Post 1 of 40

Turning 40 in a few weeks. Decided a few weeks ago that I was going to try to post daily for the 40 days prior to my birthday. . . except I already missed the starting point necessary to make that happen. That seems like a correct assessment of things, these days and possibly always for me.

Posting every day will be hard considering I don't think I posted 40 times last year. And I am a mess mentally and emotionally these days so the urge to write is. . . constant and easy to ignore because it feels so hard to a) get my butt in the chair and b) write words and send them out for other people to read because then the mess that is inside will be outside.

So it won't be pretty. It will be rough and full of mistakes, grammatical and otherwise. The things on my mind the most are my marriage, racism, sexism, my children, my work, this administration and my actual self--you know, what makes me me. All of those things feel scary to write about so I'm not sure what will make it on the page.

For now, here is a picture of the rain-filled, sickness-filled, disappointment-filled family vacation we took last week. I guess I mean my disappointment because the kids amazingly had fun. There's a lesson for me in that if I can get my mind right enough to pay attention to it.

Other random bits: if there's something you'd be interesting in reading about in this possibly impossible 40 posts by Megan, send a note to homeinsf@gmail.com or leave a comment.

If you're open to diversifying your Facebook feed to do better about listening to voices from people of color here are some suggestions that are funny while being enlightening:


VerySmartBrothas

Awesomely Luvvie


Here are words I'm thinking about a lot:
centering
intersectionality

Would be very open to hearing thoughts and opinions on these two concepts.

Musings

I feel so happy today and I am reminded to work from my strengths. Work, play and love from my strengths.
Feels good to be a part of planning Black Santa with East Bay Families for Social Justice.
Feels good to have decided to skip school with my sick, snotty kids after we all slept late and the idea of fighting tears to get dressed and hustle to school sounded bleh. The house was a mess. Instead I called us in sick and we hung out, watched a lot of TV, played together with fewer tears than normal and then headed in to San Francisco for some visiting.

That was yesterday. Today is Friday and it's drizzling outside. Kids are eating dry Kix out of plastic Ikea bowls colored like the rainbow. I'm drinking tea, reading through Pantsuit Nation posts, opening up ten browser windows at once as an online, visual to-do list:

Blogger
Facebook
Gmail
Amazon
New York Times
Girls Gone Child
Mom.me 15 Fierce Books about Females
Citibank

I've eaten three partly-burnt chocolate chip cookies for breakfast, despite recently finishing a cleanse that had me feeling energized and great. Drinking cinnamon tea.

Wearing my Boston College sweatshirt with the cuffs torn to shreds, exactly like the one I borrowed from a friend in Tijuana when we were there for a volunteer, Immersion trip with our high school the summer before our Senior year. The first time I'd heard of the school, no clue I would one day end up going there.

There is a line of beautiful holiday cards stretching across the shelf of our out-of-tune piano, faces of kids whose parents I love smiling out at us. Nikole and Annie's is the best times a million. We don't send one this year because I haven't put it together yet. Perhaps one for New Years.

The tenth load of laundry of the week spins its cycle, set to gentle because of the two Calvin Klein work dresses that will then go in the bag of clothes to donate to the clothing drive. Meena's Clothing Drive

Later today the kids and I will drive to Oakland and then Berkeley, first to deliver a Santa suit and then to go play at Habitot.

I am a community-builder. I am a continual learner. A questioner. I am opening up to become braver about putting my vulnerable heart into the world. To even let myself feel the pain of vulnerability. Of being scared and letting people see that.

There are a lot of scared people out there. I have to imagine that even many of the people saying the most hateful, vile things to their fellow citizens must on some level feel deep fear because the alternative is too hard to accept. And fear doesn't excuse it at all. It does help me try to understand.

I'm going to go eat a vegetable or something.

A story, unedited

I stood at the curb by the valet station in front of the hospital's main entrance, waiting for my Uber. It was already dark and I'd spent the day in the ICU, explaining death to a large family and helping volley the moments of grief and hope from person to person as they sat, stunned, trying to understand that their man had died. Suddenly, gone. There was regret in the room, at not having said "Thank you" or "I love you". There were smiles and stories passed across the tables, talk of getting together more regularly and not just waiting for tragedy to bring people together. It was a good day for me because I felt like I'd made a connection and I felt like by being there they were able to create a sacred space.

My attention slowly focused on a parked SUV to my left at the curb into which two women were slowly trying to climb. Well, one woman was attempting to coax an older woman into the passenger seat but the step was big and her legs were weak, unsure.

A couple weeks ago I probably would have turned my head back around, assuming they would work it out on their own. Instead I put my bags down and walked over to ask if I could help. The older woman work no shoes, her feet snug in yellow fuzzy socks with white flor de lis spotting them.

Can I help you? I asked.

It's dark, the younger woman who was older than I am said. Usually she has no problem getting in but it's dark and she can't see. She has Alzheimer's.

I'm Megan, I said. I will help you.

The older woman. She was an old woman, not just older. She didn't flinch as I gently put my hands on her. I flinched imagining someone touching me unexpectedly. She kept trying to grab the seat belt or something to help her hold on. Together the other woman and I gently tried to encourage her to step up, suggesting where she might put her foot or what she could hold on to. I held out my left hand and asked her to hold onto my hand but she wouldn't. I might not have either.

It's ok, you can do it. It's a big step. I said.

We weren't making any progress. The younger woman went around to the driver's side to see if that would help. It didn't really. In a way it was like watching one of my children try to navigate a stair or a step up a ladder, a foot held here and then there, testing the footing, putting it back down. She wasn't small but she was smaller than I am, shorter and with less mass. I felt like I could probably pick her up briefly and put her in her seat but I didn't want to hurt her or scare her or violate her in any way. We kept trying.

Through a series of small, shuffling moves we ended up with my foot up on the floor of the car, the old woman sitting on my one-legged lap. She didn't flinch, just rested her entire weight on my strange leg. We stayed like that for a while as I wondered how we would get out of this position. She was facing the seat and it was hard to imagine what Twister move would swing her around the right way.

She whimpered as we gently manhandled her around. The transition required her to give up her hold on herself. I imagined it felt like sky-diving to release your own control over your body, your safety. I thought of how scared I would be to be alone in my mind. I would hate it.

No one got mad or frustrated, at least not out loud. She never took my hand, we never really made eye contact. I buckled her seat belt and her grown daughter thanked me, told her mom to thank me.

That's Megan. She helped you.

I stepped back to my bag, checked my pocket to see two missed calls from my frustrated Uber driver who greeted my call with "Why didn't you answer?! I almost left."

He drove me to my next stop, both of us helping one another navigate the confusing GPS in a town neither of us knew. I went home.

I have been unable or unwilling to write these past weeks. The entire month of November has been silent as far as my written words though the words in my mind have been unceasing. So much happened in November that at any point it felt like if I were to try to write it down I would scatter like dust. I could try to write out a summary, at least a list of major themes, but it would read like a stone settling in the gut. Grief. Suicide. Loneliness. Marital strife. All that and then the world changed with the election results. Where would I start?

I grew up in a city, a city girl through and through. I revel in and rely upon the experience of being alone in a wave of strangers, soaking in the humanity without having to touch it. Putting up invisible walls against the person ranting to himself on MUNI or the sexist comments I've grown up with--I am untouchable, I am watching, it doesn't hurt me if I don't let it.

The walls are being torn down, painstakingly and at times ineffectually. I'm afraid to speak up. Afraid to put myself out there to be seen even as I write this for you to read and talk about wanting more than anything to be seen. I'm afraid to fight, having never been a fighter.

I am in this world and I will keep working to turn towards and not away. I don't know where I will find the words or the courage to share the words, raw, as they beat like hearts inside of me. I'll start here.

Embodied

My veins are shot. The ones in the crooks of my arms, at least. The rest of them still work ok. Spending most of September in the hospital last year is what did it--made my hard-working, long-suffering veins give up their ghosts. What does that phrase mean?

I remember hating shots as a kid. Being afraid of needles. It hurt so much I wanted to scream.

When I was eleven and got diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, blood draws became a not uncommon occurrence. Maybe a few times a year my mom would take me to Children's hospital to get some lab tests done. The blood lab was on the first floor. We would wait in the hallway that had no toys until it was my turn to go. The fear was still there--I felt it in my stomach. I wanted to cry. I didn't want a shot and this was worse than a shot.

Blood draws became IV sticks which were even worse. Those are bigger needles and they need to be jiggled into your vein and held there. The pain is a white-hot fire followed by streams of aching, stinging pain. I had a colonscopy every year so I got an IV every year--the tubing leading from the needle in my vein bringing me the forgetting meds they give you when you enter the weird dream state they put you in when they need to stick a flexible tube into your butt, into your colon, taking turns around intestinal loops that you can still feel in the dream state, just like you feel like you're falling off the bed even as they assure you that you are not.

After being discharged from the hospital following my liver transplant I was driven back to the hospital every morning, to stand hunched around my abdominal incision as I waited for the double-glass doors to opens so I could go get my labs done, first thing in the morning as my nightly dose of immunosuppresants was wearing off, before I took my next does. Every morning for thirty days, getting my blood drawn, my labs and med levels checked, tracking the function of the liver that was now mine. More needles, little cups of juice in my hand afterward.

Somewhere along the way I adopted the habit of turning my head away as the needle readied to enter my skin, enter my vein. I looked away and tried not to clench my body, gradually learning to take deep breaths. The pain got less intense. Sometimes the phlebotomist, the nurse, would ask me if I was ok. I assumed they were worried I was trying not to faint. Now I wonder if some among them noted that I had left my body and checked in because they felt the difference and wanted to draw the pieces of me back. Probably not. Or they noticed but couldn't tell what they were noticing, just that something had shifted.

I took my kids' to get flu shots a few weeks ago and for the first time had all four of them in one room with just me. They have varying comfort levels and levels of interest in their doctors' appointments, one or two of them gladly interacting with Dr. Miller the pediatrician I adore who has taken care of them and me since I first drove tiny Lily across the Bay Bridge the day after she got released from the NICU, the first time I'd ever had her in the car, the other one or two either crying out to me that it was time to leave or silently sitting in watchful judgement. As a mother it has been one of my jobs to soothe my babies, looking into their eyes as I hold their hands still as nurses plunge needles into their soft perfect skin. I've seen the flinches, felt them, as my kiddos get violated by pain for a second.They usually cry, snuggle into me, and get over it pretty quickly. This time I watched as the memory became permanent, embodied, in at least the oldest two. They will remember and they will be afraid the next time, I think. It made me sad. More than sad it made me feel like I was watching life happen in front of my eyes, catching the moment and holding it as it demonstrated it's universal truth to me. That the needles don't become less painful, we become more used to them.

I learned to leave my body, which felt necessary. My body got attacked, from within and without, over and over and over again. I did not know how to survive it, the pain and the violation, and so I left. It didn't feel like a choice I made. I didn't weigh the consequences. It just. . .happened.

The problem is that it became a habit. Unconscious. It wasn't like slipping in and out of a comfy robe that I pulled around me when I needed to soothe myself. I found that place, that out of body place, without putting rules or boundaries around the practice and soon I started to live there. I have been living in my head, in my thoughts, in my words, talking and thinking and observing. Narrating. I thought everyone did this. And even when I realized not everyone watched and thought about and narrated everything going on them, I didn't know it was something that was hurting me. Deadening my ability to feel anything at all. The trick was that still felt like I felt things. So I guess I did. Just not very much. So it's taken me decades to wake up to the sad bargain I've been making, trading away my body and the pleasure it can feel. Turning away, not just from the needles, but from the finely-tuned compass of my physical self and all the messages it has been sending out, in hope and increasingly in desperation.

I shrug things off. That's my style. Some people admire my calmness, my Zen. Sometimes I've felt cool, as though the things that bothered or worried others didn't make me sweat. But neither of those descriptions is accurate. Well, maybe accurate but not real.

The real me, the 9-year-old girl who stands shyly before me, grateful to be noticed now that I'm finally paying attention again, says its time to stay in this body, this precious vessel, and see where it takes us. Even though that means staying in the pain.

I get my blood drawn once a month now to check my liver function and my med levels, among other things. The same woman has tried every time for a year to draw from my antecubital veins, even as she frowns as she prods, feeling the scar tissue inside. She gamely tries anyway, as I keep my mouth shut because part of my almost life-long experience of leaving my body includes quietly receiving practitioners mistakes, the process of abandoning myself already begun. She stuck the needle in the crook of my right arm and the pain zinged through my body to the top of my head and the tips of my toes all at once.

 After a minute, I was glad. Because I'm coming back. And it hurts like hell.

Nap!

This is the second day in a week when all four kids have been asleep at nap time in our own home. Glory, glory Hallelujah! There is nothing better than this. I can't go anywhere because the kids are asleep (actually I technically could go somewhere because my friend Phyllis is still here I think). I'm not driving around, getting the kids to sleep but getting no rest or break for myself. Even better, I am in Lily and Cyrus' room and told them I'm stay here the whole time. Hysterical with freedom! And when I turned around and saw my laptop sitting on the dresser it felt like someone snuck in a left me a present. The laptop is in here because we got some nightlights to replace the flashlight we'd been turning on for the Bigs these past few weeks at night and the new nightlights, though already loved, require either batteries or a USB cord that only plugs into a computer. Why is this a design? Do many children have computers in their rooms for such a thing? Or do many adults have the adapter thingies that plug into the wall and into the USB cord? Or do other adults read the fine print about the weird way things are made? I do not know.

So I'm trapped and my kids are angelic and I get to write and read through the dozens of articles I have saved on Facebook and my life is great right now. Naps! I just can't tell you in enough descriptive words how wonderful four napping children in their own beds is for a mama. I need to cover myself in exclamation points and caps and do a twirly dance and drink a martini and then take my own nap and eat some cake and get a massage and a pedicure and collapse smiling into a pile of down comforters and chinchillas.

As usual there is way more in my mind than I can ever get down on fake paper. This is what there is today.

Here is something I read today. I share it because I want to keep talking about racism in our country and what we can do to fix it. Eradicate it. And because I am learning and thinking about it all the time. Do you have something you think I should read? Please share.

Talk MLKs name out your mouth: An open letter to Clemson football coach Dabo Sweeney

Black lives need to matter too

I started this in July 2016, after the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Then I got self-conscious and scared and put it away. Unbearably, here is another opportunity in the aftermath of the murder of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed 40-year-old black man who was killed in Tulsa yesterday. Video in Tulsa police shooting shows black man was unarmed with hands up


The flea infestation in our house has not been cleared, We have bombed, sprayed, had the exterminator out twice, washed almost everything in hot water more than once. The dog died. The fleas still live. The last time the exterminator came he looked at me standing with four toddlers at my feet and said in all seriousness that it would work better if we took everything out of the house and washed it at a laundry mat. I stared back at him blankly. Ummmm. And we will do that how?

I sat in a chair for three hours this week, getting a $13,000 drug pumped into my veins through an IV chemo-like. This drug has silenced but probably not healed my ulcerative colitis. Insurance pays for 70% of it and I get it every two months. And I am so damn grateful to feel so much better that I don't even want to think about another way I could treat my illness right now. I'm going to enjoy the absence of pain for a while.

My marriage is buffeted by the normal winds of raising young children, of sharing space and responsibility and limited free time with another adult and trying to figure out how to even come close to thriving every now and then.

All of this and I do not fear for my life.

I started that list because it sums up my day-to-day life, the stressors that make it hard to be me. But I am not special in having personal shit to deal with. I am special in that when a black man my age gets shot and killed by police, I don't feel it in my gut and think "That could have been me." Never once have I thought or felt that. In my last post about race I used some stories my friends had shared about experiencing racism for the first time, when they were children. This is an exchange I had with one friend:

Me: Hi Friend, May I put the story you shared yesterday on Antoine's page in a blog post?

Friend: Absolutely! How are you and those beautiful babies?

Me: Oh thanks! We are good. I mean, they make me feel like a crazy person 98% of the time and I'm not sure my marriage will survive parenting this litter but aside from that good :-And you?

Friend:Four babies... you and your husband are rock stars! I have two and I sometimes wonder if my marriage will survive them. Keep going...one foot in front of the other!

That friend looks like Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and the many other black men who have been murdered in the past two years, except he looks absolutely nothing like them other than the fact that they are all black. So when he says that's all we can do, put one foot in front of the other, he is acknowledging that as spouses and parents and professionals we are working hard every day. He has a list similar to mine above, although probably without the fleas. A list that looks like daily life. But he also has to add worry and fear and despair what might happen if he ever has a run in with the police. Oh, there's the fear and sickness in my own gut. Even writing those words about someone I know and love made it real. The point is that none of us has time or energy to try to fix the systemic racism and oppression that is killing black and brown people every day, in myriad ways, in our country that we love. But some of us can turn away from it and some cannot. For those of us who have white skin, please let us join the conversation. Please let us find something, somewhere, to do.

My last post On Parenting and Privilege included an article that talked about PTSD experienced by people of color as a result of the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. A friend shared the post and someone she knew commented, taking some issue with the reference to PTSD. He said PTSD is a legitimate medical diagnosis and should not be taken lightly. That's the point.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event. Mayo Clinic

What will it take for us to see that black lives do not matter as much as white lives in this country, in this time? That if any of us (myself included) do not viscerally feel the trauma of these men being shot and killed by police, we are living a different life than our fellow citizens?

What will it take for us to see that there are different countries within this country? That black and brown-skinned citizens watch people who look like them being killed on TV, by people paid to serve and protect, and nothing happens to the people who killed them. One of the most powerful things I read in the weeks following Alton Sterling and Philando Castile's murders was a personal essay written by 31-year-old Brian Crooks in which he wrote: 

"That is why Black people are in such pain right now. The deaths are bad enough. But having the feeling that nobody will ever actually be held accountable for the deaths is so much worse. And then watching as the police union, the media, and conservative politicians team up to imagine scenarios where the officer did nothing wrong, and then tell those of us who are in pain that our pain is wrong, unjustified, and all in our heads just serves to twist the knife."

I feel afraid when I even consider writing the word "murder" in my posts or my essays. I keep having to check myself--why am I afraid? Why don't I want to do it? This is what I've come up with, ranging from being generous with myself to hard/honest with myself:

-I don't think I've ever written the word murder before. It's not a word in my vocabulary, it scares me and I try not to do anything that brings me into the realm of using the word.

-It feels like a legal definition and by using it I'm stepping outside my sphere of knowledge. I feel okay about "killed" because I can see and read for myself that it happened. But murder? Am I sure?

-It feels so divisive, like I am taking a side. If I write "murder" people will think that I am anti-police and I am not anti-police so wouldn't it be better to use a safer word? 

I'm afraid to hurt people or make people mad by what I write here, in this sacred space that I have finally created, where I put myself into words where other people can see them. I feel like I should start with a bulleted list that says I do honor the fallen police offers in Dallas and I'm also honoring the people killed in Nice and. . .do I need to say all that? Can we give each other the benefit of the doubt that it is not either/or?It is not either/or.

My chest is full of uncried tears for all the death, all the fear, all the anger, all the pain. The familiar desire to just yell what's the point anyway? It's too hard! What difference does anything I do make anyway?

Some tears came last night as I lay on the floor in the kids' room, having literally thrown my daughter into her bed after an hour and a half of trying to get them to go to sleep. I was so done and felt so powerless and I reacted by scaring this precious, innocent person who means the world to me because I was just so done and I didn't know what else to do. I lay in the dark, covered in shame, listening to her quietly talk herself to sleep, wanting to climb up and apologize to her, to make amends, but not wanting to mess with the quiet that was finally arriving. It was a day full of good, of effort, of togetherness. And I wiped it all out, at least within myself, with the final moments of the day.

I feel so tired. Every parent I know feels so tired. It is so hard and it is so tempting to turn everything off and fold into a private corner of my own space where I and mine feel safe. Even if it is an illusion. Because I can tell you--there is no safe. Living is not safe.

After my last essay about the racial divide in this country my friend wrote: 

It makes me so angry that I will have to teach my son "Don't do this.. Don't say that.. Stand still if... ". I could scream and then I want to cry. Because it's so wrong, so very very wrong. This is not the life I dreamed for my children.

That is not the liberal media. I hope it doesn't even need to be any kind of "us" vs. "them". It is a real mom talking about trying to raise her brown son in this country we all want to be part of and proud of. I don't teach my children that lesson. Do you? If not, why not?

I'm going to keep writing about this. I hope you'll keep reading. I hope you'll reach out to me to ask questions or open conversation. I don't know how to write about parenting and my experience as a parent when parents right next to me can't turn away from this discussion just because they're tired. We can't stop talking. We can't stop trying. And for those of us who don't feel traumatized by what is happening, we have to ask ourselves why not?

A look back

Sometimes I think if I actually wrote about how hard it is to raise four kids under the age of two-and-a-half people would just start showing up at my house trying to save me. Or save us. I just started a sentence describing this past week, with a handful of sick kids and a sick mama and I got bored in the middle of it. Who really cares? Everyone has sick kids, every parent gets sick, everyone tries to keep their house clean, their bills paid, their dog's nails clipped. It's nothing new or special--it's just in bulk and it is relentless. But I think all parenthood is relentless.

I love these bright, beautiful children so much. I could stare at them for hours. It's the spilling, gate-smashing, screeching, bottle-spilling, whining, needing, door-to-the-bathroom-opening everything  that makes it so hard. The projectile vomit just when I was already at a breaking point, making me burst into hopeless tears in the kitchen before taking the blue Ikea highchair out to the courtyard to spray it off.

Complaining feels at best lame, at worst risky. Like tempting the gods of fate to even think it's too hard.


A year has passed since I wrote the words above. Not exactly a year because a year ago today I was in the hospital for a colitis flare that wouldn't end and I wasn't doing any writing in the hospital. I was resting and ordering meals from food services. I broke, physically in a way that got me hospitalized, but I know that physical break was caused by the mental and emotional breaking that had been going on for months. That and the stupid colitis that I wasn't ignoring so much as was just gritting my teeth and bearing it because I didn't think there was anything I could do to make it better. Except for maybe entirely change my diet to eat only whole foods and no dairy and no gluten and no sugar and. . . no. On some level I want to try that because I know it would be good for me, even if it didn't entirely heal the colitis. On the other levels the only way it could happen would be if someone would shop for me and cook for me and pack lunches for me and then provide me therapy when all of the emotions that get cuddled up in all the food I eat come raging out to devastate the earth around me.

What is really possible? I don't mean in the sense of "Anything is possible if you try" though I guess I do mean it in that way. The truest of true ways which for me comes down to what will you give up or change in order to do the thing you need to do? If you can even figure out what the thing you need to do is.

Months ago I picked up a Brene Brown's book Rising Strong for the third time. It hadn't been meeting me where I was up to that point, though I'd loved her earlier books. I picked it up because it was in front of me on the table and I brought it with me on BART on my way to see a play at the Berkeley Rep. The chapter grabbed me, because it started with a personal story and because it ended with her therapist asking her "What if everyone is just doing the best they can?"

This question sent the author into a rage and she fought it, the idea, for weeks. She asked everyone she came into contact with, coming up with her own qualitative data about what it means if you believe that is true about people and what it means if you don't.

I usually don't. And I haven't believed it about myself for most of my life.

I put the book in my bag as the train pulled into my stop and walked up the stairs into downtown Berkeley. As always, the energy of a city, of people walking quickly around me, dressed in different styles, talking about different things, pulled my heart up and out into the world. It's one of my best mes, the city me. Also the alone me. My god do I love to be alone. The best alone is alone in a sea of people. My favorite. I walked to the theater and met up with my younger brother. Better and better.

The play was Aubergine. It was exquisite. It was about grief, which I wasn't expecting, but was welcome and timely as I had just started my new role at work where I'm learning to specialize in grief. The characters were quirky and bold. And at one point one of the people in the show asked "What if people are just doing the best they can?"

Zing! Okay, god and the universe. I am listening. This message is meant for me today.

So I've been carrying that idea around with me for months, holding it up as a lens when I need it to see others in a different light. It helps. More than that, I've been wrapping it around myself as a cozy blanket when I need it. Maybe I'm just doing the best I can.

Right now, with what I have. With the energy I have possess, with the mental toughness available to me in the moment, with the truth surrounding me, the what is actually happening surrounding me. I've started to understand the concept in a different way. That it's not exhorting me to do the best I could if everything else cleared away and I could just focus on doing my best at this one thing. Because let's be real, I can do lots of things really really well and I expect that of myself. Expect it to the point that if someone says I did great and lists ten things I did well, I shrug as if to say but yeah that's what was expected. But if someone says one thing I could have done better, I wear that like a mantle until I can force myself to stop thinking about it. Because all this time I've been interpreting Do your Best to mean--imagine the most wonderful way in which this thing can be done and then get as close to that image as possible, whipping yourself for missing the mark which will almost always happen.

Sheesh. It hurts me to write it out. So very hard on myself and often on others. People have said that to me about myself for years and it has pissed me off more than anything. What does that mean? Or I know! But I didn't really know. I knew because enough people said it that I thought it must be true even though I couldn't feel it to be true. I didn't know how to shut it off.

What I learned last year in the hospital was that I could not trust my own self-assessment when it came to my physical health. I would simultaneously feel like I needed to do better/work harder even as my body was breaking down to the point where two doctors would look at me eyebrows raised and said This is going to take months to get better because your body is so messed up right now. I have become an expert at living, even impressing others, while in the pit of desperation. In crisis mode all the time. And my body paid. My heart and my mind have paid too but I'm still unpacking that damage.

Three weeks ago I took my four kids and my dad to a hospital where I was going to meet with my financial advisor. My kids looked cute and as though I'd scooped them out of the gutter where they'd been hanging out with PigPen in their pajamas, brushing each others' hair with Brillo pads. We shuffled our way into the lobby and past the security guard, a black woman a few years 5-10 years younger than I am. She said Are those all your kids?

Yeah, I said.

How did you get your body back?? she asked with admiration.

I didn't know how to respond. It felt good to hear, as much as it surprised me. Mostly I wanted to say, and would have if I'd come up with the words sooner, I'm getting myself back. It shows on the outside.