The Mommy Chronicles

You weren’t going to write today. Because there are other things that need doing. Children who need and so greatly deserve to be cared for. A husband who needs and also greatly deserves to be cared for, to be messaged and reminded that he’s adored, in the midst of a challenging time at work. A dog and cat to be fed. Checks to be written. Calls to be made and returned. Uniforms to be washed. Schedules to be organized. Counters to be cleaned.  Milk and bananas and paper towels and spinach and raspberries and mozzarella cheese — and those barbeque PopChips that your kids love to eat after school as a snack, in those little plastic bowls that you purchased from Ikea for them when they were small — all of these things need to be shopped for, and purchased, and bagged, and put away in their proper places in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets. There are towels to fold, and you’d rather not think about the unruly mob of worn, dog-hair-encrusted black Gold Toe socks forming in the laundry room. They’re restless. They cry out for cleanliness, albeit softly, because they’re 100% cotton. They want justice. They seek their rightful place with their soul sock match in the small, upper left-hand drawer of my husband’s oak dresser.

These are things that need doing. Not frivolity, missy. Not dreaming. Not crafting. Not dabbling. Know your place. Your place is good. Seventy-four-thousand other women would kill — easily, swiftly, without any remorse — for your place in this world.

And then a message appears. Something from a friend, saying that there’s a memoir workshop about to happen in a very pretty place somewhere else in this world.

Everything stops for a minute. You stare at the screen and feel your throat clench, just one involuntary spasm of muscle. And the inner workings of that part of your brain — that which you swore to turn off today — that just clicks on all by itself, somehow, because, hand to God, you were nowhere near the controls, and the whirr of the thinking and the words begins, even though the machine sputters and groans under the heavy weight of guilt and fear.

You can’t keep doing this. Not today. You’re not a writer. You’re just a woman. A girl, really, if you’re honest with yourself. Just a girl in a place. That’s all. Nothing special.

So you go downstairs to the laundry room and wrestle with the Gold Toe mob, one by one, unfurling each sock that retains the tight,  balled-up shape that your husband left it in when he pulled it off his tired, achy foot for lo, these many nights. Sometimes it was at 7 o’clock, sometimes at 9:30, after the kids were tucked into bed. Sometimes closer to midnight — when he finally got home, after the keynote speaker and the cocktail hour and the dinner and then the wall of traffic in the damn tunnel, and still managed to take his shoes and socks off, although he was almost sleepwalking through the exercise. He works too hard. Much too hard. You worry about this. A lot. The machine hiccups, hesitates — and damned if it doesn’t start up again. All on its own.

You break up the Gold Toe mob and go back upstairs to the kitchen. After you empty the dishwasher and clean the sink, and answer the emails about the Girl Scout mother/daughter dance tomorrow, you open the message with the link again, because this is what you do to yourself, and you click on the website that describes the workshop in pictures and words. For a minute, you imagine yourself nestled under the comforter that adorns the welcoming bed of each writer’s room. You imagine yourself there at rest. Asleep. Warm. Peaceful. Because you’d done some very good work while you were there.

You think of three other people to send the information to, immediately, because they should have the spot. This is meant for someone else. Not you. But you don’t send it. Not right away. Because you think that it might make them feel worse if you do. Like you’re feeling right now.

It’s too indulgent. Too much money. It’s abject abandonment of your family, really. Leaving these three people you love for a long weekend is — in your guilt-ridden motherly mind — akin to leaving your husband and sending the children off to live with a spinster aunt in Iowa,  and boarding a bus to New York City to join Ziegfield’s chorus line. You know, like the flighty, weak-kneed flapper you really are, right there dead-center in the mushy, undisciplined core of your being. This isn’t something that you just have to do. It’s something you merely want to do. And not exactly sure that you’re good enough to do. You’re not, actually. You’re really not.

You don’t know how else to sift through what you’re feeling, except to sit down for a minute and write, in this freeform way that you always have since you were little. You write this, just what you’re reading now, because you have to expunge it. You have to extricate this very thought and see it before you, with your own aging eyes.

You think of the mother who volunteered at the library with you a few weeks ago — the one who stopped you while you were shelving books and said, “Hey, Kathleen, you’re a writer, I have a question –” And you didn’t hear the rest of what she was saying, because those words — “you’re a writer” — were right there in front of you, because someone else said them to you out loud as something they believed as absolute fact, and you almost teared up while you were putting away those damn books about American dog breeds, the ones that all the second and third graders love to read and that you find yourself forever reshelving. The ones that your own daughter insisted on checking out of the library for month after month. Enough with the Samoyeds already, kid. They’re big dogs. They slobber. We get it.

And that’s the thing of you, really, Kathleen.  These moments of truth and clarity and beauty that you almost don’t allow yourself to feel. Because you think they’re meant for someone else. Not you. That’s the thing of all of us, really. We deny ourselves so many beautiful truths.

1. That I really should have taken a toothpick or an old toothbrush or some kind of wooden skewer to those pesky corners and edges of my appliances and plumbing fixtures — the lip of the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, the sides of the stove top, the openings in my showerhead clogged with mineral sediment — all of which I can’t seem to clean properly.

2. That I’m no longer a size four, the way I was before I gave birth to my two babies.

3. That I bought the wrong-color couch, curtains or throw pillows. That the paint didn’t really match the upholstery the way I thought it would, when I squinted at fabric swatches and paint chips in a poorly-lit hardware store.

4. That Nicki Minaj did indeed have musical talent.

5. That Twitter was a worthwhile pursuit on my smartphone. Facebook, of course, was. Instagram, possibly. Just not Twitter. Or Tumblr.

6. That I really should have eaten haggis more than once.

7. That it was important to argue with my beloved over such trivial things as balled-up, stinky socks, poor time management, errant coffee cups and their resulting stains, fleeting dirty looks, and where we were spending Thanksgiving. I should have just let it all go, taken his hand, and taken him to bed a lot more often. (Husband, if you’re reading this now, don’t get ahead of yourself. I have to take the girl to her softball game tonight.)

8. That I was good enough. I know myself. I’ll still think I wasn’t good enough of a daughter, a wife, a mother or a friend.

9. That it was all worth worrying about. Not much of it happened anyway. Except this one death thing, which I couldn’t have controlled with any amount of worry, apparently. Or bargaining. Or power-walking. Or kale.

10. That I’m done. That I’m ready to go, able to leave behind the people who I love, and this devastatingly difficult and beautiful life I’ve been so fortunate to have been given. There is no question that I will confound my husband and adult children in my final moments (please God may my husband outlive me, so he takes up with a nice girlfriend — still with her own set of teeth — in the nursing home, and may my adult children be old enough to be grandparents themselves), as I struggle to throw the deathbed sheets aside, stand and grip the window frame to keep me upright, and laugh and shriek at the view of the mountains, or the FDR Drive, or a nondescript hospital parking lot somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. I will go out like Zorba the Greek. I will never give in. I will be a spit-fired, huge-hearted, passionate (old — please, please old) pain-in-the-ass Irish woman — so thankful, so greedily desirous of every droplet of this life — until the very moment that they — he, she, whom- or whatever — turn out my light.

[Click on the YouTube video for today's musical accompaniment.]

Me on the stone steps of SU's Hall of Languages, May 1992 -- a few short weeks before the entry-level publishing job, while still in my blissful Doc Marten phase

After I graduated from Syracuse, I worked in a hollow, depressing job as an editorial assistant at a large book publishing conglomerate. My duties included forwarding packets of fan letters that would mostly go unanswered by their recipients, ensuring that authors received the contractually-agreed-upon number of hardcover and paperback editions of their life's work, and circulating book jackets in process from editors, to art directors, and to publicists. The brightest part of my day involved the sharing of secret, snide jokes at assistants' desks, while waiting for department heads to check and initial requisite blank boxes.

It was 1992, and I worked alongside a then-unpublished David Rakoff, whose eloquence, humor and intelligence made the workday far less depressing. And occasionally, more so, for the very same reasons.

We were all employees of a former boutique book publishing house, which had touted the likes of Aldous Huxley, Armistead Maupin and Shel Silverstein, and was transitioning into a grinding, mass-market machine, operated by a well-known, and little-admired, Australian mogul. (The century-old Scribner's bookstore on Fifth Avenue is now home to a bi-level Sephora. Please don't get me started, or I'll weep ugly tears.) Said machine spit out less mainstream authors like cartoonish springs and shards of metal, and only opened its steel trap to ingest those that guaranteed remarkable sales. Celebrities, supermarket mystery writers, toupee-d NFL heroes -- they all fed the machine. We occasionally crossed paths with such authors as they visited the office to kick off publicity and press tours. We fetched them coffee. We retrieved their umbrellas and topcoats. We were small, small cogs.

David was the executive assistant to the editorial director of the trade division. He smoked, like we all did, and he had a gorgeous whirl of thick, black hair, upswept in an un-ironic pompadour. One or two wisps of hair defied his hairline and danced along his high forehead, and accentuated his adept storytelling and sly-witted asides.

David shouldn't have been there. David should have been an author, a performer -- something, anything other than this -- and all of us knew it. Most of all, David. The universe seemed imbalanced, somehow, at such intellectual injustice. Each of us sneered and smoked and drank through our quiet, personal pains, and stood in the shower on random mornings, crying beneath the pulsing stream of water, so our roommates wouldn't hear us.

The editorial assistants gathered at weekly "slush lunches" -- held in a windowless conference room with a long, faux woodgrain table, which held corrugated mail sorters overflowing with the fragile egos of unpublished writers. Our job was to sort through the stacks of unsolicited manuscripts each week, in exchange for a free sandwich and a bottle of Snapple brought in from the nearby deli, and return unfulfilled dreams, receipt requested. Occasionally, we read passages out loud to each other, with the same sort of gallows humor that city morgue workers and medical students must use with cadavers. We had to, or it would consume us. We were butchering souls, and we knew it.

Sometimes, we all went out drinking together at the end of the week, fancying ourselves as the latest incarnation of Dorothy Parker's Algonquin grouping. We were no such thing. Only David was.

Once or twice, the party made its way to David's place downtown. He had the kind of apartment described in an O. Henry short story -- the tenement walk-up flat with a cast-iron bathtub set squarely in the middle of the old-world kitchen. It suited him, somehow. He used the bathtub as a base for a dining table, I think, and a group of us sat around drinking and smoking and imagining ourselves salon-worthy. But we weren't. We were simply the people who would mature into larger-cog jobs and tax brackets that allowed us to make NPR and Channel Thirteen possible because of our generous donations. David was the one who actually became a regular on-air contributor to NPR. That was the difference.

In these sorrowful trenches of book publishing, I had come to the sudden realization that I wasn't going to be a twentysomething prodigy of a writer, as I had naively imagined myself becoming. I had no stories to tell. At night, I occasionally drank tumblers of cheap whiskey by myself, and quietly panicked that I wasn't going to become much of anything, really, except very much indebted to Messrs. Visa and MasterCard.

I lived downtown on Twenty-Second Street then, in the shadow of the Flatiron Building -- the tri-cornered architectural icon that stood impervious to my existence as I walked home along Fifth Avenue. I would never be integral. I wasn't made of limestone, or of anything permanent.

I rented out a small bedroom in my future sister-in-law's breathtaking loft apartment in that first year of living in Manhattan. It was a small sleeping loft, really, built above the bathroom -- so small that my boyfriend couldn't sit fully upright to read, or he'd bang his head on the sloped ceiling. The sex up there was my salvation, albeit gymnastic -- and often hushed.

It was a fabulous apartment with an open floor plan, exposed brick, and levels. Lots of levels. (Sorry, Kramer.) The first time that my father visited, he looked at me squarely and said, "You'll never live in another apartment as nice as this in Manhattan. Understand that." There were three of us sharing the apartment -- my sister-in-law-to-be, an associate at a Big Six accounting firm who traveled frequently; the loft owner's niece, who worked in derivatives at a major US bank and dated an Italian marquis; and me, who humbly made do with a salary of $18,500 per year through frugality and skipped meals, and outfitted herself only at Strawberry markdowns. (If you're not familiar with Strawberry, consider yourself fortunate.)

When I had enough money to take the subway to work, I'd ride up to 57th Street on the 4/5/6 line and exit at the stairs under Bloomingdales' flagship store. I'd pass homeless people who had made their home on and around the set of subway exit stairs, and, shamefully, envy them. My depression-tinted glasses only enabled me to see these souls free from the tether of normality, from aspirations and expectations, with nothing but time to call their own -- time I foolishly thought was spent solely on sleep, masturbating and drink. They'd already fallen and survived the impact. Not like me, teetering and unsteady atop a malformed twenty-two year-old ego. I knew there would be such an unnerving clatter, such bruising, such brokenness, when it all gave way.

I loathed the ascent of those dank subway stairs, opening onto Lexington Avenue. I hated the confines of my beige assistant's cubicle -- that place of obligation that reminded me daily, hourly, of what I was never going to accomplish.

Desperate to lift the fog -- and whittle my "fat" 128-pound waistline into that of New York's required anorexic measurements -- I'd show up for a Step class before work ("Grapevine! Grapevine!") at the now-defunct Living Well Lady gym across the street. Mind you, no lady who procured a membership to this gym actually embodied a life well-lived. She would only have an ongoing series of painful cryogenic appointments with a podiatrist, because she'd contracted plantar warts from the unsightly women's changing room.

At Living Well Lady, I was an idle participant in a class of obese outerborough admin assistants and bank tellers, all strangely unaware that the eighties -- and several dress sizes -- had passed them by. They mocked present-day fashion, and their very shapes, in shiny, strained leotards and tights. They mis-stepped on varying heights of molded plastic risers, and plodded ever closer to turning their edema-ish ankles, abruptly ending their grotesque morning kickline. After class had ended, I'd sit alone for a few minutes on the locker-room bench as their sleeves and blazers grazed my head, a poly/acrylic flurry of Chaus and Jones New York, rushing to be at their desks before life's starting gun went off at 9 am.

After several years in this repetitive routine, I moved on to the next stage of my life -- to a series of jobs at Conde Nast that eventually offered me the title of advertising copywriter. I still keep that first business card in my wallet, because I shamefully needed that talisman. Still do, even now. Who am I kidding? Writers doubt. Always.

I didn't keep in touch with many of those assistants after I left. I speak to perhaps only one or two now, on Facebook. We've all moved on to grander positions, and hopefully, to happier places in our lives. It's a time that many of us haven't been ready to return to. I'd heard through mutual friends that one assistant had even been institutionalized, for a time. Perhaps still, in a small, cramped, New York City apartment somewhere, with no natural light streaming in.

David, however, had soared, to his obvious credit. He became a contributor to Ira Glass' program on NPR, wrote articles for magazines and the New York Times, and earned a rightful place on bookshelves as a celebrated author of several essay collections. Years earlier, he had suffered from a "touch of cancer," as he once called it, having been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in his twenties. He'd gone through several rounds of radiation then, and avoided chemotherapy, a decision which predisposed him to being a likelier candidate for a second, more aggressive battle with cancer later in life. They were poor odds. He'd be stricken with the disease again in 2010.

About a year or so before his death, when I was unaware of the recurrence of David's cancer and his grim diagnosis, I had messaged him to offer congratulations on the publication of his third collection of essays, Half-Empty. I hadn't yet finished reading it, but I selfishly wanted to connect and tell him how happy I was for his achievements. He was kind, and slyly cutting in his response, just the same as he always had been. We messaged back and forth, and a week or so later, he "liked" the photo I posted of my son on Facebook, the one proudly showing off the library card that he'd just secured. David went on to write me a kind, private message about my son's eyes, and how much they looked like mine, and that they were already wise. He wished us all well. I wished him the same, not knowing how ignorant those words could seem to a person facing such dire realities. I would realize his circumstances only when I reached the final essay in his book, the one that candidly and achingly described the betrayal that his body had inflicted upon him. I couldn't read the essay in one sitting, but approached it cautiously, opening and closing the book over a span of several days, because the details were so frighteningly real.

David died last summer, after a painful and disfiguring battle with a sarcoma that had erupted from his left collarbone. As he explained in the essay, several surgeries and rounds of chemo had left him weakened, without the use of his left arm, and finally, with resignation as to what would transpire. "Why me?" he said in an interview before his death. "More likely, 'Why not me?'"

Strangely, I learned through social media that David had died, in the way that I've come to learn about so many other facts and pieces of breaking news. I was backing out of my driveway in my suburban automobile, and received a message from a mutual friend on my smartphone. I pulled my car over to the curb, read through the message, and cried in the driver's seat. The skies opened just then, and pelts of rain, eerily timed to my sobbing, rapped on the hood of the car.

I wasn't his friend. I wasn't his peer, although I realized that some of the injustice I felt was rooted in the unfairness of his being taken so young. He was only forty-seven when he died.

I simply knew him during a short period of my life, for a set time, and that was all I could really say. And that wasn't what mattered. I didn't deserve any grief in this.

David deserved to live. He deserved to write more essays and publish more books. He deserved more acting roles. He deserved the very banality of life that I continue to hold a place in.  It still didn't make any sense, although some oncologist or genetic researcher could surely say otherwise. I don't want to know their reasons.

I don't even deserve to write this essay about him. That's how much lesser I am, than his life, his talents, and his trials.

But I'm writing about him today, because I can't delete this draft that I've been keeping in my WordPress file since he died. Still, so selfish.

David wouldn't give my words any thought or credence, if he were here, but if I'd managed to corner him in a dark downtown bar in Manhattan, and pressed him for a critique, he'd delight in dissecting such an essay, in finding the many cliches and poor word choices that litter this text. Black eyes glinting, lithe dancer legs crossed, lips pursed and hinting at his amusement, he'd unleash a barrage of literary bullets on me at close range. Because he was that gifted, and because that is what I so righteously deserve. Such is life's cruel, beautiful imbalance.

[Click on the YouTube video for today's musical accompaniment.]
 

Stacey Loscalzo, my friend and immensely talented writing cohort, always gives me thoughtful writing prompts through her blog posts. I should be working on the first assignment for a writing class that I’ll be taking in June — my obituary, which really is a fantastic exercise. Doesn’t even spook me, because I’m Irish, and we plan our funerals way ahead. Like, years in advance. I come from a long line of people who let everyone know that the dresses and suits they want to be laid out in are hanging in the front closet, wrapped in dry-cleaners’ plastic. But I’m just not that morose this morning. I’d rather do this exercise first. A list of my life’s firsts.

First car: It wasn’t really mine, in so much as I made payments for it, but the first car I drove was a 3-cylinder Subaru Justy with manual transmission. (Taught my then-boyfriend-now-husband how to drive a stick with that car.) If you hit the dashboard just right with both palms, the headlights switched off. Good times. Drove it back and forth to Syracuse in college more times than it should have survived such trips. I still love Subarus. And I still love the man who grinded those gears on Redfield Place.

First teacher: My kindergarten teacher, Miss Joan. Looked and dressed like Jane Russell.

First job: Babysitting at twelve or thirteen. Does that count? First office job — quality control assistant at Monitor Plus, a company in Wilton, Connecticut which somehow had ties to Nielsen’s TV ratings. My job was to watch VHS tapes of station broadcasts from end to end, and confirm that commercials aired when the network and its affiliates said they did, per their billing statements. Perfect job for fifteen year-old kids like me and retired people, of which there were many. For weeks, I had to help them figure out all the buttons on their VCRs. I’m a nice girl. I felt bad.

First concert: Peter Gabriel at Madison Square Garden, 1984. I was fourteen and really thought I was all that. (Thanks to Wendy Evans and her mother, who sat at the coffee shop in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania across the street and waited until the show was over so she could take us back home to Connecticut.) Still have the t-shirt, and I sleep in it sometimes, but only when my husband’s away. Because no husband should bear the shock of seeing his wife in bed, adorned in bedclothes that display the faded, bare-threaded face of Peter Gabriel in full “Shock the Monkey” makeup.

First plane ride: Everyone we knew lived no more than two hours away, so we didn’t go anywhere. I was thirteen the first time I traveled on an airplane, because my parents were finally able to afford a fancy vacation. It was a big deal. We went to the Florida Keys. I think I still have freckles from that trip.

First best friend: Ann Widerka. Met her when I was four. Friends for almost forty years.

First sleepover: I think it was at Ann’s house. Must have been.

First person you talked to today: My daughter. My husband leaves for work long before I’m roused and cognizant of speech.

First movie in a theatre: Bambi. My mother took me to a matinee when I was four, on a hot day in August. It was a beautiful old theater — I think it must have been RKO Keiths in Flushing, Queens, because it was air-conditioned. Probably a primary reason why we went to the movies, since we didn’t have it at home yet.  Can’t remember. I cried when Bambi’s mother died, and rubbed my eyes with salty, buttery fists fresh from the popcorn tub, and cried some more because they were stinging. I can still viscerally feel the salt in my eyes, the urgency with which my mother pulled me by the arm out of the theater, and that horrible shock of light and heat as I was roughly ushered out of the dark, cool, quiet and out into the bright, loud midday street of the outerboroughs. I still can’t watch Bambi. God, I have issues.

First state you lived in: Born in New York. New York City, to be exact. Island of Manhattan. Not that I’m proud of it or anything. I think there’s a small plaque in front of Mount Sinai Hospital on the Fifth Avenue side. Really small.

First pet: A pet worm, aptly named Shermy, which I adopted with said best friend Ann. We found him after a rainy day and kept him in a dirt-filled shoebox for three days. It’s so ironic how a child’s innocent, misplaced love can bring about the untimely demise of so many innocent creatures, when misplaced and removed from their natural habitat. We meant well. We left him grass and dandelions.

First foreign country you visited: Canada on an eighth grade field trip. (Me too, Stacey! Mohn-ray-ahl. And Kay-bec.)

First doll: My mother says it was a fabric doll with yellow yarn hair named Pinky. I remember a Holly Hobbie rag doll. I wasn’t much for dolls when I was little. I much preferred furry plush animals for sleeping and hugging too tightly and drooling on.

First magazine you subscribed to: I think my mother bought me a subscription to some progressive teenage magazine, which is now, sadly, defunct. We saved Highlights for trips to the dentist.

First horror movie: Friday the 13th at a sleepover when I was ten or eleven. Scarred me to this day. I despise horror movies, gore, anything depicting abject torture and agony. I’m too empathetic.

First collection: Rocks. My father used to work for a mining company and would travel to mining locations in California, the South and the Midwest, Mexico — even South America. He’d always bring me back a rock from one of those trips, and he’d sit with me and show me the veins on the specimens, and the minerals and gems they were in search of. He once brought me a rock hewn by a hand tool, not machine-drilled or cut, just extracted by the sheer strength of one blow.

First instrument played: Guitar. Even though I really wanted to play the drums. Desperately wanted to play the drums. We lived in an attached house in Queens. No drums. Started taking guitar lessons again at forty-two. Trying to get up the courage to ask my guitar teacher if I can sit behind the drum kit in his practice room.

First thing you learned to cook: Sugar cookies with my mom. That’s really baking, not cooking. If we’re going to be strict about this — then I’ll say english-muffin pizzas. If we’re going to be really strict and insist that it had to be stovetop-related, then Chinese stir-fry.

First professional sporting event you went to: A Yankees game, mitt in hand. Didn’t catch anything, but I didn’t care, because I was just so thrilled to be there.

I’ve posted this before, but I’m posting it again. Yes, yes, we mothers all deserve the breakfast in bed and the mani-pedi appointment and the seven minutes of peace and the handmade cards and coupons for dog-walking and the floral arrangements and the brunch — oh, the mimosa-saturated brunch of delight! — on Mother’s Day, the holy day of maternal obligation, when we are thanked profusely for all the ass-wiping and uniform-washing and food shopping and bill-paying and fight-stopping and homework-helping and stuffed-animal-recovery and boo-boo-kissing and dear God, perhaps most important, the tongue-biting.

But on this Mother’s Day Eve — I don’t know what the hell it’s called, work with me here –I’m posting this with gratitude for all the good men out there who make Mother’s Day — and every day — so meaningful. Especially mine. Thanks, babe.

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He’s gonna kill me. But I’m going to publish this list on my blog anyway. What the hell. That’s what you sign up for when you marry a perimenopausal hack.

[Click on the YouTube video for today's soundtrack.]

1. He is the father of my two children, and whenever they do things that make me burst with pride or laugh in a spit-out-your-morning-coffee-kind-of-way, they make me so goddamn grateful that I chose him, and that he chose me. No one else in this world that I’d rather combine DNA with.

2. He makes yummy sounds whenever I cook for him.

3. He never panics. Even when there’s an oxygen mask suddenly strapped to my face while I’m giving birth, and twelve people in white coats and nurses’ scrubs urgently rush into our hospital room. Even when I get a call that my father has to be wheeled into open-heart surgery immediately. Even when our little boy’s lips turn ashen-gray and he has difficulty breathing and we don’t know why. He looks directly into my eyes and doesn’t look away. He winds his way through the twisty-turny maze in my head, and seeks me out until he finds me, cowering in a mushy corner of my over-analyzing brain, hiding and terrified. He tells me it will be alright, and I believe him. Completely.

4. When he’s driving too fast, and I jam on the imaginary passenger-side brake that I still believe will work after nearly sixteen years of marriage, he doesn’t stop the car and pull over to the side and tell me to get out and walk. He really should, but he doesn’t.

5. He breaks the cardinal rule of Guys’ Weekend and tells me all the details afterwards.

(At least I think he does. Hmmm.)

6. He’s my own personal Geek Squad whenever something’s fer-screwy with the computer. Or the printer. Or my cellphone. Or the cable box. Or the DVD player. Or the answering machine. Or the garage door opener. (I was an English major. Not a mechanical bone in my body.)

7. He believes in me, especially at the exact moments when I’ve stopped believing in myself.

8. He lets me buy clothes for him. We went through an unfortunate overalls phase together in the early nineties, and he didn’t fire me as his personal shopper, even though he looked like an extra in Dexy’s Midnight Runners “Come On Eileen” video. Thanks for that, honey.

9. He’s a gem of a man in every sense of the word. Like, Top Five Men Ever In Existence. OK, Top Three. Jesus and Levon Helm are One and Two. I can’t provide details or there will be lines of women outside my door with pies and casseroles.

10. He puts the stresses of the day aside each time he walks in the door at night. I don’t know how he does it, but he is present, and loving, and cheerful, every time. Every goddamn time. (Now I’m rethinking the Top Five Men Ever order in #9 above. Maybe my husband is One and Levon Helm is Two. Because Jesus wasn’t even that easy-going. Remember the moneychangers in the Temple? That was a tough day at work for JC, and he totally lost it. And snipped at Mary Magdalene afterwards. Not my husband. No, sir.)

11. He doesn’t say a word about all the deliveries that arrive here regularly via UPS. Not one word.

12. He signs up for every shift in our little family. He wants to make memories with his babies. He wants to let me know he’s got my back. He shows up, he makes the effort, and he participates. Actively. He’s in this — this whole messy, frustrating, heart-swelling, mucky, glorious, exhausting, uplifting thing that we built together with chewing gum and college dive bar beer coasters and London take-away Chinese food containers and subway tokens and Cheerios and plane tickets and Advil tablets and burp cloths and cups of coffee and loose change and honest-to-God love.

13. He has the ability to grow a beard eight seconds after he shaves. Damn, that’s sexy. I miss his full-on mountain man look from our college days. Mercy. But the weekend scruff is enough.

14. He leaves me alone every December to string the lights on the Christmas tree all by myself. He’s Jewish. He didn’t grow up stringing Christmas lights. And he’s secure enough in his manhood that he can hand that task over easily. (He’s also not an idiot. Who the hell wants that job?) He’s never understood why we drag a dead tree into the house and decorate it with “Precious Moments” and “Peanuts” ornaments. And electrify it, thereby increasing our risk of a fire tenfold. And then turn all the lights off, swig Baileys, and cry. (And we Gentiles think a bris is a bizarre tradition?) He leaves me be while I blast my Christmas music and curse in the living room in the darkness, tangled in tiny white lights that may or may not be working, just like my father did before me and his father before that. He honors my traditions. Don’t even get me started on St. Patrick’s Day. The man should be canonized for lo, these many Marches.

15. He still holds my hand. And he still puts his arm around me at the movies.

16. He’s an old-school man of honor. In his life, in his expressions of love, in the way he parents, at his workplace, in the moments that make his children — and his wife — so proud of who he is and how he conducts himself. The older I get, the more I realize how few of them are out there. And how lucky I am to have this one under my roof.

17. He listens to me — about my delusions of grandeur and my moments of worry about the children and my surety that I’m dying from a rare disease and my flashes of anger about untrainable dogs or highway drivers or insurance companies.

(At least I think he does. Hmmm.)

18. He’s filled twenty years with words and actions that let me know exactly how he feels about me, and I’ve done the same, and if something happened to both of us tomorrow, we both know that we’ve had all of that, that it was real, and it was ours, and that it’s been much more than enough. I pretended for a long time that I was a tough outer borough Irish chick who didn’t need anybody — not no way, not no how. I’ve learned that the honest, vulnerable expression of love is much tougher — and more fulfilling — than any tough chick persona. And so worth the risk. I’m more grateful than I can ever say that he’s taken the leap with me, and that he’s held my hand — so tenderly, so assuredly — through the glorious rush of life.

Here’s my Week Three installment of a fun and thought-provoking year-long exercise from Morrea Seal, aptly called the 52 Lists Project. This week’s assignment: list the things you should be proud of. If you’re in your forties like I am, and need a magnifying glass as big as your head to read my list from the Instagram shot below, just scroll down and you can read my list there. More important: write your own list. Then tuck it away someplace safe and special. You’ll feel pretty, pretty good afterwards.

 

 

• my strength — not so much physical as emotional
• my never-ending goal to improve myself, do better, keep trying, and get back up when I fall
• my children’s hearts — and their capacity for love
• overcoming a painful childhood and ending (or at least lessening) generations of dysfunction
• transitioning from a little girl into a full-grown, blossoming woman without too many chinks on my armor
• my sense of humor, which saves me and — occasionally — others
• for keeping the the child within me well-loved and nurtured
• my writing — for sharing it and submitting it, and for being confident enough to risk rejection, frustration and failure
• being brave enough to live out loud
• being told that I make other people feel loved, welcomed, supported, and cared for
• teaching my children to be kind and loving souls
• having the cojones to try stand-up comedy in NYC in my twenties
• moving across the country to San Francisco, knowing no one else other than the husband who asked me to come with him
• being a pretty darn good hostess
• my acting ability — I coulda been a conten-duh
• writing essays and stories and gratitudes that make other people feel really good
• my cooking skills
• my creativity
• my ability to make our house a cozy, safe, nurturing home
• my photography skills — especially my selfies (ahem)
• my about-to-be-seventeen-year marriage — the smartest thing I ever did was say yes to that man

When I was four, my mother took me into Manhattan to audition for a walk-on role in a Broadway show. (I have no idea which one. Except that it wasn’t “Hair.” Good Lord, I hope it wasn’t “Godspell.”)

I had been in a few commercials as an infant and toddler, which, as my mother noted, was effected primarily to pay for my formula and baby clothes. I hob-nobbed with the under-five set back then, and even crawled around on the floor of agents’ and photographers’ offices with none other than Mikey of LIFE Cereal fame. (He’s not dead, by the way. Not that I get a Christmas card from him or anything, but I looked it up on Snopes.)

It should be noted here that I was most famous for my infant ass, which was prominently featured in one of those Pampers diaper absorbency commercials. I’m guessing that’s because it was wide enough to blot well. My mother was always able to pick it out on television. An ass only a mother could love.

I was also in a thirty-second television spot for Morton Salt, which aired for about six weeks.  All I can surmise is that I must have been extremely bloated. And thirsty. I had no speaking part, since I was six months old, so I didn’t get the damn actors’ union card, either.

On the day of my Broadway audition, we took the subway from our Queens apartment into Manhattan. The memory of sitting on an uncomfortable woven cane subway seat that day has still stayed with me, for several reasons.

First, my mother and I were traveling in a subway car from the 1930s or 1940s, somehow still in service and wheezing along the tracks, thanks to President Ford’s fiscal abandonment of New York City in the mid-seventies. My mother — who could have given Martha Stewart a run for her money fifty years ago, given her appreciation for antiques — commented on the car’s age, and asked me to take note of the seats. I was wearing a crisp cotton dress, carefully ironed and starched by my mother, and mary janes with scalloped socks, which I happily swung to and fro, since my feet didn’t yet skim the floor. The backs of my thighs bore the imprint of woven rattan for three days after that ride. I can still feel the way the pliable wood mesh gave and resisted, when my mother asked me to trace my fingers along its surface. “They don’t make them like these anymore, Kathleen. This is the last time you’ll sit on a seat like this.”

How right she was, and precisely why the memory is still so remarkable to me. It was the last time I would ride the subway for many years. New York hurtled down a steep, dangerous slope during my seventies childhood, and the underground world of the subway became much more ominous. My parents felt it was no place for a little girl. Or for them, quite frankly. We avoided the subway whenever we could, and instead, drove our compact Japanese car everywhere — over the 59th Street Bridge as the city sparkled in summer sunlight, through the wall of heat captured by the tiled Midtown Tunnel, along the Belt Parkway as we approached the stench of Starrett City and the nearby landfill — and risked losing a space on the street every blessed Sunday. Occasionally, I took the Myrtle Avenue bus to school with my friends, with the help of my subsidized Catholic school bus pass, whenever it rained or snowed. My father usually took the midtown express bus into Manhattan — an “express” trip which took at least ninety minutes each way. Random subway tokens,  with machine-cut “Y”s and pentagonal shapes, always appeared in our kitchen junk drawer. Sometimes, I’d use them as plates for my dollhouse family. We never used them for the subway.

The silver lining in this above-ground mode of transportation, and the compensation for the hours of my little life lost to gridlock? To be able to witness the New York City of the seventies from the back seat of that Toyota Celica. There are a multitude of images — and unfortunately, smells — that remain with me, still. To a child like me, it was street theater, and I had the best seat in the house. I saw it all — the six-foot tall hookers with Adams’ apples, the businessmen in mutton chops and three-piece suits, the fights, the birdflips, the heels, the checkered cabs, the marquees in Times Square, the beautiful, languid women that I dreamed of resembling, once I’d grown out of that unsightly plaid Catholic school uniform — the very lifeforce that New York City so casually exuded.

It was brutal and ugly and primal and gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. I couldn’t wait to be immersed in it, to bathe in it, to be eaten alive by it.

Steely Dan was all over the radio then, and their music was a compelling soundtrack for that grimy, glittery lifeforce. Even now, a few bars of “Peg” or “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” return me to the back seat of our Toyota sedan (unbuckled, of course), and to those poorly maintained, pot-holed streets. The masses strode in sync to Walter Becker’s guitar playing, and we were all alive, at once, together, all of us — the junkies and the cabbies and the cops and the secretaries and the coiffed ladies leaving the Gucci store on Fifth Avenue laden with shopping bags. We were all the same matter, the same rhythm, the same cells, coursing and pulsing down city streets.

I still miss that New York City. More than I should.

I got the walk-on role, but my parents didn’t want me to be part of a national touring company at such a young age, out on the road and away from home for so many months, so they turned it down. (Thanks a lot, Mom and Dad. I could have had Danny Bonaduce’s career.)

They wanted me to stay home. In New York City. Where I belonged.

A re-run today. My mother gave me my parents’ wedding album a few weeks ago, and it made me think of this post.
****
 

 
[Click on the YouTube video for today's musical accompaniment. Just ignore the unnatural number of photographs of Mrs. Starr within it. Creepy.]
 

 
My father doesn’t want the pictures anymore.  When he finds them, in drawers or old shoeboxes, he passes them on to me. He presses them into my hand in blank mailing envelopes, or hands them to me at Christmas and Sunday dinner in secondhand shopping bags, ones often printed with store names that no longer exist. When he does so, I am struck by the incongruence of my childhood memories, grouped together in no particular order, rubber-banded, held, restrained. My life is there, within them, in curled Kodachrome squares and in blurry Disk snapshots, in random Polaroids and duplicate time-stamped prints.
 

 
I was thirty-five, in my own marriage for nearly ten years, as I watched the marriage of my parents dissolve into boxes and barters.

There were sudden must-haves and can’t-live-withouts, oddly chosen mementos, newly minted touchstones, discussions over dishes, the coffee table, Christmas ornaments, the kitchen chairs — the functional things that suddenly become essential after passing through life largely unnoticed. They were life rafts, and my parents clung to them, alone and adrift, as they became unmoored from the weight of their failed marriage.
 

 
But the photographs largely got left by the wayside. It’s a by-product of divorce, a common after-effect of ending one life and starting another. Who wants the wedding album? Who needs the envelopes and magnetic pages filled with that trip to San Francisco, Christmas in the new apartment, the first ride in the new car, or the time we went on that trip up to Vermont in the fall? Who wants to remember that there was good there — even if for a fleeting moment — that was lost before the picture even developed? Who wants to hold the dour, cold faces, the light gone from someone’s eyes, the distant body language, the signs, all the signs — long before the other had awakened to it?
 

 
My parents divorced nearly eight years ago. They were high school sweethearts, and had dated since they were fifteen, so there’s a lifetime of memories between them. These snapshots are markers of what once was, of what can’t be fixed, and what will never come again. So they’re put aside, someplace dark, able to be closed and tucked away.

Most of them are packed up in my mother’s storage unit in Connecticut, because she can’t bring herself to look at them at all. “I’ll get to it, Kathleen, I promise.”  When dates of delivery come and go from the calendar, unfulfilled, I can’t press her for them, out of kindness.

Thankfully, my father gives some to me when he can, because he knows that I don’t have many photos of my childhood as a result of this collective denial. When he gives them to me, I often discover moments I’d forgotten, or moments I’d never been cognizant of, given my age in the photos.
 

 
There are birthdays from alternate angles of relatives’ cameras, Easter baskets, tricycles and training wheels, toys long since lost or sold at garage sales, every-day moments on outerborough summer streets and in backyard pools. There are blurry shots, ones poorly framed, ones with ripped edges, creases and yellowing in some. They’re from different sources — my parents’ old Instamatic with the harsh flash bulbs, from my uncle’s old Nikon, or from the Polaroid we had for a while around the house.

The pictures usually make me cry, when I take a moment to look at them later by myself.  They bring me back to living rooms in houses long since packed up and sold, to the feel of scratchy rompers and dresses handmade by my mother from McCall’s patterns, and to the smell of my grandmother’s Chanel No. 5 perfume, cloying and comforting on hot July days in Brooklyn backyards. They return me, quite viscerally, to the freedom of childhood summers, to the comfort of love and acceptance craved by an only child and bestowed by a dysfunctional, hysterical, extended family, to days when what has become would never have been foreseeable or possible.
 

 
Sometimes, they humble me as I realize how little we had — and how much there still was to go around. We lived in close quarters, on top of each other in two-family houses and apartments and row houses, and we were together, often. It explains why several relatives weren’t speaking to each other by the time the next meal arrived on the communal table. It also sheds light on why I sometimes wish I’d had three or four children, and why I want a houseful of people bustling and yelling and clattering on any given holiday.
 

 
One recent picture delivery from my father surprised me.  It’s a vertical shot of me, in cap and gown and broad, young smile, outside the Hall of Languages after my commencement at Syracuse University.  I’ve taken my glasses off, for vanity’s sake, and I’ve only made it worse by the obvious squint of my near-sighted eyes.  I know my father is there somewhere, squeezing the button, but I’m not exactly sure of anything except his shadowy shape.

I was the first woman in my family to graduate with a bachelor’s degree from college, and the first person to go away to college at all. My parents were proud of my accomplishments, and of their numerous sacrifices to get me there. When I graduated, my mother had a 5 x 7 print of this photograph framed to suit the decor of my father’s office. It matched the wooden credenza behind his desk and he displayed it there, proudly. He brought the picture with him when the office moved downtown to the World Trade Center, on the 92nd floor. My father was late to work on September 11, the day the towers fell and so much still-unspeakableness, so much still-woundedness, so much still-rawness, so much still-everything happened. He survived.

In the weeks that followed, I suddenly thought of the photograph and wondered what its fate had been. Had it fluttered out to the Hudson River? Had it incinerated with nothing to remain? Would it be found in someone’s backyard in Brooklyn, stuck to a chain-link fence and wrongly labeled as the photo of a 9/11 victim? It was my own irrational way of processing the physical horrors that had occurred, only able to personalize it in flimsy photo paper without imagining the abject pain and fear that took place, over and over again, all at once, for victims and survivors both.

Photographs don’t lie. They hold our past, they vibrate with our history and our stories, and they help us remember who we were, once we’ve strayed so far from our beginnings.

[Click on the YouTube video above for today's musical accompaniment.]

I just finished an eight-week memoir writing workshop, and I’m exhausted. (Yes, growing up in the seventies was actually that bad.) I haven’t posted on my blog in weeks — yes, yes, I know how hysterical you’ve all been at its absence — because I’ve been focused on other things. Good things, but other things.

So, back on the horse I go. Giddy-up.

My friend Stacey Loscalzo is a phenomenal writer — and a habitual one at that. Some of her posts have inspired me to write my own. We call them “prompts,” or more aptly, “Crap, I can’t think of a single thing. Oooh! Stacey just posted her daily blog on Facebook!” Steal like an artist, right?

Her recent prompt comes from Susannah Conway, a writer and blogger who teaches groovy e-courses on writing. God, I love the internets. But I digress. The prompt asks you to take a photo of your nightstand and describe the items strewn wildly or organized neatly atop it.

Here’s a snapshot of my nightstand, and the telling items that define my life — at least from 10 pm to about 6:45 am the following morning.

1) dispenser of hand and body lotion from Whole Foods — In theory, I’m always soft and supple, but I never stay awake long enough to apply it regularly, thereby lessening the desired effect. In my dreams, my cuticles, heels and knees are like creamery buttah.

2) lavender sheet spray from Good Home Co. — A gleeky little treat for me — and my husband, who will never admit it. Lavender is a Harris House cure-all for sleeplessness.

3) a photo of my husband and daughter looking out at the Pacific Ocean — One of my favorite pictures ever. She was so thrilled to hear and see the waves crashing that she wanted to reach out and touch them. (Not seen but tucked into the frame) a photo of my son, age two, curly-haired, delicious and wild – One of my other favorite pictures ever. The boy I’ve always known I would have.

4) a photo of me with my grandmother’s dog Sandy, one of my first and best friends, circa 1977 — Sandy was the kind of dog that grown men (and women) would still weep for, years after her demise.

5) a copy of The Best American Magazine Writing 2012 – Because it’s a quick read, and because I’m delusional and dream that I’ll actually be published in it some day. (Oh, look, Mommy! A pig with gossamer wings!)

6) a copy of Give Me Everything You Have, a memoir about cyber-stalking, by James Lasdun – A great, frightening read.

7) an iPad cover that is never used for my iPad — Because my children are always using my iPad for word study homework and math problems and, uh, Talking Tom

8) pendant embroidered with my monogram — I like interesting, unique pieces of jewelry. I’m finding a little more time in my day to put myself together, unlike most of the — how do we say it? Aughts? — when I was sporting burp cloths and diaper bags and newborns and toddlers and spit-up and peanut butter smears and not too concerned about accessories. I liked who I was then, because I surprised myself and made it through that phase of parenting without running away from home or dropping any small children on their heads. I like who I am even more now, especially since I take a few more moments to slow down and breathe and put on a piece of jewelry before I go out the door. The pendant makes me feel good when I wear it. Which is a lot, so it’s usually on my nightstand.

9) shells that my children have given me from various beaches in our travels — I can’t part with them.

10) arnica muscle gel — Because I’m shameless and beg my husband to rub the knot out of my right shoulder several nights a week. That way he’s always at the ready. The poor man.

11) lavender essential oil — Just in case the sheet spray isn’t doing the trick.

12) alarm clock — The bane of my existence. I soften the daily blow by tuning my radio alarm to WCBS-FM, and awakening to the oldies.

13) Louisville Slugger – Just visible at right. It’s not actually on my nightstand, but it bears mentioning. My husband travels often. I’m from Queens. You do the math.

I was going to post “Seasons in the Sun” as my YouTube musical accompaniment today, but I can’t. Because I’ll be on my kitchen floor, weeping, and mentally transported to the circa 1974 seatbelt-less back seat of my parents’ BMW 2002 — the one that my sorry little-kid thighs stuck to in the endless hot summers of the seventies. I’d pull down the piped legholes of my terry-cloth gym shorts as far as I could, but they were of no real help, since we were all wearing “short-shorts” back then, so I’d do some sort of bizarre ass-dance, moving the backs of my thighs so the skin wouldn’t adhere to the scorching leather, and cry about Michelle and PaPa. Oh, poor PaPa.

That was entirely too much information. My apologies.

Here’s some LedZep instead. Bonham’s drum solos make me weep, and ass-dance, but in a good way.

The old man and I recently went over a whole lot of legal and financial stuff. That’s what I call life insurance policies and IRAs and end-of-life directives. Stuff. Because I was an English major, and because I’m still in complete denial about my mortality. And my husband’s. And yours, too. Go see the doctor about that cough.

This is what you do, when you have children and a mortgage and celebrate forty-mumble-grumble-COUGH birthdays. You plan. You sign things. And then, you hopefully get to forget about it for another forty years.

There are lots of things to do and people to call and secret codes to whisper if my husband goes first. I’d rather not discuss it. Since I’m not the big macher-breadwinner in our family, if I go first, all my dear, sweet husband needs to do is follow these simple eleven steps. (By the way, I’m spitting between two fingers and ‘God forbid’ding all over the place. Peh-peh. Bite your tongue. It’s satire, God. Don’t pay any attention.)

1) Buy milk. Often. I know it’s more expensive, but please get the organic, hormone-free kind. For me. I’m dead. I’m all-seeing now. I’ll know if you don’t.

2) Throw paper towels into the shopping cart while you’re there.

3) And toilet paper. You’re out. Trust me. I know this. There isn’t anymore downstairs in the basement.

4) Make the bed, most days. You’ll feel better at night if you slip into a freshly made bed. Unless you’re bringing another woman into my bed. Which isn’t going to happen. Not on my nice sheets. At least not the first time. Take her to a hotel. It’s just creepy.

5) Keep the cleaning service. Or if you do want to bring a woman over to the house, she’ll never come back. And she’ll tell other women that you leave coffee cups everywhere. Lots of them. It’ll go viral. Trust me. You may as well close out that match.com account if you don’t.

6) Don’t eat over the sink. The neighbors can see you from the window. And they’ll start bringing you casseroles that you won’t want to eat, in Pyrex dishes that will be troublesome to clean and return.

7) Throw out your boxers when you get that hole in the crotch. I put up with the “venting,” but the new chick won’t.

8) Keep the grass mowed. Plant flowers. Paint the exterior every couple of years. Don’t let the house look sad because I’m not in it. Life goes on.

9) Let our daughter have my shoes. And my jewelry. And my handbags. And teach her to give some of it away to people that all of you — and I — care about.

10) Don’t let our son get a tattoo that involves some sort of homage to me. I’ll still worry about infection from the Great Beyond.

11) Remember that I love you. Still. Always. Forever. Indefinitely. Permanently. Other people can, and will, and should, and must. But I do, too. You’ll never be without my love, because it will never cease to be. Ever. Even if that skinny thirtysomething bitch sleeping naked on my nice clean sheets wants it to be so. I had much better boobs than she does, by the way. I’m sure you couldn’t see that initially from her match.com profile pic. Life’s a bummer, ain’t it, honey?