The last time

Everyone has a last time I saw him story. I suppose they’re not worth much. You’ll never hear a happy one, and they’re not in short supply. Everyone gets one, at some point. This is mine. My father didn’t die then, but it wasn’t too far off. The equation to get there was an acute collapse, an ER admission, a hospital stay, then weakness enough to merit two different stays at two different rehab centers.

“You have to come get me, Jennifer,” he said on the phone near the end, on one of those last calls. “You have to get me out of here. It’s hell. We’re family. This is what family does.”

The paladin and the barbarian wait for Taylor Swift

Sophie and I are tucked into our side-by-side hotel beds, waiting for the midnight to arrive. Two things will happen at midnight: Taylor Swift’s new album will drop, and Sophie will turn 23.

Albums are not released anymore. Now they drop, like fat dollops of cookie dough onto a sheet pan, or a water balloons on rough pavement.

“It was really nice of Taylor to plan this for your birthday,” I say.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to use headphones?” Sophie asks, a little surprised that I am counting down with her. It’s a leisurely wait, but I don’t mind.

“Definitely,” I say. “I’ve never been part of a Taylor drop. I want the whole experience.” I really do. My girls live in Montreal and Toronto, and I miss their singing in the backseat of the car.

Tending, then and now

I trap the skinny black cat under my left arm on the kitchen counter. He is not thrilled, but he’s a lover, not a fighter. He knows the drill. I rub a squirt of steroid cream into his ear and release him to a day of wrestling with his tuxedo brother and drowning tiny catnip-stuffed fish toys in Messi’s water bowl.

His Darth Vader breathing, combined with wheezing, sneezing, and ropes of mucous whipped onto walls and furniture, had stumped our vet.

Our cat needed a CAT scan, she told us. At a fancy vet office.

“Our vet thinks he needs a CAT scan,” I tell Mihailo. “A CAT SCAN, HA.”

Mihailo loves this cat, but our household is also a revolving door when it comes to money. Six children, five animals, one mother in memory care, one ex-wife. There is a fresh stack of bills on the kitchen island, with shocking sums that would have stopped my heart back in my Massachusetts single-mom days.

the one about and not about dooce

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you used to read the blog Breed ‘Em and Weep, and I sure thank you for that. I remember yours, too. And of course, we all knew dooce.

I started my blog in 2004 or so, not long after my second daughter was born. I was still married to the nice Jewish-Canadian puppeteer. We were living in Massachusetts, in the dilapidated skinny whitish house that my father had loaned us the down payment for. Because we were broke. Flat broke. Not “no high-octane gas for us” broke, but “boob out, nursing a baby while standing in front of a bankruptcy judge” broke.

I didn’t know anyone in person who would understand this.

I wrote about our life, because I did not know what else to do with the chaotic monologue in my head. I knew of a new breed of moms — “mommy bloggers” — and I decided that world suited me, too. It made sense to write down these days and moments, to try to pull off my own high-wire act, teetering between comedy and despair. I would never be dooce or Finslippy or ben and birdy or Mighty Girl or any of the other extraordinarily gifted and wickedly funny women I followed, but I wasn’t trying to be. They inspired me with their bravado and sass and snark and soul, but not one of them was hoping her words would serve as any kind of treacly inspiration. We all wrote copiously and shockingly freely in those early days, hopping in and out of each other’s accounts of parenting and marriages and jobs gone awry, gone right, gone terrible. We were the un-influencers: Here’s my shit, you don’t want any part of this, trust me.

I had never been in a sorority or had a sister, but this felt like it surely must be close. When Heather Armstrong of dooce left a quippy comment on one of my early posts, I swooned. We weren’t friends, per se, but we were something, and it felt good.

We mommy bloggers got into a pretty swell habit: Each of us was writing from our very own gutsy sweet spot. I liked finding out what I had to say. The words that flowed were messy and meaty. dooce especially wrote savagely, like her life depended on it. Which, of course, it did. I loved her voice, especially when it scared me.

From my own blog posts, I cobbled together my first manuscript. A major publisher reached out, paperwork was dispatched: I was going to be published. A book, a real live book with turnable, dog-earable pages full of creative nonfiction. I thought we might be able to crawl out of the debt abyss. But just a month or two later, the publishing company called to say — “regretfully” — that the marketing department didn’t know how to market me, so they were killing the project. When I got the news, my eyes were on my toddler, in her high chair, smearing chocolate pudding all over her tray and her face. My stomach slid onto the floor and slithered away, ashamed to be associated with me.

Frantic, I tried to get a clearer sense of how I’d failed so colossally. Was there nothing I could do to fix it? Couldn’t I rewrite it? There was not, and no, rewriting would not help. The marketing team had decided my voice was simply “too quirky, too smart,” and I was too hard of a sell.

“What’s wrong with quirky and smart?” I needed to know.

“It’s just not the voice they want for a parenting book,” said the editor who’d signed on, and would now be signing out. “You’re, you know, a mom. They thought you would sound more like a mom.”

“But I am a mom.”

“Of course.”

“And that’s my voice,” I said. “I don’t have another one.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” she said. “Marketing said they’d love to publish your second book.”

“I don’t have a second book.”

“Someday.”

“But…I’ll still be me. Then. With the same voice.”

“Well…you never know,” she said. “Let’s keep in touch.”

We did not keep in touch. I sank into a miserable depression over the next several years. My brain blackened into thick sludge. I couldn’t think straight and I couldn’t find work. Our bank account stayed empty. Our house crumbled, then our marriage. I tried to unalive myself in a river and did the requisite time on a psych ward. Released on scores of psych meds, I dissolved into a hot, pulpy stew of shame.

The circle of mama bloggers and my love for my daughters were the two constants in my life. So I kept writing through each blow. And these dear, dear women kept on writing too, through their own setbacks and tragedies and losses. I wasn’t the only one struggling with mental health issues and old trauma. I kept my voice because of these women writers, who made it safe to exist exactly as I was.

There were BlogHer conferences that I was too painfully shy and broken to attend, but I loved seeing photos. Heather was usually at the center of these photos, simultaneously stunning and wary.

It is difficult to explain the friendships that came from that time. Most of these women (including Heather) I have never met in real life, but I know more about their children and their husbands and their wives and their passions and their regrets than I know of many of my in-person friends. We’ve drifted, many of us, from our blogs to orbiting each other on social media, or reaching out to offer a writing gig or inquire about one. “Networking,” as it’s crassly called, doesn’t capture the sisterly “I thought of you the other day,” the relief of knowing you are remembered, that you are still seen.

Heather’s painful struggles with severe depression and alcoholism were not a secret, but still, it feels uncomfortable to reference it here. We had similar awfulness in our skulls, but I didn’t know her well outside of her blog and don’t want to pretend to. I watched from the sidelines, kept reading, observed: It felt like her anxiety only mounted as she garnered more commercial success. And my God, there was a lot of success that came her way. So many hands, clamoring for her, all the time. Her words sometimes angered or alarmed her friends and readers. Her voice was unsettling, defiant at times. There were always haters, plenty of them. They came out in droves especially cruelly when she shared that she and her husband, Jon, were splitting.

She was a gorgeous, golden, spiky, slippery, whip-smart creature and I wish very much she were here to roll her eyes at that description.

But if you’re here, you know she’s gone. She tried very, very hard to stick around, and that’s all I know how to say about that. When I heard dooce was lost to suicide, it seemed both an impossibility and the saddest inevitability. I have no claim to the kind of grief that her babies and lovers and closest friends are feeling. But the news of her death came to me by way of scores of women from our writing circle. I sense we’re all carrying the loss gingerly in our hands, not sure how much or how little we should be grieving. How are you?

Heather’s departure feels like an unfinished conversation. We’re suddenly our younger selves, sharing memories of her and the tangle of dooce-ness that only she had words for. There’s so much love here, I’d almost forgotten how much.

Love to you all xo

Jenn

How to Meet Meryl Streep (2005)

There are many, many things you must not do right now. But here is what you must do: stay calm. Breathe as deeply as you can, which is not very deeply at all. Your ribs are crumpling from the pressure. In case you lost consciousness for a moment, you are standing two feet away from Meryl Streep, under the suspended halves of a very large boulder...

The door

The door would not close.
I had tried for years
to close it behind me.

So like me, to fill a room
too full, to keep too many
useless things, to fear
pardoning the ghosts...

Safe enough

 

By 43, I think, in addition to knowing the right brassiere for any occasion, I should know how to say goodbye. I should be able to say goodbye with conviction, without looking back. At least, I feel like I should be able to do this. But I am always looking back, hoping for one last glimpse, one more wave. No wonder my neck and spine hurt all the time. I ache with goodbyes.

Sea shell, snowshoe, circumstance

In last night's dream I could run pretty fast:
tenth place in the 5k that involved climbing
wobbly circus ladders through plastic sheeting.
I did not stop for water. When I got home,
Lady Gaga received me well in my bed.

Then I drove five hours north to see you in
Montreal, a place in which neither of us has
ever lived. 

I'm mad because I don't know how to ask you for lasagna

It doesn't take much for me to decide, at long stupid last, that there is no God.

A dog skull does the trick, this afternoon. I'm cured. 

The dog no bigger than a large cat leaps onto the couch into the same space and at the same moment I am reaching for--what? Who knows now. The puppy's small dense skull collides with my left eye socket. She is unscathed (the whole fucking world, even a dog, knows how to shake itself off and walk away untouched--pain is remarkably optional for many) but I reel from the impact.

The pain is a fresh pain, at least, something new. That triggers the tears I've been holding at bay for days. I press the heel of my hand to my brow, sobbing furiously and instantly. The pain as an isolated moment is not the issue. It's a dogpile of pain that won't let up, accompanied by self-commentary so vicious, I would drive a knife into the eye of anyone who spoke to my daughters in the same way.