For years, I starved my body trying to never become a woman. At least, that’s what pop psychologists say. Female sex abuse survivors turn anorexic to make themselves forever children, suppressing secondary sex characteristics: hips, breasts, pubic hair, periods.
A couple days before she died, as I was pushing my mother in her wheelchair, I got up the nerve to tell her that I loved her and shared how much I loved spending time with her. This felt very intimate to me, thereby unfamiliar. After all, my standard share was a peck on the cheek and a distracted “love you.”
Then my beloved wife Kate was diagnosed with cancer; she spent a horrifying 6 weeks in New York hospital hell and I was dashing back and forth from home to office to hospital, trying to take care of my wife, my kids, my teaching, afraid to think about the future, or about much of anything really. The only thing that provided me any relief was working on Come Away; because it was both about my own anxieties and impending despair but also totally not about that. Working on the book was like going into a trance or something. I finished the first draft the day Kate died, in March 2012.
. It’s impossible to separate from the suffering of your loved ones, especially when grief so interrupts a person’s daily functions. Was I grieving, too? No, I was merely bearing witness. Yet I carry it as an ache in my body as though it happened to me.
Roar, love & light. BE love & light. Sprinkle that shit everywhere. Do love. Shine. You know how very precious the gift of time is. Don’t waste it. If you’re crazy about the boy, then go kiss and tell the boy. Take a shot. Why the hell not? #YOLO “Wear your scars like stardust” to quote my friend Amy Ferris, and remember the bar is high. Y
My mother and I have never gotten along. After two hours with her, I'm no longer a 58-year-old competent professional and loving wife and mother, but instead the resentful, angry teenaged daughter I once was
I’d have to be a shapeshifter, skinwalker, facedancer, changeling. A creature for whom metamorphosis is identity. I’d start every sentence as differently as possible, trying on language like shoes. How do I want to move today? I’m not satisfied that my own identity is accurate, so I collect more--writing is a place to do this less tragically than other places.
