Browsing Tag

surviving

Guest Posts, Anxiety, Self Care

Floating

November 16, 2023
float

For weeks I sat on the edge of the pool, dangling my feet in the overchlorinated water. I watched as screaming kids executed cannonballs and underwater handstands.  My body ached with envy, but I couldn’t bring myself to jump in.  At seven-years old, I felt it was already too late for me to learn to swim.  Seven-year-olds, at least the strong, brave, competent ones, had been swimming for years.  My shame kept me firmly cemented on the ledge.

Each day, during those weeks, Dad would spread out a towel on the hot concrete and sit down next to me.  He would drape his muscular arm around my bony shoulder and whisper, “Are you ready?” Every day I would shake my head no.  Until one, particularly humid day, for some reason, I reluctantly nodded my head, yes.  That is when dad scooped me up and walked us slowly down the wide steps with the long silver banister into the shallow end of the pool at the Dolphin Swim Club.  I wrapped my goose-pimpled arms tightly around his neck and tied my skinny legs to his torso.

“We are going to start by learning to float on your back,” he said with a gentle smile.  “If you ever get into trouble or you get too tired you can always just flip over and float.”

Flip over and float.  He made it sound so easy.  But, stubborn with fear, I refused to let go.

“It’s okay, today we are just floating,” he whispered in my ear as he carried me through the water.

I clung tighter.

Dad lumbered around the pool with me glued to the trunk of his body for a long while.  He bobbed up and down, back, and forth.  When I finally relaxed my shoulders and loosened my grip ever so slightly, he cupped the base of my head in one hand and gently lowered it into the cool water.  He placed his other hand firmly on the small of my back.

“Now, just lie back,” he said calmly. “That’s all you have to do. That’s it, there you go, you are floating.  That is all you have to do.”

Dad’s voice was faint but soothing through the water. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my checks.  My thin wisps of brown hair fanned out around my face.

“Ahhhhh, what a macheyeh,” he said, repeating the Yiddish word for joy.

I could feel his smile through his words and instinctively knew its meaning.  He didn’t do that thing that many parents do– unexpectedly letting you go and making a big show of how you are doing it all by yourself. Instead, dad kept a feather touch on my lower back just enough pressure so I knew he was still with me if I needed him.

Just when I felt like I could float like that forever, a sudden splash of water smacked at my face.  I panicked and flailed my arms and legs at the same time. I felt my body slip away from dad’s hand and start to sink.   The water splashed over my mouth and nose.  Dad scooped me back up in an instant.    But those seconds left me sobbing and gasping for air.

“Shhh, shhh, shhhh,” Dad said caressing my head, “you are okay, Peanut. That little boy over there just jumped into the water and splashed you.”

He pointed to a boy with white, blond curls and a mischievous grin.   I glared at the boy still sniffling.

“Don’t worry about him,” Dad said, “all you have to do is keep floating and you will be safe.”

I buried my face in the crook of dad’s neck for a long while.  He didn’t take me out of the pool.  He didn’t suggest we try again.  He just kept bobbing along with me until I calmed down.  Then I said, “Okay, let’s try again.”

Dad smiled. He looked proud. “Okay. Remember, no matter what happens just keep floating –don’t worry about what is behind you or in front of you. Just float. I will be here the whole time.”

Within weeks I was doing freestyle, cannonballing and even working on my underwater handstand, while Dad watched from the edge of the pool—there if I needed him.

Most importantly, that summer I learned to float.

***

Thirty summers later after dad taught me to float, I was living a life I convinced myself was perfect.  I was married to a man with whom I was deeply in love.  I had a beautiful baby boy and a job as a lawyer in one of Philadelphia’s biggest law firms.  And then within the course of three months, I had stepped on a trifecta of landmines that left me flailing and gasping for air.  My marriage began to unravel.  I suffered a health crisis that I could have never seen coming.  And I experienced a professional failure that left me wondering whether I chose the right career path.

During those sticky months, I somehow managed to get through my workdays and complete the maternal checklist of dinner, bath, book, and bedtime.  Then I would collapse into grief—lying on my couch, scrolling mindlessly through Facebook, crying, and eating the most comforting food Grubhub had to offer.  I wasn’t sleeping, my eyes were perpetually swollen, and despite the Grubhub, I was somehow losing weight.  I felt myself being pulled into a place I had never been before.  The identity I had spent so much of my life erecting had crumbled in the span of three months.  I didn’t know who I would be without the perfect marriage, the perfect job, and a healthy functioning body.

I had always learned that Jews don’t kneel, but one sleepless night in August I got up and for some reason found myself on my knees at the edge of my bed with my hands cupped in front of me, the way I had seen little kids pray on television.

“Please,” I whispered to a God I had never spoken to before, “please take this all from me.  Please help me.”

I stayed there on my knees for a long while.  I was waiting for an answer, a sign, some instructions about how to move forward.  There was no answer, no sign, no instructions.  God said nothing.  Still, I felt calmer for having spoken the words, lighter somehow. I got back in bed and just kept whispering to myself, “you are ok, you are ok, you are ok.”

Kneeling before my bed and asking for God’s help became my ritual that summer. The words “you are ok” became my refrain.  I repeated them to myself each time my thoughts pulled me into regret, anger, shame or overwhelm.  I repeated them when I felt rage rise in my chest and when I felt terrified of what was to come.

By September, I was sleeping better, crying less, reading more.  I was singing to my baby boy again. And at some point, that fall, I realized I was floating.

*This essay was originally published online at Philadelphia Stories. 

Tammi Markowitz Inscho is a reformed trial lawyer turned writer. Tammi’s personal essays have been featured here at The Manifest-Station and in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Tammi is currently hard at work on her first novel. She also leads creative writing workshops for youth and teens in the Philadelphia area. She lives in Center City Philadelphia with her husband and young son.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

We are huge fans of messy stories. Uncomfortable stories. Stories of imperfection.

Life isn’t easy and in this gem of a book, Amy Ferris takes us on a tender and fierce journey with this collection of stories that gives us real answers to tough questions. This is a fantastic follow-up to Ferris’ Marrying George Clooney: Confessions of a Midlife Crisis and we are all in!

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Self Care, Work/Life Balance

Hungry

October 7, 2023
boss

When I get the job at the literary agency, I am relieved. I am months away from turning 26 and being kicked off my parents’ healthcare plan. My current cobbled-together schedule of part-time and freelance work gives me neither insurance nor the amount of money I would need to purchase my own. The new job does not pay well, but I will get healthcare and overtime pay.

The salary is $32,000, but, my new boss says, “With the amount of work you’ll be doing, you can make $50,000 a year, easily.”

~~

On my first day of work, a steam pipe bursts and sends billowing clouds of unidentified smog around the neighborhood. Later, someone who lives in the area will tell me he bagged up and disposed of all the clothes he’d been wearing that day. I sit in the office, being trained by a departing assistant to answer the phones, use the filing system, and manage the mail until a firefighter comes up and tells us we need to go home.

~~

My boss does not live or work in New York City, and so every time somebody calls for her I have to transfer them to her cell phone. For the first few days, the transfers do not go the way she expects, and she screams at me over the phone, telling me to follow the directions in the guidebook the previous assistant left behind. This is the way I’m doing it, I tell her, on the verge of tears, but however I’m doing it is wrong. I place test calls using my cell phone and other phones in the office. Nobody else works in the office every day, so I need to do it myself, scurrying from phone to phone. It transpires that the desk phones have been switched, and the mechanism is slightly different than the instructions I’ve been given. I figure out how to do it.

Every time the phone rings, my stomach jumps into my throat.

~~

One day my subway stalls and I am fifteen minutes late. I miss a call from my boss, who immediately emails and texts me to see where I am. I start leaving my apartment at 8 AM so I can be at my desk by 8:30, giving me a buffer in case the trains are disrupted. I pick up a large iced coffee on the way, no breakfast.

~~

My boyfriend has been trying to get me into eating fish, and he makes a lovely meal of confit salmon over pasta that I cannot take a bite of.

“What do I do?” I ask. I am two weeks into the job and have cried every day.

He tells me to start looking for other work. Maybe it’ll get better, he says, but it doesn’t hurt to keep applying in the meantime.

It has taken me months to get this job. The idea of sending my resume out again, after ten- and twelve-hour days that leave me physically and emotionally exhausted, makes me feel ill. I stir the pasta around my plate and nod.

~~

My new healthcare does not cover my current therapist. She reduces her rate for me. These out-of-pocket costs and the money I still contribute to my useless health plan add up to almost half my salary. My parents pay for the therapy, and I feel small and guilty every time I write my therapist a check for the lowered fee.

~~

A main part of my job is reading submissions from authors to see if they are good fits for my boss to represent. Ostensibly, I could offer to represent any of them myself, but I have never sold a book to a publisher and cannot imagine when I would find time to do so. I am supposed to read all the submissions and forward them to my boss with a sentence or two explaining my take. I have always felt like taste is subjective, but I learn quickly that there are right and wrong answers. If I say a submission has “strong prose,” my boss will pull out sentences in her reply that she thinks are clunky and say, “Really? You think this is strong?”

I agonize over every word I write to her, and it takes me longer than she would like. I read on the subway on the way to work, on the iPad she has insisted on buying me for this purpose. I read on my lunch break, if I take one. If I’m meeting a friend for drinks at 8 or 9, I stay in the office until then, my eyes itchy against the blue light from my screen. I read on the train home and in bed before I go to sleep.

I can’t remember the last time I read a book for fun. When I see a book on shelves at the store or on my bedside table, I imagine all the sleepless nights of assistants behind its pages and have to look away.

~~

I can’t eat anymore, not like a normal person. My stomach is constantly roiling, and I don’t register being hungry, especially when I’m at the office. I make myself drink smoothies from expensive juice shops, packed with protein powder and nutrients. I eat saltine crackers with American cheese torn up in wonky slices on top. I eat handfuls of salted pistachios, cracking the brittle shells with snaps that feel more satisfying than the nut inside. Sometimes I eat half a bowl of soup before the texture starts to feel strange against my tongue and I throw it away.

~~

At Christmas, authors and publishing houses send us holiday gifts. I have to take pictures of each of them and send them to my boss, telling her who they’re from. Many of the gifts are candy or cookies, and other agents in the office will often leave their gifts out for people to snack on. My boss wants to regift hers to her daughter’s teachers, so I box them back up and send them on to her house.

One day, I mix up two brands of chocolate when I email her the rundown of the day’s gifts. I realize my mistake and correct myself, but she still calls me yelling, saying that I need to be more careful. If she thanked an author for the wrong gift, how would that make her look? I’m being thoughtless, and it’s reflecting badly on her.

After the call, I take a slow walk around the block, breathing in the sharp, cold air and trying to calm my racing heart. Tears freeze on my cheeks. When I get back to my desk, new emails from her are stacked at the top of my inbox.

~~

I edit manuscripts that her clients have written, and sometimes she gives me feedback on my work so positive that it feels like my entire body is glowing. I save these few emails in a separate folder, coming back to them after each scathing reply she sends me on other days. I don’t know why I want this praise so badly, why every email with a compliment in it feels like a long drink of cold water when I’m parched. These kind words are not frequent, but they come just often enough to make me think, Maybe I can do this job.

~~

I make a typo in adding a contact to our database, writing “Kathryn” instead of “Katherine,” and my boss emails me a message full of angry punctuation, asking where I got that spelling from.

It’s a mistake, I want to say, I made a mistake.

Every day, I make these small mistakes, my nerves frayed to the point that I barely register what I’m doing. Of course my emails have errors in them, of course I’m saving royalty statements to the wrong folders, of course I added a meeting to the calendar at the wrong time. It is not acceptable to my boss, which I suppose is fair—she has hired me to make her life easier, to do the work she doesn’t have time for, and because my anxiety is so high, I’m not getting better at it the longer I’m there.

One morning she calls me and asks why this keeps happening, how I keep letting things fall through the cracks. I take a shaky breath, say, “You make me very nervous,” and burst into tears.

She seems genuinely shocked, which I cannot fathom—this is not the first time I’ve cried on the phone with her, although I usually save it until right at the end, until the click of the receiver can obscure the first gasp of weeping, after which I speed-walk to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall, sobbing into my knees. This time, she apologizes profusely. She Venmos me $50 “for coffee” and tells me to take a break. I walk around the neighborhood. I wonder if it will get better after this.

~~

In the publishing world, the word “hungry” is thrown around a lot. A young, eager editor or agent might be described as “hungry,” which usually means they are willing to work long hours and attend endless networking meetings in order to get good submissions or new clients. People talking about their taste in books might say things like, “I’m hungry for a good domestic thriller,” as if ready to cut up the manuscript with a knife and fork.

~~

I have spent so long trying to gauge my boss’s taste, making recommendations and edits based on what I think she wants to see, that I have no idea what to tell people when they ask me what I’m hungry for. When I go to networking events, my mind feels smooth and blank. I can’t remember the names of books I’ve read, can’t express a preference for one sort of book over another. I pretend to have read everything my conversation partner mentions and tell them I’ll send them a submission when I have something I think they’ll like. I have nothing.

I sit across from these editors after work, at bars with good happy hours that are close to our offices, my one or two glasses of wine making my head swim dizzily. I can never remember if I’ve eaten that day.

~~

At these networking events, I listen to other agents and editors talk about the books they’ve represented or acquired. One editor talks about missing her stop on the subway because she was so engrossed in a manuscript. One agent says that over the weekend, she read an entire submission that moved her to tears. She was so affected by it she emailed the author at midnight on Sunday offering to represent her. It feels like a competition, like everyone is trying to outdo each other with their dedication and their emotional responses to their work. I wonder if these are true stories. I have never felt like this about a single manuscript I’ve read on submission.

As a child, I would stay up late reading, moving the book across a shaft of light my open bedroom door let in from the hallway. I would take five books out of the library and finish them all before the week was done. The bigger the book, the better. I craved the satisfaction of having more pages behind me than in front of me. Sometimes I would finish a book and immediately start it over, not ready to leave its world. I miss that feeling.

~~

I assist another agent, too, aside from my main boss, but he is mild-mannered and sweet and as such becomes less of a priority because I know he won’t yell at me if I’m late doing something for him. One of my tasks is to manage his inbox—he is older, not as tech-savvy, and so I wade through his incoming messages and flag anything important.

One day, I see an email in his inbox that just has my name as the subject line, from my other boss. My stomach drops as I click into it.

I read through the thread. They are talking about how I don’t work hard enough, about how I’m not dedicated to the job. “She never seems excited about anything I ask her to do,” one says. “I think that’s just her personality,” the other replies.

~~

When I tell my therapist about this, she tells me I need to quit. I know she’s right, and I cry with relief. I have been at this job for under nine months.

~~

When I call my boss to quit, she says, “How could you do this to me?” I nod through the conversation, apologizing, as she berates me, convinces me to stay a little longer by doubling my salary for the next few weeks. I have been applying to other jobs for months but so far have no new job to go to, so I agree, even though the idea of coming back to this dark, brown-carpeted office one more time makes me feel sick. When I hang up the phone, I go to the bathroom and throw up.

~~

My boyfriend has booked us a trip to Mexico for a few days. It’s a last-minute surprise, and we’re scheduled to go a week after my last official day at work. Two days after I leave my job, I get two new job offers and take one, which nearly doubles my salary and promises I can work 9-5.

In Cancun, I lie on the beach and read. I listen to the waves go in and out and pull the book into myself the way I used to when I was little, inhaling hundreds of pages in a single sitting. When I’m done, I feel full, not empty. The shadows start to lengthen on the sand. We go back to the hotel room, shower, and go to dinner. I can’t wait to eat.

Eliza Kirby is a writer and children’s editor based in New Jersey. She has been published in outlets like The Dodo, Podium, and the young adult writing community Figment. 

***

Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Sexual Assault/Rape

Numb

September 25, 2023
grade apartment friend

Shortly after my C-section with my twin girls, I went in for a check-up. There, the OB informed me that my uterus was atrophied. Or was it my vagina? Either way, I felt a little ashamed as if I should have been doing something to make it…not…atrophy. I mean, I was working pretty hard breast-feeding and managing twins plus an older son, all the while recovering from surgery. But apparently the deepest, most cavernous place within me somehow – collapsed.

My parents divorced when I was six. And I spent every other weekend at my dad’s apartment. It was in that apartment that my dad asked me to sleep in his bed. I didn’t think much of it. But I do remember how furious my mom became when I told her that sometimes, “When he hugs me while he’s sleeping, I can feel his penis.”

For my 4th grade school photo, I wore a mint green Izod shirt with a collar and a headband with a bow, proudly displaying my newly pierced ears. I gave a print to my dad to which he promptly replied, “You look developed.” I had no idea what he meant but I was uncomfortable as he failed to explain. But, what about my earrings?

During 5th grade, I was sleeping on the L-shaped couch at my dad’s apartment, my brother and his friend on the other side. Tucked in sheets over the beige suede pillows, swaddled in my long Tina Turner nightgown, I woke up to my brother’s friend kissing me. I never told anyone.

In 6th grade I walked home from school alone – it was the latch key era. One eventful day as I’m singing a Madonna song, I notice a beat up car following me. At the wheel, a bearded man with no pants, drives with one hand. He turns down my cul de sac looking for me side to side, like a rifle to a doe. I hide behind a car until he loses patience and I watch him drive away.

Vacationing with a friend in 7th grade, we are swimming at a hotel pool all day. We dive down to the bottom, laughing and adjusting our boobs and wedgies. With pruny fingers and the setting sun, a polite man comes over to us. He just wanted to inform us that the pool is connected to a bar. And the bar has a huge window where men folk sip their drinks while admiring all the little mermaids.

In 8th grade that same friend of my brothers makes another appearance, though now it’s at my dad’s “80s big money house.” This time he’s in my bed pulling down my underwear. I try to get away but he keeps following me. I slip away to my bedroom closet and wake up alone on the berber carpeted floor with the closet door locked from the inside.

In high school, I’m waiting to get picked up by my stepdad. A boy who has an obsession with me, finds me sitting on the gas station curb. He is talking. I look away. Blah blah, conspiracy theory, Jim Morrison and hey maybe you can pose for a photo shoot. He then says matter of factly, “You know, if your boobs were any bigger they’d be grotesque.”

In college I awaken to a man trying to break into my apartment early one morning after a late Halloween night – his green truck still idling in the parking lot below. He was hoping us college girls forgot to lock the door.

Twenty years ago in San Francisco, I was married on the hottest day of the year. Honey drenched sun poured in through the windows, my heart full in a custom made satin dress. A friend walked up to me (let’s call him John Douschebag) and whispered, “I never knew you were so stacked.”

Several years later, now with three kids in tow, I’m at the airport preparing for a trip across the country. I’m reeling from an early morning of logistics and I had just gotten my period. I come out of the bathroom disheveled, with heavy boobs and cramps, walking towards my family. A man thrusts himself in my path and asks, “Why don’t you smile?”

My body – my boobs –  have never felt like mine. Rather, they are simply an art piece: for men to contemplate or admire, to reflect their longing and loneliness, their grief, their tension, their aggression or their misunderstanding.

How can I own something that’s never felt like mine? Even the jarring physical sensation of childbirth – I didn’t own. Rather, it was something for doctors to drug and extract from. I’ve delivered children both ways and I can say: the “natural” of the two ain’t natural – and I’m still numb from where they cut me open.

I’m still numb—

where they cut me open.

Nikki Levine is a photographer, painter – and writer. She has been enthralled with image making since she  was a teenager. Having the power to stop time while capturing the raw emotion of a moment is as compelling now as it was then. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her  husband, son and twin girls who all keep her inspired, appreciative and joyful.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
Kirkus (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, healing

Culture Shock

September 4, 2023

Ive spent my entire adult life, it seems
to me, in a state of profound culture
shock. I wish I were unique in this, but
I
m not. You may not be afflicted with my
misapprehensions, and I may not be
afflicted with yours, but none of this
starts
tabula rasa.” We all distort what
we see. We all have to struggle to see
what’s really going on.

Some of you are going to spend the whole
rest of your life in culture shock, and
what I
m saying today is that I think all
of you should.
 

– Joan Didion, 1975

ARRIVAL:

What would it be like to witness
inappropriate affections between
dad and daughter over the years,
over your lifetime, and then one
day listen as the now young
adult daughter, vulnerable,
confides in you, her mother,
her siblings, aunts, cousins, one by
one, that she remembers her father
molesting her at age 3? As if it
were news. News to her. A new
development?

Like waking up.

 Tierssa is waking up” an aunt,
otherwise estranged, had
whispered.

How would it feel to pair the
public weirdness that you
witnessed and ignored, with this
direct confrontation on your way
of life? Not that it’s your way of
life. But.

The people in the story closest to
Tierssa mostly relied on fear and
pride which presented as
denial. Coping by remaining in the
toxic soup. Paralyzed.

I saw a video of such
inappropriate affection between
dad and daughter from when Tierssa
was 11 years old.

Tierssa was in her thirties when
it surfaced, surreptitiously, at a
family vacation. She had no
recollection of the interaction
that unfolded in her and everyone else
in the room’s view: mom step-
dad, siblings, step-siblings, in-
laws, their children, her
children.

She remembered – the clothes she
was wearing; light turquoise
sweater with colorful yarn designs
in square textured patches. She
loved that sweater – but never
interacting like that with her
father, there, at that age. Not at
all.

Also in the video’s frame:
lighthearted horseplay between her
younger brothers.

A therapist commented to Tierssa:
“Watching that video among family
must have felt humiliating.”

*

UNCERTAINTY & DOUBT:

Instant heat pushed up gut to
cheeks, surprising her, in
protest. She felt validated, her
brain said. How dare this woman
assign her a feeling she didn’t
want? Now there was evidence.
Everyone could finally believe
her. Treat her better.

A moment later, that the video
surfaced a couple of years ago set
in.

Suddenly she remembered when her
mom accused her of forging her
signature on her student loans,
post-confrontation, pre video.

Then she thought of how she asked
her mother weeks after the
vacation for the home videos,
casually. Lots of them were of
Tierssa after all. Playing piano
at school talent shows and other
events. Tierssa had enjoyed
watching. Reliving those memories.
Seeing herself.

And then that one.

I don’t know where they are
anymore
, her mother’s spaced out,
if not cheerful voice replied.

*

ADAPTATION:

This thread of thoughts gave
humiliation piercing powers that
Tierssa’s pride, fear and denial
could no longer withstand. She
would have resisted longer if she
could have. But, the shape of the
relationship, its edges, had come
into full view.

//

Some months later, she got word
her dad had died. Condolences,
then wisecracks and memes poured
through via an extended family
group chat, alienating Tierssa’s
sense of estrangement.

Tierssa was appointed the
responsible party, required to
interact with authorities to file
for the death certificate, etc. It
would have been her mom, but her
dad had fled the family, landing
in the Philippines after she
opened up.

She had a couple of fears:

          1. that he was not really dead and
          2. If he was or wasn’t dead, that
            signing things would perform an
            essential punishment of
            indebtedness or other unknown. For
            talking.

Though reluctant she submitted her
passport and signature. Then Covid
shut-downs happened. And exposure.
Everyone to everything. More
personally, to her unique
isolation. To her feelings of rage
and despair.

ACCEPTANCE & RECOVERY:

Tierssa took the opportunity to
remove herself from the group
chat, send all burial
contributions, meager as they
were, back to people. She stopped
communicating with everyone in her family.

Then she changed her name.

Kadie Kelly at Steinway

Kadie Kelly is an interdisciplinary artist born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and living in Oakland, California since 2005. She has a small business, Superpower of the Song, and enjoys writing, composing music, and spending time outdoors with her two sons. Kadie holds both a bachelors and masters degree from Mills College in Public Policy. She is a published poet and was recently featured in Wild Roof Journal.

***

Recently out in paperback…Have you read Thrust


“Blistering and visionary . . . This is the author’s best yet.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, healing, self-loathing

My Monster

April 10, 2022

I wasn’t always a monster, of course. I like to believe no one ever really sets out to become a monster, and I think most monsters are created by forces bigger than themselves, often in the murky darkness of childhood.

My sister Michele and I spent a lot of time on my family’s dairy farm as children. Our mother was the oldest of nine siblings, so my sister and I were delightful little playthings to the many aunts and uncles who still lived on the farm. We basked in their attention as they showered us with sleepovers and wagon rides and trips to the nearby lake.

There was a dangerous freedom to the barn, with the powerful hind legs of the massive cows that towered over our small selves as we ran down the center aisle, squealing to avoid a sudden discharge of liquid shit. Michele, the cherished first-born, was a tomboy who loved running around chasing cats by their tails and dodging in and out of the barn as our uncles and grandfather worked the cows on their rigorous milking schedule. My sister languished in the smells of summer hay being put up and danced in the swirls of dusty dry sunshine that accompanied all those animals.

But it was soon discovered that what seemed like wild, sweet freedom to one granddaughter was the very thing that threatened another. My grandmother never quite seemed to accept that I wasn’t just being stubborn or lazy when I stopped wanting to go to the barn. That, in fact, I had asthma. And all that dander from the cows whose milk was the sole source of the family’s income was cutting off my airways and strangling me.

But in the mid 1970’s, things like asthma and allergies weren’t well understood – at least, not in our neck of the woods in Wisconsin, America’s Dairyland, where my people lived and worked. Generations of my family were raised on milk: not just to nourish bodies, but to pay the bills. Going against the family farm in any way was akin to treason. My grandmother, in particular, had little tolerance for time-consuming things like asthma attacks. Sniffles? Quit all that snorting, Krissy. There’s work to be done. Stop bothering me.

So, every summer I tried in vain not to be a nuisance, to get out in the barn and help with chores like my good, big sister. And each time, I’d end up coughing and wheezing and back at the house, crying as I knew how much I’d disappointed my grandmother by being weak.

Crying only worsened my asthma attacks. I fled to the bathroom, closed the door, and ran a washcloth under cold water to wipe my face. I stood at the sink trying to calm down as aunts and uncles would bang on the door, saying they had to pee. Looking in the mirror, I watched my itchy and enflamed eyes as the whites turned an angry red and swelled over the green circles of my iris. For a few hours, my eyes took on the appearance of some swollen, sickly Christmas decorations in the middle of July.

My grandmother was a woman of efficiency whose nerves were worn thin by too many people needing too many things. What love she had in her heart was painfully and privately shrouded in vigil for her own long-dead mother who was cruelly taken from her by cancer when she was only sixteen. Unprocessed heartbreak with no place to go can get lodged on repeat in a cruel sort of rhythm that no amount of barking at sick children will unstick. Such is life for a generation with nowhere to place such cavernous grief.

But I didn’t know this as a child. Instead, I learned from a young age that there was something wrong with me. Something inside my body that was bad. Something shameful that didn’t allow me to participate in the regular work and play of the family like everyone else.

By the time I was five, I learned that my wheezing and gasping for air were something akin to a moral weakness – that if I would just toughen up a bit, I could get over it. Thus, I didn’t deserve to breathe like other people. I was five years old, and I didn’t deserve to breathe.

***

Sheila, my uncle Mitch’s wife, was a teacher who worked with special needs kids and took an interest in me. She loved my drawings and encouraged the stories I wrote. I relished the whirling worlds in the books we shared, one adventure weaving into another. We stayed inside her yellow brick house across the road from my grandmother’s, with air conditioning that insulated our activities from the farm’s threatening allergens.

Sleepovers at her house were a special treat for me and my sister with ice cream sundaes and buttered popcorn so rich it gave me a tummy ache. As the sun set through the white eyelet curtains of the yellow room with the shag carpeting, cool darkness fell over the house. We would lay our heads on embroidered pillows, knowing that she was safely nearby in the room she shared with Mitch, just on the other side of the closet door that secretly adjoined our room.

***

Years passed. I turned twelve before my mother finally took me to an allergist to treat my asthma. Several rounds of steroids to clear my lungs resulted in rapid weight gain and crushing depression, which perfectly coincided with the onset of puberty. It didn’t take long for my inner monster to latch on to my self-loathing. An eating disorder quickly took root, enabling me to lose fifty pounds in three months, and by the time I was seventeen, I had downed a bottle of pills in a botched suicide attempt and earned a month long stay in a mental hospital.

My psychiatrist found me to be a curious case. I’d landed a coveted spot on the high school pom-pon squad, and we had a somewhat stable, loving, upper middle class family. I had excellent grades, an artistic gift, and a boyfriend who was the running back on our school’s state-winning football team. Yet, my symptoms didn’t seem to add up. Debilitating depression. Self-loathing. Cutting. Looking at my chart, the doctor asked my mother: had I ever been sexually abused?

Goodness no, she said. Of course not.

***

It wouldn’t be long before I discovered the joys of alcohol. My Irish Catholic family was practically raised on beer, bourbon, and brats. When we weren’t floating in a lake drinking under the warm sun, we were at college football games, Summerfest, and family weddings. Life was one big celebration, and my monster loved to party.

It was at one such wedding where I met my future husband, a longtime friend of the groom. A few years older than me, he was a good Catholic farm boy from Iowa whose steadiness was the perfect counter to my volatile self. We married when I was just twenty-two, but it would be many years before I’d fully appreciate just what a fantastic sense of foresight God had in bringing us together.

We went on to have three children and life appeared to be good, but the darkness was always lurking just under the surface. My monster was often hiding in the corner, whispering that I wasn’t quite good enough. That I didn’t deserve to be happy. That there was no point in trying – I was just a sham. There were so many days when I didn’t know what would happen because I could never trust when my monster would demand to be fed next. Living with depression was like dragging myself through the day with a big boulder strapped on my back. Most days loomed dark, heavy, foreboding, as the weight threatened to crush me.

Alcohol has a cunning way of latching on to mental illness to create the perfect storm. I found that if I drank just enough, I could keep my darkness at bay. Wine had a way of blurring the edges of my anxiety, while vodka would obliterate them completely. To me, this was just the solution I needed.

Soon, I was waking up every day sick, parched, disgusted. I repeatedly told myself today would be the day I’d stop doing this. Today would be different. Knowing, even as I said it, that I was lying to myself. Just willing change into existence doesn’t make a damn difference if you don’t do anything to change. If your next move is to open up a bottle, you’ve already lost at your own game – and your only opponent is yourself.

My boogeyman never lurked around some dark corner. That bitch lived inside me. I opened the door and welcomed her to come right in and take a seat every time I bought a bottle. I thought I drank to quiet her down, hoping that the more I drank, the more likely I was to flood her out of her cave. What I didn’t know was that I had it all wrong. Alcohol didn’t put out my monster’s anger. Pouring alcohol on my monster only fed the flames, like gasoline on fire. My monster loved alcohol – thrived on it. More! More! She cried as she laughed, threw up all over the floor, then went on drinking.

With alcohol mixed into the equation, I had no chance against my monster. I hated myself when I drank. Everyone around me hated me when I drank. And even though I knew better and had everything going for me, I wasn’t smarter than alcohol; it had locked me in a vice grip that I couldn’t break. I no longer wanted to drink, but I could barely function without it.

I was circling the drain but instead of putting the cap back in the bottle, I was pouring my life away with every glass I emptied. That’s the way addiction works. Nobody wakes up one day and says they want to become an addict. It’s a slippery slope that seems to work just fine for a long time as it does what it promises to do: it takes the edge off. But after a while, it stops working. And you need more and more to get the same effect.

Twenty-five years after my first suicide attempt, I found myself with an Exacto knife in my hand, pulling it across my wrist and drawing blood. Another time, I stumbled into the middle of a country road and stared down a Mack truck that was barreling towards me. And it became commonplace for me to stand on the Metra platform in Chicago, willing my body to throw itself in front of the train. I told my doctor at the time that this was normal for me. Nothing to worry about here, folks.

But this time was different. I wasn’t just some dumb seventeen-year-old kid. I was married with three children. I owned a business with employees and was doing work I loved. I had everything. But I couldn’t see any of that when the monster came out of her cave. She was now a fire-breathing dragon, and she was going to burn down every last fucking thing that stood in her path.

The thing that wasn’t different this time was how I felt. The way I felt at seventeen was still the same way I felt again at forty-two. Twenty-five years later, and the pain inside me was exactly the same. No number of years or ounces of alcohol could drown the darkness that a lifetime of trauma had built. That powerful pull to finally give in and end it all – it was too big to resist, and I just wasn’t strong enough. And once I finally decided to kill myself, the decision was complete. Then, just like when I was seventeen, it came as a relief.

If I thought of my children at all in that moment, my only thought was: the kids are better off without me. They had my husband to take care of them. I was useless. Better off dead. And that logic made perfect sense to me. Perfect sense.

That’s what depression does. It’s a darkness that works on you from the inside out. It wears you down and pulls you in and wraps its tentacles around you and doesn’t let go until it sucks all the light from your soul. It squeezes the air out of your lungs until you’re gasping for breath. Until you can no longer breathe.

Because you don’t deserve to breathe.

***

I was surprised to find that my mental hospital had been locked in its own stagnant time capsule: faded floral artwork trapped behind plexiglass screwed to cinder block walls. A single caged lightbulb dimly casting shadow over moldy shower stalls. A wall-mounted telephone with a frayed eight-inch cord flanked by nefarious steel-barred windows. I snagged my color-coded socks on cracked and peeling linoleum as I learned that pink signified fall risk, blue for suicide watch. Mine were blue. I could have gone a lifetime without knowing any of this.

For five days, I walked up and down the stale hallway thinking of the many ways I’d changed in twenty-five years, and the many more parts of me, like this place, that were still the same. Those early days of padded, shaky steps in my fuzzy blue socks were the first of many in the tentative direction of eventual healing. It took a long time to realize that alcohol was a former friend that had turned on me a long time ago; I was just too sick to see it. Once I was able to get some clarity and distance from my old pal, I finally had a fighting chance.

I learned there were many root causes to my monster’s growth. Genetics played a part, such as living in a family with layers of madness and addiction. Ultimately, it didn’t matter why a monster had grown inside me like a cancerous tumor. The damage was done. But understanding where it came from was a way to help me untangle its interwoven grip on my life. And in order to extricate myself and live freely, I had to do the work.

I learned to separate the monster from myself. The monster lived inside me, but she was not me. In time, I could learn to tame her and live with her.

I learned that when I stopped drinking, I stopped being so afraid. And I was finally able to ask myself: what was I so afraid of? What was I trying to drink away?

My fears ran from broad and expansive to precisely imagined scenarios. Drinking had been a way to run from the fear of living in a violent and unpredictable society full of senseless acts and random school shootings. I found that I could alleviate the anxiety of not knowing if each morning’s goodbye kisses would be our last by turning to the bottle. But eventually, no amount of alcohol could keep the terror at bay; in spite of our country’s lavish thoughts and prayers, the shootings kept coming.

I was afraid of what would happen if my kids found out I was an alcoholic. But judging by the way they dumped out my wine, it was pretty clear they already knew.

I was terrified that my children were destined to live with the same madness that had hijacked my own brain from such a young age. That my daughters would develop eating disorders that would ravage them for decades. That my son would develop an addiction and attempt suicide. In sum, I was afraid of everything. Most of all: myself.

I finally had to admit to myself that I was afraid of saying I was an alcoholic, because I just didn’t want it to be true. I was afraid to stop drinking because I didn’t know how to live without it. And if I was really trying to be honest with myself, I just had to edit that last sentence a bit:

I was afraid to stop drinking because I was afraid to live.

I believed that addiction and mental illness and abuse and suicide attempts were all just a matter of time for my children, because that’s simply how it was. Because that’s what was passed down through generations of trauma in my family. Because it was destiny, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I kept continuing the cycle with every bottle I drained because I didn’t believe I had any power to stop it.

Until: I stopped.

When I learned to stop fearing my monster, I found that I was growing stronger and could finally start to face my fears. And I realized that my monster was really just a coward that hid in the darkness of her cave and thrived on alcohol, and bred depression and shame.

I learned that love is stronger than fear. Love is what breaks the cycle. Love is what cracks open the darkness and allows the light back in. And by coming back to love, one day at a time, I learned to start trusting myself again.

I remembered the ferocious love I felt for each of my children from the moment I was aware of their tiny sparks growing inside me. And I remembered the biggest love of all: God’s love. In beginning my recovery, I learned that though I never believed I was worthy of God’s love, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It was there all along, from the moment I was just a spark in my own mother’s womb. I just couldn’t see it through the darkness.

I finally learned to love myself.

And twenty-five years later, I would recall my psychiatrist’s question to my mother about whether I’d been sexually abused as a child. Memories would float back to me at random, like fireflies flickering in the night. The yellow room with the shag carpeting. The white eyelet curtain. The sleepovers that endured long after I wanted them to. I would remember my uncle, insistent that we keep up those overnight visits far after we felt comfortable. And when given the choice of any of the other rooms in the farmhouse, he would emphatically press on that my sister and I should stay in that room, the yellow room with the shag carpeting, the one that connected to theirs via secret passageway.

***

My monster’s fire-breathing roar has been replaced by the sounds of laughter that now fill our house. Our comings-together at the end of the day are reminders that we’ve survived something together. My children may carry the strains of mental illness; time will tell. But if that happens, we now have the tools to manage it. I’ve finally learned that dealing with mental illness and addiction is something I can control. At least now, we have a fighting chance.

My monster is still there. I see her sometimes, sleeping in the back of her cave. I like to think of her in a sort of permanent hibernation. To keep her there, I’ve learned to put a blanket over her when she’s cold. I’ve taken away her alcohol and replaced it with nutritious food that I put at the mouth of her cave, offering it to her if she ever gets hungry, too. I sometimes wave to her as I pass by on my daily walk, or during yoga. I see her sleeping and I think – oh yes, there she is. I remember her. I nod and respect her space. I let her sleep if she’s tired. And I pass by, thankful that she no longer has any power over me. I let her keep sleeping.

And then, I walk out into the light.

Kris Martinez been in marketing for over 25 years and has owned an award-winning digital creative agency near Chicago since 2004. Her work has been published in Entropy, The Manifest-Station, Literary Mama, Iris Literary Journal, and Enterprising Women Magazine where she was honored in 2018 as an Enterprising Woman of the Year. In 2020, Kris completed her MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Screenwriting from Antioch University Los Angeles. The essay “My Monster” is an excerpt from her memoir and first book, for which she is seeking representation. Kris lives near Chicago with her husband and their three teenage children.

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Writing Cohort Opportunity

Circe is offering: Crucible – A Year-Long Writing Cohort 

Let by Gina Frangello and Emily Black, this cohort is designed for writers seeking to spend a year deeply immersed in writing or revising a book length work.

Cohort Includes:

  • Once monthly class meeting over Zoom
    • 2-3 members will have their pages workshopped per meeting (each participant will be workshopped twice)
  • Every other month individual/private meeting with Emily or Gina over Zoom (participants will have a chance to work with both)
  • Ongoing online communication between members of the cohort to share resources and ask questions in between sessions
  • Writing prompts
  •  100 manuscript pages read and reviewed by Emily and Gina

Email info@circeconsulting.net for more information

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Family, Guest Posts, memories

Future Past

December 18, 2021
portland maine lighthouse

by Casey Walsh

I’ve been craving just one good beach day all summer, nothing to do but lie in the sun and gaze at the peaceful horizon. There’s something hopeful about looking out at the sea, as though you can see the past and the future, all there in the shimmering expanse of blue. Beyond the children on the sand and in the shallow water, past the more capable swimmers and surfers and the small vessels, ocean kayaks and canoes and catamarans, farther even than the cargo and cruise ships miles out, there is, at some point, nothing but sea and sky, no hint of a destination. No end in sight.

I’ve finally had the day I dreamed of—two of them in fact—at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, MA. My husband, Kevin, and I spent a couple of days there and two more in Newburyport, just what we’ve needed as fall closes in.  Now we settle in for a meandering drive home, including a planned detour north along the coast.

Leaving Newburyport’s historic downtown, I assume my role as navigator to Kevin’s as driver. When we first began this alliance, my task typically involved paper maps. Now, though, it’s a dance of devices. As we drive over the Merrimack River on Route 1, I plug the address into the dashboard GPS, and while it calculates, I alternate between checking the Maps app and the radar on my iPhone. Glancing up to admire the boats in the inland harbor, I plan our route and hope the weather will hold while we explore Portsmouth, NH.

For the past few days, I’ve been focused on local treks, how to get from our hotel into town or from one hotel to the next. But as we turn off onto 1a—the scenic road along the coast—I take a broader look at our surroundings. It surprises me we’re so close to Hampton Beach, the crowded honky-tonk seaside scene my first husband and I had thought was fun back in the dark ages, before kids, when we still believed we’d be together forever. It won’t take Kevin and me long to reach Portsmouth. We’ll get a feel for the city, browse the shops, and grab a bite to eat before heading home to Albany.

Scrolling up on my phone as we drive, I see the places where my high school friends spent yearly summer vacations with their families: Kittery, York, Ogunquit, Wells, Old Orchard Beach, places I only dreamed of. I scroll still more, farther up than I remember, and there it is: South Portland.

Suddenly, it’s fall 1997 again, and I’m driving east across Massachusetts, then up into New Hampshire with my oldest son, Eric. We reached the outskirts of Portsmouth, then ventured on into Maine, past exits for beach towns, and finally arrived in South Portland. I was instantly enchanted by this small city, with its cobblestone streets and cyclists and parks, as we drove along the mouth of the Fore River. I pictured Eric here in the fall, riding his bike to a job in town, making a little cash to keep him afloat.

Eric and I drove out of downtown and out toward the water, where the Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse marks a dangerous obstruction on the west side of the main shipping channel into Portland Harbor. Like most lighthouses, its distinctive beam patterns, varied sequences of light and dark, not only warn sailors of hazards but help them find their position as well.

Beautiful as it is, the lighthouse was not our destination. We were here to see the campus of South Portland Technical College, where the lighthouse is located on a breakwater at the tip.

Earlier in the year, I’d ventured into Eric’s high school guidance office asking for information about colleges for him. While the counselors offered personalized support to top-tier students, they paid little attention to kids like my son—those who had caused more headaches than pride for faculty in recent semesters. Screw ups…I believe that was the technical term. I was fairly certain the only way we’d figure out the right direction was for me to show up in person, put my best intelligent, efficient foot forward, and ask all the right questions. Essentially, I would stand in for Eric: patiently navigate the information, lay out his options, and apply just the right spin to help him see all the world could offer outside of Cambridge, our small upstate New York village.

Predictably, the counselors were busy, busy, busy, but they could steer me to a computer with a program that allowed a filtered search. Carefully, as though his life depended on it, I entered my criteria, channeling Eric as best I could: Industrial Drafting and Design. Dorms. Intercollegiate soccer program. Bingo. South Portland Technical College it is, I thought, within driving distance yet far enough to allow him to see what’s out there.

I gathered materials and made my pitch. Eric was surprisingly enthusiastic, devouring the catalogs, and soon we were planning a visit. I remember the tour, Eric realizing he’d had such good preparation at Cambridge, having already taken many courses in high school not available to some of the other students on the tour. And the coach was bursting with enthusiasm for what Eric would add to the team. All spring phone calls and letters arrived from the college, encouraging Eric to keep up his grades and updating him on who had been recruited, what promise lay ahead.

“By the time I graduate, I will have made so many new friends, snowboarded on the toughest mountains, and played college soccer,” he’d said with his trademark grin, slipping into the future past tense that swelled with optimism.

“Ah, but first you have to do well on that chemistry exam,” I’d teased.

From Eric, in characteristic form: “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

After years of guiding him through life closer to home, it seemed he, too, was ready to broaden his view to a world that just might include South Portland.

None of this would ever be. In the end, Eric settled on a local community college rather than leave his on-again off-again girlfriend, who had somehow completely drowned his ability to imagine a future on his own. That semester was a bust; partying and killing time killed all of his focus and enthusiasm for life. Afterward, he floundered for a while, searching for a path until he chose the Navy. He scored so well on the ASVAB that he was selected for aircraft technician school in Pensacola, FL, following completion of naval basic training in Illinois. If only he would stay the course.

Yet each of these options was somehow part of the tornado of trouble, the huge disturbance that had already begun its wreckage and was simply too big to fail. Though they offered brief glimmers of possibility, it was obvious even then that they were never to be. There would be stressors of a divorce that no amount of my own intelligence or efficiency could allay, adults who let him down, bad decisions and bad luck. There would be factors even I, the better part of two decades later, couldn’t begin to understand. Ultimately, a tragic crash would end his life.

Still, I remember so well how South Portland, where it all began, had a different vibe entirely. It seemed its lighthouse—which had protected seafaring travelers on Casco Bay from all sorts of dangers for more than a century—had the power to keep my son safe as well. But first he would have had to get there. Once Eric had turned away from that beam of hope, he lost his way. With nothing but sea and sky, no hint of a destination, there was no end in sight.

I squirm in my seat next to Kevin, who is oblivious to the places I’ve gone in my mind. Staring out the window at the sand and the waves, I feel the lump form in my throat, feel the tears form, hot and insistent. I let them wash over me. I’ve learned there’s no use in the fight, anyway. It’s a mystery to me, how I can feel so resolved at times, accepting of Eric’s life and of his passing as what was. What is. Then come days like this one, when everything is so present, invading my thoughts, refusing to share space with my current life, teasing me with visions of the life he never had.

I think of something I heard years ago—how sadness is missing what has been lost, but sorrow is missing what will never be—and I’m overcome with a rare wave of anxiety, something I haven’t felt in quite this way since the day Eric dashed out the front door that one last time. If only I could reach back and change one little thing, it all so easily could have happened for him. He’d been so damn close. I picture Kevin and me driving to Maine to visit Eric and his wife and outdoor-loving, risk-taking kids living out their happy lives in an idyllic seaside town. It tortures me.

I sit silently for a while as we drive along the coast, wallowing really, and fantasize about the student Eric could have been—living in the dorms, playing on the soccer team, making new friends on campus and in town, enjoying the ocean views that might have inspired him as they do me. Caught in the past, I’ve been exercising my best Google-fu, frantically searching for the online home of the place that had once drawn us in, frustrated that SPTC seems to have vanished along with the life I imagined for my son, and for me. Using the lighthouse as the beacon it was meant to be, I finally locate Southern Maine Community College on the web, the same campus anointed with a new name, another entity entirely. How like my own life, it strikes me, completely rewritten, though some of the old remains in different form. Still, the college will never again be what it was on that day, at that time.

And neither will I.

I notice we’re about to reach Portsmouth.  Kevin and I are on vacation, after all, and I owe it to him to at least attempt to come up for air. “Hey, listen to this,” I offer, feigning enthusiasm, hoping the feelings will follow.  “They even have a comic book on their website describing the lighthouse and its origins.”

Step Into History!  the title commands.

If only it were history, I think, not a future imagined but never fulfilled.

I close the app, drop the phone into my bag, and turn my eyes to the road ahead.

Casey Walsh is a writer and former speech-language pathologist living with her husband in West Sand Lake, New York. She writes about life at the intersection of grief and joy and embracing the in-between. Her work has appeared in The Good Men Project; Fresh.Ink, The Under Review; Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine; Barren Magazine; Brevity Blog; and ModernLoss, among others. Casey’s essays also appear at TheFHFoundation.org, an organization dedicated to the genetic cardiac disorder that affects her family. Learn more at www.caseymulliganwalsh.com.  Casey is currently seeking representation for her memoir, The Full Catastrophe.

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Guest Posts, Family, memories

Four Shots: Looking for Signs of a Life

August 14, 2021
white

by Suzanne Orrell

The black and white photograph you scanned that day shows your mother ­–– my would-be-mother-in-law. She is holding you on her jutted-out hip in waist high water at Lake Pontchartrain Beach. Her dark curls gather under a sun bright straw hat. Upturned crinkles smile at the corner of her eyes. The crook of your left arm is firmly clasped around her neck. Sunshine catches water droplets that linger before sloping from the fingertips of your right hand. Fred, your older brother, easily splashes beside you. The shot captures the roller coaster tracks of the Zephyr in the background as they arc skyward before sinking into troughs. You look certain that she, is

Your mother, guiding you down a playground slide. Your brother sits behind you, hands taut against your tummy. Both of you, dressed in plaid, short sleeved shirts patiently smile, not one hair out of place on either of your heads. This shot shows how the skinny white belt encircling the dark material of her dress accentuates your mother’s waist. Her hair looks freshly done. She has recently applied lipstick. She looks stylish, seems cheerful. The gleam in her eye is genuine given the low sky, broken by distant storm clouds. When you first discovered this photograph a couple of years ago, you called me in from the kitchen. Somehow, in all this time, it is one you’d not seen. “Does this look like her?” you ask. I couldn’t believe you weren’t certain that, she is

Your mother, tacking friction rubbed balloons to the wall for your birthday party. The black and white photograph proves it is your fifth because the number five is visible on the party-hat you are wearing. Neighborhood hat-wearing children gather with you around a large, unopened present. Even Jingles, the German Shepherd, wears a hat. Your mother wears one too. If there is a gleam in her eye in this shot, it is obscured from behind her cat-eyed glasses. Her hair looks flat, faded. She does not smile. She is staring down the barrel of the camera. If a look could kill. Her floral apron makes her look frumpy. “Has she put on weight? Or maybe, is it conceivable she’s pregnant with my sister?” you ask.

The final shot you scanned that day shows a tall glass lamp with a dark lampshade crowned by a belt of white ribbon. The lamp offers zero illumination. The black and white photograph shows off the lamp’s proportions visible in the long-necked taper toward the flared curve of the base. It is graceful, transparent, window-pane wavy yet impossible to tell whether the lamp is wired for a three-way or single wattage bulb. After the photograph was taken, your mother, custom fit tiny red pieces of tile to this lamp, little mosaic pulse points positioned in cement. Then, in one final action she extinguished her own life. Your mother is absent, missing, from all further photographs.

Today, the lamp sits in its final resting place, a monument on a waist high table in your stepmother’s house, surrounded by accumulated clutter, a melee of mail–some not even opened–magazines, mess. Despite its height, despite its grace, despite the red tiles, despite her handiwork, the lamp tends to go unnoticed amidst the chaos. It’s plugged in, but rarely, if ever, switched on.

You, forever her son, scan the documentation, search the long shadows in black and white, looking for clues that she, is your mother.

Suzanne Orrell lives and writes in Idaho. A former chef and caterer, she finds that writing, like cooking, requires patience, craft and honesty. When she’s not writing or dreaming up the next meal she enjoys taking long walks, playing tennis and travel.

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Leigh Stein is amazing, no really she is. Leigh was cofounder and executive director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist literary nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the careers of women and gender variant writers. The Land of Enchantment was our first introduction to Leigh, and her memoir of a broken love and lost dreams placed this writer firmly on our radar. Leigh’s recent novel, Self Care, received rave (and starred) reviews and is a highbrow yet satirical look at influencer culture. This month, though, she released a book of poetry  that is everything. What to Miss When: Poems is a look at the internet, the pandemic, and the life lived in between. Leigh is an amazing talent, pick up one of her books and let us know what you think!

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Guest Posts, Abuse, healing

What I Didn’t Know

August 9, 2021
ugly

by Ruth Arnold

I didn’t know that a father wouldn’t solve all of my issues of being fatherless for my children.I didn’t know he would yell. I didn’t know he would make us feel bad. I didn’t know he wouldn’t be home a lot. I thought I could manage him and still give my children the luxury of two parents. I didn’t know that when he was yelling in the house that they were getting hurt and made to feel unsafe. I didn’t know that when I calmed him and told them he’d had a bad day that they felt I was choosing him over them. I didn’t know that they would feel better at home when he wasn’t there. I didn’t know that  things wouldn’t get better. I didn’t know that yelling was not better than silence than not speaking as in the house I grew up in.

I didn’t know that I couldn’t fix him. I didn’t know that when he was annoyed with me it wasn’t about me being annoying. I didn’t know that I couldn’t modify myself enough to make him happy. I didn’t know that if he was unhappy with me that my children would feel he was also unhappy with them. I didn’t know that spending more time with him in my life would only make things worse. I didn’t know why I felt so lonely in a house with three people. I didn’t know how to make things different without also making them worse. I didn’t know that being quiet and also talking were both problematic so I had no mode of behavior that would make it better.

I didn’t know that loving talent and intelligence were not love. I didn’t know that the first person who asked me to marry him actually gave me a choice of yes or no. I didn’t know that I was worthy of seeking. I didn’t know that staying married wouldn’t prove everyone wrong because nobody was checking. I didn’t know that if I told everyone about how good things were with my husband it wouldn’t make it true. I didn’t know that I was not the only problem. I didn’t know that he wasn’t better than me. I didn’t know that he could be kind to others and so unkind to me. I didn’t know that he could be so unavailable to his family yet so able to stay late at work and help others when they needed extra time.

I didn’t know that I should feel good in my home. I didn’t know that I wasn’t mentally ill. I didn’t know that I wasn’t ugly. I didn’t know that I wasn’t boring. I didn’t know that I was worthy. I didn’t know that I should’ve been treated with kindness. I didn’t know that when I was sick I should’ve been helped. I didn’t know that everything wasn’t my responsibility. I didn’t know that I was doing everything for everyone and being challenged for not doing better.

I didn’t know that while we were sexless he was seeking sex with others. I didn’t know he regarded me as so awful. I didn’t know that he didn’t hope for things to improve. I didn’t know that he felt lying to me was justified. I didn’t know he kept his schedule nebulous for more reasons than real conflicts. I didn’t know that he was available to others for intimacy but not for me. I didn’t know he spoke ill of me to others.

I didn’t know he would die But then he did. And then I knew.

Ruth Arnold is a widowed mother of two boys living with metastatic breast cancer. Her husband passed away almost 11 years ago but only lately has Ruth begun to share her story due to complicated grief and shame that she is working to overcome. This essay was inspired after she shared the story of her husband’s death to her two sons ages 10 and 16 who were 9 and 5 years old when he died. In spite of this darkness, Ruth is living happily and well.

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Margaret Attwood swooned over The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl, but Enchanted is the novel that we keep going back to. The world of Enchanted is magical, mysterious, and perilous. The place itself is an old stone prison and the story is raw and beautiful. We are big fans of Rene Denfeld. Her advocacy and her creativity are inspiring. Check out our Rene Denfeld Archive.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Guest Posts, pandemic

Isolation Blues

December 29, 2020
people

By Loreen Lilyn Lee

If you live with people, sheltering in place has its challenges, but lack of human contact is not one of them. If you live alone like me, the absence of human contact feels unendurable—a seismic event for social beings.

~ The last moments of normalcy. ~

On Saturday, February 22, I dined with friends before attending a hula concert to celebrate my 71st birthday. I’m grateful to have been born and raised in Honolulu; Hawaiian music and hula feed my soul. Several hundred people filled the performance hall and took pleasure in both the chants that accompanied ancient hula’s staccato rhythms and the sweet melodies inspiring modern hula’s graceful movements. On Sunday, I met my Asian American women friends for lunch at Hong Kong Dim Sum, crowded as usual. Later we spent a pleasant afternoon playing mah jongg. During the week, I completed my regular schedule as an English and writing tutor at North Seattle College and in fitness classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. My hairstylist gave me a  perm.

                     Then everything        changed.

                        Seattle reported the first coronavirus death

            in the U.S. on February 29.

                                    Soon after, each household became an                       island.

I live in an apartment building for active seniors. The managers locked the doors on all common areas: community room, computer room, movie room, and gym. They cancelled all community events, including fitness classes. We tenants, in effect, were isolated in our apartments. For me, that’s a one-bedroom apartment, approximately 520 square feet, not exactly a prison cell, but still confining. Most of us live alone, so social interactions make a huge difference in quality of life and provide health benefits. I also hoped to stay healthy by continuing fitness classes to strengthen my immune system; this was not the time to stop. I thought the managers had over-reacted, while some called it “an abundance of caution.” I called the corporate office to complain, and the public rooms were unlocked, but it was only a brief reprieve.

            No one knew

                        a state-wide lockdown was imminent.

           I began   sheltering   in place

                                     Fri day            March   13

                                                            when the college         shut down.

Only a few days earlier, the administration had announced it would stay open until the end of the quarter. Okay, I thought, my life will hold steady for the next couple of weeks. While the crisis was still unfolding, I dreamed of maintaining my routine, some semblance of stability, and didn’t realize that solid ground had shifted to sand. So, I was shocked when Monday’s decision was overturned on Thursday morning; the gravity of the situation and the urgency to safeguard staff and students from contagion had become undeniable to college officials.

~ In Week 3 of staying at home, I learned to breathe deeply again. ~

Life was still on hold, but I began writing after clouds of anxiety dispersed. My creative energy flowed into words that converged on the page and lifted my spirits. I called a friend to go for a walk. It was a decent day for Seattle, meaning no rain, some sun. Although I’m out of shape, we walked for an hour on the college campus, now eerily empty of cars and the bustling energy of students, and in the adjoining neighborhood with tree-lined streets. We chatted while conscientiously keeping our distance. I was happy to see a familiar face, have a conversation, be outdoors, and move my body—much-needed respite from my apartment walls. However, no touching, no hugs.

~ In times of uncertainty, people need hugs more than ever. ~

I miss the intimacy of sharing time with loved ones: sitting together in a movie and sharing popcorn; jostling and jesting with an amiable crowd lined up to buy tickets at the Crest Theater, only $4 for a second-run movie; going to a concert or literary reading; enjoying meals with friends at a dinner table or in a favorite restaurant; working side by side in a kitchen preparing food; touching a pal spontaneously, throwing an arm around a shoulder or waist or patting a hand; whispering a private joke into someone’s ear; hearing live music at the cozy North City Bistro that features talented local musicians; receiving a massage from healing hands of a woman I’ve known for thirty years; feeling the warm energy radiating from another person; being near enough to see cheeks blush or the twinkle in an eye.

      When will we be able

                                    to dance        in   public   spaces    again?

Two weeks ago I hit a wall. It was late May when a convergence of profound isolation (living alone for over two months without human touch) and the frustrations of dealing with ongoing technical issues of working online slammed me. My energy reserves dipped with each new online task requiring a learning curve. Trying to troubleshoot technical issues heightened my stress. For example, connectivity without unlimited broadband access created problems: students suddenly disappeared from the screen.

            A Zoom ex istence is an         e m pty                     one,

                                                like living on a            desert               island.

People in pixels are not equivalent to someone in the flesh, and communication can suffer. My isolation is sharpened when shopping requires a six-foot perimeter around me and constant vigilance. God forbid I should bump into anyone! Life felt shaggy like my unruly hair. It felt completely unnatural.

            By early June

                        in     iso la tion        for twelve weeks,

                        without         touch ing or   being     touched by

                                                             a living,          breath ing soul.

~ I grew up on the island of O’ahu. ~

Giving a lei with a kiss on the cheek for a birthday or graduation or any special occasion was traditional. Other than this, my Chinese American family did not express physical affection often, but neither did we avoid touching one another. With seven children, we were often jammed into a car or crowded around the television. I grew up on an island, but I was surrounded by family and friends.

As a woman, I gravitated to warm, affectionate people and realized that I crave human connection, the physical communication between bodies; I need hugs and the love they convey.

            The nearness of people is    on  hold        for now.

                                                            I           get       it          and  sorely miss it.

Still, my aching heart is real—this desert heat of desperation, feeling my heart could simply shrivel up and cease working without  touch. I realize my pain may not be assuaged anytime soon, but I recognize it serves a purpose; I will hang on to this longing for human comfort, touch, and camaraderie. I don’t want to forget what it’s like to be human even though I have no idea when I’ll hug anyone or reach across a table to clink glasses in celebration. The simple gestures of friendship and love are absent for now. It is what it is. I’m hanging in there one day at a time, but I insist, I have to believe that these simple blessings will one day be ours again.

~ My island roots ground me in times of crisis. ~

An ancient Hawaiian canoe chant keeps coming to mind. I often quoted it at readings for my book The Lava Never Sleeps: A Honolulu Memoir. Skilled navigators, these Hawaiians traveled throughout the vast Pacific Ocean in their voyaging canoes. All the paddlers chanted these words in unison, from deep in their solar plexus, before pushing off from shore. They understood the risks of navigating uncharted waters and the criticality of every paddler working for the good of all in order to reach their destination. To survive.

I kū wā huki
I kū wā kō
I kū wā a mau
A mau ka ēulu
E huki e
Kūlia!

~ These words are not suggestion, but instruction and prayer. ~

Then as now, we’re all in the same boat. Social isolation is damn hard, wearying, soul-crushing. And yet, I have to do my part.

Together, we pull
Together, we draw
Together, now and forever
Unceasingly, from the top
Pull together
Persevere!

Loreen Lilyn Lee was born in pre-statehood Honolulu. Her debut book The Lava Never Sleeps: A Honolulu Memoir won the 2018 Willow Books Literature Award, Grand Prize in Prose. She has received fellowships for a Hedgebrook residency and the year-long Jack Straw Writers Program. Her work has appeared in The Jack Straw Writers Anthology, Burningword Literary Journal, and Raven Chronicles’ Last Call. She is a writing and English tutor at North Seattle College and can be found online here.

Recommended Reading:

 

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Click here for all things Jen

 

Guest Posts, healing, Mental Health

The Long Path: Healing the Wounds of Childhood

December 15, 2020
bag

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete.
It’s so f***in’ heroic.”
–George Carlin

By Julia K. Morin

When you look at this photo, you probably see nothing more than a plastic bag.

I see the trigger that caused me to have two panic episodes in the hospital— the first roughly three years ago, and the second about a year ago — and ultimately, the catalyst for me realizing I was struggling with unaddressed childhood trauma tied to my mom’s sudden death 25 years ago, and needed to seriously consider trauma therapy (which I began almost five months ago). Unfortunately, due to current events with the coronavirus pandemic, social distancing and the transition to virtual therapy sessions as the new normal for the time being, my therapist and I came to the decision together to table any further trauma “digging” until we’re able to meet in person again. I quickly learned just how emotionally triggering and draining these sessions are, and that I need as much support as I can get — in person — to get through them.

I’m proud of the difficult trauma work I’ve already done, I’m proud of myself for taking the first step (despite how long it took) to recognize that I needed this help, and then getting it — without any shame, explanations, justifications or apologies. And I know I still have a lot of hard, emotional work ahead of me when we resume. But that grueling work is what needs to be done in order to begin peeling back many complex layers, and prying beneath the surface I’ve just barely scratched all these years of loss, trauma, triggers, and how this has all manifested in my adult life.

It has taken me a while to open up about all of this, but recently I had to pick something up for some medical labs, and was sent home with this bag. I didn’t think anything of it at first, because I only saw the white side of the bag. It wasn’t until I got home, put it down and saw it in my dining room, and the words on it, that I realized it wasn’t just any plain old white plastic bag — and felt the familiar panic rising up.

I crumpled the bag up in a ball and threw it in the trash. I crumpled myself up in a ball and threw myself into bed. I took the bag back out of the trash and broke down crying and wanted to set it on fire.

Because 25 years ago, I saw this very same ‘patient belongings bag’ in the dining room of the house I grew up in…and its contents were the clothing & jewelry my mom had been wearing when she entered the hospital, and died less than two days later.

In April 2017, I was in the hospital for a diagnostic procedure (my first time in a hospital as a patient) prior to surgery, and suddenly found myself inconsolable. And then I had an epiphany: the plastic belongings bag I had been given by a nurse. A light bulb went off in my head. And then everything got very dark.

And this is how a plastic bag became the thing that makes me come undone.

My hope is that over time, addressing & talking about this and other trauma triggers/memories (and addressing associated cognitive distortions) will help to lessen the panic and intense emotion an inanimate object or other visual association has been causing me.

Because right now, it feels like a Goddamn plastic bag has control over me.

I keep catching myself saying it’s stupid or it’s silly, because…it’s just a bag. But in truth, nobody else can possibly know or understand how “just a bag” makes me feel. And now I recognize this as trauma.

My plastic bag is someone else’s fireworks that trigger the memory of an explosion that nearly killed them while deployed overseas. Or another person’s certain smell that they associate with someone who abused them.

This is hard, heavy stuff, and I understand not everyone is comfortable with it. I’m still not completely comfortable with it. But if you’re still reading, please remember to be gentle & kind with yourself and with others.

Because these are the invisible battles people are fighting as they go about their day, doing the best they can and just trying to be okay. These are the silent struggles we so often don’t see or know about that keep people up at night. These are the reminders we all need that everyone carries an invisible burden on their back, and what we see portrayed on social media is rarely a complete picture of what people are dealing with internally.

At eight years old, I watched my mom being loaded into an ambulance in our driveway from a bedroom window. That was the last time I ever saw her. That was the last time I would ever see her again for the rest of my life. Will I ever “get over” that? No. Certainly loss and traumatic experiences change shape over time, and we somehow figure out how to continue on with life and adapt with that massive void in our hearts. We learn to “dance with the limp,” in the words of Anne Lamott, one of my favorite writers. I know many, many people who have experienced and witnessed horrible, painful things that have changed them forever. They will never be the same. They will never “get over it.” They will be forced to learn a new normal and to figure out how to breathe with a piece of their heart missing, and they will survive and maybe even thrive eventually. But there is no date they will circle on a calendar with a note: “Be done hurting about this by today.”

These experiences are a key part of our stories. But do they define us? No. Neither does how long it takes us to process them, to feel a little less broken apart, to start to patch our shattered hearts back together, to feel “okay” again. And it’s okay if we’re never completely okay again.

It’s okay if we dance with a limp forever.

And, a note about grief now that I’ve recently survived the 25th anniversary of my mom’s death, and another Mother’s Day without her: grief is not linear. Neither is trauma. There is no straight line from point A to point B. There are no shortcuts. There is no right and wrong; no mathematical equation or formula. It has taken many years for me to figure out that the reason I’m still carrying around such a heavy burden of grief and trauma from my childhood is not because I’m broken, weak or somehow defective at healing. It’s because I experienced a significant loss and associated trauma at an age where my brain was still growing & developing, and simply was not capable of processing the loss and its magnitude. The result in these cases is typically a sort of delayed processing that only really begins to occur later in life.

And then one day at 30 years old, you have a panic episode in a hospital (followed two years later by another), and suddenly realize the sheer weight of this grief and trauma you’ve been carrying on your back for 22 years is actually crushing you. It’s winning.

So I decided to take back my power and start on the path of turning trauma into healing. I’m giving myself credit for doing the hard, painful work…and giving myself grace that it’s not going to be an overnight process.

This bag is my cross to bear. It is the tidal wave that keeps trying to ravage my boat, knock me down and drown me.

But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it steer this ship.

Julia Morin is a writer, wife, aunt, dog & cat mom, sister, daughter, friend, and a survivor, residing in New Hampshire. She is passionate about ending the stigma around both mental health and grief, and speaking openly about these struggles and the ways they have impacted her own life.

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Click here for all things Jen