Quincy Anne Frank

Whatever.

At 29, you'd think I would have by this point mastered the art of not falling in love. The sad fact, however, is this: pour a few glasses of wine down my non-discriminating throat, throw my sometimes-lumpy, sometimes-taut body into a bed, press your lips against the expanse of my genetically unfortunate forehead, and I'll say those three stupid words.

Now, perhaps I'll arise in the morning, totally apologetic (it was the beverage talking?) but I'll gaze up at you with eyes that have been said to be paralysis-inducing, and you'll wish that I HAD meant it. At least that's the story I'm sticking to in order to assuage my erstwhile fears of lifelong emotional infirm.

You see, as of late, I find myself drawn to relationships based on give and take; I give, and he takes. As I write this, an aging man walks by and tells me, "Smile, girl. It ain't that bad." Of course it's not that bad. Nothing ever really is, unless it's cancer or a Bush in the White House. 

A Rant About Apathy - Pt. 1

It is March of 2011. And a crazy time, as far as anyone who doesn't live underneath a rock should be concerned. I spend my days glued to a desk and a computer screen, fundraising for a well-known political organization, which means I spend hours upon hours each week listening to the complaints as well as praise (about everything under the sun) of voters across the country. The same people who wore "Hope and Change" t-shirts and baseball caps in 2007, want to talk about having "voters' remorse". Men who admired President Reagan's foreign policy are quick to castigate President Obama for simply implementing a no-fly zone in currently-embattled Libya. Or, my favorite, "They gotta do somethin. They need to be LOUDER." They, meaning Democrats. Meaning, the person on the other end of my phone line who says she's a supporter, but won't give "them" any of her money. I'm exhausted by expecting the average person to have ever looked at trends, or to consider that the man in the White House is just that: a man.

Since late 2007, the United States has been in a state of economic crisis that we all know familiarly as "the recession". Before Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, took office, the U.S. was engaged in wars in at least two different countries- costly, consumptive efforts that were drawing hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute from our nation's resources. The Clinton administration left us with a budget surplus in the billions of dollars, but now in the second decade of the new millenium, we find ourselves grappling with the greatest deficit the United States has ever seen. Worse, even, than during the Great Depression.

I was born in August of 1982, the same day on which Henry Fonda died and the year that the smiley face, believe it or not, was first used in emails. President Reagan's approval rating was in the mid-40th percentile following a series of mid-recession budget cuts and a $100 trillion tax hike; but by 1984 when my younger sister was born, Reaganomics seemed to have triggered effects felt by enough everyday Americans to make him extremely re-electable. Growing up and spending my entire childhood and young adulthood in West Texas- home to much-fabled high school football glory, and of course, Big Oil- I was ingrained with deeply held but also unmitigated conservative beliefs. Although my father's family came from used-car money, we as well as any family in Midland or Odessa enjoyed the economic orgasm spurred on by the nation's dependence on fossil fuels. Our parents voted for Reagan, twice; George H.W. Bush, twice; vowed revenge during the Clinton years; and again helped get a Bush saddled up in the Oval Office in 2001, the same year I graduated from high school and became a freshman in college. If you were a Democrat in West Texas, you certainly didn't speak about it in public.

You might not think so much in high school about the extent to which your history and government teachers, your church, and your parents shape your social and political alighments. At least I didn't. I never went so far as to question why we vilified people and public figures who spoke out in favor of things we opposed, for whatever reason it was that we opposed them. Not having the Internet- at least today's version of the Internet- certainly played a role in that naivete. The information age simply had not yet squired tools like Facebook or Twitter or, to an extent, the blogosphere, and so my generation is still one that I believe relied largely on mainstream media like television and magazines and newspapers. So when our history teachers demanded reverance for Thomas Jefferson, we paid homage, both in term papers and in our memories (later, when college professors or literature challenged Jefferson's integrity, we were loathe to believe it); when church pastors and Sunday School teachers decried homosexual behaviors and tendencies, we solemnly pledged our agreement. We spent dinnertime watching Operation Desert Storm, which we watched as placidly as if it were a made-for-TV movie, chewing up broccoli and watching tanks emblazoned with the American flag plow through Saudi Arabia.

Then came Clinton. I remember remembering nothing except for my father's off-color jokes about Hillary's dowdiness and her peach pantsuits, and naturally, lunch-table discussions at school during which we giggled over the 42nd President's Resolute Desk indiscretions. Household names Linda Tripp and Ken Starr were parodied on Saturday Night Live so frequently that every 2nd-grader across the nation, if they didn't already, now knew what it meant to have a stain on your blue dress.

In November of 2000, I proudly showed my voter registration card and driver's license to a woman sitting at the polling booth. Alongside my Republican Women grandmother, I voted for George W. Bush and Vice Presidential candidate Dick Cheney in a district that probably boasted no more than a handful or two of votes for then-Vice President Al Gore, Jr. All people could talk about over the ensuing days was the Recount. Now notorious both for its historical precedence and subsequent journey to the Supreme Court, it was an event about which each and every single voter and pundit held an opinion. For anyone who thought or still thinks that Gore should have prevailed, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, named George W. Bush the winner of the case in what was regarded as a landmark decision in Bush v. Gore (2000).

His critics said he rode through Yale and then Harvard Law School on his daddy's coattails. When he beat out the venerable Anne Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race and went on to spend four years in office, he was regarded by most as simply a figurehead; it was Lt. Governor Bob Bullock who was instead regaled for being the "man who ran Texas as Lieutenant Governor". Accordingly, as soon as he was sworn in as the leader of the free world, people either lauded him in a back-slapping way for his "good ole boy" brass, or degraded him for his admitted alcoholic past and party days in college. I watched Will Ferrell portray him as a cocky, glad-handing idiot who said words like "pasketti" and "nuke-yoo-ler". But I also watched a man who orated passionate, if perhaps not superbly articulated speeches from the White House podium that appeared to come from (pardon my emotional side) his heart. Liberals in the media absolutely destroyed him for his insistence upon saturating each public appearance, speech, State of the Union address, and policy decision with "God rhetoric". Instead of offensive, I found it (cringe!) endearing- it appeared to be just as much a part of his inexorable authenticity as his love-it-or-hate-it Texas drawl and frat-boy swagger. After just over 200 days in office, about 50% of Americans would have professed that they strongly disbelieved in his ability to do anything, let alone what they had elected him to do. That is, until the devastating morning hours of September 11, 2001. My dormmate Megan had returned from the shower and I had followed suit, shampooing last night's cigarette funk out of my hair before class at noon. Walking back through the dormitory hallway in a towel, an unsettling and palatable hush compelled me to almost run back to my room, where I found Megan and a boy from downstairs staring at the television. I made it just in time to watch, on live TV, the second plane plow into the second tower. What. The. Fuck.

Immediately, as happens unequivocally amidst tragedy, heros emerged. President George W. Bush, Mayor Rudy Guiliani, public servants like firefighters and police officers, bystanders, and those who appeared to rise from the ashes miraculously at Ground Zero. At 18 years of age, I had never before felt patriotic; I'm sure many of my peers would agree with me. It just wasn't a part of our generation's constitution to tear up at the sight of the American flag. But on that day we wore red, white, and blue, we gave blood, we were proud to be Americans, and we believed in defending ourselves. 

...(tbc)...

The War At Home

Jim and I went almost three whole days without speaking. Sure, I could have been more vocal about the wave of nausea I experienced at the thought of an animal's ass and penis regions occupying the same pillow my clean hair and open mouth occupied each night. I could have been more explicit in my thirst to be recognized as the sole object of his desire, and not just some erstwhile distraction that had happened to suddenly and conveniently been dropped at his feet. I could have even laid down some ground rules- a code of conduct that detailed, but was not limited to the parameters of our relationship. I might have delivered an oratory on the musts and must-nots. Instead and as usual, I arbitrarily determined silence to be the greatest means to a favorable end.

When I returned home on the evening of the fourth day, it was with an air of contrition that I announced, "I don't know how to communicate." Instead of addressing Jim, I spoke into the closet, my face pressed into the cleave made by the union of closet door and wall. If he hadn't heard me, I would have not had the chutzpah to reiterate it. Revealing this to another human being was huge! But, being a man, he probably took great pleasure in hearing a woman utter those very devastatingly irrevocable words. So his response, "I've noticed. Well. Let me teach you!" came as no surprise. Now there was no turning back. Besides, to reneg would have been mortifying. I now had established a platform from which I could play my favorite and most famous role: The Misunderstood Martyr. So see? Everything always has an underlying purpose.

To be frank, if you've ever lived in a smallish space with someone to whom you do have a very, let's say, vehement attraction, four days is a LONG time. It is my personal belief that no self-respecting woman admits fault unless she stands to gain something by doing so. I had something to gain. Ideally, Jim would have asked me to expound on my inability to communicate. I assume that everyone has a keen interest in dissecting my relationship past and my history with incapable and unreliable father figures, both of which can make for a heart-wrenching (and borderline illusory) tale.

But Jim isn't the breed of man looking to nurture an adult-child-woman. Nor does he feel compelled to dance around my carefully constructed web of misanthropy. No sir- Jim was poised and ready to deliver a lecture on the ebbs and flows of maturity, presumably aware that for THAT, I had prepared no licit argument. Damn it all. Now, instead of martyr, I am simply a girl, wearing pajamas and mascara, asking a boy to do her before he gets too tired and falls asleep. And I know it's hard to believe, but instead of actually asking, I just stripped down to my panties and made sure to strike what I am sure was a very non-deliberate-looking sexy pose, stretched out on top of the sheets. When I think about it now, I imagine him rolling his eyes before removing his boxers and saying, "Well, isn't this a surprise."

Valentine's Day Reflections.

Lesson learned: Don't waste time teaching old dogs new tricks and, similarly, don't commit yourself to being some young pup's obedience trainer. Seriously. I'm pushing 30, and in my not-extensive dating life have run the gamet from romancing youngsters seven years my junior, to men old enough to be my father's younger, more assertive brother. These young ones, they have to be instructed on how to bring a woman to orgasm, how to deal with premenstrual symptoms and how to purchase the preferred tampon or sanitary napkin. They haven't mastered the art of self-confidence or of masking their jealousy when it arises. Their youth is often absolutely palpable when politics or important pieces of our cultural and historical makeup are introduced in conversation . They cuddle too little or too much.

The old ones are, let's face it, not going to be making any marked or extreme changes in behavior or rhetoric, especially as it pertains to how they treat and communicate with a significant other. Some have had vasectomies and won't be coerced into condom-wearing. Others have substantially lower libidos than even they themselves are willing to admit, blaming a less than special performance on stress, sciatica, poor blood flow. They cuddle too much, or too little. They grew up in a different time and have values and an ethos that probably are not congruent with yours. They have, possibly many times, loved and lost and loved and lost, which has perpetuated the predisposition for quick but elastic commitment, whether out of habit or necessity. Because they are older, they assume that naturally, they are wiser. They can talk for minutes that span into disconnected hours about everything from food to social and relational injustice. And, invariably, their exes.

Why not date someone in my own age pool, you ask. Well, I suppose no one my age has ever offered. My son's father was perhaps the last one, and not only did that relationship begin when I was a young (and very dumb) 18, but it also ended five years ago this summer. Maybe talking about having the same interests along the same timelines, crossing similar thresholds and being pioneers at the same junctures, watching the Twin Towers ex-- no, implode that morning in college dorms or classrooms, knowing the price of oil at each of five-year increments (and how those changes were reflected in our allowances and our dependencies on our parentals) - maybe all of that feels so moribund and flavorless to me. Maybe I resent my immediate generation and contemporaries; I suspect that's probably it.

Becoming involved with someone younger lends an air of excitement that is primarily shallow and has more to do with pop-culture than substance. The person would have been in pre-school when Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. He wouldn't appreciate why matriarchs in his family made an icon out of Princess Diana of Wales. But, he's had a PC since first grade and has been whacking it to graphic internet porn since the sixth. So once he's gotten your clothes off, he assumes certain things that only a guy watching hours of smut would assume. Asking, "Who taught you that?" would just be patronizing. So you're left to mutter all of the expected things, moan at precise moments, and eventually tremble as if you've reached an apex from which you're loathe to recover, in that order.

With an older suiter, you're signing up for one of two things: the divorcee, or the perpetual bachelor. The bachelor is of course the more frightening of the two. This breed of man has not committed himself for some critical reason that will very soon make itself apparent, and probably in a very terrible way. Common reasons are 1) The Oedipus complex, 2) the preference for the opposite sex, 3) Misogyny, and 4) Fear of commitment (possibly because it sounds so much like going to the insane asylum). Although jaded in some ways, they are fresh in others. Their knowledge of dealing with women is broader- both emotionally as well as physically. When I talk about men who have been married, I am remiss if I fail to insert a blurb about- ahem- oral sex. Sorry, bachelors, the once-marrieds win in this category. But along with the perks come glaring handicaps. The dynamic that exists between two people who were once husband and wife is one around which I've spent much of my life tiptoeing. Saturated in resentment and guilt, it clearly becomes an energy that becomes more Byzantine, if you will, with the addition of third and fourth parties. Fairly recently I had my first encounter with "the ex-wife"- an experience that was neither as painful as I had anticipated, or as comfortable as she or I would have liked. As a woman 12 years her junior, I knew exactly how I would be perceived, so I was prepared when she rolled her eyes at him while simultaneously managing a tight, ironic smile in my direction. I know that one day, I will be in her shoes, hefting around 20 pounds I didn't carry in my 20s, and smugly saying to myself, "God bless her."

Until then.

Mommy, I Miss You

After I spent the night in jail and was released on a PR bond, my friends picked me up and treated me to a chicken strip basket at a popular fast-food chain. I had given my standard-issue turkey sandwich to my cellmate. When I was put into the patrol car the night before, leaving my purse, phone, and money with the people who weren’t being carted to jail, my friend had gone through my phone in sort of a drunken mania. She called several friends, one of them whom, against her warning, called my mom in the middle of the night and told her of my plight. So when I returned home the following day, expecting only to have to explain my overnight absence, I was confronted and promptly asked to spend the night elsewhere, so without much argument, I did. She prepared a concise speech to deliver to me the next afternoon, the gist of it being to pack my bags and leave. That, too, I did without ado and without questions of when I would be able to return. I expected, however, that my detention would have a speedy expiration date.

That first night, I took my bags to Henry’s dad’s mom’s house, despite the fact that we have never really had an exemplary rapport. I didn’t want anyone who didn’t already know, to find out about the DWI, or that I had been exiled from the home in which my son was living. Over the course of the next two weeks, I did something I’d never done. I couch-surfed. First with my best friend and her husband; then with Henry’s dad; then with another girl I wouldn’t have even considered a great friend beforehand. Every day I had to worry about where I would be sleeping, and because I was so embarrassed, it became harder and harder to ask people for help. I understand that my shame could easily have been confused with pride. It was simply incomprehensible and against my nature and upbringing to ask for help from someone that I had, at the present time, no means of paying back. During those weeks, by the time it got dark, I had gotten in touch with a friend who could give me a bed and a shower for the night. Sometimes, I had already mentally resigned myself to sleeping on a bench if I had to.

My next step was to find a hotel or motel I could conceivably afford to live in for a brief period of time, long enough for my mom to cool off and decide that it would be better for everyone if I returned. Soon enough, she made it clear that it would be selfish of me and harmful to Henry if I removed him from her home. It was the middle of his last year in preschool before kindergarten, and it would be wrong to uproot him. She concurrently delivered some terms: that I find employment immediately, even if it meant making less than my unemployment benefits or if it meant getting my hands dirty flipping hamburgers. My parents had long been advocates of their children humbling themselves to “putting a green apron on and working the register at 7-11” if we had to in order to be part of the workforce. The other part of the bargain was that I seek out help for what my mother called my issues. We had spoken before about my depression, and what made it so insurmountable and cumbersome, and though many times her resolve was firm that mental illness was perhaps legitimate, more often she called it a crutch implemented by the weak to hobble through life.

Since I was 12 I had attended Al-Anon; at 16 I saw my first “therapist”; at 20 I went to rehab for my eating disorder and related drug issues; and again at 23 I repeated rehab for anorexia and bulimia. I can count the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, and therapists of whom I have been a patient on two hands and two feet. Transparency can be a challenge for some seeking treatment, but I can’t say that I have ever understood why. On each “first visit” I would hold my listener hostage for one full hour, starting with my dad’s drug addiction and my parent’s divorce, and weave my way to the present. Their questions became old hat; my responses cursory. The point is that I’ve spent hours upon hours being analyzed, and doing self-analysis, and it has turned me into someone who is introspective and self-aware almost to a fault. I know that I use anorexia and bulimia as a means of controlling things that are either outside of my realm of control, or outside of my realm of comfort. I know that I tend to get into relationships that are in some way abusive or ill-fated because I missed the point in adolescence at which girls learn how they want or should expect a partner to treat them. I know that my proclivity for cocaine and methamphetamines earlier in my twenties has to do with dopamine and serotonin imbalances and that I have a tendency to favor euphoria over stability. I know that I’ve always been starved for negative attention over no attention, and that I create chaotic situations in order to feel alive.

Carrying a suitcase and five additional bags containing my clothing and toiletries and books, I checked into an extended stay hotel. Lack of transportation was an issue, because not only was I looking for a job, but it was the middle of an extremely cold winter for Central Texas, and I had to stay within reasonable walking distance of my mother’s house so that I was able to see Henry. The first week in the hotel was lonely and I again succumbed to letting the world gnaw on my sense of resolve. One encouraging job interview turned out to be an offer to sell Kirby vacuum cleaners. Instead of getting warmer, the weather got colder. The 4-mile walk to see Henry was bearable in the daytime, but at night when the temperature dropped, it was less tolerable. No matter how cold it got, or rainy, or icy, I always went home to the hotel after I made sure that Henry was tucked into bed and fast asleep. Excepting the two months I spent in rehab for my eating disorder when he was just over a year old, we had never spent much more than a weekend, possibly a few days more, apart from each other. And most of his life since he could walk, he had tucked 5 stuffed animals under his arm and snuck into bed with me in the middle of the night. Neither of us liked sleeping alone.

It wasn’t long before he caught on and began asking questions. “Are you going to be here when I wake up?” “Can I sleep where you are sleeping tonight?” “Mommy, I miss you.” I don’t wish that dialogue--those feelings, on any child, or on any mother.

Exodus

A year has passed since I made the biggest mistake I hope I’ll ever make. Ironically, it happened on Thanksgiving night, after all of the turkey had been sliced from its skeleton and its carcass wrapped carefully in plastic. I mourned that dead, headless bird before hefting it into the non-recyclables trash receptacle. I had been unemployed since April, and had allowed myself plenty of pity and plenty of pizza. My four-year old son and I had moved in with my mother, who was simply at a loss as to how to motivate me to do anything about my dismal situation. So was I.

Following a sudden layoff, I found myself at odds with reality, the way a mountain climber might feel hanging from a sheer precipice and suddenly deciding to stop mid-ascent and unclip his carabiners and just drop. I did that. When I lost my job I immediately went to Nordstrom and bought a pair of $300 jeans. I asked my son’s father to watch him for the night while I got drunk and cried so hard that I left a trail of boogers and tears on a friend’s shirt. The next day I spent drinking margaritas and shoveling chips and queso into my mouth until I felt empty… but sated. Days became weeks, and every time I looked into my son’s face, I hated myself with such intensity that I talked myself into thinking that I wasn’t a fit mother. Half-heartedly I searched for a job. With each resume and cover letter I submitted, I had less and less hope, and then desire, to be hired. At the end of every day, I ordered a pizza, and ate it.

I couldn’t stay in the house my mother was currently helping me rent, because part of that bargain was that I was employed. My mom told me to begin packing up the house, and she picked up my son so that he would not have to witness this transitional period. Two weeks was what I was given. During those two weeks I stopped paying my bills. My gas was turned off, which meant I didn’t have hot water or a stove. Instead of doing laundry, I piled everything that was dirty into a hamper, and when the hamper overflowed, clothes were tossed onto the floor, hung over furniture, wadded up. I closed the door to Henry’s room because his absence made the house cold and awful. For several of those days I never moved from my bed and I kept my blinds closed so tightly that not even a captured fly could escape. Pizza boxes piled up and I had no impetus to carry them outside to the trashcan. When a knock came at the door, I lay very still, praying that I had remembered to deadbolt every door.  Finally, the two weeks came to an end and I was expected to have packed up the entire 1200 square feet of clothes, toys, linens, books, kitchen wares, and miscellany. I hadn’t even assembled the cardboard boxes.

That morning, my mom started knocking on the doors. Her key slipped into the lock and turned, and the deadbolt held fast when she shook the door. The landlord came and he, too, could not get in. Sitting with my back to my bedroom door in pajamas I had been wearing for two days, I didn’t even know why I didn’t just let them in and give up the charade. Instead, I listened as she called a locksmith, and I waited until he arrived, and waited as he picked the lock and waited while my mother paid him and ushered him away. She opened the front door and I imagined seeing what she saw: Filth. Everywhere. The floor needed a vacuum, or maybe just a flash flood. In the kitchen, there was food in the refrigerator that had been there for weeks. In the garage, trash was piled up and had begun to stink so badly that it almost permeated the house. Finally she approached my room and became aware that I had been inside the entire time.

This is the first time I have been able to write about or talk about that day since it happened. The amount of shame and confusion and utter helplessness that I felt neither made sense nor did I want it to make sense. And only on that day, when I started cleaning up the mess that I had been living in, did I realize how deeply depressed I had become. For the next 8 hours, without speaking, Mom and I cleaned and threw away and packed up my house. I went from feeling embarrassed to ambivalent to sentimental to angry to downright devastated. The movers came and began loading mine and Henry’s furniture into a truck to be deposited into a storage unit. Henry’s room was the only room in the entire house that was still clean. By the end of the second day, the house was immaculate. Sweeping the final cobwebs of dust from the dust boards in my room, I finally broke down and wept. And as I did, my mom pulled up to the curb and Henry got out, running to the door. “Mommy! Mommy, are we leaving this paint house?” Since we had moved in and had it painted, he had never stopped calling it our paint house. Yes, I told him. We are leaving this home.

To call it an exodus is hardly dramatic. For four years, Henry and I had had our own life, our own rooms, our own rhythm. We had our habits and our schedule and our time together. To say that I felt like a failure as a mother is an understatement. But apparently, I wasn’t done being selfish. Going back to Thanksgiving, which was two months after the move, I decided that I would go out with some friends, against my better judgment. My best friend was in town from New York City, and I agreed to let her pick me up and go out with her, telling my mom that I would be back before midnight.

It was 12:30 before we left the bar. I had agreed to be the designated driver, because my friend was temporarily license-less. Five minutes later, we were pulled over due to my failure to turn on the headlights. By four in the morning, I was booked in city jail and charged with a DWI, and walked with the rest of the women going to cell unit B, wearing canvas pants and a shirt, and plastic shoes. It had been 8 years since I had been in any kind of trouble like this. What profound consequences that night has had on me and on Henry. A year later, I think I am finally ready to tell the story.

Worms. (Opening a Can)

Breakups tend to always be about what the other person did wrong. How the other person wasn’t right for you, disrespected you, broke vows made to you, stomped all over your values, fell asleep when you were in the mood for sex, embarrassed you in public, and most importantly, wasted your precious time. A common practice is, following that last big argument, the angry and sometimes drunken night where your peers are subjected to an hour-long diatribe about your recent ex’s shortcomings, weird behaviors in the bedroom, and bad breath, after which your friends will perform the requisite recitation, “Oh. You deserve SO much better,” and you will concur that yes, you do.

Friends are good during breakups. They steer us away from self-deprecating thoughts and remind us of our strengths. They give us condoms and condolences; they encourage us to consider shots instead of beer. In your moment of weakness, friends will lavish upon you their unmitigated and undiluted solidarity. Even despite the fact that they warned you all along.

Patrick and I probably started breaking up a couple of months into our relationship. Having broken up with someone else several months prior, I was still in that tender state where vindication and having the last word still hold a certain importance. Greg was the boyfriend who, after a relatively short but whirlwind courtship, told me that if anyone suffered hurt in the relationship, it would be me. Those are words that I assume might give anyone, male or female, pause. The split in April was bitter and yet clean, without residual communication. By the fall, however, we had settled into, I guess, setting aside our differences, and resumed light but infrequent conversation via text or email. Updates on family, job news, inside jokes, etc. Thanks to Facebook, we were mutually aware that the other had begun seeing other people, but that didn’t really affect the lack of surprise I felt when one night in October, a couple of weeks before Patrick was scheduled to come to Austin to see me, he asked me if I wanted to come over to his new place and catch up. It was pure egoism that made me accept the invitation and get into his car fifteen minutes later. Once at his new digs, I remembered why I couldn’t stand him. As much as I admire ambition and self-made wealth, hearing about its inception and trajectory isn’t as stimulating when gross amounts of pride seep their way into the conversation. Yawn. Wine gets poured, and drunk. Greg mentions that we haven’t even hugged yet, and approaches me. Eye contact post-wine becomes entirely too reminiscent of bedroom eyes, and before I know it, we’re mouth-on-mouth and his hands are hugging the cheeks of my butt about the same time that I come to and pull myself out of his purposeful embrace. Awkward situations were made to become more awkward, so I offered to take myself on a tour of his apartment; he volunteered to roll a joint. During our brief courtship, we’d been bathtub-to-bed-sex people, so mention of that upon seeing his Jacuzzi was humorous and lightened the mood. Sexual tension faded, and we spent the next hour sucking on the joint and trading stories about our new significant others. It had become too late to go home, so once I’d made a compelling argument for why I should sleep on the couch and not vice versa, we said our goodnights and went to sleep.

In the morning, my head ached and my phone was dead, but I knew Patrick had tried to get in touch with me probably most of the evening and throughout the night. Patrick and I had not yet met, but we had pledged a sort of preemptive pact of monogamy- that, and he had already purchased his plane ticket for his first visit and our first meeting. Greg and I weren’t getting back together- the night had been, if anything, a mistake, but all things considered, a relatively harmless one. Thus, when I finally got to talk to Patrick later that day, I lied. “I lost my phone but was home in bed all night.” There wasn’t a shred of malice in the lie, and I even somehow felt justified in getting that closure from my previous relationship before I fully launched into another.

Had I told the truth that day, he might have cancelled his plane ticket, we might never have met in the flesh, and the whole relationship might never have happened. Instead, as you know if you have read the previous blog post, he DID come, we DID meet, and the relationship happened. But that is why I say that perhaps we did start the breakup process from the get-go when I buried that indiscretion.

This January, I came clean to Patrick about that evening, rendering as much detail as I have here, and asked for his understanding of why I lied, and for his forgiveness. His anger was more convincing than his mercy, and I remember wishing I had just left it alone.

…to be continued…

heap.

Remember the piano intro in "Hold The Line"? Sit down and I'll play it for you.

My mother once wrote a letter to me, about me. She wrote it because my therapists asked her to, and I was to write one in return. Something something something Twelve Steps, etc. When she delivered it to me, a dozen other girls and their parents were in the room with us, sitting in steel and epoxy straight-backed chairs and drinking chilled water out of Dixie cups. The air was thick and heavy, the way air in a room gets when adults are made to do things they've at one time or another seen people doing only on TV, and as they had watched they thought, "How stupid." If a Tag Heuer was consulted once, it was consulted 100 times.

We were placed in chairs facing each other in the center of the room. A “mediator”, Pam, sat between us on one side, and the rest of the patients with their parents grouped around us in an organized and evenly-spaced half-circle. Pam had the mouth of someone you could tell gave good head, and I'd thought about telling her that- reconsidering only because I didn't need to offer up any excuses for 'bisexual' being frivolously added to my list of 'symptoms.' Smiling, I waited for my mother to start. Adrenaline coursed through my chest, pouring down into my legs and up into my skull. Like I was about to win a prize or at the very least, a glut of  sympathy for the wreckage of my tortured soul. Adjusting her glasses and crossing her arms around a sheath of papers, she began speaking. Instead of addressing me as “you”, she addressed someone else: “my daughter,” and her lips tightened around the words she read from carefully constructed, grammatically perfect sentences.  Unlike parents who had spoken before her, she didn’t cry or plead; she didn’t apologize for things she knew intellectually she hadn’t been the cause of. She recounted a 9-year battle with someone she now said she did not know. The person was thoughtless and disrespectful and selfish and vain. Me. I kept holding my breath, breaking two fingernails while gripping the undersides of my chair, waiting for the part where she would discuss my merits.

 This January, I found a copy of the type-written copy of the letter in my grandmother’s closet. In my mother’s perfect handwriting, in blue ink, were the words: My letter to Q, March 2006. When I reread it, I did so again and again and again. I put it down, folded laundry and came back to it; watched something on TV and came back to it. In her letter, my mother talks about how I was growing up; she says I was talented, ambitious, smart, funny in a self-deprecating and endearing way, loving, selfless, and a delight to be around.  When writing the letter, she painted a very different picture of the person I’d grown up to be. Talent had turned into exhaustion; “ambition” had become laziness; “smart” had twisted itself into a general feeling of intellectual superiority; the self-deprecating “funny” had melded into a simply insatiable vanity; and “selfless”? I might have offered a person my leftovers and hand-me-downs, but never the clothes off my back. My mind focused on the mention of self-deprecating, because I’ve long considered that to be my best quality. But self-loathing is like making a pact with the devil: you might gain humility and perspective, but you lose your ability to love yourself.

 Admitting to being depressed is embarrassing. It’s difficult to talk about, and easy to laugh off. When I feel it coming on, I have a really cowardly formula: Accept it, get through the day, turn on Family Guy, go to work tomorrow, repeat. I become exhausted with wondering if it will ever just go away. Anti-depressants make me feel nothing, turn me into a zombie.. It’s hard not envying people who just don’t care about what other people think. What is it like to wake up in the morning and feel just NORMAL. ‘Cus in the meantime, I’ll just have to fucking fake it. 

If you have met me or talked to me, you think maybe I'm effervescent. You see someone aloof and spontaneous and fantastically eccentric. I've worked a long time to perfect that image. How am I doing? Go ahead and tell me. I love criticism.

2009 Was A Bad Year: Installment One

2009 was a bad year. It began like any other year, marked by resentment over not being able to think of a viable resolution, and not entirely determined to make any real changes anyway. I was ass-deep in a relationship with someone who was non-committal, and who was nonplussed by my primary role in life- motherhood. I had agreed several months prior to playing the piano in the band for a 4-day church retreat that was coming up. And I was experiencing a surfeit of stress at work, with layoffs hitting our company at the first of every month like clockwork. For the first time in almost three years, I started smoking pot again, a vestige of my moral deterioration, since I had promised myself in June of 2006 that I would not engage in use or abuse of any controlled substance again. One.

In February, I left for the church retreat, leaving my son in the care of my grandmother. Before leaving, I forgot or neglected to pay my utility bill, and my electricity was cut off, forcing my grandmother to take my son to my mother’s house, forcing my mother to have to babysit them both for the ensuing four days. At the retreat, my role was that of pianist, but I had also been elected a speaker, necessitating a 15-minute oral delivery on a spiritual realization or journey. It was something I had wanted to do for a couple of years, since my return from rehab and subsequent return to the church. Church symbolized, for me, something that was an integral part of my upbringing, and something I knew to be important in the proper rearing of a child. But, at the same time, feeling 100% sure of God- or A god’s existence was forever something with which I’d struggled. I arrived at the retreat, my 15-minute speech a blank piece of paper. Part of the process is asking for and receiving advice, proof-reading, editing, from other people, and so naturally, I was loathe to be approached by anyone for fear they would find out I hadn’t even begun to compose it. In the end, I drank two glassfuls of a fiber supplement on an empty stomach before bedtime, knowing that it would make me feel AND appear ill. It worked, and the next morning I was able to make a pitiful but understandable request for reprieve. Someone else at the retreat had to step up to the plate and prepare an impromptu oratory in my stead, and I felt ashamed and selfish. It was indicative of another personal failure. This is the point at which my family would later mark my descent into dejection. Two.

In March, after playing piano at a friend’s wedding, I joined the person I was seeing at a party thrown by his friends. Because he was a recent college graduate, most or all of his friends were still in school, throwing keggers and sleeping with each other and loving Ecstasy and mushrooms. I don’t think I’d been to a house party with blacklights in four or five years, and I’m positive I hadn’t missed anything about it. Insecurity got the best of me- young sire was talking to girls who I told myself looked like supermodels next to me- methodical self-deprecation I'd made into an art form. The more beer I drank, the angrier and more vindictive I became. Next, I was giving a lesson in French kissing to a boy who was a willing student, and also my beau’s good friend. And so, the night’s festivities capitulated with my date interrupting the make-out session, leaving, and locking me out of his apartment. He finally let me in, presumably because my car keys and various personal effects were in his living room, but I stayed long enough to articulate an apology that granted me overnight access. In the morning, during a post-coital conversation, he essentially dumped me in a very Don’t Let The Door Hit You fashion.

It wasn’t the breakup; the relationship had been non-climactic and inappropriate. He was never someone I cared about, nor someone with whom I desired a future. It was the feeling I had going home that morning, looking around my house that I should have been home cleaning, the laundry I should have been doing, the pictures I could have been hanging in my son’s room. It felt remarkably similar to the way I felt on the morning I lost my virginity (a terrible experience) in that I knew I’d met an end result that was in direct correlation to composite decisions I had been making. My heart hurt; I was penitent. Three.

April arrived, and my big brother, who I love to death, got married to a woman I love to death. It was an incredibly happy weekend, and I was loathe to return to a less than nurturing work environment that following Monday. Barely four hours into my workday, I was listed among thirty-one people being laid off that day. My stomach crawled up into my throat and my eyes cried without actually crying. Since November, I’d been ostensibly aware of the imminence of the events of that day, but I was as unprepared, both emotionally and financially, as I would have been if it had come unexpectedly. For me, that “job” was more than just a job; it was a place I went to every morning, and before leaving every night, had the distinct privilege of helping people and getting paid to do it. My coworkers were like family and my clients, more often than not, were people deserving of so much more than they’d been given the opportunity to have or to experience. So being let go was bigger than just knowing that my bank account would soon be depleted and bigger than the threat of unemployment. It was, for lack of a better term, sort of an end of an era. I had to return home to a child whose father was already the picture of Unemployment. This, I knew, was defeat exemplified. Four.