Yesterday was my birthday until 13 years ago, when my dad unceremoniously usurped it for his memorial day. For several years after, my brother Mark would call on my birthday and lament on my behalf. “Dude. I was thinking today. It SUCKS that Dad died on your birthday. MAN, of all the days out of the year, that SUCKS!” We would devolve to laughing raucously about all the jagged edges on that final practical joke.

But I don’t think Dad would have been happy about me dealing with it by calling it a joke. I imagine he would have gotten really grumpy and growled at me, letting me know that he would never do something so awful to me as a joke, and that death is never funny. Then he would have shaken his head ruefully and walked away with his eyebrows raised, grumbling the whole while.

Dad’s ending wasn’t especially pleasant. He went to the hospital for a major emergency heart surgery — a last-ditch effort to save his life — and never came out. On my birthday that year, about three weeks into Dad’s hospital stay, I got a call from Mark in the morning. I assumed he was calling to say happy birthday to me. Me me me. I saw his name on caller ID as I answered the phone. “Hey Mark, whassup?”

“Dad’s gone.” Mark sounded weird, subdued.

I thought he meant Dad wasn’t in his hospital room, or maybe he’d gone home. “Where did they take him?”

“No. Dad’s gone.”

I shook my head. My eyes rolled around. Mark sounded so confused. How in the world could Mom and Mark lose Dad at the hospital? I felt really grumpy as I snapped at Mark. “Well go find him. Go to the nurse’s station and ask them where they took him.”

Mark tried a third time. “No. Carla. Dad’s gone. He’s dead.”

Oh. That kind of gone. Now I understood why Mark sounded so off. He was calling me from the bathroom in the hospital room where Dad had died, just moments before.

Crying, wailing, tooth-gnashing. You know the drill.

One of my Korean uncles, my mother’s brother, was there. He asked Mark for the phone. “Hi Cahla. Yah. So you get plane ticket and come home.”

It was two days after 9/11. This directive rubbed me all wrong. I yelled emphatically into the phone. “Get a plane ticket? What kind of advice is that? You think you need to tell me to come home? ON WHAT PLANE? WHAT PLANE DO YOU THINK I SHOULD FLY HOME ON. THERE’S NOT A SINGLE PLANE IN THE SKY. HAVE YOU BEEN WATCHING THE NEWS. WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT TO ME.”

My uncle waited patiently and silently until I was done, and then he spoke gently, with kindness in his voice. “Yah. Okay, Cahla. I give phone back to Mahk now.”

I did make it home on the first day commercial airlines were back in the air, but my family had to delay the funeral a couple days or else I would have missed it. I was thankful for it. One thing my mom didn’t delay was Dad’s death, and I was even more thankful for that. She had gotten a call from the hospital to let her know Dad had arrested; he was on full life support and would die without it. She went to the hospital and, without hesitation, signed the forms to set him free. When I thanked her later for being quick and strong in this decision, she told me it was no more than the simple kindness Dad would have shown even a dog, to end such senseless suffering. It was an easy choice.

I found it hard to accept celebratory birthday words for quite a few years after. One year I said so to Mom when she called to wish me a happy day. “I can’t celebrate my birthday anymore, Mom. This is the day Dad died now.”

She answered me sadly. “I know, Carla. But this is the day you were born, so for me it will always be a day of celebration.” I remember those words every year, and I try to convince myself that celebrating my life matters as much as remembering Dad’s death. I might almost be there.

My family brought it home for me this year. I woke up to tiny-armed snuggles and two sweet little voices wishing me a happy day. Jesse was a little upset that she didn’t have a chance to shop for a gift, but she made do with other resources. She wrote a card.

Nice reference to my 48 years. Awesome.

Taped to the card, in a small folded piece of paper, were a piece of quartz and two tiny pieces of sea glass — prized summer finds, which Jesse took from her treasure chest to give to me.

As I marveled over Jesse’s generosity, Nick got a curious look on his face. He ran upstairs and reappeared a few moments later. He handed me a bracelet that I had given him months ago. I didn’t know he had saved it. He spoke proudly. “You gave it to me, mommy, and now I am giving it to you.” He ran upstairs again and came back with even more — a thank you card from his preschool teacher that opens into a flower, a perfect little shell he found this summer, and a butterfly picture Jesse had colored for him. Horded personal treasures, all.

I tried not to cry over these gifts of the magi. I asked Jesse and Nick to put the gifts back in their respective treasure boxes. “They’re mine now, but I would like you to safeguard them for me.” That worked for everyone.

Then it was an ordinary day in a life. I was delighted by many well wishes on facebook. Anthony took the kids to swim lessons. I took Jesse to a birthday pool party. When Jesse and I got home after the party, I was surprised by a kitchen festooned with balloons. In addition to normal birthday balloons, Nick had insisted on a “Tangled” balloon as big as a boogey board, and Anthony chose a giant, phallic pickle, “Another birthday. No big dill.” Inexplicable, and just the right kind of silly. There was no room left for grumpy. Anthony baked a strawberry cake – one of my favorites. He’s not a confident baker, so there were many apologetics, but it was delicious and properly frosting-free. We ate the cake amidst the balloons, and I was happy.

Every year on 9/11, I unexpectedly find that I’m quick to cry — though after 12 years of it, you’d think I’d expect it by now. The bleak mood is really bad for about a week, and then it waxes and wanes until Christmas, when it finally peters out. It’s time to admit to myself, once and for all, that this will go on until I’m dead or old enough to start forgetting things, like the way the end of my father’s life is inextricably bound to 9/11 for me.

Several weeks before the World Trade Center was hit in 2001, while I still lived in Washington, D.C., I got a call at work from my mom. You have to come to California today, she said. Daddy’s in the hospital and he’s going into surgery tomorrow morning for an emergency quadruple bypass and valve replacement. It’s not good.

I booked tickets and was on a plane a couple hours later. My goal was to get home in time to see Dad — possibly for the last time — before he went to sleep that night. I flew through Atlanta in August. I was trapped there for hours by thunderstorms, waiting for a connecting flight to take off, and I didn’t make it into San Francisco until somewhere around midnight. My brother Ted picked me up and drove me to Mom’s hotel room in Sacramento, near Dad’s hospital. It was too late for me to see him.

Early the next morning, I held Dad’s hand and kissed him as hospital staff wheeled him off to surgery. He was doped up on sedatives, and he asked me in a concerned daze, “Are the boys here?” Yes yes, of course they were. We all huddled up as surgeons tried to save Dad’s life.

And they did, at least for a time. Dad suffered in ICU for more than three weeks until his body finally failed, but the first post-op days were celebratory. Dad was recovering nicely, hospital staff were optimistic, and I went back home after 4 or 5 days. Still, the cloud of Dad’s condition hung over everyone in the family, and he remained in the hospital.

On 9/10 my mom called and asked me to please, please talk to the doctor and nurses. She was distraught. Dad looked so bad. He had lost so much weight. His circulation was failing. His feet were turning black and they were talking about amputating. What would happen to him? He wouldn’t want to live like this. Should she be preparing for him to die? What should she do? His suffering was crushing her, which is why she was barely willing to go visit him in the hospital. Please, Carla, call the hospital for me.

The ICU nurse who took my call said that Dad was going to come out of ICU; she was confident he would live and he wasn’t going anywhere soon. But mom should still prepare for the worst. Just in case. I couldn’t decide whether I should go back to California right away or not.

All this was swirling around in me when Al Qaeda attacked the next morning. Otherwise, my story of the day was an ordinary one for someone in the D.C. metro area. I went home early; I watched smoke rise from the Pentagon as I rode the metro. I spent the day grimly watching redundant news updates, listening to fighters buzzing the skies, and wondering what was coming.

The next morning, while Dick Cheney and other politicians cowered in a bunker somewhere, many government hacks like Anthony and me went back to work, passing through military checkpoints along our commute and embracing the fiction of normalcy. There was a telephone message from Mom waiting for me at the office, which she had left on the morning of 9/11. It captured everything I love most about her. She sounded confident, even cheerful. I couldn’t hear fear in her voice, though I’m sure her heart was full of terror. “Hi Carla. This is your mommy. I’m just calling to say hi and I love you. Call me. I hope you’re fine.”

I was, except my dad was dying. He took his last breath two days after New York City’s towers fell. I spent the next months comforting myself in relative terms. My loss wasn’t as great as that of others. My dad died with family by his side, peacefully. He didn’t burn or choke to death in desperate fear, he wasn’t crushed by a falling building. He had a full life. He didn’t leave behind young children or a pregnant wife. I had my dad for 35 years. I had much to be thankful for. I didn’t have cause to grieve so much as many others.

Month after month I told myself these things. I went back to work and play, I struggled through the holidays with my family. Some time in January, I sat up in bed in the middle of the night, weeping. But I could have felt worse. The wave would pass. I turned to Anthony and said, “I think I’m handling Dad’s death pretty well. Don’t you?”

I may be grumpy, but I’m an optimistic grump.

My dear Anthony answered in his true voice, practical and plain, a little worried. “No, Carla, you’re not. You cry every night. You need to get help.”

That night I finally started to face my reality. 9/11 swallowed my dad’s death whole. My little grief was subsumed in the colossal story of the fallen towers. Day after day, I felt like I didn’t have the right to suffer for the loss of my father as much as families who lost their people in the towers. I felt guilty about how much I was hurting.

What silliness. Of course I deserved to grieve. 9/11 took that away from me. Or, perhaps more honestly, I used 9/11 to avoid a simple truth: my father’s death was so unexpectedly, so horribly painful to bear that I couldn’t really face it. He was — indeed he remains — my fallen tower.

Every year when 9/11 hits, I relive this process of avoidance, wretchedness, grief, and loss. 9/11 isn’t a day when I reflect on patriotism, nationalism, vengeance, those lusty American themes that drive us to send our young men and women to kill and die in wars overseas. I find myself meditating instead on the value of every single human life, each of us a son or daughter, many of us fathers and mothers, all of us connected to each other across this vast planet, as I was connected to my father, as I remain connected to him long after his death.

As for the popular 9/11 slogan, “Never forget…” Who could ever forget 9/11 and the twin towers? I’m not moved by those words, except with respect to my dad. I tried to deny that his death was as colossal to me as the destruction of the towers was to the rest of the world. So every 9/11 I remember, and I try to get it right. I travel anew the bitter journey toward saying good bye to Dad, whom I will never forget.

Jesse has been in a vague tizzy for most of her conscious life about whether people think she’s a girl or a boy. Part of the problem is her name, of course, which is fairly gender-neutral.

Don’t think for a minute that the name choice was some anti-normative statement. Anthony and I don’t play like that. It was a lazy statement. We never bought a baby name book or anything like that. We just needed a name with no tooth-gnashing and we didn’t feel like waiting until 26 weeks or whenever it is that they do the big ultrasound. At about 3 months into the pregnancy, we picked a name we liked that could go with a boy or a girl, and that my mom could say without an accented struggle, so then we were done.

After Jesse got her hair cut really short this summer, she became even more self-conscious about her gender identification. It’s all mixed up in her head with the notion that girls aren’t as good as boys. One morning at breakfast, after hearing for the umpteenth time from Jesse that some lame-ass little boy hassled her about looking like a boy, I got fed up. I googled “celebrities with short hair,” and we eyeballed Hollywood girls looking fabulous and feminine with short hair. I don’t know what I was thinking. After 3 minutes of this, I had the big DUH and told Jesse that one of the most powerful women in the world has short hair. We talked about Hillary Clinton and we looked up photos of her, with both short and long hair. Jesse liked her much better with short hair. I never really noticed that Clinton looks really handsome and strong with short hair, but she looks kind of dopey with long hair.

As we browsed pics of her, I remarked, “She’s probably going to run for president.”

“I didn’t think girls were allowed to be president.”

Said my daughter. In 2014, in the United States of America, in MY home. I was stunned.

We talked it through. We talked about voting rights, the word “suffrage.” Anthony and I chattered about how, indeed, not so long ago women used to not be able to vote or be president.

“Who stopped girls from voting and stuff like that?”

Men? I answered. Society, culture, religion? It was a curious question, one I couldn’t really answer. And anyway, now women can vote. In the USA anyway.

Jesse commented that it must have been a girl who helped other girls vote. Following this inspiration, we looked up Susan B. Anthony on Wikipedia and read about how she went to jail for voting and about the suffragette movement. We talked about the 19th constitutional amendment. Jesse wanted to know who the president was when it became law. She thought he must have been a pretty good guy.

I was getting more and more agitated in my heart as this conversation progressed. How had I allowed the world to make my daughter feel second-class? How had I screwed this up so badly? Nick walked into the kitchen. We went through a shout-back chant. I was standing in the middle of the kitchen. The kids looked a little concerned. Anthony fussed about nervously because he knew I was all worked up.

Can a girl or a boy be president?

YES!

Can a girl or a boy be an astronaut??

YES!!

Can a girl or a boy be an engineer or a mathematician??

YES!!

Can a girl or a boy be a great athlete??

YES!!

Can a girl or a boy be a great artist, a great musician??

YES!!

CAN A GIRL OR A BOY BE ANYTHING THEY WANT???

YES!!

I turned to Jesse, who was sort of cowering and giggling nervously in her kitchen seat. My arms were gesticulating and karate-chopping wildly by now to punctuate my words. I was practically yelling as I explained why I was so upset.

When a little boy says you look like a boy, girls aren’t allowed, only boys can do that, boys are stronger, or anything like that, I don’t just see a little boy being a jerk, I see HISTORY and all the suffering women have been subjected to, all that we’ve risen above! I see Susan B. Anthony towering behind that little boy, telling him NO! Women are powerful! Women are equal! Women deserve everything and anything they can earn and learn! How dare that little boy put you down!!

The kids were silent for a moment as I caught my breath, and then Jesse snickered. “Mom, stop. He’s just a little boy.”

Which was sweet. But then again, little boys become little men with attitudes that put down girls.

That was a couple weeks ago. I was optimistic that my histrionics would make a difference. Then last night Jesse said these exact words to me: “boys are smarter than girls.”

Is there no hope?

I just signed us up for the monthly family plan at J.K. Lee, a popular local tae kwon do studio. I’m still not sure it’s a good idea, but Nick, Jesse and I are going to look so gooood in the cool uniforms. Anthony is ambivalent about the whole thing, but I might sway him yet.

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a couple years now. Jesse has interchangeably expressed interest and terror at the idea. She’s worried about all the discipline; she imagines instructors yelling at kids all the time and has trouble seeing past that to all the fun. Last year, when I used to pick her up after school and then drive over to get Nick from preschool, we would go right past the studio. Once in a while, if she was talking about tae kwon do again, I’d suggest we just drop in and take a look. This invariably produced a panic attack and ended the subject.

But now Nick’s five, and my goodness does my little free spirit need an interest other than dinosaurs, dragons and angry birds. He’s ready for an organized activity. The universe came together for me when Jesse decided she wants to be on the swim club at our gym and also take diving lessons. The timing is perfect. While she’s doing that, I can take Nick to a kids-only beginner tae kwon do class and still get back to Jesse before she’s done swimming. When I was working all this out, she insisted she didn’t want to do the marshal art, so it’s a win-win. No one has to sit around waiting for anyone else. (Except me, of course, I’ll be waiting around, but I’m not relevant.)

So we went to J.K. Lee Friday afternoon for a meet/greet and introduction to how they do things. Here’s a blow-by-blow of how it went, real time in my mind as I type:

We’re making the visit for Nick, but Jesse has to tag along because her school lets out before our appointment at J.K. Lee. All she has to do is sit in a corner of the studio and wait peacefully while Nick and I take care of business. But I’ve also just learned from googling about on my iPhone that the monthly fee covers everyone in our family, so I’ll be able to learn tae kwon do along with Nick. Yay! And if Jesse changes her mind and wants to participate, a lot or a little, she can. There are many class times, and you can go to as many as you want. She spends the 5-minute drive to the studio whining about whether she wants to do it or not. I tell her she’s banned.

We walk into J.K. Lee. It smells and looks clean. This is really important for OCD Jesse and (though I have trouble admitting it) OCD Carla. We’re greeted by one of the most enormous human beings I’ve ever met. If I stretch my arm straight up, I’m not sure I’ll reach his nose. He towers over us in his black-belted dobok and he’s huge and his hair is big and his voice booms. He welcomes us enthusiastically and tells us to take off our shoes. Jesse is startled but thoroughly unintimidated by this intimidating instructor. “Why do I have to take off my shoes? I’m not doing it.”

Enormous Man smiles and booms cheerily. “THAT’S FINE, BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES. WE DON’T WEAR SHOES IN HERE. THEY’RE DIRTY!” Jesse stares at him suspiciously and shakes her head as she walks away. 

He shows us where to put our shoes and then directs us to a little training room next to the main studio floor. Nick starts running around and around the room like a wind-up toy, a mix of simple joy and nervous energy. Something new! Something new! Something new! Jesse mewls unhappily, disregarding all efforts by Enormous Man to encourage her. The Korean half of me cringes in humiliation and my face turns pink. I can feel the shades of my ancestors glaring at me in shame as my off-spring show utter contempt and disrespect for the instructor. I feel an unnatural compulsion to bow deeply and issue humble apologies in Korean to sah-buh-neem on behalf of my unruly and horrible children.

But Enormous Man, with his red hair and white skin, probably won’t understand a word I say in Korean. I hold my tongue and remind myself that I live in Wisconsin. I settle instead on snapping at Jesse to go sit somewhere. Far away from me. Where she won’t disrupt Nick’s experience. Since she isn’t going to do this activity anyway. 

We meet the instructor who is going to give us a little demo. Thankfully, she is normal-size. Indeed, she’s quite short, so that makes me feel more at ease. By now Jesse has decided that, although she won’t be doing tae kwon do, she’ll participate in this little intro. Wonderful. I’m so thrilled that she’ll continue to annoy me for the next 20 minutes. 

We stretch, we strike some poses, we learn to yell. Teacher explains that we yell to have energy and focus. She adds an afterthought. If someone’s attacking you or bullying you, and you need to defend yourself, you need to be LOUD. I like this attitude. 

Jesse mutters, “I can’t do that.” 

Teacher adjusts. “Then you can just breath HARD when you punch.” I’m liking this place more and more. Eventually Jesse yells anyway. Ha-yah! We yell as we punch the air. Then we’re taught to yell “Peel-son!” which Teacher says means “I can do it!” 

I don’t think so. That’s not a literal translation. Whatever “peel-son” means (and there’s no telling from the accent what it actually should sound like), it’s not a sentence in Korean. I let it go. Teacher is blond.

We sit down on the mat. Teacher is super up-beat and positive. She lectures the kids about showing kindness and helping. “What do you do at home to help your mom?”

My children stare blankly at each, then slowly look back at Teacher. 

Nick is hesitant, but he tries first. “Don’t yell at mommy?”

Jesse goes next. “I let Nick harass me.”

Teacher, apparently an optimist, tries to find something they can brag about. “Don’t you put your dirty clothes in the laundry when you change?”

“Yes!” yells Nick.

Jesse is more precise, more critical of herself as usual. “Yes… Well, not always. Sometimes not.”

Teacher doesn’t give up. “Do you clear your plates at meals?”

“Yes!” claims Nick, smiling hugely as he tells this big fat lie.

“Well sometimes,” says Jesse. She thinks for a second and then sounds matter-of-fact as she adds, “Actually, mom is our servant at meals.”

With raised eyebrows, Teacher leaves kindness in the dust and moves on to following instructions. She tells us we have to say “yes ma’am” and “yes sir” when the instructors tell us to do something. “How many times does your mom have to ask you to do something before you do it?”

Nick starts guffawing. “Like… One HUNDRED!!!” Inexplicably, he bends over into a butt-up fetal ball as he laughs, knees tucked in and head under his arms.

Jesse nods in agreement. “Yeah.” 

Teacher continues. “How many times should your mom have to ask?”

Nick sits up and gives the correct answer. “Just one?”

Jesse considers the question and then answers in a contemplative tone. “One? Well, two. Maybe two times.”

We get a brief demo of some skills we’ll practice in classes. We throw punches at the air and then at a clapper thingy. It turns out Jesse is a beast. Her punches pack a wallop that surprises Teacher. I don’t explain that this is because Jesse has been punching Anthony and me viciously since her nervous system was just barely developed enough for her to control her arms and hands. Nick is still too sweet to punch very hard. He laughs and tosses his fists about, but his heart’s not really in it.

We learn a high blocking move to protect the head from a downward blow. Teacher gets out a soft bat-like device. She swings it gently down toward the kids’ heads so they can practice the high block. Jesse stands her ground fiercely and blocks well, adding her own move to deflect the bat to the side. When Teacher takes her first shot at Nick, he squeaks as he turns and runs for his life. She gets him back and he gamely tries the high block, but mostly he just squinches his eyes and cowers. 

Now the kids get to use the bat to try to hit Teacher. Jesse goes first. She’s a polite child, so she gently drops it towards Teacher’s head a few times, and she disregards instructions to go ahead and try harder. She really doesn’t want to hurt the nice teacher. Then Nick gets the bat. Time for some payback. He can’t believe he’s being allowed to smack a grownup on the head with a bat, and he really wants to land a blow. He tries to brain Teacher, driving the bat up and down viciously with both arms as he laughs insanely. 

We practice a few other moves. In between skills, Nick runs at high speed around and around the room, like a dog who has the zoomies after a bath. Nick is seriously happy and excited about all this. He’s not bothered that he’s not really following instructions. Teacher isn’t bothered by all his energy. She has plenty of experience with out-of-control kids, because they tend to self-select (or more accurately, parent-select) into tae kwon do so they can gain some discipline.

On a whole other plane of existence from Nick, Jesse struggles with her anxiety as she goes through the drills. She’s worried about Nick being naughty. She’s worried she’s not doing things right. She whimpers, mutters, barely hangs on. But I can see her interest and desire growing. Eventually Jesse settles in, but only after she raises her hand to ask an important question. “Will we die?”

This unexpected inquiry stumps Teacher, who just stares at Jesse silently for an inappropriate length of time. Jesse sees it’s not getting through so she clarifies. “When we do classes, will we die or get badly hurt?” Many soothing words ensue. I’m actually really pleased with the instructor’s answer. She’s plain-spoken, not false in her encouragement. She tells Jesse no one even gets to touch each other for a long time. She reminds Jesse that the motivation of all this is self-defense and confidence, not hurting each other. I’m in. 

Finally we each get to break a board. The board for the kids is a thin piece of pine or balsa, curved a bit. I could break it easily over a knee or with a foot, and I can see Teacher holds it with pressure the right way to make the breaking easy. The kids have to use a hammer punch, a downward blow with the soft pinky side of the fist. Nick is too afraid to do it so Jesse steps in. She strikes with a ferocity that takes us all by surprise. The instructor nearly drops the board and it’s broken into three pieces. Even so, Nick struggles to convince himself he can do it without hurting himself. He does things like touch the board ever so gently with his fist and then closely inspect his hand for splinters. After almost 5 minutes and a dozen failed attempts he finally strikes hard enough and his board breaks. He’s ecstatic and relieved. He cannot believe it.

Teacher says it’s my turn now but she wants me to use a different blow, a forward punch with the palm of my open, flexed hand. She shows me how to do it. Uh, okay. She wanders off to get a bigger board. Unexpectedly, I feel a little nervous. In a didactic vein, I tell Jesse. I’m feeling a little anxious about this, Jesse. What should I do?

This is at the heart of what we work on daily for her, the alternative to anxiety medication — developing and practice coping mechanisms to deal with anxiety whenever it simmers up. Deep calming breaths, body relaxation techniques, self-reassurances that nothing bad will happen, acceptance that failure is okay, doing-not-thinking, and so on. Now that we’re here in a place that she’s feared for 2 years, I’m really curious what tactics she’ll suggest for calming nerves.

“Just think of all the things you hate most about Nick and me and then when you’re really angry just HIT the board as hard as you can.” 

Teacher comes back with a thicker, larger board for me. I nail it on the first blow.

It was the first day of school for Jesse yesterday. Day 1 has traditionally been a bad, bad day. The stress and anxiety are overwhelming, and Jesse has typically expressed those feelings in ways that bring to mind things like the scene in Alien, when the gooey creature comes out of the android’s stomach.

But Jesse’s been in talk therapy for almost four years now, and she’s getting really good at managing the stuff rattling around in her head. She started talking openly about school fears a few weeks ago. In particular, she became very anxious about seeing a first-grade teacher who had been awful to her. There’s no legitimate reason to fear this woman anymore. She retired. After we worked that one out, Jesse got agitated for a few days about her hair, worrying that everyone will think she’s a boy. She solved that one herself by demanding an even shorter cut. I thought it was a perfect solution. After the haircut, she was fine.

A couple days ago I spoke with Jesse about finding her way to the classroom alone, because I didn’t want to drag Nick through the school and deal with that. She whined and mewled, because getting lost at school is one of her weird fears. So I drew her a map of the building with arrows showing the path to her classroom. I listened to 10 minutes of complaints and questions about my failure to draw everything correctly to scale. But eventually Jesse took up a pencil and added trees in the courtyard area, and then she was satisfied. She studied the map intensely, and she pulled it out again at breakfast on Day 1 to study it some more. She seemed in control of this particular fear.

Leading up to the first day of school, I felt that Jesse handled her feelings really well for a nine-year-old with a tic disorder, OCD, and abnormal anxiety. She seemed fine. I kept waiting for the ax to fall.

I anticipated Jesse would have a bad night’s sleep before Day 1. In fact, Jesse came into my room at about 2 a.m. muttering about where she had put her pillow. Fortunately, I was wide awake. I walked her back to her room and handed her the pillow, which had fallen to the floor next to her bed — probably when she got up to come ask me about it. She put her head on it and fell right back to sleep. I’m not convinced she was really awake, and I was thankful that she wasn’t having her more usual nightmares or terrors. She seemed fine when she woke up, and in a pretty good mood.

I had some extra concerns about how Day 1 would go because Jesse had a huge patch of poison ivy rash on the back of one knee and some over-scratched bug bites that appeared to be badly infected and a rash on her face and spots forming all over her torso. But otherwise she seemed fine. I put medicine on all her itchy spots and she didn’t complain about anything.

Breakfast went smoothly too on Day 1. Jesse actually ate something. True, she burp/cough/vomited (the mouth trifecta) in the living room. But she seemed fine afterwards, and she cheerfully told me it was a nice reminder that she still needed to brush her teeth. I was the only grumpy one because she nailed the beanbag chair and rug, making cleanup that much harder. If she had just leaned out and puked one foot to the west, she would have hit the hardwood floor, which is so much easier to wipe up. I don’t know why kids can’t be more thoughtful about where they yack.

Anyway, Jesse seemed downright calm all morning. When Nick came out of the bathroom and announced he had a pee pee accident (i.e. he peed all over the walls), she handled it peacefully. Eventually she wandered upstairs to dress and she spent about 20 minutes by herself. I went to check on her and found her in an almost trance-like state, slowly going about her business — feed the fish, brush her hair, get dressed. She was fine. Kind of normal, even.

When it was time to leave home, I anticipated the drop of the ax, but it didn’t come. Jesse was a little slow to get out the door to the car, but there was no ululating or screaming; she didn’t do anything mean to the dog or Nick; I didn’t have to sit in the car for 15 minutes waiting for her. On her way out the kitchen door, she did carefully and deliberately place her hand flat on a stovetop burner — her only capitulation to the “hurt myself” compulsions and tics that rage up inside her in moments of great stress. But the stovetop was off so she was fine, and I let it go without a word because I actually get it now. She’s looking for a real danger to replace the imaginary ones, because the real fears are less frightening. Also she’s trying to show herself that some real fears are only real in the wrong moments. The dangerous stove is safe. School too. 

We walked outside and I took her picture. I could see the worries oozing out of the green flecks in her eyes.

I felt all squeezed up inside. But then wonderful kooky Nick came over and took all the edges off, and Jesse seemed fine as she jumped into the car.

We got to school and it so happened that one of Jesse’s friends was pulling in at the same time. They walked in together holding hands. Jesse was calm. It was quiet, so Nick and I followed Jesse down to her classroom after all. Jesse was acting a little dazed, but it seemed like a lot of kids in the hallways were feeling that way. When we got to her locker, Jesse gave me a big hug. She didn’t want to let go. But she eventually did, without any clinging, grabbing, inappropriate groping, or strange noise-making. I didn’t have to pull her off me. She was nervous, but she was also fine. It was the first Day 1 where I didn’t feel like I was abandoning my helpless little girl to face her unbearable fears alone. I didn’t cry.

When I picked Jesse up after school, I knew the ax would finally hit me. Jesse is apt to come out the schoolhouse doors and unleash her pent-up emotions all over me. But on Day 1, 2014, she was calm and cheerful. She didn’t slap me or scream at me, or whine and complain about something that happened at school, or tell me she had been bad bad bad. We went over to the playground for a few minutes with a friend. They ran around happily, and when it was time to leave Jesse went with the flow instead of whining and refusing. I started to feel like she must be a body-snatcher. She remained good-natured as I rushed about preparing dinner before she and I headed to the doctor to see about her rashes. At the doctor, Jesse was well-mannered and not disgusting. She didn’t touch waiting room toys and then lick her fingers. The doctor concluded Jesse has impetigo and needs antibiotics. Jesse handled the news well. She was fine.

We headed back home and Jesse dug into a bit of homework, which was just a list of questions about her day of school and a snoopy picture to color in. With fatigue setting in, she unraveled a little. She didn’t understand the homework because she had been “spacing out” while the teacher explained it. She couldn’t settle to read the written instructions. She lashed out at me as I tried to read the instructions for her. She got hung up on inanities, expressing it with fussing, whining, complaining, wiggling. Her letters weren’t good enough. Her handwriting was bad. She didn’t know what to write. Her spelling was all wrong. She wasn’t sure the teacher would like it. She couldn’t color the picture as directed because there was a blank spot. She got it wet a little. I started to feel on edge, because these behaviors have been a torture to me for several years. But after a time, Jesse settled and finished her homework, and then she seemed fine. 

By bed-time, Jesse had disclosed a lot of anxieties to us — homework, school success, lunches and snacks, rashes and itches, the discomfort of sitting cross-legged on the floor, unfair teacher corrections, shyness, arbitrary rules, on and on. But she wasn’t brandishing a fire hose. It was more of a leaky wound, an uncomfortable cramp Jesse was slowly working out. Some of her tics erupted, but Anthony and I handled them with as much patience and compassion as we could muster, and the tics didn’t define our evening. It was a good day.

* * * *

The ax finally fell on Day 2. I got out of bed this morning and was completely exhausted. The kids started irritating me immediately. By breakfast, I was nattering at Jesse about her homework behavior. I can’t make it through 9 months of your nagging and whining, your bad attitude about homework. Yesterday you started up already and that wasn’t even REAL work, just something that was supposed to be fun for us to share. It wasn’t fun. It was painful. It took three times as long as it needed to. I don’t want to do that for 9 months. I won’t survive.

Jesse got up and left the kitchen without a word. Anthony pointed out I felt exactly the same way in June, as I stared into the abyss of summer vacation. Helpful. Jesse came back to sing me a be-happy song.

Jesse was annoyed about the lunch boxes I was using to package her lunch. She got a little whiny and difficult. I nattered again. I can’t do this for 9 months. I have PTSD from all the ways you’ve been mean to me about school. I can’t allow you to treat me like that. I won’t make it in one piece. If you don’t like it, I don’t have to send lunch for you and you can skip it.

Jesse said, “it’s fine it’s fine,” and walked away from me. 

Jesse decided she wanted to bike to school. As I was pumping up tires, she came outside and started her Tourette’s-style trash-talking about male anatomy. My bicycle seat looks like balls and penises, balls penis balls penis. I ignored her for as long as I could and finally started nattering again in exasperation. You will stop that now. This year you will act like a nine-year-old, not a toddler, or I will take away privileges left and right, starting with your iPad and all of your swimming extra-curriculars. If I hear from school that you are using words in this way, in the wrong time and place, I will come down on you like a hammer. I cannot do this for nine months.

Jesse stopped. She pushed her bike far away from me and got ready to leave.

Despite my best grumpy efforts this morning, Jesse’s ax never fell — only mine. She stayed up-beat. I felt like a terrible failure. I slumped into a chair on our front porch and asked the children to come over. I said what they already knew: I woke up really grumpy today. I don’t know why. I’m over-reacting to things. Thank you for tolerating it so well. Can you please forgive me, and I will try to feel better? Of course, my little urchins told me. They leaned in for a sweet, gentle trio hug and some kisses. They filled my cup and filled my cup and filled my cup.

We had a peaceful bike ride to school (Jesse only took her hands off the handlebar a couple times, and not for long enough to fall over completely). The sunlight shown on us from a blue sky. We arrived early enough to spend 15 minutes in the wildflower garden that’s in front of the schoolhouse. The flowers are in bloom late this year because of a cool summer. The stems towered over the kids’ heads like castle walls, golden and lavender buds bursting. A little rabbit hung out with us for a time as it ate breakfast in the underbrush. We quietly observed it as it hopped about. A brown grasshopper flopped past. Jesse caught it with her hands so that she and Nick could observe it together. A flock of goldfinches burst from a tree overhead and disappeared into a new tree. We looked up and breathed in this wonderful world. I withdrew my ax. Jesse seemed fine.

My heart clenched tight yesterday as I read the blurb off Yahoo’s home page about the nine-year-old girl who accidentally killed the shooting instructor who was showing her how to use an Uzi submachine gun. All just part of a Vegas bus tour. It’ll be the Story of the Day for 48 to 72 hours, with incessant commentating, opinionating, and diatribing, all of which I imagine is going to be polarizing, politicizing, and infuriating. Everyone in the gun debate will spin and distend this situation, until suddenly it’s forgotten. I intend to scrupulously avoid all of the follow-on news-cycle bibble babble. It adds no value to my life and my thinking. 

As the mother of my own lilliputian nine-year-old girl, I find myself fixating not on the dead instructor (who presumably knew the risks when he placed a powerful weapon into the hands of a little girl) or the parents (who I feel must be ignorant or fools or both) or the extreme gun rights lobby (which I consider to be insane). My thoughts run to the child, that poor little child, whose super fun adventure with an Uzi automatic went all wrong. I imagine her standing there next to the man she just shot, wondering what in the world just happened as blood pours out of his head. I don’t have to just imagine it. If I want to, I could watch the video. I don’t want to. I don’t want to watch a child kill a man, however accidentally. I imagine that child in the years to come, dealing with the simple fact that she killed a human being for no good reason at all. Will she be ruined? Will she forgive her parents?

It’s not her fault, of course. It’s the fault of her parents, of the instructor, of a culture that says it’s FUN for a small child to shoot off a lethal automatic Uzi that she isn’t strong enough to control. When I ponder what this country’s gun fetish is all about, I always land at the opinion that non-criminal people who love-love-love their guns think of guns as an expression of righteous courage and strength, in the manner of super-heroes like Batman or Rambo who use weapons to take out the bad guys. 

Those cartoon characters are, of course, fake.  Guns don’t speak true courage to me. Holding one wouldn’t make me feel more in command of my life or the world around me. Guns don’t make us mighty. They just make us lethal.

My mom taught me about courage and guns when I was 13, though it was many years before I understood the lesson fully. My parents had recently purchased a mom-and-pop liquor store. It was summer, and Mom and I were at the store together during the day. A man came in and walked to the counter. I greeted him and asked if I could help him. He pulled a large gun with a long barrel from under his jacket and pointed it at me. He told me to give him all the money.

I don’t have a clear linear memory of what happened next, but these are the things I remember. I was paralyzed. My mom walked deliberately over next to me behind the counter, but not too close. She stopped a few paces away and was still as a stone. She looked the man in the eye and spoke calmly. “Please don’t point the gun at her. You can put the gun away. We’ll give you the money. You don’t need the gun.”

The man turned the gun and his eye toward Mom as she spoke. Mom didn’t say anything to me, but I knew what to do. I opened the register and started pulling money out. I asked the man if he wanted it in a bag. He said yes, and as he spoke he turned the gun back toward me.

My mom interceded again. She was still calm, and she spoke quietly. “She’s my daughter. Please. She’s only 13. Don’t point the gun at her. Point the gun at me.” She tapped her chest with the fingers of her two open hands, like a gentle directive or an open-handed namaste. “Please.”

My memory’s eye tells me that something changed in the man’s face. Mom had reached him. He answered her gently. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt her.”  He turned the gun away from me and it never returned. It stayed on Mom. I didn’t feel in danger anymore. I gave him the money. He left.

Mom must have called the police, because they came and all that. I don’t remember any tears or histrionics, except that once I cried a little when a police officer questioned me intensely about what sort of gun the man was carrying. I knew nothing about guns. “I don’t know!!” I wailed after the fourth or fifth question, breaking down into tears for a few seconds. I thought he had decided I was a liar because I didn’t know what to call the gun. The cop relented and patted my back. 

That’s really the only kindness I remember in the wake of the hold-up. I don’t remember Mom holding me after the thief left the store. I don’t remember special hugs or kisses from my parents or family. I don’t remember anyone really asking me how I was doing in the days that followed. Maybe it happened, but I don’t remember it. We just returned to life as normal.

I thought I was very brave through the ordeal. I was pretty calm and my hands didn’t shake much when I was giving the man the money. Other than that moment with the police, I never cried. Afterwards, I thought it was kind of cool that I survived a hold-up. I’d tell people about it and say how scared I had been at first, but then make a joke out of how I asked the guy if he wanted the checks and the change. What was I thinking, ha ha ha ha.

Mom, on the other hand, was a drama queen. She moped about the house for days, her face set in a grim, closed mask, her thoughts trapped tight inside her as she lay on the sofa staring at the ceiling or a wall. I got kind of irritated with her. I mean, I was just 13 and I was handling it so much better than her!

It wasn’t until many, many years later that the lens through which I saw her — and myself — turned into better focus. Mom saw a deadly weapon pointed at her daughter. In that moment, she must have drawn on every ounce of her courage to silence her fears and speak as my advocate. She placed herself in between me and death, not with a lunge toward a weapon but with a practical choice. If a bullet had to fly, she simply wanted it for herself, not me.  

Mom never held it over me or crowed about her behavior. She never again mentioned the fact that she was ready to die for me. I never felt bad about it. In fact, until quite recently I didn’t even appreciate it. To this day, I’ve never thanked her for that moment in our lives. She never asked me to. It pains me to wonder on this. 

I used to think I was just inherently brave and strong because of the way I handled the hold-up. That’s horse shit. The fearlessness I experienced was gifted to me from Mom when she spoke for me, stood in for me. That man didn’t take a thing that mattered when he walked out that storefront. He didn’t take anything from me emotionally. Mom’s courage built a wall around me that he and his gun couldn’t surmount.

Would I have felt safer if my mom had pulled a gun out from under the counter and tried to kill the man? Not hardly. If he had been hell-bent on killing us, would a gun behind the counter have saved us? Probably not. And if Mom had shot and killed that man, what lesson would I have learned? That holding on to a drawerful of cash is worth a person’s life? Neither of my parents believed that, and I don’t either.

I see photos of these idiots wandering around in shops with rifles slung over their shoulders, acting like they’re making some stand for safety and order. Do those fetishists really think any of us are safer because of their weapons? I’ll take my mom’s style of courage over one of those swinging dicks any day. She never reached for a gun when I was 13. She didn’t throw herself in front of me or make a scene. There were no heroics. Mom did something far more courageous, more powerful than any of that. She stood her ground, defenseless and in peace, simply asking a man to show a little compassion and, well, kill her instead of me if it came to that. What a thing.

I won’t be putting guns in the hands of my children. I won’t teach them that it’s fun to shoot guns or that guns are cool. I won’t teach them that it’s okay to kill someone over a fistful of dollars. I intend to teach them that they don’t need guns in an ordinary life to be brave and powerful protectors. They’ll do better with passionate, peaceful souls. And I’ll continue dreaming of a world in which little girls don’t ever get to play with Uzis.  

I’ve spent the summer of 2014 being extremely active. Having 47 years behind me is no barrier.

I’ve taken the kids to our little water park at every chance. I don’t sit on my ass. I play. I toss my 40-pound son into the air, wheeee wheeee. I throw my 50-pound daughter into airborne flips and cannonballs. They like to grab onto me and then I rise like a drunken behemoth, 90 pounds of human barnacle stuck to me as I heave myself around the shallow end. I play tag and chase rings with Jesse in the deep water. We like to do handstands in shallower spots.

We spent almost two weeks at the ocean this summer. I carried Nick into the surf and tossed him over breakers. I boogey-boarded with Jesse and by myself and swam around and had loads of fun. I chased the kids about the beach. We dug deep holes with our bare hands and made forts and trenches and moats. I couldn’t get enough.

We went camping for many many days, at numerous locations. This entails loading and unloading lots of heavy things and carrying them from here to there and back again. The cargo topper for the car makes it even more strenuous because one must hoist equipment high over one’s head, especially when one is only five-foot-one. I can duck-walk (because I’m too short to regular-walk it) a 30-pound propane tank around a campsite like there’s no tomorrow, and squat-dead-lift a fully-loaded 50-gallon cooler — that’s about 70 pounds as far as I can tell – into and out of the back of a car, my short arms extended to almost maximum wingspan. Them paleo-crossfit chicks ain’t got nothin’ on this cave woman.

We hiked miles and miles and miles in mountains and sand dunes. I frequently carried a 15- to 20-pound pack with our water and food and emergency gear. We had elevation changes and steep grades. I even occasionally gave the kids piggy-back rides when they were tired.

These activities tired me and occasionally left me with sore muscles, but I never broke or hurt anything. I’m proud to come from pretty hardy stock.

Yesterday we got back from our last camping trip of the year. After 3 nights in a tent and 4 days of sand and dirt, we could not have smelled worse. I jumped into the shower with pleasure, a perfect way to wind down and relax. I got to work scrubbing all that nasty grime off all my parts. I even remembered to do the bottoms of my feet. I lifted my right foot, turned it up in front of me with bent knee and scrubbed the sole. I lifted my left foot and turned it up and —

GAAAAAH – AAAAGGGH.

Something gave out in my left hip and low back, standing in the shower with a foot up.

You’ve got to be kidding. This morning I’m suffering, shuffling around bent over, my back covered in icy-hot. Looks like Advil is in my near future.

Not two crazy kids, not a summer full of fun, nor even excessive heavy lifting can take me down. But it looks like 47 years are taking their toll after all.

Jesse and Anthony love to read short form poetry. Anthony and I ponder sometimes whether this is partly a function of their dyslexia. As Anthony points out, he can actually enjoy poetry because he can finish it in a reasonable amount of time, unlike a long-winded novel. Too many words. I’m more of a novel-reader, but I learned from sharing poetry with Anthony that there’s a richness in few, carefully selected words, especially when read slowly and deliberately.

Many years ago, I passed through a museum shop and picked up a beautiful book of poetry and art containing a lot of short classics. We used to read from it to the kids when they were babies. Jesse especially took to it in her infancy. She would lie next to me on her back for a good half hour, quietly perusing small prints of famous art with her immense, unblinking eyes while I read to her – Neruda, Whitman, Frost, Shakespeare, Hughes, Yeats and so on. Nick would wiggle and get bored quickly, but I fancied he still got something out of the rhythm and lilt of the poems.

A few nights ago Anthony and I walked into the local Barnes and Noble. We were on a quest for a small anthology of imagist poetry for Jesse. She has a children’s book about William Carlos Williams that she really loves. Anthony’s a fan too. I think they love the imagist work because it doesn’t generally contrive some emotional discussion. Jesse and Anthony prefer to savor the sensory beauty of life, not talk about feelings.

We managed to find the three half-empty shelves labeled “poetry”, crumbling into oblivion between row upon row of sci-fi and manga paperbacks. We rummaged through the 14 books of poetry in stock. No news flash here: there was no imagist collection at Barnes and Noble. But we did find a collection of WC Williams.

Jesse literally jumped and laughed with pleasure when we gave the volume to her over breakfast. She looked over the cover photo of Williams. “He looks old.”

He looks happy, I countered. Why don’t you read a poem to us?

She flipped through the first few pages and stopped. “This is not poetry,” she said dryly. She held the book up to show me. She was in the introduction.

Anthony stepped in. “Just go somewhere in the middle of the book and find a short poem.”

We waited as she thumbed around. What would she find to tickle our fancies? Wheelbarrows and chickens, plums and fire trucks, birds and water?

She chose a random page and read the title of the poem.

“DEATH. This poem is called death? It’s about death??”

Anthony and I exchanged a glance. Leave it to Jesse to flip through a WC Williams collection and happen on the poem called DEATH.

She started to read the poem in her clear, high, sweet little girl’s voice:

He’s dead
the dog won’t have to
sleep on his potatoes
any more to keep them
from freezing

he’s dead
the old bastard–
He’s a bastard because ——

Okay whoa whoa whoa. A mighty rustling started about the kitchen table as Anthony and I tried to change the subject and poem.

We continued downhill on this botched journey into imagist poetry. Jesse handed me the book and I found a more copacetic poem. But by now Nick was tired of it and wanted some attention. He hollered and groped me as first Jesse and then I tried to read aloud. 5 minutes in, we set the book aside and cleaned up breakfast dishes.

It was raining when I took the kids to camp yesterday at the Audubon nature center. It’s a great summer camp program. The kids get outside a lot, and they learn about stuff related mostly to local geology and environment – rocks, water, prairies, crystals, birds. Students are encouraged to touch and explore, get dirty and wet. This isn’t usually a problem for Jesse or Nick, but it’s more complicated with Jesse. She’s fine with the filth and wet of nature, but only when she’s outside. In nature. If things get on her inside a building or at the wrong moment, she can fall off the rails.

I had an intuition the rain could be a problem, because Jesse might get wet on the way into camp. It’s okay to get wet AT camp when they go outside, but ARRIVING wet is different. It’s potentially very, very bad, depending on how aggressively Jesse’s OCD and anxiety are acting up. I thought this through as I packed rain boots and gear in the car. The class starts inside, and Jesse doesn’t like to wear her rain boots inside. It would be a pain to wear her boots for the commute and then change to her sneakers when she got to the classroom, because the boots were caked in mud from the prior camp day and would get wet and muddy, so there was a high probability she’d get mud on the wrong part of her body during the shoe exchange, and then all manner of whining and disintegration could ensue. I evaluated two alternative futures – wet sneakers vs. mud from boots – and concluded the lowest risk path was wet sneakers.

Sure enough, when it was time to leave, Jesse expressed concern about her sneakers getting wet. So we had to have a debate about it, which boiled down to this:

Jesse: Mommy! Go get my boots!!
Me: No.

The actual exchange was slightly longer and slightly more excruciating, but in the end Jesse put on the sneakers without any threats, which a few months ago would have been a minor miracle. She ran out to the car and got in as fast as she could. We drove to the Audubon. I parked about 200 yards from the entrance. As I pulled gear out of the trunk, Jesse barked a command to Nick. “Run to the door!” He shot off like a greyhound.

The Audubon parking lot is not a safe place. Crazed parents desperate to unload their miserable kids careen about madly in their SUVs and minivans, apparently oblivious to the idea that other crazed parents are also struggling to get their spawn to camp and might not want them to be run over. I’m filled with terror when we walk through that parking lot, especially when we come to the part where there’s a blind hairpin turn near the entry sidewalk, right where we have to cross the road. You never know what’s going to come ripping around that turn.

So I yelled at the kids as they rushed to their certain deaths. “Stop! Wait for me! Parking lot!! DANGER!!! CARS!!!”

Jesse yelled back, “But my shoes will get wet!”

Grrrr. Still, they slowed down enough for me to catch up. I nattered at both of them. “You know it’s not safe to run in a parking lot blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah! Blah-blaaah blah-blaaah. Which is worse, being hit by a car or having wet shoes?”

Never ask rhetorical questions to a smart ass. Jesse’s answer was inevitable. “Wet shoes,” she replied, without hesitation and in a tone that said “DUH.” My eyes rolled a couple times around the track, but I held my tongue. I said my little mantra in my mind (“it’s why we’re in therapy, it’s why we’re in therapy”).

I made Nick and Jesse stop at the scary turn, and when I was sure it was safe I told them now they could run. Jesse was visibly annoyed with me as they raced across the road and up the sidewalk, because WET SHOES.

Then suddenly she stopped, a good 30 paces from the doorway to DryLand. Nick ran right on to the door, but Jesse bent way over and was staring at something. I gritted my teeth as I approached, preparing for the worst. Was she going to obsess on a wet spot on her shoe or sock? Maybe some mud or dirt splashed up on her leg? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pretty.

“What’s wrong, Jesse?” I asked tentatively, not sure which battle I’d be fighting in the next few minutes as I tried to drag her into her camp class.

“Look,” she chirped cheerfully. “Slugs!”

I stood in the rain, watching Jesse’s shoes get wet as she watched the slugs. I couldn’t hide my exasperation.

“Jesse. Get it up and go. Which is more important to you? Slugs or wet shoes?”

She answered without hesitation, a smile on her face. “Slugs.”

Duh. Who knew slugs were an antidote to OCD.

I now have more than a hundred posts after about 8 months of blogging. I can’t decide what to make of that. Autocorrect just insisted I’m bluffing, not blogging. Maybe autocorrect has it right.

Last week Jesse and I dropped in on Dr. Abrams for the first time in a month. She missed him during our long vacation, and this visit was a must. She needed a therapy session like a badly constipated baby needs an enema. I needed a healthy session for her like, like… Like a mother nearing insanity needs her vaguely troubled daughter to have some therapy.

Not that things are going badly for Jesse. Leaving aside the remaining (and the new) irritating behaviors and also the anxiety and OCD and tics and social cue stuff, Jesse left a lot behind when I think back to prior travel tortures. This year she didn’t try to destroy the tent, ever. She only got sent to the car in the middle of the night once. She didn’t kick dirt on us during meals. She didn’t scream as much. She didn’t hang over cliff edges while wondering aloud about what it would feel like to fall to her death. And so on. She just wasn’t as angry or tense; there was less self-loathing, and she seemed happier. Still a pretty strung-out kid, but better. I’m thrilled.

Whatever. She still needs a lot of therapy. So there I sat in the waiting lounge while Jesse did the talk-talk thing with Dr. Abrams, and what book should catch my eye in the little self-help bookcase but the very tome that inspired me to start this blog!

Hi Marci. I stared at the cover again and wondered if therapeutic blogging has changed my view of Marci the chicken soupy soul lady, who wants to teach me how to create a life of unconditional love, and also if I read her Happy for No Reason book I will get everything I want and be wealthy too. Am I ready to let go of being grumpy for no reason, in pursuit of Marci’s love prescription?

Unfortunately, she still looks smarmy to me, made-up and air-brushed and botoxed, and this time as I stared at the cover I could swear I spotted an edge of steely meanness around her eyes. I bet she abuses her personal assistant and hair stylist, I thought to myself as my head shook from side to side and my eyes rolled into the back of my head and my tongue hung out my mouth.

And then I realized I was the one being mean. And unfair too, because I’ve never read her book; I only flipped through it for about 15 seconds, like I was fanning a deck of cards. Maybe there was something in there to help me. I started with the bio. It told me she’s a pretty spectacular person. She “is a celebrated transformational leader and an expert on unconditional love and happiness” (italics added by me). She is a “top-rated professional speaker” who has even given speeches to Fortune 500 companies. Aaaah. She is AN EXPERT on this shit! Even Fortune 500 companies have hired her! I guess they want Marci to tell their employees about how to find love for no reason and happiness. Because that’s the kind of thing large 21st century corporations care about. No wonder Marci’s proud. And rich.

Carla = sold. I had 15 minutes before Jesse came out of her meeting with Dr. Abrams, and Nick was happily involved in some game on his iPad, so I dove into Marci’s text. I did the speed-read thing, i.e., I read the captions throughout the book and looked at the pictures. There were lots of captions, so I promise I wasn’t being a slacker.

I will now share with you the beginnings of my path to LOVE enlightenment.

There are seven LOVE CHAKRAS I need to open up before I can love for no reason. That seems like a lot.

I can’t just say “love chakra” in a normal voice, by the way. For some reason it keeps coming out emphatically. The word “love” sounds more like LUUEEEV when it leaves my lips, and I find I want to swivel my hips about all groovy-like. Maybe I’m just developing a new tic.

Anyway, here’s the illustration Marci provided of the locations of the seven LOVE CHAKRAS.

The Oneness doorway is in the brain; Vision is at the eyes; Communication at the throat; Openness at the heart. Totally makes sense. Then the chakra of Unconditional Self-love is at the stomach. I know a lot of peeps make themselves feel good by eating, so yeah, that makes sense too. Vitality in the gut, yup, I get it.

What’s up with the doorway of safety? Is my vag really where I’ll find my safety chakra? That’s way past my intuition.

I tried to read a bit more on the safety thing, because its location at the crotch caught me off guard. “Safety” apparently means something along the lines of being in the here and now. Aha. Now it makes sense. What’s more in the here and now than our sexual organs. Check.

Maybe I’ve got this all wrong. I assumed I was going to learn about spiritual love. But is it possible Marci is talking about something more corporeal?

My Love-Body? At 47 I do feel a little more flaccid than I want. I could definitely use help developing my LOVE-BODY. Hugh Jackman has maintained his LOVE-BODY into his 40’s, so why not me? Grrrawwr.

Marci didn’t explicitly mention equipment, but I think this must be part of the self-love aspect of her program. Hm.

Love bosses and plugs? That might be a few too many shades of Grey for me. But I like that Marci’s getting a little kink-ay.

And what is this poor woman doing?

She’s probably supposed to be demo’ing some exercise to release a chakra, but it sure looks uncomfortable. To me it looks like she’s scratching her itchy ass on the chair, and possibly the camera person just caught a well-timed photo of her right before she fell off the chair from all that squirming. My kids squirm all the time when I try to make them sit for meals, a lot like this lady is doing, and they spontaneously fall off their chairs regularly. I never realized they were in pursuit of a love chakra. Children are so intuitive.

(Post-script: Anthony says she looks like she’s “dropping a turd.” Yet another reason to love my man.)

Yeah, duuude, trust your vibes. You’re a LOVE LUMINARY, duuude.

Is “Connection” some new concoction that’s going to get me in touch with my love-body? Is Marci marketing it? Maybe an exclusive distribution deal with Walmart would be a good idea.

It looks like she might be working on another trademark too.

Duude, the world looks so soft and blurry when my brain is on Oneness. Oneness is AWESOME STUFF.

No seriously, after skimming intensely through Marci’s book, I can feel my love chakras opening right now. RIGHT NOW. Unconditional love is trying to push its way out of me!! I gotta go find someone to love NOW!! I’ll be right back!!!

False alarm. I just had to pee. It was my pee chakra opening.

* * * *

In fairness, I do believe in the pursuit of unconditional love, though I prefer to think of it as altruism or acceptance, or something along those lines. I just don’t think I’m going to find it in a book. I mean seriously, does this jingo-istic pep-talk shit help anyone?

I’m wiping my mouth with the back of my hand right now. I lost control of my gag reflex. And anyway, Marci’s not offering a path to unconditional love. She’s offering a path to some sort of personal success, which is just not the same thing. Check out this graphic:

This is supposed to show the reader that the person on the left is loving for “good reason,” because of (or in order to get) the stuff attached to her heart by strings. Subtle. Heartstrings, get it? The person on the right is loving for NO reason, so that gray shadows are radiating from her heart to cloud over the stuff.

No no no. I’ve got that wrong somehow, don’t I.

Let me try again. So the person on the right is going to love without reference to the STUFF, but in doing so she gets to have the stuff anyway, only it’s because she loves for NO reason and not for a GOOD reason. So yay, everyone’s happy, and she gets the stuff too! Apparently children fall in the same category as nice cars and houses. Huh.

I think I’m still confused about Marci’s love program. I’m just not sure that my body has 7 love chakras. I mean, I wish it did. I wish love really was this easy. I wish unconditional love could come from a book and some stupid exercises, because then I could fill myself with it every EFF’ing day.

Marci sent me a message in her book.

It’s okay. For what? You’re welcome. I’m not feeling it.

* * * * * *

No worries. I will stay the course and continue working on my GRUMPY CHAKRAS. I think they look like this:

The Five Grumpy Chakras

Don’t be intimidated — it’s hard to compete with my graphic tools.  (Mechanical pencil. Kiddy art paper pad. Steady hand.) In case you’re thinking about lifting this amazing graphic, please know that it is seriously COPYRIGHTED. Unconditionally and for no reason.

The chakra on the head is pretty fundamental. The people I know who are very comfortable with all of these qualities are really content. They might come off as kind of grumpy, cynical, rude, and usually everything that’s the opposite of earnest. Their eye muscles are well-developed from all the rolling. They probably also know a bit about unconditional love, even if they don’t make a big stink about it. They would never tell me to jump on a love train (which I would interpret as a version of “get lost” anyway). They’d just complain and laugh with me. Maybe they’d even fart near me, and then that would make for some more good laughing, and also smelling their farts would decrease my risk of cancer, so it’s a win-win.

I think I’ll stick with grumpy. Sorry Marci.