What It's Like

Weird & Better

I've been back for eleven days after visiting my father in Arizona over Christmas. They've been jittery with publication obligations, which sometimes leave me deer-in-the-headlights about things like putting my luggage away (finished THAT this morning) or opening the Christmas cards that came while I was away (I don't even know where they are now). In the mean time, life rushes on & I've neglected Car on the Hill for other spaces & there are things I want to say about my life that belong here.

I went to Arizona not knowing what to expect of the first Christmas without Mother. Would I cry the entire time? Would I sleep & eat the entire two weeks to escape the misery? Would Dad want me to spend the time doing non-Christmas things? I had a couple of TV spots & a radio interview lined up, as well as a friend & a cousin to see, & my social life increased late in the game when another cousin, the sister of my Phoenix cousin, came to stay for a couple of days as well. Dad began to fret about her visit. Where would she sleep? What would she want to eat? Would he like her?

The approach was a little fraught, then, with questions. Little did I think I would learn more about my relationship with my mother by her absence than I had in the 53 Christmases we'd spent together.

I believe 2009 stands as the most pleasant Christmas in memory.

I couldn't put up certain ornaments: they were too laden with association, too much Mom's. But Dad wanted me to put up the tree, of which he could only see the blur of the lights, & when we sat looking at it, I described what ornaments stood out, which I think he liked. I brought out two new holiday CDs & he loved If Mozart Wrote White Christmas, playing it well beyond the 25th. I did some cookie baking and took a bag to the Christmas Eve dinner we spent with old friends, & he asked me to make extra copies of calendars as gifts, which our friends enjoyed. (I did two this year, at Shutterfly which has a sort of scrapbook/caption capacity: "2003 in Lab Years" had dog quotes; 2010 Flowers had seasonal floral quotes. One of my dog walking clients cried over the dog quotes.)

Friends were kind enough to send my gifts to Arizona so I had things to open on Christmas afternoon. Dad loved the bottle of obscure & hugely expensive rum I brought out (opened it on the spot & took two big swigs). I wasn't sure he'd want gifts but after some phlegmatic responses he gave into his greedy side & I set about finding the best I could. I made seafood casserole & a faux yule log that is delicious. It was a quiet day. He watched football & I read Laurie Notaro's An Idiot Girl's Christmas and Augusten Burroughs's You Better Not Cry, which did, in fact, produce copious crying from me.

The visit was pretty much like that. Low key. Smaller but in the spirit of our years together. Together but separate.

Therein lies the insight: that together but separate.

When my mother was alive, life was together but divisive. She hated his sports, his documentaries, his Library of Congress books for the blind, so Dad retreated to their bedroom to watch TV & listen to his tapes through his headphones. Dinner had to be early because later upset Mom's stomach & meds, & my father's historical disinterest in talking at the table is abetted by tracheal problems, leaving Mom hungry for conversation, which fell on my shoulders. In the last few years she had less to contribute but more greed of me than ever.

While Dad hung out in the bedroom, Mom napped through Oprah & her knock-off line up, then on to Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and the news. Somehow she had the idea that I loved those shows, or would if only she could get me to sit down & watch. She never did remember from visit to visit that I spend the half hour of Wheel calling out "Bankrupt! Bankrupt!" & she got furious with my father during Jeopardy because he sat there rattling off the answers.

Bookended with the Dr. Phil white trash problems, I felt like I was living in a trailer on the moon.

Dad's come out of the bedroom now. Football & boxing are such a steady roar that I can ignore them. I enjoy listening to his tapes -- we spent the days leading up to Christmas with Magellan's voyage and the smell of butter cookies.

I certainly ate too much but in the past I would wake in the middle of the night and go out to the kitchen and take a pile of crap back to bed. Every night. This time I engaged in this garbagey behavior perhaps four times. I ate less during the day, & had two day-long comas (the day after Christmas, the day I had an 8 a.m. TV gig that I got up before first light to drive the unfamiliar route to & then spent my vertical time running to the toilet).

The house felt quieter despite the roar of television or talking book or CD (Dad is quite deaf, even with hearing aids). He didn't expect me to watch football with him & I was involved in his books or enjoying his music. Our tastes are similar & we met up with each other when they coincided. Even then, however, we each live on our own planet, which we understand & wave to each other from.

This is not to say he can't be demanding & it drives both my brother & me crazy to be doing one thing for him only to find him next to us with a request to do something else, spoken in the sort of voice that we have to take a breath & ask, "Can it wait?"

But I found, in the absence of my mother, that I was more intact. I felt an expectation from her, rightly or not, to give ALL my words to her. I'm 53 & ever-single, a writer & dog-walker: I don't have that many words to say out loud. I know I was the light of her life but it evolved into a cost to my body & my self-respect & my energy, & I used food-induced comas to escape whatever it was I felt I should & probably wasn't giving her.

I love my mom...but I can live with my dad.

At least I came home with fodder for therapy.

Comfort and Joy

This fall has been a traumatic time in my family, most lastingly, perhaps, because of the schism of alienation in the wake of my mother's death.

Enough said.

I was talking to my pal BJ not long ago about how she was decorating her new house for Christmas. She's new to this concept of trees and wreaths and whatnot, having fallen in love with the idea after marrying an Italian. She's still adverse to the notion of Santa Claus or nativities, and he gets a Christmas stocking while she gets a Hannaukah stocking, but for the last couple of years, nothing has delighted her more than getting ornaments as gifts and buying them after Christmas. In the latter case, she puts them away still packaged and is surprised all over again when she opens them the next year.

So we were talking about her tree, which she put up some time in mid-November and I asked what other decorations she would put up. "Nothing," she said. "A wreath...lights!"

"Icicle lights," I recommended. "No lawn ornaments?"

She laughed with derision. "No sleighs, no inflatable anything. I won't live in a Bay Ridge display."

I laughed because when I was growing up, we lived across from a carninval. Each year, our neighbor made one more mechincal gizmo from wood and machinery -- a carousel, a waving Santa on the roof, a elf-run workshop. I don't remember everything that filled his yard, but I do remember the traffic in our cul-de-sac, bumper-to-bumper on the days around Christmas. Most of the other then-seven houses kept the spirit up, I told her, by putting up lights. My mother sewed long strings of gold foil disks to hang in our living room window, with gold lights in evergreen boughs in the flower box that ran along outside.

"Oh, and we decorated the circle of the cul-de-sac," I remembered. This was my brother Dick's project. Our court had a small stone circle with some evergreens and a birch tree. For much of the fall we saved the lids of coffee and other large cans, and collected copies ofReaders Digest. We spray-painted the lids and thronged them with glitter, punched a hole in them and hung them up in the circle. We folded each page of Readers Digest to make a point so that when we were done we had a large heavy diamond-shaped object that we also spray-painted and hung. We put up flood lights. It was very homely but had the advantage of being unappealing to pranksters.

"You had an enchanted childhood," BJ said with a certain wonder in her voice. I thought about that and decided yes, in main I did. Passing for Thin and Angry Fat Girls tell the grim stories but I know from the Rooms and from friends how good I really had it, especially at Christmas.

That's an odd statement in a way because when I was a kid, gifts were not always my parents' point at Christmas. I recently got a Barbie catalogue and nearly choked when I saw that one of the reissued dolls was Nurse Barbie. I got my first Barbie in first grade, which was in the days when it was clothes we wanted for our dolls, not more dolls. Barbie was expensive. The clothes were beautiful. Now it seems the opposite is true. Girls collect the dolls and the outfits are frayed rags.

So I got my first Barbie and she was the first bubble-haired Barbie, the pony-tailed version just phased out. And I got two outfits, which would have to last her a year of play -- a tutu and pointe shoes and that nurse's uniform.

Need I say that I bought Nurse Barbie that night?

My brothers often gave me choice between a birthday or a Christmas present, the two dates spearated by less than two weeks. The next year, my brother Jim gave me a packet of Barbie shoes and hats.

We all know that not only can a gal have too many shoes, but an eight-year-old is especially in need of Barbie shoes.

I think I got Ken in second grade but one of the puppies made short work of him and ever after my Barbies -- Midge, Francie, Skipper, Tutti, Todd and Jessica -- were, unbeknownst to me, lesbians. I think Barbie had to be replaced at some point because she was an amputee. More fine work on the part of Jet or Sandy or Buff or Jan.

The first cooking memory I have is of waiting impatiently for my mother to come into the kitchen to make sugar cookie dough for Christmas cookies.

Last year I gave BJ a mistletoe ornament and her husband a bike ornament. They had a few of these personal ornaments among their generic but pretty balls and I felt kind of sorry for them for not having a tree that is their lives' histories. I just put ours up and saved the few fragile bulbs from my childhood for prominent positions. We have Henry VIII and his six wives because I'm obsessed with the Tudors, and Clara, the Mouse King and the Nutcracker because we all love the Suite so much. There is a cathedral radio like the one my father grew up with, many gnomes because my father loves them (and calls them g-nom-eys), a number of Labradors, a hippo in a tutu because one of my parents' "songs" is [Offenbach?] the piece in Fantasia ("Dance of the Hours." Note: remember to tell Jean the flowering bush is forsythia.) There are oraments from all over Europe and the Southwest, the University of Montana, cloisonne bells that match my mother's small collection of Japanese cloisonne that my father brought back from R&R while he served in Korea, Polish emblams and German and Englsh Santas from my mother's of the family. This morning my father asked why we don't have any mushrooms, which he studied and during surgery made replicas of with the hot substance used to make artificial hip sockets.

Of course, when I was a kid, there were some fancy glass balls, some less fancy ones, and a lot plastic. The lights were the big colored ones and my brother Dick would string tinsel, strand-by-strand, for hours. At some point, my mother made a popcorn garland: I remember taking the ornaments out each December and nibbling on the incredibly stale popcorn.

My father actually had candles on the trees he grew up with. They were lit for about five minutes with a bucket of water at hand. My mother's father invented (and should have patented) strings of white fairy lights from the switch board lights at Bell Telephone where he worked. Her baby doll and straw carriage were left behind in a move but I still have the electric oven of the `30s that was another year's big gift.

Because I was the youngest by seven years and because my mother figured out that T.I.N.S.* from the handwriting on the packages as soon as she could read, Santa was downplayed. We opened our presents on Christmas Eve -- we are Northern Europeans whether we know it or not -- and as I was in the bathtub later, I would hear my father or mother saying, very loudly, "Ohhhh...Santa. Francie is going to be SO sorry she missed you!"

I'd go running out to the living room, wet and nekkid, but he had ho-ho-ho'd off to thenext door neighbor's house and I was left with a tricycle (white, with those plastic streamers on the handle bars, so pristine that I remember riding it through the house) or a cradle and high chair for my baby dolls. Then, when I was four or five, I asked my mother why there was a Santa on every corner Downtown. They were the Salvation Army of course, and the six blocks of Higgins Avenue that was our Downtown, and a place we wore white gloves when we visited, was merry with ringing hand bells. She was tired of Santa and had been disillusioned early enough that she looked down at me and said, "T.I.N.S." End of THAT ritual, though I kept hoping that if I said I believed, I actually would and Santa would come back.

That, I believe, is double-magical thinking.

There was so much snow when I was a kid! Forget about quilts and blankets of snow, this stuff huffed down in boulders and stranded my father's Jeep in mid-driveway. One year my brothers were broke and so they built me a snowman as tall as our house. I loved that more than Barbie shoes and I loved my Barbie shoes. The dementia of the project tickled me and it was such hard work to go to for a baby sister.

All of this left Christmas Day wide open. We always had dinner with our aunt, uncle and cousins, always a reprise of Thanksgiving, always mincemeat pies and "poison" (a.k.a. oyster) stuffing. There was, also, always a paranoia about cranberries, a condition we grew up with from the holiday dinner my aunt served without cranberries. My father and uncle, his brother, excused themselves and went out to find a can. Where? In those days, there were no 7-11's, no grocery store was open -- society expected housewives to be ready in advance because that's what all women did. Somehow the cranberries were procured and I wonder still if they went to one of my father's nurse's houses or my uncles railroad buddies to find them. They grew up in Missoula, went to the same grade school I went to. They knew everyone between them. My uncle had the most wonderful dimples and melodious laugh, as did my other uncle. All of their kids inherited both. Put my eleven paternal cousins in one room, tell a joke, and you will hear the music of the spheres.

There are pictures but not many of those Christmases. To take a home movie or photo meant, in the former matter, a six-foot light bar that instantly made all participants' behavior completely abnormal. And cameras had single flash bulbs that, once used, smoked and had to e thrown away. The temperature of the living room was raised by a good five degrees when movies were taken, and another ten degrees when we burned the wrapping paper in the fire place. Please don't tell Al Gore about that.

So much of what I remember has been lost -- the big Christmas bulbs, the plastic ornments peculiar to the 1950s, tinsel and the patience to string it, the Big Snow, the ice skating rink at the University where my brother Jim danced with me, the hats we wore (knitted ovals that covered the ears and tied under our chins: the Vermont Trading Company just started to carry them and I bought two), the worry about finding last minute cranberries. But a lot of it is on our tree, collected in fond memory of who we are and where and when we came from.

There are ornaments I couldn't bear to unwrap and hang this year - the tin treadle sewing machine that was like the one my grandmother used, the quilt blocks, the Scarlet O'Hara figurine (my mother to my father when Francie wa third grader, when Gone with the Wind was released every ten years: "I am not waiting until my daughter is nineteen before she sees Gone with the Wind!").

But a lot of them are hung, rehung, admired after being forgotten for a year. And now I'm going to go make my grandmother's sugar cookie dough.

*There Is No Santa.

Snow Day

Well this really sucks -- or maybe it doesn't.

I tripped in the Grand Canyon this October & smashed the lens coverings of my camera. If I was careful, I could still use it but last week it died a true death. I find I'm lonely without my camera. It's been a good friend. I'll replace it in lower-priced everything in Arizona but in the meantime I can't show you what my street looks like under whipped cream.

On the other hand, it's one more reason I don't have to put on 8 million items of clothing & go outside.

I was due to leave The Bat Cave for La Guardia at 6.30 a.m. for my 8.30 flight to Phoenix. When I called American Airlines last night about the weather conditions, the Human said the flight was on but to call as soon as I woke up. At 4.45 this morning I called & found out my flight was canceled & please hold for the next available agent. I knew, after something like 24 hours of cancellations, I had to stay on the line if I was going to get a flight in time for Christmas. At 7.15 a Human voice interrupted the music & woke me up.

"M'mpg m'mph, yabba, bwaf," I said.

"I can't understand you," the Human Agent replied.

I shook myself awake and told her my flight had been canceled and what should we do about this. She reticketed me for Monday afternoon & I found myself truly alone for the first time in years. There was white snow-light pooling into the Cave, I was exhausted from therapy, errands, packing & laundry the day before, Daisy is staying with her auntie & uncle for the duration of my trip & went off to the Fields of Snow in New Jersey yesterday. I keep thinking she's sleeping at the end of the bed & will start whining any minute for a walk. It's very quiet. I slept till 11, called various car services to cancel & re-book, read, called my father, read, napped, considered a spot of interpersonal turmoil I've hit but had had explained to me by New Therapist & now it's 8.30 & I've taken two Klonopin & thought I'd write a spot of blog before it hits.

I love Daisy. You know that. But I'm oddly enjoying this strange solitude that comes from everyone thinking I've left & no dogs to be wrenched around by & resting after an incredibly busy week. I've boarded with dogs for something like two weeks, had a promotional video & podcast to do at Berkley, a day of tradition with my friend Meem (Union Square Xmas Fair, Qi Dong massage in Chinatown), a marathon present-wrapping day & another of delivering, then a Saturday of errands & appointments & chores. Had I made that flight this morning, chances are I'd be a zombie tomorrow. Maybe I'll be a little fresher & rested for today's enforced downtime.

I'm missing a radio interview in Phoenix, however. Never a good feeling but, well, not my fault.

I'm actually looking forward to this two weeks in Arizona, although I know it will have some heart string tugging without Mom. Does Dad really want a tree? Does he really want cookies? Will I be forced to make mincemeat pie with my mother's alliance? Despite the questions of who my father and I really are when it comes to Christmas, I know my presence there will do more good than not. It's a good feeling, to be needed.

One of the gifts of this year's general yuckiness has been a growing correspondence with one of my cousins. She gifted me her kids who have adopted me. I'm like a pig in shit with all these younger first-cousins-once-removed who are snarky, smart, articulate, educated & share some common ancestors we can laugh at. One lives in Arizona & another is coming to stay with Dad and me (I should tell him this, yes?) for a few days.

I'm looking forward to 2010. Angry Fat Girls may have been turned down for some of the media coverage that Passing for Thin got (20/20 wants all five women in the book & I've been creative in protecting their anonymity), but I think AFG is a much more important book. PFT is a sort of fairy tale come true; AFG is the truth waiting at the close of every fairy tale. I want very much to make the point that weight gain is not merely statistically inevitable but biologically and emotionally normal. If we can't live with our selves we won't sustain weight loss and will make being overweight a form of 24/7 punishment. I want to salve some of our collected woundedness.

I want my relationship with my family to mend. New Therapist asked how I expect this to happen & I said, "Organically." I'm not sorry for this hissy fit(s) I threw over not being at Mother's memorial service but I am working through the anger & not mattering to my family. The lump in my throat right now is MUCH smaller.

I'm done with writing about fat & thin. I'm moving on to the kookie side of my life, of being a peasant in Brownstone Brooklyn. Today is the only day I've not had some light bulb flash of something I need to add to one or another planned essay.

I've eked out enough savings to plan another trip abroad, either to Budapest/Krakow or Brussels/Amsterdam. I'm planning to go to Seattle & Portland to promote AFG & will see many friends & extended family there, as well as snoop around Seattle as my potential next home.

Right now my attention is on those things. It's also on the intangibles of what I want from therapy -- setting boundaries, making myself heard, not reacting to stubbing my toe by automatically saying, "I hate myself." It's high time I hie myself off to the Rooms to get those boundaries & automatic reactions applied to food as well. But for now, it's a small miracle that this Panic-Disordered Lady can run a half dozen errands & get herself into a shrink's office.

These are the ruminations of a snow day. I'm grateful this difficult year has less than two weeks to wreck its grief, worry, stress, loneliness & rejection on me. I want, for the first time, to be the driver of the new year, rather than a nervous cringing passenger.

So. Happy new year to all of us. May the snow melt quickly.

In My Own Two Hands

Things are coming together for the publication of Angry Fat Girls, and between the work involved with promotion and Christmas preparation, I haven't had any time at all.

However: here it is, in all it finery:

I'm setting up an Angry Fat Girls website & redoing my personal website at franceskuffel.net. Look for changes to come.

I think it's a glorious cover & have no idea how the art director came up with it. But then she probably has no idea how I come up with some bizarre metaphor, either.

You can pre-order from Amazon now and it should be in bookstores in late December - early January. Its official publication date is January 5th, the eve of the Epiphany.

Will post soon. I'm freeeeeezing.

Junkie

A close friend called last night and took me to task -- gently, a little bit -- for leaving my blog readers dangling for a month. I'm sorry. I've been on a bender of pain and finding ways to dodge the pain.

I start my days wondering whether it's a Klonopin day (if my heart is beating fast and my stomach is fluttering at the thought of leaving the house, leaving bed), or a codeine day (if my heart is in my throat and I've got to try to show up. Some days I use those drugs, other days I get back in bed as soon as possible, or I zone out on computer games or, of course, at night, sugar.

The other day I realized I was really and truly poisoning myself with sugar. I was dashing to the toilet a half dozen times a day, shaking like a leaf and so, so tired. I have a very fragile few days' reprieve and my energy is a bit better as are my visits to the bathroom.

But each of the last three mornings would have been a codeine morning had I chosen to swig some back. Let me explain that my reaction to codeine is a muffling of bad feelings and a slight heightening of good ones. It's also dangerous if not taken with a lot of water, on a full stomach. And one of the reasons I'm making an effort to reign in my food is that my new shrink commented on Saturday that it's no wonder I'm so tired: I'm hanging onto the cliff above all the grief, fear, anger and love that I need to go through that it's exhausting. He's right. So I'm trying to get rid of the sugar/flour & let myself fall off the cliff, as frightening as that is.

My poor friend who prodded this entry: she got to hear a shard of the abandonment by my family and my fright over Christmas alone with my father. There are other things gnawing my insides as well. I don't have a good feeling about the fate of this book. I know of an adoption going on and my birthday is soon -- I want to write a letter to that baby to tell it how special it is. I've started work on a new book proposal and, wouldn't you know, despite it not being particularly about me, I hit a spot where I'd have to talk about how apart I've always been from my family: dead halt. Nor am I sure I want to write that book. There is a boy on the far, far periphery of my life that I try hard to keep behind my dinky fake Christmas tree on a high shelf who has fallen off the shelf a few times. My favorite aunt died a month after my mother did.

I don't even know where to start letting myself feel this stuff although I'm weepy as I write this.

There have been wondrous things as well, of course. I've discovered a branch of my family who care unjudgmentally about me, who are hilarious, literate, interesting. I spoke with the cousin my age about my aunt's brief illness and that little contact with a cousin I've always looked up to was marvelous. Hero's dad took Daisy and me pheasant hunting. Daisy put up a flight of crows, found a dead pheasant and played nicely with a pheasant from the freezer, her repugnance to feathers a one-off before she caught on. I watched how much fun she had following Hero's lead into the brush, how well she took my commands to go with Uncle S., and her concern when I lagged too far behind. I saw about 95% of what a Lab is all about that day.

I've spent masses of money creating a wardrobe for my hoped-for publicity, mostly in browns (a bright color will really add pounds; black is what is expected of authors, fat women and New Yorkers) & I've assembled a couple of calendars for gifts and a raffle item that were absorbing, amusing projects. I want to start my last calendar, for the Labs, today.

And, after two months of being unable to concentrate on much, I'm sick of chick lit and can, with certainty, say that the only writers in the genre truly worth reading are Helen Fielding and Marian Keyes.

But I've been in heroin zombie mode except for those times I had to get it together, and exhausted from the effort afterward. I keep thinking of first lines of this blog but fall into pointlessness almost as quickly as I think of them.

Fingers crossed that I stay clean. I've got Christmas to do, dogs coming out of my ears, and vegetables to chop.

The Best I Can Do

I was just commenting over at "Dear Ethel" that I don't think the originators of Thanksgiving and Christmas would find it in the least bizarre that their heirs would be grouchy. The Pilgrims were a miserable lot & hungry as hell. The Indians were scared of the white intruders. Mary was not gracefully praying over the manger & Joseph was probably bedded down in the straw with both God & the Mother of God in order to generate some badly needed body heat.

All these folks -- who were grimy, cold, hungry, frightened & physically exhausted, as well as thankful & in awe -- were probably pretty crabby.

So I'm advocating the OK-ness of wishing people a Grumpy Holiday Season. Personally, I'm going to concentrate on doing the best I can, enjoying what I can & avoiding talking too much about myself for fear of breaking into tears.

Hence: one pretty bad photo of the Empire State Building in autumnal colors. My amazement at the roses that are still hanging on. Curling up with whatever dogs I have on hand & watching their trusting sleep.

Thanksgiving was a near-tragedy in errors. I spilled pureed sweet potatoes all over the oven & couldn't clean the mess up sufficiently to avoid an hour of smoke. On my way to bed that night, I smashed & broke a toe (another toe; again). I took three things to Thanksgiving dinner & felt like I was catering the whole meal for twenty people. My life has gotten so small over the last five years that I'm easily overwhelmed. I 1) have to respect that, & 2) have to work on it.

Getting Daisy, a crate, luggage & myself to Newark for a 6.30 a.m. flight should challenge my hide-in-a-shell mentality.

I had five dogs to take care of that day as well. One of them lives about a mile from where we had dinner. Too full, having drunk a number of glasses of wine, exhausted, I walked three dogs down to DUMBO & left my keys in Henry's door. I didn't realize this until Chance, Daisy & I got back to the Heights. No. Way. I saw a light on in my building. No one answered. We turned around & got the doorman at Chance's house to let us in & bunked down there & picked up the keys in the morning.

Pressure. Thursday Daisy & I move to Molly's house for three nights & four days. I leave for Arizona on the 18th for three weeks. I've wrapped all the presents I have on hand & will mail them by the end of the week. A little compulsive, Frances?

Yes & yes. I should be getting editorial notes this week & will have a little over two months to revise my manuscript in a publishing atmosphere of canceled contracts & retrenchment. I'm scared. I have a lot of work to do. I have to get as much Christmas done in advance as possible. It would be a wonderful thing if I opened the box of cards at my feet & started them tonight, but I still have Italian greyhounds to feed as well as myself.

I would like to not eat sugar tonight.

I deserve to not eat sugar tonight. I wrapped those presents, having hand-picked them. Some of them are inspired. I did laundry this weekend & swept the kitchen floor after cooking before putting down the clean kitchen rug. I put all the summer linens away. I've done the dishes & taken a bath. Surely I've done Enough to merit going to sleep easily, without the aid of sugar?

I can't be a size six for my parents this Christmas, which would be their favorite present. But I could lose six pounds.

But oh Lord, the oblivion! I love the oblivion!

Angry Advent, everyone!

Stumped for a Title...

Well. That was a hurtle, the simple act of committing myself to a title.

I've been absent for much of the autumn. There have been reasons.

In mid-October, I went to Arizona for my parents' birthdays (91 & 87) for four nights and stayed for two weeks. My mother had been taken to Intensive Care the night before I arrived, with fluid in her lungs. Thirty-six hours on a ventilator followed by four more days of intense antibiotics, fluid counts and respiratory therapy saw her released but very weak.

I was very weak. Hospital visits are a balled knot of waiting to go, then, once there, wanting only to get out ASAP. My father, who is blind, discovered a great deal of his helplessness that he's depended on Mom for. He is also a physician & pragmatist.

Last night I made plane reservations for me and Daisy for what is most probably my mother's last Christmas.

Writing and reading those words makes me pause. How do I go on, here and with life?

I've been doing a piss-poor job of life since the summer, cycling in and out of depression & food. After something like two years, my 16 hormones decided to stage a coup last week & I found myself at the drug store wondering what size of tampon was called for.

I find that I wake up with a fair amount of energy & that around 2 p.m. I start to slide down the slope of my despair. It lifts a bit around 7 or 8 p.m., enough to do one errand or chore but also just enough to run over to the deli.

They say the most dangerous time in starting anti-depressants is when they begin to work just enough to give the patient the energy to kill herself. In my world lately, I get just enough energy to poison myself.

It hasn't all been like this, but I knew Friday when I heard people behind me on the sidewalk and I cringed to the side to make sure they didn't have to step out of their way that IT was back.

Today I began a conversation with Judy. I had to think about what I would tell a friend who is feeling the fear of the holidays, a manuscript revision in a time when publishers are thrilled to kill books, and tight finances, with some heavy dollops of guilt and resentment, but first I had to decide who the friend was. I thought of Marilyn Monroe and of Judy Garland, poor souls. I don't think I could listen to Marilyn's breathy pipsqueak, so I decided I would reassure Judy of some things.

"It was huge that you made those reservations, Judy. You know it takes four times as long to do it when you have to book Daisy, too, but you did it."

"Just do one thing that feels impossible, Judy. One thing. Take your pills? Great! Brush you teeth? Amazing! You did it."

You can see where this is going.

My heart, I tell you, is exhausted.

My mother and father are not a perfect mother and father, but they have sheltered me, believed in me, loved me even when I feel unlovable. They called to forbid me to buy them Christmas presents this year but I had already consulted with my friend Ann about what she did when she was facing her mother's last Christmas.

"I bought her a beautiful, expensive gold bracelet. She loved it. I knew it would be mine soon and when I wore it, I always thought of her."

So they will have Christmas presents, whether they want them or not. I probably won't -- Mom is too feeble now even to call a catalogue order in. That will be weird but OK.

I want to make a beautiful Christmas for her. And I wish I'd gotten the china figurine of the penguin mother and hatchling rather than the necklace. It would have better said what I'm feeling.

Or what, for 52 years, I've felt.

Maybe I'll do it anyway.

"All I want," she sighed, "is..."

Let me start off by thanking you for your understanding, advice and support. Further, I'm feeling a little grayer after so much blackness. Getting a very small cold that's kept me away from the nursing home has also given me a small space -- very small because I've been sleeping like it's my new profession and I am not abstinent. There hasn't been room for the Great American Novel in the gap my cold gave me, or even room to do the laundry or bathe every day. But I'm in less despair than a week ago.

Just before I set out on the afternoon dog rounds, I was sitting in my kitchen not enjoying the taste of my coffee and whining to myself. "I don't even know what I want," I said of today's soporific atmosphere.

That was immediately and transparently one of the stupidest things I've ever said.

I want to be abstinent, I retorted.

I want a bunch of money.
I want to be thin.
I want to start chapter three of my novel.
I want to get Pam's situation under control.
I want some energy.
I want to be in [my 12-step] Program.

Those were the items that came to mind at the moment. Here are some more:

I want to live in a home where I can give a dinner party.
I want my body not to ache.
I want a television that's not snowy and a DVD player in both my computer and my television that works.
I want Barak Obama to win the election. I want him to get us the hell out of Iraq. I want him to make Brian Schweitzer Secretary of Energy.
I want to go on a real vacation.
I want my debt to be less that five thousand dollars.
I want to know if my Missoula friends are still my friends.
I want lilac bushes.

I have no illusions that these things will make me happy-with-a-capital-H-Happy, but they would certainly promote comfort, satisfaction, community, existential meaning, and hope.

What have I done as I've slowly (and I do mean slowly) pulled myself up out of this dark place? I ordered most of my Christmas presents. I figured out how to make some stuff on Cafe Press. I've given reasonably good dog. I've eaten what I wanted, or thought I wanted, at night.

As I look at this list, I'm struck by how achievable they are. I'm pretty powerless over Pam's recovery in and of itself but I can coordinate things to facilitate it. I'm quite powerless over the election and I wish the Obama people would stop emailing me forty times a day to "call my friends and talk them into voting" for him. They have in their records my zip code. I live in a zip code that sports Obama placards in twentieth-story apartments; I don't know anyone here who's not voting for him and I won't risk yet another family schism by talking about it in certain quarters.

I'm utterly powerless over the appointment of Schweitzer to a new cabinet.

I'd say the big stumbling block in the way of everything is lack of abstinence and lack of energy.

I wonder if they're the same thing.