I’m really not that interesting. I just find the idea of people asking each other anonymous questions, stupidly fascinating.

http://formspring.me/ordinaryart

Ask me anything.

My daughter wakes up in the middle of the night. She cries for me. I find her lying cold and wet in a tangle of sheets. In the marriage of her night light and the moon, her skin is pale as halloysite. She shivers as I change her pajamas.  Shaking against my hands, my daughter is small and vulnerable. I feel tenderness like a Neruda poem.

My daughter reminds me of Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks. Neruda writes of the mermaid who stumbles into a bar. She has no clothes. The drunks assault her. They burn her body with cigarettes and toss hate like burnt corks. The mermaid, not having language, is silent through the entire assault. She does not shed a tear because tears do not belong to her. After the drunks have finished with her, she exits out the same door she entered. She climbs into the ocean and swims away. Neruda says she is clean as white stone. She swims towards emptiness, towards death. 

I find comfort in Neruda’s poetry. We are all swimming towards death. Even my daughter with new skin, moonlight perfect, unblemished, will die one day. As I put my daughter back into her bed and pull up her covers to meet her chin, I am reminded of her namesake. Last year, my Nana waved a wrinkled hand at death. She and death flirted. He rested a bony hand in hers before losing interest and relenting. I went to see my Nana in the hospital. Hooked up to monitors, she looked so small against the bed rails.  She was as beautiful as my daughter waking up in tears against some foreign night. We are all swimming towards this great empty.

When my daughter wakes up at night and calls for me to comfort her, I swell with love. I am simply overcome with it. I think about Neruda, mermaids, and drunks. Most times, I am comforted. Then, there are times when I get angry. My daughter so small, all of us so vulnerable, the arrogance of corks and cigarettes. At those times, I rage.  I dream of fire. But, even clothed in words, with the burden of my emotions, I am certain the river will wash me clean.

J.D Salinger died and it reminded me of John. We were friends in college. The very first night we hung out, he brought me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I think it is a beautiful thing to call up a person you barely know and invite them to go see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When you discover they are too poor to afford a simple movie ticket, there is some poetry to be found in arriving unannounced at their dorm room with a copy of your favorite book. It was inscribed with the word, Love.

The night John gave me that book, we used my dorm room bed like a trampoline. We told each other stories. When he was five, John broke all the windows in his parent’s garage and urinated in his mother’s flower bed. When his parents asked him why, he had no answers. They brought him to a psychologist. Jumping up and down, up and down, beside me on my bed, he tried to pinpoint what had compelled him to do what he did. He had no answers. I told him that I thought childhood might become completely foreign and unknowable seen from a particular distance. I was grateful he did not laugh at how sad this observation made me. We collapsed atop my bed, shared a smoke, and willed ourselves to remember the birth canal, the acid trip we were certain was our infancy.

I never told John I was afraid of myself. At the time, one of my professors asked me what I truly cared about. I opened and closed my mouth repeatedly like a ventriloquists dummy. I was stunted like a lobotomy. I blurted out the word dolphins. I mumbled dolphins, and then pushed my chair back and fled from the table so hastily that, had I the courage to turn back and look, I’m sure I would have seen my professor shaking his head as he wiped up spilled coffee from his lap.I never told John any of this. I did not have to.

You do not belong. John whispered this in the parking lot of the Olive Garden, as all my girlfriends piled into the backseat of my car. My good girlfriends who refused to share an apartment with me that year because, as they politely informed me, they were afraid I would borrow their sweaters without asking and try to sleep with their boyfriends. You do not belong. The way John said it made me feel unashamed to be proud.

John gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye at a time in my life when I was terribly lonely. I fell in love with Holden Caufield. Loving Holden made me capable of loving just a small part of what I previously thought was ugly in myself. That book simply changed my life. It was given to me by a boy who taught me that intimacy did not have to hurt.

J.D Salinger is gone. I never knew him. It feels silly to be sad, but I am. I feel as lonely as 19, as tender as the folding of a green dress on a hotel bed. I wish I knew what happened to John. If I knew, I would arrive unannounced on his door with a tattered copy of the book. I would inscribe it simply with the words, Thank You.

Holden Caufield knew that he would never be able to wash away all the scrawled words, the Fuck You to the world. John knew, and he taught me, that sometimes you do not have to.

I was raised to believe in God. For a long time I did, and then I didn’t, and then I did again. Now? I think the question of God is irrelevant. I am more interested in theories like serendipity and synchronicity.

When I was in elementary school, we took a field trip to the zoo. There were big black bears growling in a cage. These bears frightened some of the children. The frightened children moved their backs against the brick wall opposite the cage, back away from what their instincts told them was a threat. Other children, embolden by the separation of bars, hurled insults and pennies at the animals. I stood still and expressionless, trying desperately to fight the urge to snatch the keys from the belt of our tour guide and unlock the cage door. It was not so much a desire to free the animals as it was an insatiable curiosity to see how a crowd would behave if confronted with a snarling beast and no bars to protect them. At that very moment, as I struggled with my own impulse, our pimply-faced tour guide leaned over to admit to our teacher that a mistake had recently been made. The person in charge of cleaning the bear cage had accidentally left the door unlocked overnight. The zookeepers thought it quite a blessing that the bears, left to their own devices for over 12 hours, had never wandered outside of their own imprisonment. I heard the tour guide tell all of this to our teacher and suddenly I was all four feet of pigtails and pasty Irish skin trying to hide my tears. I stood in front of that bear cage, this awkward little girl, and I cried. When my teacher saw my distress, she leaned down to ask what was wrong. I could not find the words to explain it.

For the past two weeks, I have been thinking about that trip to the zoo. I was even thinking about it the day that I went to my local library and checked out The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. Synchronicity? Dillard introduced me to Casper Hauser. Up until last week, Hauser was as unfamiliar to me as the walls of the dark cage he was raised in. All those years being raised with nothing but shadow, his own unfettered mind, a cot, and a wooden horse. At 17, Hauser was abruptly released into the streets of Germany by his unknown captors. He purportedly carried nothing but a piece of paper inscribed with his name. Here is the part that amazes me. Even after being imprisoned for over 17 years, Hauser did not show any anger towards his captors. Only once did he show any negative emotion regarding what happened to him. His only negative response occurred after he witnessed his very first smattering of stars. His chest heaved with the knowledge of depravation. He was quoted as saying, “My captors should be jailed for a few days for withholding the sky.” I may be lazy about my belief in God, but I am certain about my faith in Annie Dillard’s version of Casper Hauser.

Did you ever see the movie Serendipity with Jon Cusak? Okay. I know it appears that I am changing gears here, but stay with me.  I think everything may be connected. I think, but I am not sure. Anyway, the movie is a big pile of crap. The movie confuses serendipity with fate, just so it can trot out the big soulmate cliche and entertain a bunch of teenage girls and housewives who need to believe that it is there destiny to be loved like movie stars. This is not serendipity. Serendipity is when you discover something necessary while on a quest for something else. The point is that you have to be searching for something in order for serendipity to happen. I am not sure if finding Casper Hauser in the same week I tried to process my feelings about that trip to the zoo is serendipity or synchronicity. Hell. Maybe it is God. If so, I imagine he is laughing.

The evening of that day my elementary school class went to the zoo, I stretched myself out on my small bed. I stared at the ceiling. I practiced the art of revision. I was a writer even then. I was only little and lacking all the necessary tools, but gifted with a reckless imagination. I envisioned my field trip much differently than the way it had been. I pictured it the way I would have liked it to be. In my re-telling, I do get my small hands around the zoo-keeper’s keys. I unlock the heavy cage door before anyone can stop me. The biggest of the black bears lumbers out, growling, he moves towards us. Children and adults scream and scatter. In the center of all this confusion, I stand firm. I throw my head back like God. I laugh too. I laugh like a crooked finger pointing directly at the stars.

I know some of you clicked on over because I told you that this post was about you. It is okay. Have you ever stood in front of a mirror searching your own reflection for such a long time that you become all distorted, like a cubist painting, a mere abstraction, a metaphor instead of an actually person? Yeah. Me too.

Marriage is hard. That is such a simple statement. A true statement. Sometimes marriage is too hard and a couple realizes that they need to walk away. I think that is incredibly brave. I can not imagine how hard it would be. I wonder how many of you have ever wondered if that couple might be you? Maybe you thought it in your head when disappointment built, or aloud in arguments where you strike out to hurt. If so, you are not alone.

I met my husband while in college. We started talking at a dorm room party. We have not stopped talking since that night. We moved in together within six months. We were young and relatively poor college kids, rolling up quarters to buy gas and the cigarettes we smoked back then. We laid on the rooftop. I use to ask him, What if?

What if a genie said he would grant you every wish you had, but it would mean that I had to lose a leg or be horribly disfigured? Would you do it?

Inside a silly game, we both knew what I was asking. There were things that made me afraid. What if you hurt me? What if you lie? What if you break my heart? What if I break yours? I wanted protection against the inevitable.

This year, my husband and I will be married for 10 years, together for over 14. In this space of time, I have broken my husband’s heart in ways both small and large.

Some would say that I am not an easy woman to love. I have thrown around the word divorce as a weapon. I have let my anxiety get in the way of my logic. I have pushed away my husband’s need for the simple intimacy of having me, his partner, look him square in the eyes. I have spent hours on the internet engaging with others when I should have been engaging with my husband. I have even wondered, in the very darkest of moments, if Dave was truly the one. If you knew my husband, what we have together, you would know that this is the most egregious fault. I am not proud.

14 years together. We are not poor. The roof is over our heads. The ground is under our feet. We construct and deconstruct our daily boundaries. We ask questions. We no longer play, outright, the game of, What if? Instead, we live it.

What can we do to make sure our children grow up healthy? If we buy the new house will it be something to make us happy, or a burden we can not afford? What are all the ways we can ask forgiveness for how we hurt each other? If we evolve separately, let us promise to remember that we love under the exact same stars?

I think that what and If might be what constitute a marriage. My marriage has been a series of what and if. It has also been about, Why? I used to constantly ask why does my husband stay with such a difficult woman? Why does he continue to love me so faithfully when I have made so many mistakes? Knowing Dave, he will answer for himself. He will come here and he will say sweet things because he is good and kind and whole in ways that I admire. I am lucky that way.

I do not know if we can ever truly explain, why. Sometimes we just are.

When my husband and I first met, I was unsure and insecure. For a long time, I thought that David saved me from myself, my loneliness, my pain. I have learned that another person can not fix the cracks, the fissures of self. I can take credit for that all on my own, even if I am still a work in progress.

There was a time when I could not see past all that David did for me, to realize that I do for him too. I note with pleasure the absence of space when my hand reaches out to find his. I am a really good listener. I fill our house with goofy laughter. I burn toast with grace. I mother with love and good intent, always, his two children. I am a devoted wife.

I am also a reflective enough wife to know that i have been selfish. Finding myself should not be about dismissing the person that I love. This is what I hope to be forgiven for.

My husband and I are beautifully bound. We fail in a million different ways on a daily basis. But add us up to sum, and we make it work in all the ways that count.

David, I love you. Then. Now. Always.

Who are you falling in love with? I asked a friend this after reading something she wrote. Inside her lines there was a longing I could recognize, a love of mountains and parked cars that did not seem that unfamiliar. She replied with the name of a folk singer, and I was left to wonder why I felt such strange relief.


Who are we suppose to be falling in love with? I wish someone would ask me that question, just so I could think about my answer.

When I was 14, I was accosted in a stairway. A boy name Tommy did a drive-by with his hands. Rammed his fingers right up my skirt without asking my permission, or even stopping to say hello. I remember laying in the pink bedroom of my childhood, listening to the radio and staring at the ceiling in confusion. Is this what a love song is suppose to feel like? I wondered.

The next day in school Tommy stated a rumor that I did not shave my legs above my kneecaps. Not in possession of my mouth, I did not know how to contradict him. I just allowed myself to detach a little and let other people take ownership of my body in the passing on of the lie.

You and I. We might be strangers. However close we get sometimes. It’s like we never met. I’ve been playing these lines of a Wilco song on slow repeat. They remind me of you. Me. If we are talking history here, at one point they would have reminded me of my body.

Do you know that when you drink you lose the spatial relationship to your own body? Where did my legs go? Has anyone seen my hands? Who has stolen my heart? I used to crash into other warm bodies just to convince myself that I existed. I’d wake up the next day and be reminded that I was still a ghost.

This body, it belongs to me. I am so fully present in my skin.

I had three miscarriages. I used to expect you to feel sorry for me when I said that. I used to feel sorry for myself. It helped after I got angry. I let myself get fighting Irish mad at the doctor who sat across from me in a sterile white-washed office. Without ever looking up from her chart to meet my watery eyes, she told me I had a defunct uterus. She might as well have gutted me with a spoon, taken my womb and hung it on her wall like a hunter mounts a deer head. The day they ripped my daughter from between my shaking legs, exhausted, I mouthed a silent fuck you at my former OBGYN.

Anger smashes down walls so beautifully, doesn’t it? How else would we ever learn to find the secret places that happiness hides if we were not willing to deconstruct. I have complete ownership of my body now. I am giving you a seductive invitation to detonate your bones against this body of work.

I wish that I could exist in the rooms where you read my words. I like to fantasize that I make you sob. I give my body permission to be a vehicle for your comfort. I trace a sonata against your collarbone. You rest your hand in mine. Sometimes our bodies can be so simply free when we allow them to be led by our words.

The phone rings while I’m walking down the streets of Chicago.

Well, how is it? How is Blogher?

The voice on the other end is familiar. A fellow blogger turned family. She is home, nursing a newborn daughter instead of walking arms linked together into ballrooms and breakfast buffets with me.

It’s….It’s….

The city is racing against my pulse. There are fireworks exploding over my head, bursting against the architecture. The river is a mirror to the sky that blooms in multi-color. I am muted against this landscape.

In this last post, I talked about the power of the panel I spoke on, the generosity and candor of the audience, the way I felt transformed. It was not a lie. But, there is more to the story of Blogher. I do not think I understood this more until I was removed from it all and back home.

This morning I awoke to an e-mail from our bank informing me that the house we are desperate to buy is most likely still out of our reach. The laundry that accumulated from last week still sits in a messy pile on my daughter’s bed. My children will still interrupt me 10 to 15 times during the writing of this post with sibling rivalry, and a sudden desperate need for me to scratch their backs, wipe their butts, or pour them a glass of milk. My husband and I will still argue over who wasn’t paying enough attention last night when our son poured chocolate ice cream all over himself and then rubbed up against every single wall in the downstairs of our home. There will still be the risk that my school district will cut my reading program, or that tomorrow I’ll find that the ragged freckle on my back is really not a freckle at all. Despite the panel I spoke on, or the fact that I urged every single women I met to consider the impact we have writing on-line in determining what society deems womanhood to be, I will still google posts and tweets about Blogher, to find drunken pictures of women squeezing each other’s breasts. Today, I have the accumulation of blog posts, but I’m no closer to writing a Pulitzer, at all. 

When I think about Blogher in this context, it feels like a disappointment. It is scary when I explore this emotion further and conclude that the disappointment in the equation is me. Am I alone in this? How many of us go to Blogher with the hope that it will fundamentally change something for us? Maybe, it will bring us much needed money, or feed our weakened self-esteem, or act as a salve against our loneliness. What happens when the carnival ride ends, and your feet touch down on the ordinary concrete of our everyday? How and what do you do to sustain?

I don’t have any answers.

Well, how is it? How is Blogher?

I’ve reached an overpass, emergency sirens are screaming underneath my feet, the sky is bleeding the last of  explosive color above my dizzy head, I’m aching to be heard. I raise my voice and call into the phone.

It’s…It’s….

It has taught me that I want more.

I lied about being raped. How is that for an opening line? This is what is true, and what is not true. This is my story.

Awhile back, I wrote this post. I wrote it pretty early in my bloggy life. I do not know what came over me in writing this. But, I did it. It was like cleaving ice with an axe. Everything that had been dormant and frozen inside of me, split. As terrifying as it was to write that, to wait with my head between my knees, rocking back and forth, anticipating that first comment to arrive with either support or indignation, it was liberating too. I told my truth online. I took the first step in owning it. That post was seminal in the fact that it brought me here, to this ordinary space, where I recognize my own art. Oh, how long it has taken me to say that my history is more than scar.

For years I told everyone, my husband included, a lie. I told people that I was raped by a stranger who shared a cab with me. I needed to tell my story, but I was afraid of the true version. I was afraid the real story made me culpable. I was the one drinking. I was the one who got kicked out of that damn bar. Didn’t that make me an accomplice, willing participant, whore?

In writing the past down, sharing the vague memory of two men in a parking lot, how I woke up the next day with my underwear missing, and an ache between my legs, a foggy black hole where my memory should be, I was able to move forward and share that painful history with the people I love in my real life. I was able to see that no matter what I did, or did not say or do that night, that I was too drunk to give consent. I wrote those words down, and claimed the reality of that experience. It was not my fault.

Why am I telling you this, now? Well, I’ve been thinking about sharing this story at BlogHer. I’m going next week, and I’ll be speaking on a panel about the Transformational Power of Blogging. I want to sit on that panel and let you see that blogging with dignity means forgiving yourself, loving yourself, knowing that your words are enough.

Please stop worrying about the shoes you are wearing, or the size of your waist, the number of blogrolls that link you, put the focus where it belongs, on the power of your own language. You determine your own worth, no matter if your content is cats, technology, food, humor, Mommyblogging, or anything in between. You determine your own value.

I deem myself worthy. Do you? I’d love for you to stop by my panel and tell me. I’d love for you to stumble across me in the hotel lobby, or random hall, and share your life as poem, sing your history as spiritual song.  

I believe that blogging can transform you life, if you let it.  Has blogging transformed my life? My god, yes! It is through blogging that I learned to understand and accept my own narrative. Blogging is the accumulation of all of our stories, all that passes between us in posts and comments, in private e-mails, Facebook, and Twitter. All that we learn, all that we are.

I want to share this story, my story, so that maybe one person sitting out there in the audience hearing it, or you sitting at home reading it, realize. No matter the past you carry in the deep pockets of your own flesh, you have the right to lay it down. We are all scarred. We are all human. I just want you to know that there is someone out there who will understand. There are people that are listening.

I am one of them.

I have stomped my angry feet and, like a petulant child, pounded my fists against the table. Damn, woman!

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to rock your sleeping children in the night, and whisper lullabies that you will never leave them. Tell them that no harm will come, even though you know that the madman is busy busting down the door, charging forth in the form of your own damn heart that beats impostor when you lie between familiar sheets and dream of foreign hands.  

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to stop telling stories that only have heroines with smoky-eyes and size two clothing. No one wants to know about your bruised back from the same mistake you keep making furious against the floorboards. I know that you can be more than Eat. Fuck. Shit. Overly-medicated memories of the rough contours of your father’s hands are nothing short of terrible tragic, but this does not provide adequate excuse for why your own child’s eyes can sometimes appear so hollow. It is not an excuse for why you lie, and lie, and keep on lying.

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to stop spreading your gossip like disease passed from one unwashed hand to another. You need to stop feigning victimization. I want you to have the courage to step outside of the carefully manufactured photo-shopped persona that you have created, and admit that what you really were then, still might be now, is just a scared girl masquerading inside her own womanly skin.

I want you to be. Better? No.  

I want you to be who you are. Even though, I am struggling with what I have come to discover about you, what I have come to discover about myself in relation to you. That I, the women who claims herself to be feminist, is the most judgemental, hypocrite, fucker of them all.

I want you all to be. You. And, I want to be better.