnant wife, who smiled tightly and decided she would take some turkey to be polite but would only pretend to eat it.

Emmett did thorough cavity searches every year since. He also learned to make the stuffing up hours before and lightly toss it with broth before baking it uncovered to get the right mix of softness and crisp. He learned that the dishes that went quickest usually contained the most sticks of butter. He learned that everyone loves to talk about eating too much almost as much as they love eating too much.

In short, Emmett had arrived at a place in his life where he felt comfortable preparing and serving what is essentially a simple meal consisting of a complicated series of well-timed steps of varied importance. Thanksgiving dinner was like an orchestra where one of the flutists could suddenly go into a fugue state and stare down at her instrument as if it were as foreign as a didgeridoo, but the remaining flutists would have to work doubly hard. If she were the first chair flutist (the smoked sausage and chestnut stuffing...maybe the praline topped sweet potato casserole), well, they would need to work quadruply hard.

Emmett's wife, Jane, was not good in the kitchen, so she tried to compensate by pressing the tablecloth and setting out the various bowls of savories and fanning the cocktail napkins in an aesthetically pleasing way. Emmett came behind her and mindlessly rearranged the bowls of peanuts and crackers and dips and even re-fanned the napkins, though they looked exactly as they had before, only were now more wrinkled.

This year Emmett was not nervous about the fan of the napkins or the food, though the outcome of the meal was far from predetermined as he had been quite distracted. Emmett was finally planning to tell his mother that he was a clown. His mother had no idea and thought Emmett sold life insurance because that's what he'd been telling her for the last two-plus decades. The part about him being a clown was going to be tricky enough. Emmett would work on the length of his career at another time. Perhaps Christmas.

Emmett had gone over many times in his head how and when he would tell his mother the news. At first he thought it should be after cocktails but before turkey. Then he second-guessed and thought perhaps over pie and coffee might be better, but then remembered how his mother was always chomping at the bit to start washing dishes. It's not that she particularly enjoyed it and in fact complained about how long it took to hand wash each piece and how the hot water dried her skin out something terrible.

In the end, Emmett realized he'd waited long enough. He'd been a clown for the past twenty-two years and had brought countless smiles to the faces of children and old people and every age in between. He'd worn his share of giant trousers and piled into so many tiny cars that it wasn't even a challenge anymore but rather something he looked forward to, like crawling into bed at the end of a long, satisfying day. Simply put, Emmett was not ashamed to be a clown and was more ashamed that his own mother had no idea.

The doorbell rang. Emmett sprinkled turkey stock on the stuffing and lightly fluffed it with a fork and then straightened his bow tie and nose before answering the door.

I like all of the paintings here, but this one struck me as the saddest and inspired this post.

Dear god

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Every night before I go to sleep, I try to remember to thank God for keeping me sober that day because that’s what all the recovering drunks say to do. I don’t get on my knees though. Praying feels silly enough. It feels like talking to myself, only silently. I’m perfectly okay talking to myself out loud.

I want to give thanks because I am very grateful for being sober. As long as I'm sober I won't suffer another hangover. I've suffered some wicked hangovers. Mostly I've suffered in silence and pretended not to be suffering at all because I knew having that many hangovers was not natural.

So I'm laying in bed and it’s quiet and I’m feeling grateful in my heart - full of appreciation and peace and hope. And it feels unnatural, but still I silently thank God or whomever for keeping me sober. The cat jumps up on the bed and steps on my hair, and I think about how he used to sleep on my pillow when he was a kitten. I wax nostalgic for when he bit my head and chewed my hair with razor sharp kitten teeth, though he's very old now.

I feel grateful for my cat’s love and relative health and pet him until he bites me, at which point I retreat my hand and slip it safely beneath my pillow. Then I wonder why I am a seemingly bottomless pit when it comes to wanting someone to listen to and care about what I have to say. I think that probably comes from childhood, duh, but isn’t knowing where it comes from enough to make it go away? Or maybe it is like being scared of the dark, and even though you know better, you run up the basement stairs at night like a ninny.

At this point in the prayer I remember I'm supposed to be praying, so I think about my bottomless pit and recovery and recall one meeting where a woman cheerfully announced we drunks have a hole in our soul and we have to keep filling it up with God or we’ll get empty and drink again. And whenever I hear “God” I always picture Jesus with his beard and robe and inexplicably blue eyes. So now I’m picturing drinking from a white plastic beer mug (not filled with beer) with Jesus on the side with one outstretched hand, palm up, and his loving but serious face.

Something like this, which 1) is totally real and available for purchase, and 2) was discovered after I'd written the above paragraph, but note it does not show his outstretched hand anyway, though the heart is a sweet touch.

And these are but a handful of reasons I don’t feel like I’m good at praying, though I do find quiet comfort in those moments before my mind wanders, and even during, and definitely after. I don’t think I need to plug my soul with Jesus, but I do think I need to keep doing good, loving things and this will make me feel good and less lonely. Maybe I just need to listen to myself in those quiet moments of prayer or thought or whatever you want to call it. Maybe I haven’t done that in forever and maybe that’s pretty sad.

Jesus.

Meltdown

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:39:00 +0000

Going to the boardwalk with my grandmother when I was little wasn't all fun and games. When it came time to use the public restroom, she made me stand up on the toilet seat to pee. And please don't mistake this for the sit-hover position, or even the stand-squat. I stood on the toilet seat and then promptly peed down part of one leg and had to endure the rest of the evening with a damp pom-pom sock.

For baffling reasons, my grandmother had complete faith in rickety rides and the ex-cons who ran them, yet when it came time for ice cream, I was allowed to hold my cone only after it was carefully wrapped in no less than six napkins. I'm not sure what this accomplished since gravity caused the ice cream to bypass the napkins and still run down onto my arm. The good news is my grandmother was probably instrumental in the invention of the ice cream holder. The bad news is I ate a lot of napkin as a child.

Easier clean up, but no cooler looking than the unpatented six-napkin wrap.

I bring up the pee on my leg and ice cream on my arm not to belittle my grandmother, who was probably enduring anxiety levels heretofore unseen just to let my brother and I ride some rickety rides. My point is that you can't enjoy things like the boardwalk and ice cream without getting a little dirty. And sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

I am finding this out now while weaning off my antidepressant. By the way? If a doctor ever tries to prescribe you Effexor? Google it first. I google everything under the fucking sun and have haunting dreams to show for it, but for some reason never bothered to see what other people had to say about Effexor before I started taking it. To be clear, the extensive complaints are not about how well it works, but how hard it is to stop taking.

It's a real thing - discontinuation syndrome - and the issue with this drug is its short half-life of 15 hours or so. So every time I pull back as instructed by my nurse practioner, my brain goes into meltdown roughly 30 hours later and drips down onto a soggy mess of napkins and no one is particularly happy. Just ask my husband. I am supplementing with giant fish oil capsules and B complex vitamins, which is smarter than peeing down my own leg. I think.

Winterthur

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Last weekend we finally visited Winterthur, the childhood home of Henry Francis DuPont, who never endured cruel taunts over his name because he grew up safely ensconced in what has to be the only 1,000-acre woodland utopia with its own post office and train station.

We've long enjoyed the structured beauty of nearby Longwood Gardens, another DuPont legacy. But where Longwood is like a youthful grandma chattering about roses, Winterthur is the timeless, natural beauty you notice is wearing a touch of lipstick and blush when you get up close. Every tree and plant in Winterthur's 60-acre garden was carefully selected by DuPont, yet it has the appearance of always existing in that perfect state.

We got there in late afternoon and wandered around for a couple of hours and forgot for awhile that we weren't the only ones on earth.

It was the perfect antidote to, you know, life.

Handsome Joe (note daughter's first photobomb)

These fish probably talk in deep, bubbly voices about being fed, mostly.

Me and my girls, whom I love more than anything in the world, even utopian woodlands and talking fish.

Bittersweet

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Fat and happy. Skinny and miserable. Neither one is across-the-board true, though there is truth to both.

If you're fat, it means that a good part of the time your brain is being sensually massaged by food-induced endorphins. But you're never happy about being fat.

If you're skinny, you might obsess about food and sometimes even murder. But you're always happy you're not fat.

A few years ago, I was fat. And then I lost more than 40 pounds using weight watchers online (which I recommend) and acute life-stress (which I do not recommend). I picked up about 5 pounds from my lowest weight, but held steady until soon after I started on an anti-depressant.

The anti-depressant worked and my mild depression lifted in about a month, and then I stopped drinking and life was all sugar and spice and actually just mostly sugar and, yes, please, can I just have all the sugar?

I've talked to enough recovering alcoholics to know sugar cravings aren't unusual when you quit drinking. It makes sense that my body got used to a carb-load that might cripple a normal person. It happened gradually, over time, so I couldn't cut out all that sugar overnight.

But I also know that my body's reaction to sugar has been extreme on an anti-depressant. It's like I'm making sweet love to dessert with my mouth. If the image of someone doing horrible things to ice cream with their lips and tongue makes you uncomfortable, I'm really sorry. But I don't know how else to describe it. It really is unholy and awesome.

If I could do unholy, awesome things to ice cream and keep a healthy BMI, I wouldn't be writing this and would probably be off in a private freezer closet I had built just for me and ice cream. But I exercise daily and I already cut out all those calories from booze and still my pants have started to tighten. And when a woman says that, it never means anything good. It means I'm getting fat again. And that's terrifying.

Weight gain was a deal breaker for me, so I plan to taper off the anti-depressant slowly and hopefully successfully. I don't think the depression will come back because its root was situational, plus I stopped drinking alcohol, the world's most popular depressant. But if it does come back? I'll know one drug that worked on the first try, though not without side effects.

This experience reminds me that there is no easy fix. I took medicine to be happy and gained weight, which makes me unhappy in a different way.

It also reminds me how nature abhors a vacuum. I gave up drinking, which made me feel better emotionally, physically and spiritually, but now my body craves sugar in the same way I used to crave a drink.

I spend so much energy trying to find balance and harmony when chaos feels a more natural and comfortable, if destructive, state.

I would have made a terrible Puritan, but Hedonism doesn't feel right either. Maybe I'm getting closer to that in-between spot, whatever that's called.

Rube Goldberg makes me coffee every morning

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 11:44:00 +0000

This is me at 5:40 am trying to build a contraption to fall back to sleep and take advantage of daylight savings like a normal person.

Confession time.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is probably my favorite movie. That part where Pee-Wee grows so weary of hitchhiking that he passes out on the shoulder and his arm hangs out into the road? It gets me every time.

The part where his breakfast is prepared by an unnecessarily complicated chain-reaction contraption drives me nuts.

The chain-reaction contraption is also known as a Rube Goldberg machine in honor of the cartoonist/inventor who first engineered ridiculously complex devices to perform simple tasks.

I do so love a good Rube Goldberg machine. The reason the Pee-Wee scene bothers me is that after his contraption goes to all the trouble to prepare pancakes and eggs and bacon made to look like a fucking face, Pee-Wee eats a few dry pieces of Mr. T cereal with a fork and then skips off to water his neighbor's house. Maybe if he'd eaten something with protein, he wouldn't have chained his beloved bike to a waving mechanical clown.

I would be all for a hot-breakfast Goldberg contraption of my own, but I have too many concerns. If I make up the pancake batter the night before, won't it dry out? Won't the house need to be kept at a significantly cooler temperature so the eggs don't rot? Who's going to scrub the pancake marks off the ceiling?

I prefer the Jetson's meal machine that Jane used to feed her family, which is sort of like an evolved Rube Goldberg device. I'm assuming Jane didn't have to first prepare each dish and slip it into its allotted cubby. And I hope Rosie the Robot didn't get saddled with that task either.

Flying sausage pizza sounds vaguely dirty and delicious. Yes, please.

I have an evolved Rube Goldberg machine of my own and fully appreciate and utilize its complex balance of simplicity and design every morning. It makes my coffee.

For years we were a slave to the Bunn because I'd read enough forum posts insisting that coffee tastes best when grounds are soaked by water specially heated to 200 degrees. And while this may be true, it is only true if your second Bunn doesn't crap out after less than a year. So this time we spent half the money on a programmable coffee maker.

We measure out and pour in the water and coffee and then push the 'program' button before we go to bed. I don't know what happens in the morning, but it probably involves a tiny hammer, flame, balloon and chicken. I do know that we wake up to rich, hot coffee, which we appreciate to the last, delicious drop.

I have one other Rube Goldberg device in my life, but it takes forever to set up and I rarely get the dude to wind up in the bucket. It's always back to the drawing board on that one.

Audrey Kishline

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Back in the gay '90s, a good friend used to throw regular, splendid cocktail parties in his non-air conditioned rooftop Baltimore apartment. Dressed in semi-formalwear, I fell in love with the swanky world of cocktails and white trash sushi and once watched a man - later dubbed Penile Knievel - shoot a bottle rocket from his penis that landed on an Ace Frehley doll and set its hair ablaze. Yeah, they were pretty amazing parties.

I hadn't much success handling hard liquor though, so throwing up in the outdoor vestibule of my apartment complex after one soiree was a bit of a wake up call for me. I distinctly remember going to Barnes and Noble in search of self-help literature, and I found something that spoke to me in Moderate Drinking. I was only 22 at the time with my whole life and drinking career ahead of me.

I read that book and decided to follow author Audrey Kishline's advice to abstain from alcohol for a period of thirty days while I used that time to reflect and form a plan to drink moderately. I remember that a good friend mocked me when I drank a soda instead of beer during this time. I wondered if I wasn't being overly dramatic.

By all accounts, I did get my drinking back under some control for years. I didn't throw up in any more vestibules, and the crippling hangovers lessened enough so that I could grocery shop without fear of panic attacks. I don't credit Kishline's book for "curing" me though. Maybe it helped me through that period of shame and self-loathing, but I still drank too much for my own good and health. I was never the type to drink two beers and feel satisfied.

Many years later, I felt my drinking habits slip from grasp again. This time it felt undeniably worse and scarier. I still wasn't ready to give up drinking forever, though, as the thought of never having another beer was still preposterous, inconceivable. I searched moderation management and joined their online community and hunted down their book, which I could not find on bookstore shelves this time.

When I found the book online, I noticed its title had changed to Responsible Drinking. More interesting, though, was that Audrey Kishline was no longer the author. A quick google search turned up why.

In March of 2000, Audrey Kishline drove the wrong way on an expressway in her pickup truck and crashed head-on into another car, killing a man and his twelve-year old daughter. Kishline's blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. She survived the crash and spent 3 1/2 years in prison.

The woman who founded a moderate drinking movement that laughed in the face of AA and other abstinence-based programs couldn't follow her own program. She admitted to years of secret drinking that well surpassed moderate levels in this email to fellow MMers, which she sent a few months prior to the crash. She claimed to be in AA at the time, though it seems she was little better at abstinence and the kind of rigorous honesty that seems key in recovery.

The story is already pretty remarkable, but it gets even better.

While Kishline was in prison, the mother of the girl (estranged wife of the man) killed in the accident forgave Kishline and began visiting her in prison. The pair struck up an unlikely friendship and wrote a book about their experience called Face to Face, which has been sitting on my bedside table for roughly four months now. I bought it when I first got sober because rarely does real life emulate Lifetime in such heartbreaking detail.

Maybe there's a reason for that, though. I became aware of the complete Kishline story when I was still trying moderation. Honestly? It left a real bitter taste in my mouth. When I finally got the moderation management workbook in the mail, reading it felt like taking advice from a marriage counselor you just found out is going through a bitter divorce.

Ultimately, the Kishline story did help get me to sobriety, which I've no doubt is where I should be. And I will read Face to Face and, in fact, picked it back up again last night. The thing I'm dreading most is reading how the mother/wife opened up her heart and forgave Kishline because I don't understand why or how she did that as a mother and wife. The thing I fear most, though, is discovering I can relate more to Kishline than her forgiver.