Cut from a new book project

And for what? It would be one thing if she worked hard to clothe and feed her children to outfit them with the energy and outerwear they needed for the day, but her five and eight year old used all of their consumed calories to stare at glowing screens.

Cut from a pregnancy memoir I'm working on

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Feb 9^th, 2014

The breastfeeding battle continues. I’m loathe to admit defeat but the harder I try, the less I produce, the less I produce, the more Gabriela rails against me, the more she protests, the worse I feel, the worse I feel, the more I get stressed, the more I get stressed, the less milk I produce.

Cut from a pregnancy memoir I'm working on

Throughout our home base in the Berkshires, we had a lot of friends to whom I could look for advice on a scaled back life with baby, but as I started asking questions and really observing what was happening in our circles, I realized that my generation was practicing a perverse hybrid of locavorism and attachment parenting that would pretty much guarantee that I never got to leave the house.

            On demand breast-feeding. Co-sleeping. Baby carrying to the extent that the baby never touched the ground. Cloth diapers. Homemade baby clothing. Organic, homemade baby food made from homegrown, heirloom vegetables. No pacifiers. No formula. Breast-feeding for the first two years of baby’s life.

            Let me tell you a bit about my life here in this rural town. We live on a road so out of the way from anything civilized, we have neither mail delivery nor trash-pick up. Our nearest convenience store is twenty-three miles away, and because we’re located in the middle of a microclimate in an already mountainous region, it’s common practice for us to be buried under five feet of snow, the bulk of which Diego and I spend countless mornings shoveling out of our steep driveway. In the winter, we heat our house almost exclusively with a wood stove. In the summer, we don’t have air conditioning. We didn’t have a washing machine until we hit our fifth year here, and we got a washer/dryer on our sixth. We have one bathroom for three bedrooms and a cat with big-breed heart problems that necessitates the twice-daily administrations of pills and an inhaler.

            None of this is to say that we have a hard life, because we don’t. This is just to say that we weren’t looking to make it any harder.

            Ever since the age of ten, I’ve been lugging around tote bags and eating root vegetables and drinking water out of funky smelling Nalgeens and avoiding single-use items like the bubonic plague. For decades, I’ve been as low impact as they come, letting it mellow when it’s yellow, re-using the same cloth napkin for a week’s worth of meals, making a chicken soup from the bones of every chicken we’ve ever roasted. So when it comes to the initial raising of this child, I just feel like, enough. I’m giving nine months to this unexpected project whose grand finale will push my body into the liminal state between humanhood and animalia, at which point I’ll start dripping creamy fluid out of my breasts like a cow.

            Enough. Enough! I’m not going to be washing cloth and Velcro diapers with my hands in a bucket like some busty hireling from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I’m not going to be signing paperwork so that some organ fairy can come down from the wilds of Northampton to encapsulate my placenta, nor am I going to make 4 x 6 souvenir, placenta prints. I’m not going to feel bad about getting liquid nutrients into my baby via a bottle so that I can have a little freedom and I’m not going to treat the last months of this pregnancy like an esoteric art project, leaving paper mâché belly molds around the house.

            What I’m finding as I move into my final pregnant months is that my generations’ lust for all things small-batch and difficult to come to mean that “easy” is no good, even in the realm of parenting. As the intelligentsia must ride their single speed bikes to Brooklyn to overpay for hand-crafted jars of mayonnaise for the sandwich they wanted four hours ago, so too must new parents go a crazy distance to be “good.” Cloth diapers, co-sleeping, home births, breast feeding for two years (or more!), attachment parenting, getting the child accustomed to hearing yes, yes, yes, (or at the very worst, “no thank you,”)—building this world where mommy and daddy are always there to cheer and protect them, that’s just not the way it works.

            I still hold strong memories of my mother tucking me in at night, the heady snap of her Joy perfume emanating from her clavicle, the sound of her necklace shushing against her skin as she leaned in to kiss me goodnight, a kiss that was frequently a goodbye before she headed to some place with clanking cutlery and shared cigarettes and floral arrangements, and I would dream about these places, and I didn’t cry.

            My parents were wealthy, then. I get that. They could afford a nanny and I can’t. But still. I don’t want motherhood—my motherhood—to resemble some obscure travail like artisanal pencil sharpening. I want it to be as fun as possible. As liberating as possible. I want it to be good. And right now that means taking the easy, low road all the way to a super pack of Huggies.

Cut from a pregnancy memoir I'm working on

I've always hated the beginning of a pregnancy memoir I've been writing. It's obnoxious. It sucks. I'm deleting it and pasting it here. RIP.

            When you’re looking forward to something, you see signs everywhere that the thing you want will happen. A little extra foam on your dry cappuccino? That barista you’ve been admiring finally loves you back. Your stoic boss sends you an email with an exclamation point in it? You’re getting a raise! You’ve been having an insatiable craving for wild mushrooms and lo and behold, the place you choose for lunch has wild mushroom ravioli as an appetizer. Obviously, within the next four days you are going to have mind-blowing sex.

            Wishful thinking is something we do in order to navigate the ups and downs of daily life. Certainly, for those of us with horrendous jobs, unmanageable family members, bipolar managers or unpredictable roommates, it’s imperative to allow ourselves to interpret mere coincidences as momentous signifiers of pleasant things to come, following them like magical bread crumbs to a land where dreams come true.

            The opposite of wishful thinking is denial. Defined by Google as “the refusal of something requested or desired,” denial also has a medical definition, such as this one by the American Heritage Medical Dictionary: “An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings.” Mosby’s Medical Dictionary explains denial from another angle, one that takes into account the feelings or expectations of another person: “The refusal or restriction of something requested, claimed, or needed, often causing physical or emotional deficiency.”

            I am a writer. I hold platinum distinctions in denial. Since the age of seven, I have relied on phantasmagorical levels of rationalization to convince myself that someone, somewhere cares about the stories, poems and essays that no one has asked me to write. When a story of mine is rejected from a literary magazine, it’s not because it wasn’t polished enough, it’s because it’s too original. When my latest novel is turned down by editor after editor, it has nothing to do with the fact that I write one thousand words when two hundred would suffice, nor with my tendency to forget that even fictional characters sometimes need to leave the house, it’s because we no longer live in a world of risk-takers. It’s because they’re scared of my Bold Voice.

            Because I work from home as a copywriter in a rural area, I’m not exposed to the kind of reality-checks that would keep my delusions in line. I don’t have to show up at an office at any particular time, and I don’t have to dress in any particular way for any particular person. In fact, a consequential portion of my morning is dedicated to convincing myself that it matters if I shower. But matters to whom? It certainly doesn’t matter to the seven hundred ascetics who inhabit the fifty-three square miles of woods around the town in which I live, nor does it matter to my filmmaker husband, who also works from home, and is French, and has been wearing the same sweater for five years. The aforementioned “painful reality” is that it doesn’t really matter whether I put on underwear in the morning, or foundation, or whether I finish my eight-thousand word short story about a sadomasochistic carpenter or not. The denial comes in when I decide to do these things anyway. Because someone out there cares. Right? They must.  

Cut from a memoir I'm (sort of) working on

I turned to poetry, mentored first by the poet Forest Gander who supported my self-absorbed poems about sex and boyfriends and quirky things like Snow Cones, and then by Michael Harper, a Poet Laureate who did not. Professor Harper didn’t select me for his advanced poetry class, even though I’d already taken the pre-requisite class with Professor Gander. I heard from older students that Professor Harper liked people to beg, which I did, I doubt very humbly, in his third story office in the creative writing department on Waterman Street.

            An African American historian and a social force, Professor Harper tried to impress upon us the importance of context, meaning, research. For me, at that time, his words fell on deaf ears. I fell squarely into the other camp: the verbal school of impressionists who write when the mood passed through them. I know now that this is an intolerable, naïve and unrealistic school to be a part of it you have ambitions that include a readership beyond your local bar. But I didn’t know that then. In his review of my poetry thesis before the end of the school year, he said he didn’t want to see anything published by me for twenty years. When I asked him why, he said, “Because you won’t have anything to say.”

            At the time, his comment both saddened and enraged me, but years later when my rejections from editors and agents started to include notes of encouragement, I took solace in what Professor Harper had said. It gave me the courage to be patient, or at least, to try. After all, it wasn’t like I was trying to be a ballerina. After all, to be a good writer, to write about other people’s lives, you have to spend some time in your own.

            At the time of graduation, I was dating my French teaching assistant; an Adonis of a man named Jean Houdent An exchange student himself, his Visa had run out a year before I graduated, and so, with no request on my part for such a gesture, he sold all of his furniture and books upon his return home in order to afford a one-way plane ticket back to Providence to live with me until I graduated.

            This unexpected news was both flattering and horrifying, but I didn’t protest because the fiction lover in me wanted to see how the whole thing would unfold.

            My three female roommates were less interested in living through the next chapters with my unemployed, pot smoking, reggae loving Frenchman. The request that he live elsewhere came with Jean installed a periodic table of cocktails poster in the living room next to a framed poster of the black animated infant hero, Kirikou, which had absolutely no context if you weren’t a comic book aficionado, and French.

            As Jean was dead broke, I got him a job at the French creperie where I’d started working after I quit Starbucks, after having an hour docked off my timecard one day when I showed up with a little piping on the sleeves of my white shirt. My protests that it was a vintage bowling shirt went unconsidered, and I decided that a place that didn’t respect vintage athletic wear was not a place for me.

            Anyway—we made it through that year together and I moved to Paris with him a week after graduation, two suitcases stuffed indecently to bursting, determined to never come back.

            Upon arrival to his childhood apartment in the seventh arrondissement, I found that he hadn’t sold all of his belongings—just one or two things—and after several weeks of cohabitation with his doting, single mom it became apparent that he’d probably go the money for his plane ticket from her.

            That summer was a terrible one. The Jean I’d known in Providence had been a poetic capitalism hater with a boundless appreciation for literature and tennis. He liked sweet cocktails, camel lights and pot, but beyond his been-there-done-that stories of licking coke off of friends’ nipples, rolling on ecstasy at his grandfather’s foie gras farm and the like, he’d never given me any reason to suspect the three hundred and sixty degree personality turnaround that hit him—and us—in Paris.

            In an move incongruous with his personality, he pulled family strings, and then pulled them harder when he botched up the first interview but finally snagged a job as an analyst at Ernst & Young. He worked the long hours that such positions are known for while I stayed home in the apartment in a charmless street surrounded by postcard vendors and men in dashikis selling bottled water and Eiffel Tower key chains.

            I made sandwiches at home and took them to the nearby Champ de Mars where I perused the expat magazines for jobs that would let me keep my clothes on. Such jobs were hard to find. It was becoming resolutely clear to me that Jean Ralphaeo had been wrong—you did need a Visa as a foreign job applicant—it wasn’t something the French government just handed out at the Charles de Gaulle airport to little white girls who spoke French.

            With a miserable amount of savings and no friends to speak of, I started to sink into a depression that was worsened by my inability to find an even semi-dignified job. Meanwhile, despite the fact that Jean was cohabiting with two women who had a vested interest in taking tabs on him, he started staying away from home for entire days at a time, building a double life as a rising analyst by day and a clubbing coke fanatic by night. He would come back on Fridays, sallow-skinned and skeletal with a bag full of the Jekyll and Hyde outfits he’d kept in his car and sleep until Sunday night. On July 14^th, as Jean was sleeping off the aftermath of a particularly long MDMA trip, his mother went with me to the Eiffel Tower to watch the Bastille Day fireworks. As the displays became grander, brighter, more outrageous, I began to cry. No, this wasn’t Paris as I imagined it. Lonely, friendless and illegal, standing in a drunken crowd with my boyfriend’s mom. Jean had been doing so much coke, he’d actually lost a tooth.

            There was one more event that took place before I made the desperate call to the French chapter of Brown University that I’ve already described. One Sunday, out of nowhere, Jean became obsessed with the idea that I was cheating on him. While I sat on our bed wishing that it was true, he stormed around the apartment gathering all of my belongings while intermittingly updating travel websites to see when he could get me a one way flight back to New York.

            When I announced that I wasn’t going anywhere—or rather, that I wasn’t leaving Paris—he screamed that he was going to drive me to my lovers’ and threw everything I owned out of the fourth story window in preparation for our trip. When he realized that I had been doing laundry before he’d woken up from one of his drug naps, he stopped the spinning washer and threw my wet and sudded clothing out onto the pavement as well.

            By that time, I had an awful undocumented job at a place called “Paris International VIP Services” that promoted itself as a boutique guide and tour agency and translation center, run by an Indian man who exclusively wore leather overalls and worked on the side as an online shrink. He made me work with pseudonyms that expressed his brand values, so for four mornings a week, I was Earnest, Prudence, or Claire. I also had to read the emails from his online psychiatry patients in order to tell him who needed to be seen most (a.k.a., replied to). It was a horrid, horrid position, but because I worked the early shift there, I had the office key, so with all of my belongings in the back of the car stinking intermittingly of dog shit and laundry detergent, I told Jean to take me to my “lovers” place at sixteen Rue Pascal, the domicile of Dr. Nagpal Singh.

            Because I was still at an age where I confused drama with romance, Jean Ralphaeo made cameo appearances through the next three years of my life, with the dramatic curtain call taking place on my twenty-forth birthday in the city of Lyon where I was managing two weeks worth of parties in the next iteration of my professional life: party promoter and Coronamobile driver for Corona Extra.

            Diego had come with me on my “business trip” and we were actually lying in bed together when I got a text message from the maniac I hadn’t heard from in four months, a man whom I finally—truly—wanted out of my life, saying that he had driven three hours from Paris and was right outside my hotel. I gasped when I looked out the window from my eleventh story room and spotted his shitty Peugeot, and saw that he was.

            I made Diego come down to the lobby to act as a witness in case Jean stabbed or shot me. (Diego offered to walk out with me but I didn’t want him to get stabbed or shot, too.)

            With no explanation as to how he knew where I was or why he thought it was okay to come there, Jean produced a set of Japanese dishes and a tremendous ficus plant as birthday presents and said he’d made a reservation at the finest restaurant in Lyon. The epicurean in me took over—my first comment was, which one?—before launching into a diatribe informing him that he had no right to be there, that our relationship was over, that he couldn’t keep making unexpected appearances in my life and P.S I’d met somebody else and I loved him. Jean absorbed this information while I held onto the huge plant and then he asked me to marry him, an offer which the last name on my French passport will assure you I declined. Weirdly enough, my husband and I still have those bowls.

Cut from "My road dog, post-baby bod"

This is cut from an essay I'm working on for Fanzine:

When I was five months pregnant, I went on a road trip through northeast Mexico with my husband and became obsessed with the Spanish road signs that we passed. I copied them down in a journal with a plan to turn them into bookmarks with these abstract, Spanish phrases stenciled on. I have, so far, made one. What it says is that my body map is evolving. That there isn’t a specific destination, just this great and frightening journey with no room for a time out. What it says is, “Termina acotamiento.” Shoulder ends.

From an essay I'm working on about my cat

When I pulled the tab off the can of tuna shreds to feed our new cat for the first time, there was a crack, and then a hiss, and a briny, tinny odor that up until that point, had had no place in my life. I remember thinking, This is what it smells like to be responsible for someone else.