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On Being a Fatherless Daughter.

December 21, 2014

By Ginger Sullivan.

The last time I saw him was Labor Day Weekend 1987. Our family was gathering in Memphis for my brother’s first college football game of the season. Before my car came to a complete stop, he was there, greeting me. He covered me with an outpouring of enthusiasm and love – much like a dog awaiting the homecoming of its master. Little did I know that three weeks later, he would be dead.

It seems like a lifetime ago. When I had a father. Some dads are not very good ones. I was lucky. Mine happened to be one of the better ones – or at least, I think so. He died before he turned fifty and I was all but still a child.

Sometimes, I wonder if it was all planned out. As if he set my brothers and I up on the next course of our lives and then exited stage left. My older brother had just gotten married. My younger brother just left home for college. And I was set to begin a graduate program in psychology. Weeks before he died, he had a long talk with me about how proud he was that I had chosen a profession of meaning and significance. To prepare me for my studies, he settled me into my first apartment – complete with homemade bookshelves and freshly painted furniture all at his hands. And then he vanished. He went out into the woods to deer hunt with a friend. And when he never showed back up, they went looking for him. He was found breathless on the ground.

No warning. No good-byes. No nothing. I got one of those emergency phone calls – antiquated compared to today’s cell technology. My dad’s best friend was on the other end. He told me that my Dad had been in an accident. “He didn’t make it” – his exact words still ring in my ears. Continue Reading…

Birthday, Guest Posts, love

FIFTY-EIGHT AND COUNTING.

December 20, 2014

By Lesléa Newman.

I have been waiting all my life to turn 58.

Well, not all my life exactly. Just the last 48 years, ever since I turned ten. That was the year my best friend, Vicki brought over a wooden Ouija Board with the alphabet, the numbers zero through nine, and the words “yes,” “no,” “hello” and “goodbye” painted on it in bold black script. I still remember the day we sat cross-legged on the carpet of my bedroom facing each other with the board and our future between us. We asked the Ouija Board typical ten-year-old-girl questions: Would we get married? (Yes for both of us which proved correct: Vicki married a handsome man named David and I married a handsome woman named Mary). Would we have children? (Yes for Vicki who happily raised three magnificent children; no for me, who happily raised a pride of magnificent cats). And then bravely and stupidly I asked the Ouija Board: “How old will I be when I die?

Vicki and I held our fingertips lightly against the wooden heart-shaped marker as it slid across the board slowly, stopping first at the “five” and then at the “seven.” “Fifty-seven,” I crowed, thrilled to learn I’d live to a ripe old age. At the time, fifty-seven seemed beyond ancient. Why, my mother wasn’t even that old! It was 1965 which meant that I wouldn’t turn 57 until 2012, a year that sounded so far off and futuristic, it couldn’t possibly ever arrive.

I don’t remember ever consulting the Ouija Board again. But I do remember how its premonition popped into my head when death almost came to call. I was home alone slicing a leftover baked potato into rounds to fry up for breakfast. I popped a piece into my mouth without thinking about it until it landed flat across the top of my windpipe, sealing it tight as the lid on a canning jar. But I’m not 57 yet, I thought as I leapt up, raced to a neighbor’s house and frantically pounded on her door. After my neighbor performed the Heimlich maneuver, and the piece of potato flew out whole and landed with a splat against the wall, I thanked her and calmly strolled home, as if she had just given me a cup of tea instead of the rest of my life. She didn’t understand how I could remain so unrattled. But I was only 23. According to the Ouija Board, I still had 34 years to go.

Over the years, there were other brushes with death: a car accident here, a bumpy flight there. And then there was that time when I foolishly followed an electrician’s advice and stuck a raw potato into the socket of a broken overhead lamp to see if the switch was on or off. It was on, the potato sparked and fried, and I almost did, too (what is it about me and potatoes?).

And then I turned 57.

Guest Posts, Letting Go, loss, love, Men, Relationships

Longing For Her.

December 1, 2014

By Tim Lawrence.

Our relationship ended in a myriad of contradictions, with love and uncertainty.

She had been my closest confidante for several years—my companion, my lover, and truly my very best friend. This was not a pairing of superficiality, it was the most profound love I’ve ever experienced. Prior to meeting her, I did not fully grasp just how extraordinary another’s happiness and wellbeing could become to you—how inextricably linked you could become to another person.

It was a gift I had avoided most of my life, never really allowing my romantic relationships to move into the territory necessary to achieve the sort of undeviating commitment most of us hope for. But this was different. And it awakened a part of me I had no idea even existed.

An understanding of a lifetime, found, cherished, and cultivated slowly.

That’s what I wanted. And I had found it.

Until I lost it. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Inspiration, love

My Mother’s Boyfriend and Me.

November 24, 2014

By Caroline Leavitt

When my mother turned ninety-two, she fell in love for the first time.

Although my mother and my father had been married for over thirty years, theirs wasn’t even remotely a love story. Before she met him, she had thought she was in love with the son of a butcher. He courted her for a year, and one night, he had even scribbled out their wedding announcement in mustard on a napkin, giving it to her to put in her purse for safekeeping. Then he left for Chicago, promising to come back to her. He kept his word to return, but not until six months later, and then, he was holding the hand of a pretty, very pregnant wife. When his wife excused herself to powder her nose, he cornered my mother in the kitchen, hotly whispering against her neck, “Maybe I made a mistake.”

“No,” she said. “I did.”

As soon as he left, my mother let her heart break. It wasn’t so much that she cared about this young man, whose character was clearly lacking, but, it was more that she saw her future leaving her. A family. A home. All the things she wanted so desperately. She was living with her parents and she lay in bed crying, so long and so hard that her father began to plead. “You have to live,” he urged. He sat by her bed, coaxing food, insisting that she get up, and try and be happy again.

And so, because she loved her father, because she didn’t want to be a disappointment to him, and mostly because she was twenty-eight, which was as close to spinsterhood as she could allow herself to get, she let herself be trundled off to what was then called an adult day camp, where single men and women could spend a month, living in cabins, enjoying swimming, boating and arts and crafts, but really looking for their mates. There, as if she were choosing a cut of meat for dinner, she had her pick of men. She settled on two of the most marriage-minded: a sturdy looking guy who was going to be a teacher and my father, who was quiet, a little brooding, but who already had a steady, money-making career as an accountant. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him, but she believed that love had already passed her by, like a wonderful party she had somehow missed. But even so, she could still have the home, the family, the life she wanted if she were only brave and determined enough to grab it. My father asked her to marry him, and she immediately said yes. But later, she told my sister and me, that when she was walking down the aisle, her wedding dress itchy, and her shoes too tight, she felt a surge of terror. This isn’t right, she thought. But there was her father, beaming encouragingly at her. There was her mother, her sisters and brothers and all her friends, gathered to celebrate this union. Money had been spent on food and flowers and her white, filmy dress. And where else did she have to go? So she kept walking. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, love, poetry

How to Love a Stranger.

November 13, 2014

By Adina Giannelli.

How about we meet in Chicago, a city neither mine or yours, and see what, if anything, might be found there;

And you will fly in from a small southwestern city, not your own, and I will arrive at O’Hare late, owing to unanticipated flight delays, and I will meet you in the lobby of the Hotel Godfrey, and you will be there, waiting;

And our hotel will be full of Europeans and people looking for a time, a show, a warm body (always a warm body);

And I will talk to you for hours, that night, about unanticipated subjects of all kinds; you ask for a year-by-year recitation of my life, and you ask are you okay? and how are we doing? and does this irritate you, the barrage of questions. Some people find it cloying, you will tell me, but I think it kind;

And we will sleep, strangers in a large cocoon, and your hand will slip quietly over mine;And we will float, curious, upon the muddy waters, in our rapid riverboat, our bodies anchored to metal folding chairs, our necks craning to see the city’s architecture from our watery vantage, the sun shining bright against us, in spite of and through the wind;

And the boat will rock and occasionally rise, the tide high or low (but I don’t know), and we will glide in our seats, unsure of what is flowing forth before us, certain only of our bodies, separate and together, moving easily through space and time;

Guest Posts, healing, love

Markings.

September 15, 2014

By Arielle Berstein.

On the surface all my injuries have always healed perfectly.

I don’t have any visible scars. I’ve never broken a bone. I spent a good deal of my youth avoiding permanent marks.

I have no tattoos, though I have had a few piercings. I’m not frightened of leaving a mark, but I’m terrified of scars, anything that haunts the body, that lingers beyond a reasonable amount of time.

There was a time in my youth when I sincerely longed for my suffering to be more visible. I was never a cutter, but there was a time when I experimented with biting. When I was incredibly stressed out I’d clamp down on my arm and watch my little teeth marks fade from red to white to nothing at all. I was amazed at the resilience of skin, how many marks didn’t last.

I still feel things first in my body before anything else. Real love; real, thick love I feel in my hands before I feel it in my heart. I’m offended by anything less than a bear hug. I ask my love for grips, marks, bites before asking to be covered in tiny kisses. There is gentleness in me, but there is also something rabid in my heart. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, healing, love

Patchouli: An Untraditional Father’s Day Post.

June 15, 2014

Patchouli: An Untraditional Father’s Day Post by Amy Roost.

I was six. She was twenty-six. I was a chubby, dishwater-blonde tomboy. She was a tall, lithe, brunette model. I wore football jerseys. She wore patchouli. The only thing in had in common was a love for her boyfriend–my dad–which is saying something because he was not an easy man to love.

My dad was a type-A take-no-prisoners business man who cheated on my mom, probably from the day they met. He left my mom, my brothers and I one June day in 1968 with no warning. No explanation. Just a garment bag in one hand and a red and black electric shoe polisher in the other. He found me coloring in my room, at the pink and white activity table my grandpa had made me and said to me, as if I’d understand, “I’m leaving”.

“When are you coming home?” I asked.

“I’m not, sweetheart” was all he said. Fade to black.

And yet he had his moments, enough to make himself lovable, at least to those of us who were hardwired to do so. He brought dolls for me from every foreign land to which he travelled. And though he was a work-a-holic, he tried to make up for it—-in the only way he knew how–with large expenditures of money and extravagant gestures such as a family vacation to Aculpulco or a new bobble for my mom. I distinctly remember the night he came home later than usual with a box of Bazooka Bubble Gum for each of us three kids, and a bouquet of roses for my mom. My mom must have understood he was apologizing for some unspoken transgression. Maybe my brothers–six and nine years older–understood as well. I just remember thinking what an awesome dad he was for giving me a whole box of my favorite bubble gum, comics and all!

I also remember he’d sometimes sit on the fireplace hearth and play the acoustic guitar. (It’s no wonder I fell in love with Christopher Plummer when “Sound of Music” was released the following year). I always requested that he play “Drunken Sailor”. He’d strum the chords and together we’d sing. Sing it loud. I remember that. And the bubble gum. And the garment bag.

My parents eventually separated. My mom was awarded full-time custody and my dad had visitation every Wednesday evening and every other Sunday. I’m not sure if my dad’s having the short end of the custody stick had to do more with the times or because my dad never wanted any kids in the first place–or so my mother claimed.

Wednesdays we went to dinner. My mother instructed me to always order the most expensive item on the menu and so I developed a liking for lobster. I suspect my dad caught on because he began taking us exclusively to the Pickle Barrel–a local hamburger joint.

On Sundays we were supposed to spend the whole day with him, however, since he’d relocated to downtown and we were in the north suburbs, he generally didn’t pick us up until closer to noon. I’d wake up early, dress for the city, sit on the living room couch and wait. My brothers and I used to call “shotgun” whenever all three of us would go somewhere in the car, however, my dad made it clear from the start that I was to sit up front with him on our Sunday outings. No more calling shotgun. Shotgun belonged exclusively to daddy’s little girl.

Sometimes we’d go to Old Town and stop in at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, then stop for an oversized chocolate chip cookie at Paul Bunyon’s*, Other times he’d take us to a Cubs game. He would buy us peanuts on the way to our seats located on the first base side just behind the Cubs dugout and he taught me how to keep score in the program. I may very well have been the youngest girl to know what an infield fly rule was.

I heard his Lincoln Mark IV pull into the cul de sac just as a dog who is sound asleep hears the jingling of his master’s car keys. I looked over the back of the couch through the bay window to confirm. There he was! But wait, who was that woman with him…riding shotgun? I ran to get my mom. “There’s someone with daddy!” I shouted.

I remember my mom going outside. I remember going back to the couch and peeking through the curtains as my dad got out of the car. I remember how they stood face to face on the sidewalk with their lips both simultaneously and furiously moving. I remember my dad storming toward the front door. I remember the front door slamming and his calling “Amy Liz!”. I remember my mom coming in through the basement door. I remember my running for the steps leading down to the basement. I remember my mom reaching out and taking hold of my left hand as I scuttled down the stairs, and my dad coming down after me and grabbing my right hand. I remember becoming a human rope in their tug of war. And then I don’t remember. I don’t remember who let go first. I don’t remember falling.

I do remember the scrape I had on my knee the next day. I remember kicking and screaming while my dad carried me out to his car then pushed my head down and forced me into the back seat. I remember the model’s name–Michaelann. I remember the pungent scent of patchouli in the car. To this day, I remember that scent. And if tomorrow someone wearing patchouli were to get on an elevator I was riding, I’d frantically press every button for every floor in a desperate attempt to free myself from the grip of my childhood.

Click photo to connect with Amy.

Her multi-dimensional suchness, Amy Roost, is a freelance writer, book publicist, legal and medical researcher, and vacation rental manager. She and her husband are the authors of “Ritual and the Art of Relationship Maintenance” due to be published later this year in a collection entitled Ritual and Healing: Ordinary and Extraordinary Stories of Transformation (Motivational Press). Amy is also Executive Director of Silver Age Yoga Community Outreach (SAYCO) which offers geriatric yoga teacher certification, and provides yoga instruction to underserved seniors.

Jennifer Pastiloff, the founder of The Manifest-Station, is a writer living on an airplane. Her work has been featured on The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Jezebel, Salon, among others. Jen’s leading one of her signature retreats to Ojai, Calif over Labor Day in Ojai, Calif and she and bestselling author Emily Rapp will be leading another writing retreat to Vermont in October. Check out jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Next up: Seattle, London, Atlanta, South Dakota, NYC, Dallas, Tucson. She tweets/instagrams at @jenpastiloff. Join a retreat by emailing barbara@jenniferpastiloff.com.

Next workshop is London July 6. Book here.

Guest Posts, Letting Go, love

Prop Love. By Jordan E. Rosenfeld.

February 14, 2014

My first serious relationship was forged, not in lust or booze, like most of my college friends, but in furniture and household goods. “Martin” and I moved in together at the end of our Freshman year, built a checking account on the flimsy foundation of financial aid checks and subsisted on Bisquick pancake batter and big dreams.

For the first five months of living together we slept in a pile of sheets and blankets on the floor lusting after bedroom sets we couldn’t afford and dish settings to match.

“There’s no way I’m taking help from your parents,” he insisted. Having not yet met his family or laid eyes on his childhood home, I didn’t understand his stonewalling. But I was not too proud to take help on the sly, my parents peeling off cash like dealers, to buy a few necessities and blend them in slowly so he wouldn’t notice. There was a grimy romance to our deprivation. My attitude was partly from having grown up in Marin County, California, where, no matter that one of my parents’ income was Welfare provided and the other from illicit sales, my grandparents still had to bail us out. I wouldn’t fully appreciate Martin’s origins for many months to come.

Meanwhile, Martin got a job on campus cleaning dorms that first summer and came home with abandoned items while the supervisor looked the other way. We gained an electric can opener, a good cutting knife and eventually our first bed, a rickety, bent-spring mattress set, stained and smelling faintly of ammonia.

While these were hardly luxury items, they were the glue we needed to paste together the edges of our flimsy union.

Martin dressed like a J.Crew model, in tightly-fitting, sleek fabrics, groomed himself impeccably, and kept his clothing and possessions in tightly controlled order that corralled my naturally slovenly tendencies into cinched up squares. I imagined that his childhood home reflected this image. “I think you’ll be surprised by my house,” he said as we eventually made the four hour drive up to misty redwood country. I prepared myself for grandeur that would put to shame all the apartments and tiny two-bedroom houses I grew up in: a sprawling ranch-style home with Spanish tile and big bay windows, an acre of land flanked by the area’s famous ancient trees.

When he pulled into a weedy, pot-hole strewn patch of dirt where three cars, badly rusted and ravaged for parts, and a tiny, listing shack of a house sat like some apocalyptic roadhouse, I wondered if we were stopping for directions.

His father was a diabetic emphysemic who still smoked several packs a day as though in defiance of death; his mother’s lips crimped in around words she bit back as her three other beefy sons cracked “fag” jokes at Martin for his trim, clean presentation, and gripped the flesh on my arm proclaiming, “Try not to crush her when you crawl on top of her.” After a weekend in the house I had to hang my clothes on the apartment porch for a day before I could even wash the tobacco stench out of them.

Martin was odd man out, ashamed of his roots, and it made me want even more to give him the material façade he so desperately craved.

By Sophomore year, we both took jobs that paid more than minimum wage, a whopping $6/hr, and moved into a “cush” apartment—that is to say, a two-bedroom with a roommate, where we were no longer privy to our neighbors’ explosive toilet habits. For a brief time the new place itself was material enough to keep us happy.

When things got rocky near the end of our first year because my “take it all to therapy” desire to process feelings clashed with his “button up your shame” stoicism, he surprised me with a turquoise blue Mustang; she looked good, but her alternator went out on long-distance journeys. In it we traveled (and broke down) to places Martin’s neglected inner child needed to go: Disneyland (blew a tire), Universal Studios (dead battery) and the Drive-Through Tree in Humboldt—which we could not drive through because it was closed.

When our roommate moved out six months later, the empty space unbalanced us. As a temporary fix we bought plastic bathroom sets printed with sea shells; a comforter—which sadly provided little comfort; and pre-fab paintings of the sun and moon—which we’d already stopped being for each other—to hang over the new stereo system.

To fix the disparities between us, after new outfits and sets of dishes and cookware did not turn us into The Beav’s parents, Martin upped the ante: a trip to Italy.

Martin became unusually affectionate as the trip neared, returning home after special forays to the mall for trip-related “surprises”—mainly new travel-friendly clothing for himself and tchotchkes like leather luggage tags and a money purse that screamed “I am a tourist, steal this” to me.

Two days before we left, though I found it quite by accident, I discovered the travel pouch contained more than traveler’s cheques and passports; a bulky box-shaped something holding what girls are taught to sell their souls for.

Holy fuck, I thought.

I spent our first week in Rome watching him gauge the quality of light and the photo-worthiness of his profile against the Coliseum versus the Pantheon. I was sure it would take place at the leaning tower of Pisa, or outside that powerful symbol of God-sanctified unions—the Vatican. Or maybe at one of the sweet street-side cafes where he glowered over clenched jaw when the waiters flirted with me.

By the time we reached Venice, halfway into our trip, I had the urge to drag the box out of his pouch at night, slip the ring on and simply flash my hand at him in the morning.

I also thought of losing him in a crowd of tourists and hitchhiking around Europe for some summer fun of a variety that did not make me feel like I was already married.

Yet I let myself be led onto that gondola, wrinkling my nose against the putrid smell of those otherwise lovely canals (a detail not featured on any travel literature). I watched him survey the scenery, imagining his thoughts—Near Casanova’s home? Nah too obvious.

As we neared the final stretch of the ride, I felt him fumble in his pouch at my side while I pretended not to notice. He turned to me with the smile of a man who has just bought a wide-screen TV.

He flipped open the box. I know he said the words but they are lost in the white noise of my shock. I gasped.

A diamond!

A fucking diamond?

I had told him in no uncertain terms that I didn’t like diamonds, even less the solitaire—that universal symbol of possession. I liked pinkish tourmalines and muddy agates, jewels that still resembled the earth they came from.

Yet, with two weeks remaining on the trip, I slid on his ring like a yoke, faking a smile while daydreaming about going home with the gondolier.

The next morning I woke with a weight around my finger that gradually looped around my entire body until I was dragging cement feet through Venetian streets.

Noticing my sagging demeanor, Martin went on a purchasing frenzy, picking up iconic trinkets we could barely carry—a glass knockoff of the Rodin sculpture The Lovers; a Venetian urn and a Murano glass necklace. These were props to convince at least one of us that in setting the stage with all the right items, we could pretend that our love had a life-time guarantee like the leather couch and the display case that housed tiny precious things our hearts couldn’t hold.

***

For eight months after he proposed, the ring snagged on clothes and scratched red lines into our flesh in bed at night. Rather than a diamond, I wore a dangerous claw that tore at the seams of our life.

When we’d been engaged nearly a year, my high school girlfriend, Rain, came to visit me while Martin was off playing indoor soccer.

“So are you excited?” she asked, holding my finger up to the light as if to assess some odd fungus I had acquired.

I prepared to speak the words in my head, the practiced ones that I said to everyone who asked, “Of course. Marriage will be great!”

What I actually said was, “I don’t think I’m ready to get married.”

Rain scanned my material paradise and then focused her wide blue eyes on me. “Hmmm,” she said.

“What do you mean, hmmm?”

“Oh nothing,” she said, stroking her own long fingers as if to point out how unencumbered they were. “I’m just glad I asked. It sounds like you have some thinking to do.”

Those two sentences bulldozed the paper set of my relationship. Twenty years old was too young to cinch myself to a man who would go silent on me for three days at a time if I pissed him off or questioned his judgment. A man whose ex-girlfriends from high school had a funny way of turning up in person and on the phone just to “see how you’re doing.” A man who felt threatened by my writing in my journals—my most sacred personal act. I feared that I would become just another fixture in our home, a polished, perfect wife unit who completed the bedroom set or the new kitchen.

Still, Martin and I didn’t break up instantaneously; after all, it takes more than a day to demolish a house. I slowly moved the things that were unequivocally mine to a new apartment, saying I needed a little last-chance independence. We dated once a week under the pretense that nothing had really changed, the way we had built our prop life in the first place. Yet each time I stopped by for a “date” there’d be a new pile of our carefully curated stuff, like surgically-removed organs, waiting for me on the table.

“You don’t want those?” I’d ask, lifting kitchen towels and matching Tupperware.

He’d shrug. “I thought you did.” Suddenly it was no longer clear what belonged to whom, or why it had ever mattered.

The set of our romance grew bare, but we hung in there.

Until I tried to give back the ring.

“Don’t fucking insult me!” His strong jaw was rigid with rage.

I might as well have said ‘Your money’s no good here anymore.’

“But we’re not getting married and you spent money on it.” I felt it was a fair gesture.

He glared at me. “Nothing was ever good enough for you.”

For me? For me? I never wanted all this fucking stuff, I thought but didn’t say. I was merely the prop girl, trucking in goods, ticking off items on a list to make him happy. Only I hadn’t realized it until then.

It was clear that more than just the engagement was over. Still, I was stuck with the piece of jewelry that barely measured an ounce yet weighed me down like a mattress. I could feel it deep inside my jewelry box like the Princess and the pea, hear a metallic pinging in my inner ear whenever we were in the same room.

I could think of only one solution. I went to the grounds of the University at the edge of the duck pond where he’d once seduced me with a necklace and murmurings of how different I was from other girls. Though I hadn’t ever liked it I felt sorry for the ring, for how it had failed to keep Martin and me together. How it had never had a chance to sit on a married girl’s finger and never would. I threw it into the pond and imagined its slow descent to the mucky bottom. It wasn’t a gracious end, but at the time I was thinking like a serial killer: if neither of us could keep it, then no one should have it.

With only a hiccup’s panic after it arced through the air, relief hit me like a cold sweat as it slipped into the dark water. Only the ring had disappeared; I was still here.

Jordan Rosenfeld is the author of the novel Forged in Grace, and the writing guides Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time, and Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life (with Rebecca Lawton). Jordan’s essays and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, and she teaches via online writing courses and webinars. She has two writing craft books soon to be released with Writer’s Digest Books: A Writer’s Guide to Persistence: A Toolkit to Build & Bolster a Lasting Writing Practice (Spring: 2015), and, with Martha Alderson, “The Plot Whisperer,” Deep Scenes: Plot Your Story Scene-by-Scene through Action, Emotion & Theme (Fall, 2015), the material of which will be taught at their first annual WriterPath.com Retreat. Her first romantic suspense novel (pen name J. P. Rose) Night Oracles, releases Spring, 2014. www.jordanrosenfeld.net.

Jennifer Pastiloff is a writer based in Los Angeles. She is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Jen will be leading a Retreat in Costa Rica at the end of March and her annual retreat to Tuscany is in July 2014. All retreats are a combo of yoga/writing and for ALL levels. Read this post to understand what a Manifestation retreat is. Check out her site jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Jen and bestselling author Emily Rapp will be leading another writing retreat to Vermont in October. A lot. Next up is a workshop in London, England on Feb 15th. Book here.

And So It Is, Grief, Guest Posts, healing, loss, love

Nothing Is Just One Thing. By Elizabeth Crane.

February 6, 2014

Nothing is just one thing. By Elizabeth Crane.

The last few days have involved a combination of gratitude and morbid reflection. The inevitable losses that result from addiction somehow still never fail to shock me, though I have not had a drink in nearly twenty-two years and I’ve seen more than a few people die at this point. It wasn’t until the news about Philip Seymour Hoffman that I thought about how many there have been – which turns out to be too many to count – I keep thinking of others. Sometimes you see it coming, sometimes you don’t, and for me, most of the times, I just don’t want to. I’ll make up reasons why this one or that one is an exception so that my friends will all live forever, or at least until after I go first. The people I’ve met in recovery are some of the most phenomenal people I know; some have come back from homelessness and prostitution to build lives they could once barely imagine. My own drinking story is less dramatic; think of your most self-pitying girlfriend and add in a bunch of booze (whatever was available/free) and poor decision-making and that’s about as interesting as it gets. When I quit, I had reached a point where I imagined going on like that for the rest of my life, maybe never even missing a day of work at the job I hated and for sure never having any more money than I did then (which was in fact, substantially negative), or a relationship that lasted longer than four months, and I saw a way to change that worked for me.

When I was newly sober, Phil was part of a crew of my closest friends. He wasn’t my closest friend, I want to be clear about that. We had many delightful conversations, but we weren’t I’ll call you when I get home kind of friends. We were close with a lot of the same people (who I did call when I got home), and I often saw him on a daily basis. That was two decades ago. But it was a critical time in my life. I cannot overstate how much each person in that group meant to me, then and now; we were part of a greater thing, and we all helped each other whether it was deliberate or not.

Over the years, many in that group moved away from NY, including myself. In Chicago, I found a new group of people to break my daily bread with, and as we built our new lives, we all had less time to gather every day. I have kept in touch with those who aren’t close by, and we’ve always found ways to keep tabs on each other, pre-social media and pre-email. We used the phone. We wrote letters! Crazy.

I’m not getting to it here.

It’s been twenty-two years. Countless individuals have helped me change my life, countless more help me keep it changed. But there’s a special place in my heart for the people I met at the beginning. And losing one of them feels different – shocking, frightening, heartbreaking, cause for a broad, unbidden life review. The short version is that it’s good now, life. I’m happy and well, I have meaningful work and healthy relationships with people. I’m also married to a sober person, and yet it’s not until just now that I’ve stopped to really consider the flip side of that. We continue to do what we need to to maintain our sobriety, but it is part of our makeup to want to drink or use. Relapse happens. There’s a lot of talk in the media right now that makes me want to scream, the idea that we can just suddenly decide to not drink or take drugs, and that it’s a moral failing somehow when we can’t. We drink and take drugs because it’s what we’re wired to do. I’ve said many, many times that I think it’s just incredibly hard to be awake and conscious in the world. Shitty things happen kind of non-stop. People die. That’s just the deal. Spectacular things happen too, which is the part of the deal that makes the other part of the deal worth shaking on. But the feelings associated with the relentless input of life can often present themselves as unbearable, and plenty of people can have one beer or one hit off a joint and resist taking another. Alcoholics and addicts don’t have that luxury, not in my view, but we’re really, really good at making up stories about it. Maybe I should just speak for myself. I’m really good at making up stories about it. “Oh, I never crashed a car. Oh, I never drank as much as so and so did. Oh, it wasn’t really that bad. Oh it’s been a long-ass time now, I’m older and wiser and sure it will be different. Oh, I’ll just take one extra painkiller, just this once – it’s prescribed!” And so you have one, but for an addict or an alcoholic, as they say, one is too many and a thousand isn’t enough.

I’m still not getting to it. Maybe I don’t even know what it is.

So Phil died, and our friends are crushed, and I’m in shock and yet I feel lucky and amazed that I’m here. I don’t know how I got to be this age. (My thirty-fifth high school reunion is this year. Wha-huh?) That’s shocking too, because not many people get to be this age without a lot of losses. Both my parents are gone now. I’ve been back in NY for a couple of years, where I grew up, where I drank and where I quit, fueling my bittersweet nostalgia for that time of early sobriety in particular, crossing Columbus Circle with eight or ten friends through rain and slush and sunshine to our favorite coffee shop; we had a big round table in the window that was almost always held for us. I think of all those guys – and it was a guy-heavy group, though I had many sober women friends too – and how I had crushed on almost all of them for one five minutes or another even though I was in no position to be seriously involved with anyone at that time – and according to some greater plan, wouldn’t be for another ten years. (It worked out right.)

Maybe there’s nothing to get to. Oh yeah, gratitude and morbid reflection. I think we exist in a culture where we still think in black and white so much of the time. So and so should have not taken drugs, obvi. This is right, that’s wrong. You’re happy or you’re sad and if you’re sad you should get happy. But that’s not my human experience. I exist in a place where I feel at once profoundly conscious of what I’ve been given in this life, and also how quickly that goes. I feel grateful, giddy, on occasion, at the bounty that’s been given to me, but it’s not mutually exclusive of feeling impossibly sad. They coexist, more or less constantly. I’d much prefer an easier, softer way. I haven’t found one yet, but I have found one that works for me.

***

Elizabeth Crane is the author of the story collections When the Messenger Is Hot, All This Heavenly Glory, and You Must Be This Happy to Enter. Her work has been featured in McSweeney’s The Future Dictionary of America, The Best Underground Fiction, and elsewhere.

Grief, Guest Posts, healing, loss, love, motherhood

What Is Gained After Insufferable Loss.

January 24, 2014

By Stacey Shannon.

I hide these tears from my husband and kids. It upsets the kids, unsettles them, to see me cry. My husband, who loves me, but who never properly dealt with his own grief, is not able to respond to the quivering blob of bottomless need that replaces his normally stoic and capable wife each year at this time. This upsets me–but then most everything upsets me right now. I am short with my darling dears. Then berate myself for not holding them close and treasuring them instead. They are, after all, the babes God allowed me leave the hospital with.

But, now, it’s a rainy Monday morning, my darling dears are at school, my husband, at work and I am on the couch, still fighting a stomach thing that has been dogging me for two weeks. I call the doctor to explain the problem and as I am made to list and thus face, the pain, inconvenience and other indignities I’ve suffered for the last 10 days, it is too much, something snaps and the tears will not be stopped.

Who are these tears for?

They are for my raven-haired first born. Why she was allowed to leave here without knowing how very much she was loved and wanted, I can’t comprehend. When I think of the things she missed, that we missed as a family, I can only shake my head. I’m sorry her last day on earth was spent on the surgeon’s table instead of in my arms. I’m sorry I let them cut her satin skin and crank open her impossibly tiny chest. I guess we made the only decisions we could at the time, but, now, knowing the outcome, I wish I had said “no” and spent her last days holding her warm little body, letting her feel my love for her. Covering her angel skin with mommy-kisses and tickling her tiny feet. I would have rocked her and sang her all the lullabies I’d been storing away like so many Christmas ornaments wrapped in tissue paper. I didn’t have the chance to do any of these things until it was all over. I hope she doesn’t hold it against me.

And, they are for me, the girl I used to be. The girl I was 12 years ago who never believed, no matter what the doctors said, that my baby would not come home with me. I was the one reassuring everyone around me. I was keeping every one’s hope afloat. The possibility of my baby dying never once computed with me until it was all over. It took us a year and half of trying, in earnest, to conceive her. “God wouldn’t make us wait that long, give her to us, then take her back after 3 days. Where is the sense in that? Of course we will take her home, of course we will. She will come through this day-long surgery just fine and we will take her home. This is just another test–He just wants to see how much we want her.” That girl? The one who was so sure she understood the order of the universe? She doesn’t exist anymore. And I miss her. I cry for her broken heart, as I would cry for anyone else’s. She left a piece of her heart back there in that bitter and grey January. I see it now, that lost piece of her heart, as one sees the broken bits of muffler in the rear-view mirror as the car it was once an important part of, inexplicably, continues to chug on down the interstate.

I keep a list in my head of all sorts of things I lost in that moment. Topping the list: consciousness. I’m pretty sure, as the surgeon came into the waiting room and said, “I’m sorry folks….”, that I passed out, perhaps for only a few seconds as I slid, sweating and shaking, out of my chair and onto the floor –I was 3 days post-partum, wounded and bleeding, and I remember thinking, “Why does this shit always happen to me?”

I lost all faith in God. Fear not, Readers Dear, the Big Guy and I are tight these days. But in that moment: I was done. I hated Him and I was convinced He hated me. The spiritual rug had been pulled out from beneath my feet, and it took many tears and alot of time before I was able to put my world view right again.

I lost a future. To best explain what I mean, I can only say that I spent much of my mental energy reconciling what existed with what I thought my existence would be. These moments of reconciliation would come upon me in many places. In the grocery store, I would look down at the empty seat in the shopping cart and think, “there should be a baby there.” At Christmas I delighted in my little 1 1/2 year old niece, who was such a comfort to me, then sneak out of the room to dab at my eyes, because my baby should have been there in a pretty Christmas dress to match her cousin’s. At support group I broke down, sobbing, saying, “I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be here.” The other ladies there, also grieving, rushed to reassure me that I did indeed belong there. My friend Donna, who gained her own understanding of the situation the hard way, gently explained my tears to the others saying, “She means she shouldn’t be HERE because she should be home taking care of her baby.” Rocking and clutching my sides, I could only nod and sniffle. “None of us should be here.”, said another girl, and she, of course, was right.

I didn’t know it then, but in that moment was the beginning of the end of a friendship. I had a friend at the time, who, having chosen to be child-free, simply was not able to relate to my grief. She made me, if you can believe it’s possible, even more miserable than I already was. Let me tell you, there are few things more pitiful in this world than a young mother with aching, empty arms. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t shoulder her unending problems and listen to her go on and on. AND, BE FUNNY! She actually asked me, “Where did my friend Stacey go?” If we had been in the same room I probably would have, well, I don’t know what I would have done. As it was, I spat out across the phone lines, “HER. BABY. DIED!” The words tasted like bile and I couldn’t believe I had to actually vomit them out for her. Eventually, I learned, as I hope anyone who survives a life trauma learns, that I had to show her my back as I turned to face those who did “get me.”

I am happy to report, when I look back on that time, I believe I gained, if not more, than, at least as much as, I lost. The PA Posse as an example, (read “Wine for My Horses, Chocolate for My Girls” to learn more about the Posse) and other new relationships. New character traits: strength, patience, peace, etc.. And, a close, personal relationship with my new boyfriends: Ben and Jerry. I’ve never been fond of the whole “when God closes a window He opens a door, yadda, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah”. The universal, mathematical truth of it is that once a vacuum is formed, it will soon be filled.

We all lose our innocence. If we are lucky, we gain wisdom in it’s stead.

Click photo to connect with Stacey Shannon.

Stacey’s first daughter, Faith, would be 14 years old this month. In the space created between then and now, she and her husband have been blessed (through much blood, sweat and tears) with another daughter, age 10, and a son, age 8, who was the sweetest of surprises.

Stacey Shannon is a life-long reader/amateur writer whose most exciting accomplishment, before today, was to have been chosen as a finalist in Real Simple Magazine’s First Ever Simply Stated Blog Contest in 2011. To see her entry: https://simplystated.realsimple.com/2011/08/31/finalist-stacey-shannon/

She is president of her children’s PTO and is her church’s librarian. She has been married to her first husband for twenty-one years, and is the mother of two school-age children, both budding writers. You can find her blog at: https://insomniachamster.blogspot.com/

Join Jen Pastiloff in The Berkshires of Western Massachusetts in Feb of 2015.

Join Jen Pastiloff in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the sunflowers!

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