::
All images unedited, taken with the iPhone using the Hipstamatic app. First day of school 2010 (Kindergarten, and the big 5th). All images property of Maggie, dammit, may not be used elsewhere without permission. Duh.

Dave smiles at me but says nothing, eyebrows raised and too carefully set, a tell. Awkwardness acknowledged, quickly dismissed–but I’m already steeped in memories of this meaningful place and all the drinking that used to go with it. I’ve already taken careful inventory of all the wine all around me, all my favorites, even the Mondovi cab at the very next table—really? The Mondovi cab? Within arm’s reach? I watch a woman lovingly caress her stem and I guess this is why they call it a trigger so I say then, to Dave, “Quick. Remind me why it’s so awesome I can’t drink anymore.”

He hates this but he’s prepared. “Because your skin looks amazing right now. Because you can appreciate this moment in one of our favorite places. You aren’t wasting all our money on drinks so you can have the best steak. You can celebrate. Your eyes are clear. You can see how good-looking your husband is.”

I narrow said eyes. The waitress drops the breadbasket off, asks if we need anything and I open my mouth but no sound comes out. She turns on one heel, walks away and I say to her back, “We’re celebrating because I signed with a literary agent and my therapist thinks I need to publicly acknowledge this.” But actually I say this all in my head.

***

I returned from New York City on Tuesday feeling filthy, my Self a hard line of fuzzy morning teeth, the humid air one big searching tongue. My soul needed a good scrubbing, but for the life of me I could not figure out why. It was an amazing time. With Camille, my sweet friend and very favorite author, we ate sushi on a rock in Central Park, wandered dozens of city blocks and scooped frozen hot chocolate, her treat. All week Dave and the kids took to the subway like commuter-robbing thugs, texting me picture after picture of experiences they’d cockily stolen. I ate pizza in East Harlem with two cousins and an aunt.  I ran through Central Park in a tutu, survived speaking on a panel despite serious Impostor Syndrome, danced in eyeliner and heels for an hour without a drop of alcohol. I saw Larry David and had the stones to sneak a picture. I spent incredibly rich moments floating safely with friend anchors. I loved and embraced and snorted and wept and laughed from the belly—and, yes, I met with an agent on the 16^th floor of a Manhattan high rise at 11am on Thursday morning, one who’d invited Heather and I there, and signed my name to a piece of paper. And then I spent the next three days with 2400 people and I didn’t tell a single one of them what had happened to me. I didn’t even call my mom.

On the airplane home I sifted through BlogHer photographs, read dozens of recaps, and squirmed. Even the loveliest of them made me inexplicably cranky. I snapped at my kids. I fell asleep. I woke up dull and thick. Back home I slept in, skipped my workouts, ignored my phone calls, banished the Internet and got back to work. I held still through the mild sickness and waited to feel like me again. And when it finally hit me, it hurt—what bothered me about my week in New York was me. Too much self. Too much ego.

The thing about ego is it’s not as simple or obvious as unbridled arrogance. It’s not about other people and how they act better than you, how they’ve snubbed you, or wounded you, or misrepresented themselves. It’s about you. It’s about me, and being trapped inside myself again like I was for so many years. I have always worked hard to be a humble person, to be gracious, to defer and demure and dodge dodge dodge. I spent years on the couch truly believing my drinking didn’t hurt anyone else, my nose firmly planted in my naval. I wallowed in self-pity, in depression, in darkness—but I was a nice, giving, generous person, right? I would have never in a million years used the word ego while describing myself.

But it’s about ego when I can think of nothing but myself, no matter how nice I’m being. Who doesn’t like me, who’s judging me, who’s taking advantage of me, where I’m eating, what I’m buying, where I’m going, how tired I am, how sick I am, how loved I am, how much stuff I have, do I really deserve to wear this flashy green dress, am I a social idiot, how do people do this, how do people do this, how do people do this—and that’s what NYC was for me. Too much me. It was an incredible experience, a conference well done, time spent with so many people I really truly like, but it was also a suspended state of completely unnatural being. It’s not natural to be subjected to so much extreme and relentless socialization. To hug a hundred different people in a day, to try to honor each one’s individual essence, to berate myself for doing it wrong, to worry how everyone else interpreted my actions. It’s not normal to have so much praise heaped around, so that all my brushing off begins to feel contrived, so that I’m in a constant state of frozen self-analysis, so that I end up crying in a hotel bedroom snotting tears over a battered pizza box, buzzing with emptiness in the face of all this fullness and wondering yet again, for the gazillionth time, why I can’t just let myself feel good things. Why I won’t give myself that. Why I don’t know how to accept good things and bad things alike, why I’ve spent too many years avoiding feeling at all. And knowing that, no matter what the answers are, even the questions are simply too much self. Me me me me me. That I just need to get out of my own head, because that’s where real grace lives, to scrub and scrub and scrub myself clean—but where do I stop? And what’s left of me when I do?

***

My step-mother-in-law picks us up from airport and asks why she had to learn about the agent thing by reading someone else’s blog. I squirm in my seat. I sit with my therapist and she says my understanding of ego is on the right track, that I’m going in the right direction, but perhaps I should quit stopping along the way to inspect my angles in funhouse mirrors. She suggests I say this agent thing out loud, that I honor it and see what happens. She assures me people who love me will not brand me a braggart. That they’ll be happy for me. That humility to the point self-degradation, to the point of experiences erased, is just as bad for the world as rampant arrogance. That pretending this amazing thing never even happened is a sock to God’s gut. I feel chagrined. I say I don’t know how to properly honor this thing, don’t even know what that means. She says start by going to fancy dinner.

Back home it’s so quiet I can literally hear the crickets. I wake early enough to catch the moon sinking into morning, whisper up into the Universe and feel heard and held. I sit in intimate circles of other people, different people everyday, people whose last names I don’t know, people who don’t know mine, because who I am matters but it matters so much less than who we are. I bear witness to their stories, to their joys and pains, to their very existence. I float outside of myself, relieved. There is no hierarchy here, no imagined social construct with winners and losers. There’s just humanity, un-retouched.

At dinner I maybe can’t say it to the waitress, but I say it to my husband and we sit there watching it hang in the air between us, I don’t brush it away. I maybe can’t hold his gaze but I smile into the air, into my plate, into my lap and I let the smile stay. I’m writing a book. I’m scared and I didn’t ask for this but it’s here, and ignoring it isn’t gracious. I still have so far to go in this learning how to live thing, but that’s okay. I close my eyes and send up a prayer wish for sweet breeze and clean spaces, cold water in my glass, the ability to somehow live outside myself and honor Self at the same time. This here is a real moment, nothing tweeted, nothing photoshopped, nothing embellished, nothing certain, nothing preached, nothing obvious. I wait for the lightning strike but see across from me only quiet kindness, open space and time, gentle faith, a whole grain life.

I reach for the bread.

“Life goes on / full of silence and clamor / in the grey cities / in the far bourgs / in the white cities by the sea / where I go on / writing my life / in neither blood nor wine.

—-From Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “At Sea,” courtesy of my good friend.

Some days I wonder if you know that I’m still here, listening. I’m reading your words. I’m watching you continue to churn this bloggy butter and I’m tasting it (thick, rich, unexpectedly sweet). Please don’t mistake the quiet in this place for apathy, or think that I don’t relish its sticky taste anymore. I do. Right now it just feels really good to sit back and observe, to save the hard work and grittiest words for other notebooks, other rooms, other phone calls.

Here’s the ironic thing–I value the privilege of writing publicly today more than ever before, even as I draw further inward myself, pull my attic hatch mouth closed behind me and burrow up into my head. I still hold tightly to your words, the braver the better, even as I choose to nod along silently. I’m watching the way you lift each other up and I am nodding, nodding, nodding. Maybe it was my turn to talk for a while back then, and maybe today it’s just my turn to listen, who knows. This quiet isn’t angsty or dangerous like before, and it’s not even self-protective–it’s just still. Steady, open, and good. My whole life I’ve been straddling this teeter totter, feverishly pressing my feet back and forth between each end seeking balance, never really getting that if I just held still and tightened my center, it would come. Steady footing. Today, I get it.

Even better, a few days from now I’ll have the opportunity to hold your hand in mine, many of you, and hear you own your own words–and, unlike in the past, I just don’t feel anxious. I’m painfully aware what a fragile, gorgeous opportunity it is to pack up my family and show them New York City, really take it in, with them, with you. Lord, that’s a gift. I never used to see these sorts of gifts before, not really, not through the fog of anxiety or stress or fear. I kicked so many pretty packages for so many years as I stumbled along, well-intentioned, but unseeing.

Some of you have asked if this trip will be hard for me, and I don’t know how to make you understand that it won’t. I have a new love for experience, a joy for the day, that I just didn’t have before. I am no longer afraid to speak up when it counts. I finally found that greener grass and then the fence up and disappeared, the lushness spread and bled all around me further than I can see. I am exactly where I was always meant to be. I’m lying down making lawn angels, squinting up into the sun. (And if I need a reminder? There’s always the Serenity Suite.)

But some mornings, like this quiet summer Saturday while you’re in here looking for connection or out there slip-and-sliding with your kids or anywhere at all licking the sticky juice of white peaches from your forearms, I want to call your name. I want to lie my head in your lap and close my eyes against the stroke of your hand on my hair, just be out here in this space with you. Remember what it feels like to throw words like jacks with no rulebook, no deadline, no older kid standing behind me, arms crossed. To just let loose these words, a handful at a time, and watch you watch them roll. Fall where they may, for once.

This world pitches and rolls, cycles through its seasons, and I’m so grateful for its tilt, right now, today. Thank you for keeping it turning, for still being out there, for still hearing when I call out, for that drum-beat reverberation, that cosmic nod of recognition, for your lap, for your hand, for here, for now.

It clearly pained you to have to say it, too, your face shy and twisted with feeling, and it flattened me on the spot. I felt terrible for not anticipating your base need. I’d been so concerned about mortifying your older sister by talking about her that I’d completely overlooked how you might feel in not being mentioned at all. It was one of those parenting moments where all the air squeezes from the room because you thought you foresaw it all and instead you missed the Most Important Thing. (You don’t know about parenting moments like that yet, my girl, but you will, God willing, you will.) I know these days I let hundreds of brilliant moments slide by undocumented, whether in the name of privacy or laziness or both, but as I sit here tonight holding my heart in my hands, palming it back and forth, pressing my thumbs against its fresh cracks, I think of your face and your question and your spirit and decide today is a good day to write about you, about the amazing thing you just did.

Earlier this week we were talking about our friend Chris, the one we were then-losing, the one we finally lost on Friday. You and I talked about his cancer and what it meant, and I tried to answer your 5-year-old questions simply, but with a measured dignity. We talked about the way Chris lit up the world while he was in it, and about how special his wife, Brandi, is to me. We talked about their two young daughters, and how they weren’t going to have a daddy on earth anymore. That’s when you said you wanted to have a lemonade stand to help them.

Actually, that’s not true–you said you wanted to have a snow cone stand. You wanted to get a machine, and you wanted to have 16 different flavors, and you wanted to add sprinkles and cherries to each cone. You wanted your own daddy to build you a stand with an overhead sign and wooden shelves below (you were very specific about this), and you ran to grab a piece of paper and a marker. You made me write down every single item we would need, right down to napkins and a butterfly net. I nodded and smiled politely, in that noncommittal way of non-rookie mothers. You said you wanted to talk about it. I nodded and smiled. You wanted to talk about it some more. I nodded and smiled some more. You said you wanted to talk about it again and again, and when four hours had gone by and you still wanted to talk about it, I knew we were probably going to have to do this thing. That’s when I did some talking of my own and convinced you to start with lemonade and cookies instead of your highly engineered snow cones. You agreed, and ran off to grab your marker box.

I watched you painstakingly letter your signs, marker gripped deliberately between fingers no longer fat. You asked me to spell each word as you slowly wrote what was in your heart, and I tried my best to speak around the sudden numbness in my throat and tongue, made thicker as your sweet sentiment dawned on me one letter at a time.

MY-FRIENDS-DADDY-IS-STARTING-TO-DIE-HE-HAS-CANCER-I-WANT-TO-GIVE-MONEY-TO-MY-FRIENDS

You asked me to print out a picture of their family and so I found one and did so. Your dad used the $8.00 bag of organic dark chocolate chips in the cupboard, the one he’d grumbled about when I bought them, to make a batch of cookies. He found a container of lemonade mix in the back of the pantry and I took the lamp and books off an end table, found a little Adirondack chair and helped you set up in front of your grandma’s art studio on Main Street on Wednesday. I won’t lie to you, kid, we placed a couple of bets on how long you’d last. Your dad thought maybe an hour. The barber down the hall gave you until 1pm. I was far more pessimistic than both of them, I’m sorry to say, but you proved us all wrong, didn’t you.

For seven hours—seven hours—you manned your little lemonade stand all by yourself, serving up shaky dixie cups filled barely half-way with your watery mix. When you sold your entire batch of cookies you borrowed from grandma’s stash, and ran through two big tupperware containers of hers. We remixed and refilled your lemonade jug three times. You were the hardest working 5-year-old I’d ever seen. It was unbelievable. When you finally sold the last of your inventory and collapsed on your grandma’s front steps, you had raised $121 for your friends.

Two days later, we told you Chris had died.

We knew you would be a little sad, expected you to try to wrap your little head around that difficult concept of death, but I never expected what you said then. You said, “But mom, I did my best to get as much money as I could. Why did he still die?”

Oh, my sweet baby.

I talked a lot in answer to that question and I don’t know, I’ll never know, exactly what you heard. Whether or not you understood what I said to you that night, I hope you felt my love. I hope you felt my pride, and I hope you really got it, that no amount of money could save your friends’ daddy, that instead you had given those girls a gift, the gift of your sweet kindness, as priceless as the amount you raised, a number you have no comprehension of. I hope you remember that you had a lovely idea, you did a generous thing, and that your only job in this life is to go out there and keep doing kind and lovely and generous things for other people, to get out there and live your life well, just as Chris did.

Because Chris did that better than anyone else I have ever known, and I swear to you that is the truth. He straight-up sparkled. He had this sort of propeller or something attached to his back, this joy motor, and he just shot through life like a brilliant meteor, showering love and goodness in his trail. We can’t do a thing about his passing, my girl, no matter how many cups of lemonade we sell, but that doesn’t make us helpless. There is plenty we can do. We can honor his life by trying to be like him, to live and love as he did, to say yes when we want to say no, to jump up when we want to lie down, and to always, always keep our arms out wide and open. And, if you ask me? You’re already quite like that.

If we sit here and wallow in the why’s of his death, we fail, and I know this because I spent the last several weeks before he finally passed doing just that. I spent some days really angry, some days lying really still on the couch, some days when the only way I could be a friend to Brandi was to keep my weighty grief off her own overburdened shoulders. I spent a few more days trying to puzzle the whole thing out, asking “why” more times than I care to admit, pouting and sulking and belching negativity. But no answers can be found in any of that, sweetie, because the lessons are not in his dying. They’re in his living. Let’s go out there together, now, and show people what he meant.

I love you so much, my daughter. I am so proud of you and your sister, both. You are good people, and that’s more important than any job you’ll ever have, any outfit you’ll ever wear, any label you’ll ever strive to bear. I hope you know that for every one of your stories that I share with the world, there are hundreds more I keep close, just for us. Soon enough there will be no containing your magic at all.

####

(In Memory of C. J. W. Funk, August 6, 1973–July 2, 2010)

I grew out of this, thankfully. I grew up in bits and pieces, learned to better mask pain and disappointment and, eventually, learned to work through it in a healthier, more honest way. I’ve had a good life, rich in love and support, and I learned how to believe in that. In my 30s now I’m so much better at honoring my own pain, rather than tacking it to some spectrum, judging it as not good enough or not important enough or not worthy. I’m better now at taking responsibility for my own part in things, too. I walk taller than I did ten years ago. Hell, I walk taller than I did five months ago, but that’s another post.

I haven’t forgotten that desperation, though, and I keep it in the back of my mind as I sit with other people and their trauma. Whenever cynicism creeps in, I remember how very real my pain was. I’m not telling you this because I think other people make things up as I did. I don’t. I’m telling you this because I believe the acknowledgment of each other’s pain is more important than the specifics.

Because of Violence UnSilenced, I am in a unique position to hear about a whole lot of pain every day. In the beginning I was completely helpless to it, raw and exposed, and my boundaries were very unclear. And, in the midst of that chaos, about a year ago, there was a situation where one person’s character was brought into question by the community and, at her own request, the post was removed. I haven’t talked about this before now, but I think it’s time. I think many of you have too much respect for me to voice your concerns that I’m perhaps naive, or being taken advantage of, and so I’d like to go on the record about my own personal, deliberately-thought-out beliefs. The reason I didn’t address last year’s situation publicly was mostly because I’m not into feeding blogging drama, but there was more to it, too, and it occurs to me now that my not saying anything may have led to some misconceptions.

I am not naive. I am not being taken advantage of. It’s true, I have no way of vetting the stories that come my way, nor do I have any interest in doing so. The overwhelming majority of the time, the stories posted on VU are entirely factual. I fully believe that. Sometimes, I concede, it’s possible someone is not telling me the truth. What that percentage is, I have no idea. Two percent? Five? Ten? I have no way of knowing. But here is something I do know: One hundred percent of the time, the story is true for the individual author. And, more importantly, one hundred percent of the time that story is true for somebody, somewhere.

Truth is an abstract thing, but pain most certainly is not. And even if I possessed some sort of built-in lie detector, who am I to stack stories like measuring weights on a scale? If a person feels a powerful need for connection, and reaches out, then I will trust in the Universe and honor that desire. In the end I’m only responsible for myself, and I would rather be a person who trusts, even when there is the occasional reason not to, than a person who grows hardened and cynical. I don’t always know the specifics of each person’s situation, but I do know we live in a world where these terrible things do happen, are happening to somebody out there right now. I know that each person’s story is authentically somebody’s, even if on rare occasions it isn’t the story of the person who actually submitted it. I can’t control how other people walk through this world, I can only stand up straight on my side of the street. I’m so grateful I’m not in pain like the people who write to me, and I don’t mind extending an open-minded hand to those who are. I would rather err on the side of compassion. Pain is pain. I make a conscious decision to believe the people who confide in me.

The hard-to-swallow truth is that this crap happens, it happens all the time, and you must swallow it. You must. The people who haven’t yet spoken out are afraid you won’t believe them. The most horrific crimes are also the hardest to believe, but they’re happening. The VU survivors as a whole are honest, brave, and generous enough to expose themselves to you in the hopes that you will learn something. In the hopes that we can own this together, stop this together. I refuse to let your pessimism about one or two detract from the integrity of hundreds.

Let’s not forget the facts.

One in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, 1.3 million women each year. A woman is beaten in this country every fifteen seconds.

1.2 million children are trafficked around the world each year for sex, 100,000 of them in America. Their average age is eleven.

One in six women and one in 33 men will be sexually assaulted in her/his lifetime. Every two minutes in the United States, someone is sexually assaulted. Nearly half of these victims are under the age of 18. Sixty percent of sexual assaults are not reported to the police.

These statistics are conservative, based only on the crimes that are reported. Many of the people I know have never told anyone. Many of the people I know speak out for the very first time on VU.

If your own cynicism ever starts to seep in and bleed all over your thoughts, remember these horrific things are happening to someone, somewhere, right now. Right this second as you read these words. Whether or not each of those victims has the opportunity to voice survivorship, the problem is real. The pain is real.

Let’s keep honoring that together.

But this particular light is white-hot bright in my life and its impending loss seems, to me, a permanent darkness. I’m painfully blinded in an acid-to-the-face kind of way. My heart is on the ground. Someone took a frigid ice cream scooper to my gut. I can’t feel my face. I can’t make sense of this coming death and I’m not ready to prepare pretty eulogies. I’m not ready to look for the lesson. I’m not ready to forgive God. Some things just suck beyond words. Some things are just wrong.

I’ve been trying to accept this for weeks and I still can’t. I’ve got my eyes squeezed shut so I can’t tell if it’s dark or not, can’t tell if this will be the day when that light is snuffed out, refusing to look so it will not happen. I’m a toddler blindly stomping out my rage, fingers plugged firmly inside my ears, lalalalalalalala I CAN’T HEAR YOU ASSHOLE DEATH LALALALALALA! I’m sorry if this makes me a lesser person, a weaker woman; dramatic, negative, selfish. I can’t help it.

My sweet friend is about to become a widow. Her two tiny daughters will no longer have a father. Their father, the kind of man who took his wife’s name instead of the other way around, the kind of man to whom Lance Armstrong sends a video message, the kind of man that makes other men stand up straighter in his presence, as I always did, as I would do now, if I only could, if I weren’t so broken and slumped over this laptop, its keys thick with snot, that kind of man, that king among men, that friend, that son, that brother, that husband, that father, is dying. He’s dying and I want so badly to spew love and light the way he does even now, and I can’t. I just can’t.

Christopher, the world is about to suffer its greatest loss yet. This world will simply not be as good as it could have been, now that you’re leaving it. That is just the truth.

I know you expect better from me than this. I know I wish for better. I know this post does not add to the beauty in the world the way you do. I know a lot of things, even though it doesn’t sound like it right now. Somewhere deep I know the opportunity to stroke your face and whisper my love and say my goodbyes to you today was a rare and precious gift, just as knowing you was. Somewhere I know that keeping my rage and grief away from you and your family is about all I can manage right now. Maybe the grace will come a few days or weeks down the road, when you become glittering sunlight on my skin. Maybe then you’ll warm and lift me in a way I can’t muster on my own. But today is not that day, I am weak and I am pouting and I am sorry. I’m sorry I don’t honor your life, don’t honor you, with this ugly rant. I wanted to.

I guess I’m writing this because the rest of you should all know the world is ending. You should all stop and take a moment to grieve something you didn’t even know you had, because I promise you we’re all less for this impending loss. He is just that amazing. He is just that good. His particular gifts are just that rare. The world will just not be what it could have been. You should know. It just won’t. It just won’t.

It just won’t.

(and I hope you’ll forgive me this Bruce Springsteen, I know you’re not a fan–your lone imperfection, I guess.)

My own personal placing-of-hands produced my most lovely and profound parenting experience to date. It happened when I stood up on that stage and told the world how amazing my daughter is. I did this while she watched and, unbeknown to me, cried. What happened after that is between she and I, and something I never saw coming. My point is, I don’t know why it never occurred to me the gift I was giving her as I tenderly listed her attributes, as I vowed to respect her at her core always, before a crowd of witnesses. I don’t know why I didn’t see ahead of time how rare that was for her, for anyone, to hear someone else say such sweet things about you so publicly. I anticipated her embarrassment, but that never came. I did not anticipate her swelling of spirit, which came in spades.

I’m pretty good at articulating my personal shame and pain, but I’m not very good at making sure the people I love know just how powerfully I love them. I don’t say thank you enough to my husband. I don’t say I love you enough to my own mother. I don’t tell my kids the specifics of their unique beauty and genius as often as I could. I think all of these things inside my head but I don’t give them voice. We should all be so lucky as to have someone shout their love for us from a stage, and to do the same in return. We should all feel solid in our right to feel what we feel, to be who we are, and share it publicly without shame.

In that audience on Sunday sat writers too afraid to call themselves writers, mothers still unsure of their own worth, people who have bought hook-line-and-sinker stories about themselves that simply aren’t true. There sat hundreds of people who keep close their regrets, the fear that flattens them, the events that silence them, the ways they feel alone. I wish they could have experienced how it feels to finally write your hardest things. I know they got a taste of what it feels like to hear them.

After the show I found myself wishing I had this opportunity more often, to stand before the world and un-spool for you the endless thread of my gratitude and fear. To tell you all the ways I ache, and watch you nod in recognition, in solidarity. To stun and be stunned into hushed reverence. To seek connection and remind myself I’m not alone, and neither are you, and words are to be shared not stifled, even when, especially when, they’re big and clumsy and painful. I drove away wishing I had a megaphone and a stage from which to reach for those deep places in you, and to hear you echo back love in return. I wished I had a seat in a theater to listen to your hardest things, so that I could rise to my feet and applaud and call all the cats with my fervent whistling.

And then I remembered–I do. We do. It’s right here.

The image of a woman holding a megaphone, the one Ann chose for this Mother’s Day production, was lost on me in the beginning. Yes, it seemed appropriate, but I didn’t give it too much thought. I have been a blogger for several years and so I already know and take for granted the breadth and depth of the blogosphere, and what this special kind of back-and-forth brings to my life. I also forget its power far, far too often.

This space is a megaphone gripped firmly in chapped hands, these hands that smooth my daughters’ hair, these words my own self-soothing touch. I get so wrapped up inside my head, tangled up in my own snarls, that I forget the power of speaking out (despite twice-weekly proof.) For a girl who over-thinks everything it’s shocking to me how much I miss, the obvious truths that never even occur to me. I hem and I haw and I fold my little arguments into pleats and I write post after post in my head, but not here. I judge and jury every thought I have until the resulting sentence is solitary confinement, a spiritual sort of death.

The answer is to write. Block out the fear and the critical judgment and the unfounded certainty that you’re not worth hearing, that you’re not good enough, that your words don’t fall into place the way you’d like them to. Stop weighing your own feelings against someone else’s and give your love without expectation. Throw out the rule books and crack wide your heart and honor your own experience, your own honesty, especially you, you who feels isolated. Don’t worry about the numbers in your audience–if you touch one, it will be an immeasurable gift. More importantly, if you unlock your own pain you will be saved. Testify. Keep testifying. Keep writing.

And remind me when I forget.

A ten-year-old girl, all dangling limbs and pained petulance, wrapped around a panting dog [click.]

A five-year-old tripping over a green kickball, curls flying, happily thwarted [click.]

A man made content by the mirage blur of a charcoal grill, a woman at the top of a tower, two people, together, at the top of the world [click.]

We had the entire place to ourselves. I breathed it all in deeply, soaked there, in the colors and sounds and detail and magic that just can’t be reproduced in art, on TV, in books, online. I was at once grateful and sad that we were the only ones there.

And I thought. I thought about how I’ve been struggling to stay open–to feelings, to assaults, to divine and ugly alike, to life… and, yes, to this blog. My journey over the last three months is a quiet one, calm, and private. I have spoken about it here on occasion because it is such an enormous part of my life, but I haven’t always been comfortable with all that that openness brings. Lately, I feel me sinking into myself more and more. I find myself more connected to spirituality, to my gut, to other people. I have always had plenty of friends and plenty to do but so much of it wasn’t as authentic as it could have been because of my past inability to connect with my own self; the brutal beating I gave my feelings until they were numb, the truths I kept swept under rugs gone lumpy. But now, as I practice daily these rituals of spirituality, of connection, practices meant to nurture honesty and bravery, hope, faith, and strength, I find myself so humbled. I’m humbled by the power of (I’m just gonna say it) God, and I have a growing reverence for true humility. And so, to be honest, it feels incongruous to have a blog at all. A blog, no matter how genuine, respectful, and guarded I strive to be, feels so look at me! Look at me! And lately, I just don’t want to be looked at.

Yet, I am human. I want recognition for my work, for my voice. I want connection. I want to know that people are listening, I want people to know that I am listening to them. I want us all to know that we matter, that we are heard and seen in this world–and the Internet has made that possible in ways previously unimaginable. It’s staggering, really.

So I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel this overpowering bear-hug slobbering love for blogging, and other times I want to smash it dead with my paw. Sometimes my words are lauded. Sometimes they are attacked. Sometimes I stand in a room of thousands of virtual voices and feel utterly alone. Sometimes I tug Twitter like a dive line and there is life tugging back above the surface, there is breath and humanity, there’s the rest of the world letting me know I’m not drowning.

And I hear so much about this hunger for stats, for traffic, but I don’t share it the way I did a couple years back. The thing about traffic talk is it turns readers into faceless clumps, into 10s and 100s and 1000s and 10000s, so you forget that there is a #46 or a #2 or a #123. You forget that these are individual people out there, reading your words, accessing your thoughts, with different perspectives, different motivations, different agendas. I am not interested in 23,000 readers; I am interested in that one reader who spent 23 hours on my blog on Tuesday before throwing cruel words my way, a handful of tacks to the face. I am interested in the ones who whisper, who lurk, who can’t seem to stop reading though they claim to hate the vehicle. I am feeling exposed and mildly paranoid and closed up here, more and more, each day.

But I remain fascinated by and invested in the individuals–in far greater numbers–freely giving me their time and love and respect. I’m interested in #34, looking for human connection. In #65 struggling with addiction, or #115 shrunken by abuse, these people, not numbers, reaching out to a complete stranger. I’m interested in my friends, those who’ve leaped from 2D to 3D, from computer screen to my living room, a love I never would have believed in or known if not for the sharing here of our words. How could that possibly be bad?

I was sitting at breakfast yesterday with a small group of friends and as the conversation turned to the past we realized just how often our paths had crossed before we really knew each other. We said things like, “My God, I must have talked to you a hundred times,” things like, “That was you and I didn’t even know it,” and so on. There was a buzz in the air, a sort of high, simply because we were sitting there, together. As one. The same thing has happened to me online. It is indeed a small world, of varying and shrinking degrees.

Connection–to each other, to the ground we walk, to the air we breathe, to the things we mutually respect–is such a base human desire. We crave it, and though I still give human touch more weight than the tactile clicking of these keyboard interactions, I see in the near future a world where there are fewer and fewer obstacles to each other, where there is no online or offline, there just is. But either way, whether inside this virtual community or out there with the car honks and dog barks, I need a well-worn seat to set down my soul. I need my spirituality, my quiet solitude, my reverence, my balance. I need my privacy. I need my humility. I need stories traced on the inside of my arm only, ones shared deliberately, sparingly, or not at all.

At the same time I believe in the validity of this medium, so often terribly misunderstood. I believe in my right to send my truth out into the ether, as long as I keep the focus on me. I am learning now, when attacked, to first ask myself, “Is it even true?” which is something I never did before and it’s a fine, fine skill. I never used to ask, I always simply believed whatever it was that was said about me. I am so much more solid in my skin now but that hasn’t come from writing on in the face of judgment; it’s come from connection. It comes from the connection I have when I sit in a small group, open and honest and brimming with compassion. It comes when I press my body into a bed of grass or against my husband. It comes when I’m laughing from the belly with my oldest friends. It comes when I’m on my knees, weak, or in gratitude. And yes, absolutely, it comes when I write in this space. When I reach out to you and you grab right back. When survivors open up and you embrace them, over on Violence UnSilenced, where grace blooms. It comes even on Twitter, sometimes manic and disjointed but always open, where we speak and are heard and we play one great endless game of Telephone. I learn, am moved to tears or laughter, become inspired, here online. In here and out there, both.

I want to be a person with my chin up, my shoulders proud, my Self solid and unwavering, resistant to outside blows. I also want to be a person hunched beneath the weight of humility, private and appropriately introverted and reverent of all I do not know or understand. I want to be connected to you, to them, to the earth, to the Universe, to myself. I want to be so many things I am not. Who I am is this, me, here, uncertain, working, waiting, listening, speaking, trying, just, to be.

We’ve gotten into the habit of using Netflix to watch all of those TV series we’d heard so much about while our kids were babies, and the latest marathon is 24. We’re on Season Two and yesterday, when I was talking to my best friend on the phone about health care, I had to forcibly remind myself that the nice man from the Allstate commercials is not actually our real president. I forget, just like I need to remember I can’t just call Jack Bauer every time I’m kidnapped, though I do giggle every single time he says dammit. Every time. Anyway, we had just flipped off the latest episode, I’d tucked Helen the iPhone into her sweet pink case for the night, and I was drifting off when from right next to me in bed Dave starts screaming. (Not that high-pitched girlish screaming like, say, Kimberly Bauer, but manly-man screaming. For the record.)

So many things happened in what, looking back, had to have been only a second or two. Before I even opened my eyes, like, through that snakeskin of eyelid I didn’t realize I had but makes sense because of my obvious superpowers, I could see colorful flashing lights blitzing up my bedroom. There weren’t time for thoughts, but my first instinct was ambulance, police and firetruck lights. I thought they were in the driveway, that someone I loved was in trouble. This is a big deal because as some of you know I live where my good friend not-so-happily refers to as “Waythefuckoutsville,” and so sirens or emergency lights of any kind are incredibly rare. The two or three or (okay, fine, six or seven) times we’ve had to call 9-1-1 to deal with an out-of-control brush or garbage fire, it’s taken a minimum of 23 minutes for emergency responders to reach us. True story.

Anyway, in the half-second it took to rip my eyes fully open and crane my neck around to the window at my head, I registered a second instinct: There is an airplane coming apart over my house. I even ducked and flinched. My next thought, as it blazed all those greens and yellows and oranges and blues was, Well? The Aliens are finally here. I should have known it would be my neighbors they’d come for, I’ve certainly had my suspicions. Finally–and, again, this could have only been two seconds of time passed–I figured out that it was a meteor. And by meteor, I don’t mean those pretty little twinkly shooting stars we all see on occasion. I mean a GIGANTIC BLAZING FIREBALL OF DEATH framed beautifully by my window. Holy crap.

Dave bolted out of bed and, much like in times past, I grabbed for Twitter.

Immediately after posting that tweet, I did a Twitter search of “meteor” and saw zillions of people talking about the spaceship and/or airplane and/or atomic fireball that just exploded right over their houses. Except they weren’t just in my neck of Wisconsin, they were in Minnesota. North Dakota. Illinois. Missouri. Iowa. (As an aside, the next day I had this Doppler image tweeted to me that shows where the “tail cloud” was–pinpointed above Grant and Iowa counties in Wisconsin. That’s exactly where I live, hence the extra special show I’m thinking. Oy.)

Meanwhile Dave is already in the car driving around, apparently trying to find his people. And there was this “THWUMP…THWUMP…THWUMP…THWUMP” like God was in an enormous helicopter, which I’ve since read was probably a sonic boom? And I’m tweeting away and Dave comes back and he’s all, “Well, I guess it will be on the news in the morning and we’ll know more then” and that’s when I start giggling because the news is not only happening on Twitter, the news is looking to me. To me, Dave.

And Dave just blinked and blinked. And I tried not to rub it in once I could see it in his face that he was, finally, a believer in the power of social media.

After 45 frantic minutes of this crazy high intensity I forced myself to sleep, and I won’t even begin to try to tell you about my 24-come-to-life dreams. Let’s just say I’m fine with Obama, but if the prime minister of Some Unnamed Threatening Country’s chopper suddenly falls from the sky tomorrow I’m pointing that finger straight at President Palmer’s wife. I mean President Obama’s. I mean…. never mind.

I’ve seen some still pictures but they just don’t do it justice, so here is a video. This video is NOT the meteor from last night, but I swear on a stack of 24 DVD’s that this is exactly what Dave and I saw through our window. For real. Watch it.

And I lived to tell about it, as I’m quite sure you are now regretting.

***

I’m not done. Since I’m on a rambling roll here I need to tell you about a few more things. One of my recent posts about sobriety is being syndicated over on BlogHer today. If you think BlogHer is just an annual conference, you are missing out. They’re always intelligent discourse about all kinds of things over there, with hundreds of writers and 70 different editors and a pulse that pixelates right through the screen. I hope you’ll go check it out… I’ve never been syndicated there before and I’m kind of all angsty about it, so I thank you in advance. (Also, in case I haven’t told you, I’m speaking this year at the conference in New York City. Please come to my panel, it’s the first one and I am terrified. Thankfully the far-more-practiced Queen of Spain is on the same panel and I’ve asked her to bring my pacifier and blankie.

***

Three. Kind of like people who look around at their five or six kids and think “Well, we might as well keep going,” in the vein of braggy self-conscious things I’ve got more. Violence UnSilenced has been nominated for this Women’s Health Hero Award on the Our Bodies, Ourselves website. It’s a voting thing, but it’s easy–you just press the little thumbs’ up. No email addresses, no signing up for anything. I’m embarrassed but I’m also aware of the visibility this could bring VU, and so I’m telling you about it here. For those who’d like to help out. If you’re so inclined. Ahem.

Or? You could just go support the survivors, two new ones each week. Today is Rina, a survivor of… pretty much everything. It’s kind of incredible.

***

Four and OMG I CAN HARDLY STAND MYSELF ANYMORE but this one is important: I have this good, good friend. Her name is Ann Imig and she is one of the most even-keeled, lovely, insightful, thoughtful, hilarious, creative, beautiful people I am blessed to know. (Speaking of pacifiers and blankies, I often find myself falling apart in Ann’s capable presence.) Anyway, after BlogHer last year Ann and I (and probably 1200 other people) were moved to the point of near-paralysis by the Community Keynote speeches, where a handful of talented bloggers read their words aloud from a podium before a packed ballroom. The difference between Ann and the 1199 rest of us is Ann, a theater major, decided to bring it home and make it a reality here in Madison, Wisconsin. So, if you are in the area and looking for something special to do this Mother’s Day, I hope that you will come to the Barrymore Theater and check out the Listen To Your Mother show. Auditions were kind of intense but I am reading, along with 11 other people like my girl Becky, and even though I’m breaking out in a cold sweat just typing this I know it’s going to be awesome. Awesome like Ann.

***

Speaking of mothers, I feel the need to defend mine. On my last post I was trying out a creative writing technique, and apparently failed miserably because many of you thought I was referencing my own mother. My mother is mushy and sloppy-kissy, but she is not a drunk. In the first and third parts I was speaking as if I was my own daughter, looking at me. Sorry for any confusion.

***

I’m done. You’re welcome. Fresh cookies and punch if you’re still here. Lord have mercy.

*

I am on my knees in the bathtub and I am praying. I never used to be much for prayer, not used to this sort of thing and my knees—these knees that have never held body weight over rice or gravel or any other self-flogging form of humility—are unpracticed.  I am flushed and panicked and my head is a spinning wheel and my fingers are stuck, pricked, bleeding out and I’m whispering, “Please, God, please. Come to me now and stay with me here. Please come. Please stay.”

I’ve been okay for months. I’ve been okay all week, this week of my long-awaited, much anticipated family vacation. I have endured—dare I even say, enjoyed—thousands of miles in the car. The bitter back-and-forth-throw-downs-turned-love-fests that only road-tripping siblings truly know; the miles stretched like taffy; the uniquely stale air of a family squished close. I’ve been one of the 50,000 feral cats herded through Disneyworld every single day, and I’ve made it through without tackling a single princess. I’ve even survived that fancy meal at the upscale steak house where, when we refused the wine list, the waiter blinked several times, stunned. I have met new and hung out with old blogging friends with nary a craving for liquid courage, and I have grinned in the faces of my children, often, and authentically. I have been deserving of a good long back pat. I have been living in the now. In the now.

But now the now is here, here at this magical place on the beach, this house of momentous import, this place of plastered precedent. And I am surrounded, literally surrounded, by alcohol. And I am having to live with it for the first time. And for the first time in all of these days I am angry. I am angry, I am bitter, I am sad, I am resentful. I have completely misplaced my gratitude and I’m searching desperately for it here, slick with soap, at the base of this slippery bathtub, at the base of my heart and my gut and my soul and this weakness, this craving, not necessarily for a drink but for normalcy, this wretched self-pity, this Why the hell don’t I get to be like everybody else? thing has brought me to my knees here, in this tub, where I seem to have forgotten who I am.

And so I’m praying. “Please, God. Please come to me now and stay.”

And that’s when I’m graced with the memory of the way things used to be. I watch the movie reel play in my mind and I see myself drinking and sure it’s glorious at first but then it’s all I am doing, all I truly care about, here in this would-be paradise. Spending every waking moment of this beautiful beach time figuring out how to ingest all of this poison and somehow keep it hidden and oh, the fixation! The 24-hour-a-day-obsession, one that I’d been freed from but has suddenly reappeared as quickly and mind-bogglingly as it left me in January, that sneaky, sneaky bastard.  And in the remembering I’m back in touch with the shame and the guilt and the self-loathing and then, suddenly, I’m awash in grace. I’m feeling incredibly blessed that I don’t have to drink anymore, that the obsession no longer rules my days, that this is an odd, terrible moment, a grim, necessary reminder. And I am back, I am me, I am here. I slide from my knees to sink below the surface into a puddle of exhausted gratitude. I open my eyes against the sting and I look at my new life, blurry, hot, swallowing me whole, floating me with freedom. I say one more prayer for today, that I did not have to drink today, that all any of us have is one day anyway, this blessed day, days stacking up like gold coins, one after the other, one at a time, riches.

*

We’ve been home two whole days and mom still hasn’t left the house and so on the third day I put a stop to it. I put my finger in her face and I tell her to get up and I giggle a little so she doesn’t get mad but inside I’m serious. And she’s not mad, at least I don’t think so, because I hear her telling this over again a bunch of times to other people (arrrggghh I hate when she does this), about how I said the funniest thing, ha ha ha, and her voice sounds laughy so it’s okay. All I know is there’s a way a day goes now and it hasn’t been going that way for this week. If I have to remind her once in a while I guess I can do that but it doesn’t take much anyway, because she’s kissing me goodbye now and she smells like a shower. Her smoothie’s in her hand and she’s headed for the door while me and E and Dad are still in our pajamas. When she yells “I love you!” I look over and catch a last glimpse of her as the door slams shut. Her belt is brown.