Cut from a 2015 book project—I hope!

.... but after high school, at Juliard, he went in for composition and for a while, he was an emerging musical composer in the world of modern dance, but then his lifelong penchant for addictive substances took over and he became a drug addict before netting out at drunk.

            There are certain people who do not want to heal. People who need access to the specific briny beauty that the world affords you when you’re high; the transcendental high notes, the paludal lows. There are lots of performing artists with substance abuse problems, but the really successful ones have teams of people who check the automatic payment box on their cellphone bills for them, who schedule their hotel wake-up calls, who buy them airplane tickets and drive them to the planes.

            Or they play in a band and survive on a system of checks and balances with the other members of the group. With some exceptions, the severly drug addled are not playing Rachmoninov for a sold-out house in Lincoln Center. Stephan could have been a great composer, or he could have made a tolerable amount of money showing up (or sleeping through) gigs in hotel bars, but for him, it was the prestige of the concert pianist, or it was nothing else.

Cut from a 2015 book project—I hope!

She had a call on her voicemail from Maven Fox. It had started. The girls knew that she was back in town. Just like her sister, Lola, Sloane had her own set of girls. She called them the monograms and she’d gone to high school with them. Just like Lola’s set, these women were born as little girls in Connecticut, then they went south and west to come of age during college, then northeast to Manhattan for their first jobs in banking and event management and PR, and then they moved back to the bedroom town of Connecticut once they’d found a hedge fund manager to share a bed with. And then they had the kids. It was astonishing, all of the off-spring produced by former friends of hers. All of the darn kids. Sloane wanted no children until she became pregnant, and once she had one, she wanted two. When she was told by her husband that he never again wanted to have sex with her, she wanted all of the children. She wanted, effectively, to drown in kids. And now she’d come home to a set of women she used to be friends with who had everything they’d ever wanted: rich men who got it up for them, rainforest showers, radiant flooring, and 3.1 kids.

            Maven had run into Stephanie Williams who had run into her mom who had said that Sloane was back in town. Could it possibly be true? They absolutely totally just had to get together. How long was she around? Did she have plans for Thanksgiving? Well, obvs, of course she did! But they positively had to get together. Restaura did white wine flights now. They had to make a plan.

            Listen. Sloane doesn’t hate her female friends from high school. She envied the fact that they were already in their golden years, was the thing. Recently, at a party, she’d met someone who told her about a friend of theirs who’s life goal was to own a house with a two-car garage. At thirty-four, he’d done it. He wasn’t interested in kids or career advancement, just the house and the garage and now he had it and the rest of his life was just bonus footage, as far as he was concerned. Sloane envied her old friends for much the same reason—their DNA seemed to be configured without the restless gene that hers had. Sloane didn’t have an overarching goal for her life except that she wanted to feel less frenetic and concerned about her chances for survival, which was difficult to do in a world where restaurant managers were shot in the stomach for running out of bread bowls and (victims of sinking vessels) used dead porpoises as life preserver vests.

Cut from a new book project

While most of her friends here spent their weekends standing in line to nab a table at a restaurant so overcrowded they’d dine with elbows in their backs, Lydia could be found, more often than not, out in Rye with her sister, pushing broccoli puree inside of rigatoni so that little Jane would get some veggies down, or sitting with Sally’s eldest, Lucy, on a stack of hay as Peter rode Beltello around and around.

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.