Fred

I call my father most nights to read him the "funnies," his expression for the television schedule.  He lost his 90% of his vision about ten years ago and while he still cooks and does his laundry, he's dependent on other people for such niceties.  His housekeeper in Arizona is wonderful and my brother as faithful as molasses, but when I'm with him I come in for heavy duty reading -- he wants to look up something in Merck?  You ask the English major rather than the Costa Rican or my rather unschooled brother.  I read him the best of the catalogues, the grocery store aisles, eBay, the Missoula obituaries, liner notes from his CDs, the contents of his desk.  Whether I'm with him or not, most days I end up reading to my father.

He's trying out assisted living in Missoula for some six months just now.  The food, he says, ranges from awful to very good.  He eats dinner at an assigned table of taciturn men.  He spends his evenings with football or baseball or one of the science channels, and he spends his days listening to books from the Library for the Blind.  Losing his vision turned him from a sort of free-thinking Republican into a raving progressive because one of the first subscriptions he got was The Nation and he discovered he likes spending an hour or two waking up with NPR.

He's about to have a girlfriend back in Arizona.  My brother called me a few days before Mother's Day to ask me to take care of Dad's command that we send flowers to -- we'll call her Lois.  I called Dad because flowers are a personal thing and read him the website.  He wanted red roses.  I told him that women regard red roses from a man as a love token.  "That's fine.  Send her three dozen on Mother's Day." 

Mother's Day I refused to do.  She is not his mother.  She is not the mother of his children.  She has sons in the Phoenix area who would most likely give her flowers so Daddy's gesture would be lost.  I sent them on the Thursday after Mother's Day.

My father has never picked up the phone and called me but he calls Lois each Sunday.

I think this is fine.  She's an old friend; her husband was one of my father's lab partners in medical school.  There's a best man/maid of honor thing in there somewhere.  She's small and pretty like my mom but possibly, in some ways, more of a lady where Mom had a touch of the dame.  When we had a small get-together in Sun City after Mom died, it was Lois I turned to.  She has so much joint-history, you see.

One of the godmothers of my gray mood has been a consciousness that on Wednesday the 29th, it will be a year and a day since my mother died.  I miss her a lot.  I had new author photos taken and one of them is really gorgeous.  I feel sad that she's the only person for whom I would have made a print, framed it and sent it to.  Daddy would appreciate it but he couldn't see it.  The sense of a safe haven left with my mom because she always wanted to hear about my deepest thoughts and feelings.  That's not how my father operates and that's fine, too.  I couldn't talk about Sibelius or 15th century England with my mother.

I called Dad tonight with the wonderful news that there is boxing on TV and a couple of college football games until then.  He said he'd been watching football and then 60 Minutes because he was resting up from his big day yesterday.

His big day had gone right over my head.  Actually, I think it went over his head as well until today when everyone in the complex had something to say.  It seems they had a dance yesterday.  Dad put in an appearance because he didn't want to disappoint the recreation director.  Said director pulled him out on the floor for the rhumba.  "It's been twenty years since I danced," he said.  "I didn't think I knew how any more."

One of my favorite phrases from the movies is Woody Allen's aunt in Annie Hall confiding to his kid-self that once upon a time she "was quite the lively dance-ah."  My parents courted on dance floors.  They collected Glenn Miller 78s.  As a kid, I remember how much I loved/hated their dancing club nights.  I loved them because I hung out on the bed in their room and watched them put on their formal clothes.  The smell of face powder and Channel No. 5 and a waxy kiss goodbye are physical sensations even on this warm Sunday night ten days before the first anniversary of my mother's death.  I hated dancing club nights because my brothers were "babysitting" me.  I never knew what that would entail except that I would either be used, hurt or told to get lost.

In the mysteries of a marriage, my parents were a united force when it came to dancing.  I saw them dance once, in a taverna in Rome when I was twenty.  The band struck up "In the Mood" and they were there, swinging and moving to the rhythm in such a circle of knowledge of how to dance to that music that the other dancers fell back and watched in admiration.

I was drunk as a boiled owl that night but I remember the people parting like a curtain and seeing my mom and dad at it.

Lois is passionate about dancing.

So my father allowed the rec director to pull him into one rhumba and history was made.  She didn't know what she was doing but all the steps were buried memories in his 92-year-old body.  Ladies were lining up to dance with him.  "When I finally got to sit down, I was sweating," he told me with surprise.  And today, ladies were still lining up to compliment him and ask that he save a dance for them the next time.  And Daddy is thinking he will start going to tea dances in Sun City.

He lost his Ginger but he's got a long career ahead of him.

The Plague Year

The anniversary of the morning my mother fell and injured her hip is in twelve days.  From that day on, she was never the same and in a sense, it marks the death of her as part of my home family.  I want the day to go by and to put the last twelve months behind me.  There have been wonderful things in this year -- going to Prague, going to the Pacific Northwest, meeting a lot of people on Facebook -- but there has also been a lack of energy to write, sadness, bad depression, family schism, and a bit of a broken heart.  Add to all that, weight gain and increasing social anxiety.  It hasn't been pretty.

In making some choices to speak up and claim parts of myself, I've lost a couple of friends. Just recently, another seems to have rebuffed me, although I haven't tried to find out why.  For the most part, I've probably been a distant friend this year, absorbed in family events and trauma, sunk in a wordless place when I was confined to quarters for two months, traveling, watching Angry Fat Girls tank, and getting abstinent, which always makes me go underground with civilians.  If my illusiveness has caused more rupture in my friendships, I'm sorry.  But it was, on the whole, a year in which I had to put the oxygen mask on myself first.

For the last five weeks I've struggled against my anxiety to get anything done.  While I was in relapse, I had occasional hard work days because if I didn't do something, I'd feel so miserable that I'd want to die.  Without sugar, I've been feeling what's going on.  Not much is happening in my life to blog about because that's what I've been doing: feeling.  Therapy has been like boot camp and I joked on Facebook one day that I think I need a therapist to talk to about therapy.  There and in my step work, I'm facing some demons.  There are days when I just go to bed after crying through an assignment or therapy session.

All of this is by way of saying I'm sorry to anyone and everyone who reads this and who has felt slighted by me.  I've been curled up in a very tight ball.  My life is about to blasted open if we come to an agreement with Berkley about the next book.  I'm going to have to go on about a hundred first dates and write about them.  Am I ready?  I don't know.  You can find out by going to my new blog, "Assholes in the Headlights," which I should have started yesterday.

My blogs: sheesh.  I blog about food/addiction/depression at Psychology Today, snarky dating experienced at Headlights, about publishing on my website, and about my other stuff here.  I feel fragmented but somehow, also, that any other blog needed to wait until I could write this.

So I'll see you around the Web, and I'll see you in Starbucks.  I'll be the large woman having a stilted conversation about what the guy opposite me does for a living.

And I'll try to come up with events to report here on as regular a basis as possible.

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.

Public Confession

I had a b-a-d week & it all culminated in acting out yesterday.

I desperately needed to be at my mother's memorial service in Missoula on Sunday. I needed to hear what the co-founder of the "alternative Catholic community," which I call Our Lady of Off-off Broadway, said about the years of working with my mother in the Church. I needed to remember my mother with friends from high school who have the same context as I do for her. I needed to see how my father reacted in the moment.

But I had a dog to board, a promotional video to do & a flutter since then of more interviews for Angry Fat Girls. My publisher is optimistic about the fate of the book. I am cautiously hopeful.

Not only, then, could I not go and everyone set the date in stone, but I didn't hear from anyone except my high school friends about the service or about being missed. I went to Mass with friends, who held my hands during the prayers for the community. We met another friend of our age for brunch & laughed ourselves silly at all the old Catholic stuff which we share an obsession with. I was happy until I got home & saw the emails from friends about the service, at which point I fell apart again.

Something burst in my heart yesterday morning & I blasted off a phone call about the timing of the memorial. I think Christmas is going to be cheaper this year because of it, and my publisher is seeing if the last line of the acknowledgments can be changed.

& so began my day.

What was big became venal. Daisy took a dump in a pile of leaves at dusk & I couldn't find it & didn't search very hard for it. Later, Henry took his dump & I was deep in conversation with a friend about how death opens up thinly healed family dynamics. No one saw & I didn't venture out to the ed of the dog run to pick it up.

I always pick up poop that can be picked up. I am insistent about this because dogs are in such danger of being hated in the city as it is.

The grocery stores had none of the free local broadside newspapers I need for the Italian greyhounds's crate but two copies of the New York Times were lying around the vestibule so I took them.

Petty thievery! The only thing I can say for myself is that given the state I'm in, the dogs were lucky to get a good walk & play time, and that the greyhounds are lucky I went over to feed them & clean their crate. This morning I washed dishes that were two days overdue. I finally put the toilet paper on the roller. I'm blogging instead of playing Monopoly, which I downloaded. Maybe today can be a little bit better. No transgressions today. Keep "forgive us our sins as we forgive others" in the front of my brain. I didn't yell at Henry when he broke my favorite bowl today. I've picked up poop. I wrote my sponsor. I am trying to be somebody in the wake of feeling my family regards me as no one.

But, Lord, I wish I had some gumption to take on a bathroom shelf or noodle around a new book proposal or walk over to the office supply store to buy bond paper. Beyond hurt, anger & bouts of impatience with the dogs, I am empty.

Onward through the Fog

I thought grief would be a spectacle. You know, breaking down in public, asking the missing one if everything is OK or if she has some wisdom to shed on some subject. I went through a grief similar to that when the Boy from Connecticut dumped me in Round I but this is different.

I don't get it, frankly. I always thought that when my parents died, I'd be headed for Payne Whitney. Up until last May, Mother was the person I was most consistently open with, the person I went to for advice about everything except men. It's not that I don't have a lump in my throat as I write those sentences, as well as the operative phrase "until last May," but this frame of mind I'm in is more like a fog than a fire.

My concentration is almost nonexistent except for stupid computer games. Sunday I slept 19 hours. I never really unpacked from my trip to Prague and came home with some of my mother's jewelry and scarves so the Bat Cave is like a jigsaw puzzle dumped out of the box.

I keep losing things. My checkbook went missing in Arizona but I found it at the last minute and packed it in my suitcase. It did not, however, come out of my suitcase. I've looked ineffectually for it everywhere. Then my ATM card went missing. I found it but only after I'd gotten a replacement. And those are just the important goners.

Nor can I remember things. I sat down, sans checkbook but with a notebook, and paid bills, writing them down. When I looked at my checking account a few days later, there were bills I wrote down that hadn't gone through and bills I'd paid that I hadn't written down. It took an hour to find check blanks and a new ledger and then I called all my credit cards because I had no idea what their balances were after traveling for four weeks out of five. I bought a gift for friends, along with a few other items, and discovered when I got home that the box was empty.

And let's not forget handing over my passport at the bank to get a new ATM card and being unable to remember my social security number for a good three minutes.

I feel haunted -- not by my mother but by a feeling that I've forgotten something important. When I'm out on the street I'm in a rush to get home and do something but as soon as I arrive, I stall out.

It's a miracle my animals are alive and that I haven't walked into an oncoming delivery truck.

All this forgetfulness and losing stuff makes me incredibly anxious. Add stomach problems to the mix. I would love to be able to sit down and cry my eyes out if only I needed to. I'd much rather be in paroxyms of grief than in this light-headed Alzheimer's state.

I'm clinging to accomplishing small things and to the hope of another day's abstinence. I was so wound up over the bank card and keys I needed to return yesterday that I couldn't decide what to do or in what order. But I managed both as well as groceries. I went through masses of papers last night. It took at least two hours when someone else could have done it in 30 minutes, but things are paid and National Public Radio is $25 richer. Today I've done one load of laundry and found a photo for my Lab Lady blog. I've brushed my teeth and taken my morning meds. I remembered that a hungry stomach means I should eat before getting into a new twitter of disorganized organizing.

For the time being I guess I'm going to have to slow w-a-y down, keep my lights on dim and the windows open.

But if anyone finds my brain, could you let me know? I'll gladly pay overnight shipping.

Hello Again

Thank you everyone for so many kind wishes, prayers and listening ears.

I got home very late Monday evening from three weeks of mostly dealing with the Aftermath. Sorting, giving, tossing, organizing; reading tiny bits of paper to my father; eating & sleeping; absorbing.

It's good to be home. I have a lot more absorbing to do.

This is not so much about Mom being gone. She began to leave, emotionally and mentally, when she fell in late May & was in such rotten shape that to regret her dying when she did would be an act of cruelty. She would have been 88 years old this month & she was ready. When the social worker at the nursing home asked her three days running (she couldn't remember much by September) if she knew what hospice care meant, she replied it meant end of life. Then asked how she felt about that, she replied, "Shit happens." I'm more OK with her death than I imagined I would be.

But it was an intense time of family & looking at family. Much of this began earlier in the summer & circumstances conspired in various weird ways to keep me looking back in time. Conversations with cousins, with people I knew in grade school, being a unit with my father & brother, making calls & receiving visits, figuring well, we're talking living wills and family trusts -- is there a better time to ask about my birth mother? Much was revealed, much has been forgotten, only a little of it all is something some of us can address.

My brother & I were pretty united over the summer in our efforts to help & plan but death, even a benign one, is a wall one hits, I suspect, with the kind of impact that brings out undercurrents. I collapsed one day soon after Mom died, binge-reading, napping & finally sobbing hoarsely. Jim did not collapse. He soldiered on, reading mail to Dad, sorting business papers, making business phone calls, wrapping up my mother's official life. I have lived alone my entire adult life & I'm not only used to having a lot of private time, I need it. I wasn't surly through that day but I was not communicative nor was I a team-player. Around five I began to stir & Jim walked into my room & said, sarcastically, "Are you going to connect today at all???"

I snapped back in equal sarcasm, "I'm going to take a shower." Which I did & then came out & made crab quiche for dinner.

When we drove to the airport for his flight home, I got a lecture between his taking cell phone calls. Dad was hurt by my moodiness. Dad didn't know if we could all spend time together in the future. Et cetera.

I listened & was mortified. I'm used to being as much in my own world when I'm with my father as he is -- I thought -- used to being in his own world of talking books, science lecture series, football & the Discovery Network. I didn't mean to hurt my father but my "mood" was exhaustion, escapism, grief & a response to how accustomed I am to Dad being literally plugged in to anything but live human beings in his home.

And, dammit, I listened & accepted without retort. I began to see an old pattern re-emerging in that week with my brother. He kept answering for me or cutting me out. People would ask when I was planning to leave & despite my having an open ticket & no set plans, he would give them a day that for some reason he thought was best. We had a small remembrance party with my parents' Arizona friends & the hostess said Jim would say a few words & then Francie would say a few words -- except that Jim thanked everyone for coming for me.

Years ago, he took me to see his shrink to see if I had any memories of childhood that would shed some light. I'm a pro at shrinks & after a while the man broke in & said, "You're great. You know, I met your parents & I've been seeing Jim for a while but nobody ever talks about you. It's like you don't exist or something."

Yes, well, that's a pattern. & rather than turn things narky, I said nothing of my own hurt feelings & ability to speak for myself & let him codify me into whatever story of me he's comfortable with.

I'm "sorer" about that than I am about my mom's death. Once again I feel as though I have no brother, both because the man who calls me "Sis" (Sis? When the fuck did I become SIS? I HATE that name; it's as bad as being called "Fran". Sis makes me feel like a 16-year-old snake & Fran is a nasally whiny version of "fat". Sis infuckingdeed) doesn't get that I am a grown-up (& he could have spoken to me at 2 in the afternoon instead of letting his resentment fester until 5) person on my own, and because I eventually came to feel resentment & disgust rather than anything more fond for him.

I laugh that he is my mother's child -- uber-organized & organizing, dogmatic according to his own lights, a little belittling of my father for Oedipal reasons of his own. I'm my father's child -- happy in my own world, relaxed about certain kinds of things. He needs to DO in order to justify his days & I need to BE in order to survive mine. He's far to the right socially, politically, theologically & I wonder if this gives him some sort of patriarchy complex, a need to be the Man.

I'm sighing here & thinking, whatever. The full story turned out not to be all about Dad being hurt. I felt more manipulated yet. I wonder what other childhood attitudes will blossom in the next few years & I wonder if I'll have a brother after them.

All of this was particularly odd because a week or so after he left, two cousins came to visit. They were eager to hug & catch up & I had to warn them that I am the Antichrist to their similarly conservative headroom. It worries me a little -- I am glad-handy with everything they find reprehensible. It worried me more when I jokingly said that Catholicism is as heathen a religion as anyone could wish & they nodded solemnly. It's a paradox that I'm sure the Old Testament, somewhere, warns against: how can one love someone whose advocacies in life are anathema -- possibly, in their gestalt, sinful?

All of which makes "love" feel a little fragile.

I've always known death brought out the worst in people but I thought it was material rather than whatever this is. I went on to spend two nice weeks with my father & if Jim's competency with legal papers made me feel pointless, I did a lot of heavy lifting & cuticle-ruining going through closets, drawers, desks, under beds. Dad & I drove up to the Grand Canyon, which in nearly 20 years of spending half or more of the year in Arizona I've never seen. We had a nice time & we experienced that wonderful rare thing of synchronicity when we stopped at an Indian market outside the Park as we drove toward the Painted Desert. I don't know why that was so but we enjoyed it the same way, inhabited that 15 minutes so happily that our rhythm the rest of the day was set. It was a two-day excursion we'd never done because in those nearly 20 years my mother simply hasn't been well enough for it.

There are second acts to come even as, once again, I wonder why I can't open my mouth to stake my boundaries and my self, & why I'm not right -- as in, stable & OK -- the way I am.

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.

We Shall Not Regret the Past...

nor wish to shut the door on it.

To any 12-step program member, this sentence is burned on our brains. My response to it is, "Oh, really???" Just as my response to the Promises of recovery is, when read aloud, "Do we think these are extravagant promises?" and everyone answers "We think not!" I either keep my mouth shut or say out loud, "Hell, yes!"

My past has caught up with me in recent months. It has been heartening to know that some bridges didn't burn down completely, that others were never erected but always had the potential to build, but they ALL send me whizzing through time to 1972 - 1984. I've been through one of the worst depressions I've had in a very long time.

I can tell how bad it was because it's slowly -- s-l-o-w-l-y -- lifting. I've actually told four people about it and three of them offered understanding &and faith. My mother, who last week was on my ass about insurance and retirement, said, "You're a strong person, Francie. You've weathered a lot when a lot of people would have given up." That felt validating. Admitting it is a first step. Realizing yesterday that Daisy is my anchor to having to get through it was a second step to crawling up. Having a fierce crying jag that has been building for weeks was good.

It's all been made worse, of course, by losing my abstinence & then getting off sugar again. Yesterday was Day Three & I was jittery and hyper-emotional.

Which was a good time to have something like a six-hour conversation with a friend I haven't spoken to in, um, like 20 years.

One afternoon when I was an undergraduate at the University of Montana, she stopped and asked if I was Francie Kuffel. I am sure I said coldly, "Yes." Undeterred, she introduced herself. I knew her brother from high school. That's all either of us can remember but it began a sporadic friendship for about ten years that was both acutely painful for what and who she was and what and who I wasn't.

One of the things she did that made me break down crying as we talked was fall in love with my hair. Age has done things to my hair. It's more red than black now. It's straight after being naturally curly. But I have glorious hair and she would sit me down in a chair in the back yard and trim it and brush it and gush over it.

It was the first time in my life I felt feminine. It would, in retrospect, be another 20 years, until I lost weight, that I felt feminine again.

All through the early chapters of PFT when I lament about the life obesity prohibited me from having is imbued with C. She was an adventuress. In fact, she googled me when she and her cousin got to reminiscing about showing up at my door at 5 a.m. to haul me off to Mount Lolo to watch an eclipse of the sun. I didn't go but I packed them off with chocolate cake for their adventure.

How fucking perfect. What a microcosmic look at my entire life. No I won't go but I'll send you off with cake. I'll provide but not participate.

I don't happen to remember this episode but it burns with all the toxin of my M.O. in life, all the things I didn't do.

It turned out, however, in the course of the conversation, that I said some perspicacious things about her that she found to be among the nicest things anyone has ever said about her. At that same time, I listened to her success and the aspects of her thick fruitcake of a life & felt I'd never lived or achieved anything at all.

There have been two other old friends who've touched my email lately. One I have yet to seriously deal with, the other I exchange witticisms with on Facebook, but by the skin of my teeth. She was brilliant in high school and is still an elfin character. I was thinking of her when I told my mom today that I'm SO tired of battling depression & food -- so, so, so, so weary of it. Had anyone noticed, which no one did in Missoula, Montana, in 1973, that this 14-year-old kid was drowning, I could have been so much more. Instead, the consensus, of course, was that I needed to lose weight.

I need fucking drugs, man, and the second I graduated from high school I asked for a shrink, which was pretty self-preserving as I entered my Suicide Years. But regrets have been flowing through me like another set of white cells. The men I couldn't have. The travel I didn't do. The sexiness I did not feel. Reed College, my dream school, far above my pathetic grades. C still visits her favorite teacher and asked if I was fond of her. I laughed. I had what I now know was a nervous breakdown my senior year and was out of school for three weeks. "It's just as well," said-teacher said when she asked if anyone knew what happened to me, "she doesn't belong in school."

She was an English teacher.

So, no, I'm not fond of that teacher.

Depression is like this, OK? I've been feeling on the verge of tears for weeks. It built. I self-medicated and was excessively tired. I played computer games and brooded and hated myself for not doing something constructive. The crisis, like scarlet fever, came yesterday: the fever broke enough for me to feel my feelings, to cry for not going to Reed College or playing the Poetry Game in graduate school, to look at Daisy and realize I was alive because I have to BE with this animal. To realize I had not been admitting for a while that I didn't want to be alive: the battles against myself are so so exhausting. To tell my first, beloved shrink that I'm in a Bad Place, and my friend D., and my friend J., who completely got it and didn't act as though I was insane when I asked in a small voice if she thinks Daisy loves me. To actually tell my mother what I've been going through and have her respond sympathetically.

Depression is like this: I published a book that cracked open an experience many women share that led to a cyberspace community of sharing. Maybe I saved -- or salved -- some lives. Now I'm getting ready to edit a book about the shame of regaining weight in an effort to tell these woman it's OK. It's OK to gain weight, it's what we're unfortunately wired for. And whatever battle we chose with regards to our weight -- diets, exercise, acceptance, surgery, depression -- they're all OK to. Because it's a war between self and self, society and self, and we Americans haven't won any wars lately. It's OK to love our success and to deeply revere and respect our failure and to celebrate every day that we stick to whatever option we have decided to fight for and with in this battle. Hell, let's celebrate every hour.

And then depression is like this: telling myself all that doesn't make me believe it. I'm still the young fat woman standing at the front door with chocolate cake wrapped in tinfoil, sending my friends off to have fun, have an adventure, drive 9,000 feet up closer to the sun while I went back to bed.

I hope to God I said no because I was writing a paper on Troilus and Cressida that day or had an Italian test coming up. I hope I was reading Proust at 3 pages an hour. And I'm grateful C and I found each other and that maybe I can make up for lost time in some small way.

Say a prayer for me, friends. I'm working hard to climb back up to the daylight. One day I'd like to be close to a tricky sun.