smog

smog

how fitting that it was four o’clock all day,

my least favorite time - it was just

dim, like the sun never rose or set. 

it rained ash and we all were so sorry 

that we hadn’t tried a little sooner, a little harder,

to save ourselves from Mars.

i found a polaroid of our best boy in your glovebox,

a cheap pocket-watch hidden in your dresser drawer,

a book of mine that you borrowed for a road-trip - 

the second or third copy, well-loved, 

some notes you wrote to yourself last week, 

saying just GO, don't look back. 

a letter to my cousin on his 22nd bithday

the day i almost died wasn't the day, shortly after my 16th birthday, that i got t-boned and nearly crushed by the steel door of my 1982 bmw. it wasn't any of the days in high school that i thought i'd be better off dead but was too scared to formulate anything more than a vague plan. it wasn't for that matter, any of the days of cancer and chemotherapy and radiation or the day, years later, that i decided to have my tits cut off and woke up, after 8 hours of surgery, wondering where the hell i was and what the hell i'd done. the day i almost died was the sunday after thanksgiving, november 26th, 2006.

that morning, when rory quietly walked away, i almost broke in half and died. and then, that night, when i realized he was never coming back, i did break in half. and then i broke in half again and again and again for days and days and days until i was tiny grains of sand and i couldn't break anymore. it wasn't pretty. at all. it was drained bank accounts and mistresses and lies heaped upon lies. it was my parents sleeping on the floor of my living room because i was too immobilized to be alone with the kids. it was legal papers and process servers and years of protracted proceedings. it was wishing and regretting and begging and negotiating. it was the world's saddest christmas and a shaved head. it was talking and writing about what i was thinking and feeling, endlessly. endlessly. i can remember every single moment of it and none of it at all.

looking back, almost 9 years later, that day, all those days that i almost died, crystallize to one conversation, one word. integrity. maybe it was just profound to me in hindsight, but sometime during the divorce i had a talk (okay, a million talks) with my dad about what i could control. namely myself, and my own behavior and nothing else. and integrity became the guiding principle of my life the moment he spoke the word. act with integrity. even when you don't want to. even when it would be easier not to. even when you want to be petty. have integrity. you will never be sorry.

the cunt is back. OR this is what happens when you abandon a blog for six months.

yeah. 27 year old me would have given a shit that you think i'm a cunt with ugly boobs. 31 year old me doesn't.

life has gotten in the way of blogging, namely the shop. i owe the great wide web a metric buttload of pictures of my semi-relaxed foobs. and of course i'm back because the shit is about to hit the fan again with BK. tucking the childrens in bed. i'll be back. copiously. angelina jolie, if you're out there, i hope you saw my foobs before your surgery! that'd be pretty cool with me.

in short: the womb has been sealed (and signed and delivered). i miss my nipples some days still but i hope that tattoos will appease me ultimately, not tattoos of nipples. the shop is insanely busy. rory moved away to be with his girlfriend. and stopped paying child support. 

bob redux

in the past month i've referred two people to bob (the therapist that rory and i saw). i remain convinced that none of those sessions were wasted on me/us. in spite of the outcome, it was money well spent. but it's weird, because in looking back at those old posts i cannot believe how much things have changed. it's like reading a work of fiction, or an autobiography of someone else's life. i don't recognize myself in that time. i don't recognize rory. i cannot remember what it felt like to be so completely and constantly terrified. i can't remember what it felt like to desperately want to fix things with rory and to hate him so much at the same time.

i visited with j3n today (yes, of snake & butterfly (she's moving to portland and the kids were good friends so we visited, okay?)) and she asked me how things with rory have been. good. really really good. i like him as one of the fathers to my children. and i like him as a human being again. i actually went out of my way to have lunch with him the other day. there's a strange level of comfort between him and i. and i suppose none of that would be possible without the strange and incredible level of comfort with danny and summer too. i genuinely hope that he's happy. i hope that we stay happy. i hope for shared holidays and vacations. it does get better. imagine that. 

3 days 23 hours and some minutes

some aspect of my brain fried yesterday. i had coffee with forrest in the morning and then drank an entire bottle of champagne and got *rather* inebriated and sobby.  (mike, amanda, heather shut your respective faces.) the forrest part was uneventful and pleasant-ish. we swirled around the old cancer-y stuff, kids and jobs and avoided anything more personal and reminisce-y.

rory conversation: not.so.much. danny had guys night, no one was around to go out for a drink with me. i came home with a cheap bottle of champagne for me and a very large beer for rory and made him keep me company. we talked for a long time about summer and her family, about danny and his family, about our jobs, about the kids, about normal things that people talk about when they've known each other 16 years and haven't talked in a very long time. and then the fact that i haven't been drinking and had consumed 3/4 of a bottle of cook's brut turned me into a crying confessing raccoon faced mess. we talked about him cheating (though he never sealed the deal with tara until he left) and i took it as the moment to tell him about sleeping with austin before we got married, hoped it stung a bit. i told him that the way he left made me think that danny was leaving at every turn over the past five years. that i've changed. that i'm not that pushy bitch, that i retreat instead into the body of a 1930's housewife at one moment and a liberated whore at the next. he went silent for a few minutes, but in a thinking way. i called him out. he said sorry that he did what he did, how he did it. i thanked him for leaving, leading me ultimately to the messy joy i have now. he said that he told his boss that we've been divorced for years but are 'very good friends.' i cried for being young and dumb when he said something about it sometimes taking 8 years to realize what you don't want. he hugged me. he left. i cried some more, cathartically and drunk dialed brett until danny came home.

6 years, 9 months, 14 days or 59,520 hours but not a song from RENT

on 18ish february 2006 i had just celebrated by ten year anniversary with rory and was 19 weeks pregnant with mr. baby!

on 18 february 2007 rory and i attended therapy and i found out he had no job. ugh, that sounds sucky.

on 18 february 2008 i was grading and i confessed a whole bunch of crap about me and rory. i redact most of what i said.

on 18 february 2009 i was pretty happy because my divorce was about to be final and putting out vibes into the universe for rory to have a partner that loved the kids. success.

on 18 february 2010 i posted about 13 books i love. hey, that sounds normalish!

on 18 february 2011 (and this is amazing since i only posted four times that month) i was talking about my boobies and hormones. weird.

on 18 february 2012 i am bored and reminiscent. it is 70 degrees, dylan is visiting, the kids are irritating me, and i'm cranky from lack of sex.

the one where we survived the apocalypse, i turned thirty, and decided to get new tits

yeah, so months later. we went to amsterdam. we turned thirty. i'm anticipating a messy 'breakup' with ben. parker home schooled for a while and went back to school. brett lived with us. the business is ridiculously busy. and the reason i suppose i'm back here with something of note to blog about - i decided last week that i'm going to have a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy.

this is something i started researching several months ago and then forgot about, only to be reminded last monday (my birfday). i got a letter in the mail informing me that my insurance is going up to $720 a month (from $520) starting on march 1st because of a "change in age/are on which our rates are based." read: you're thirty now; you're a liability to us. pshaw.

i'm done with babies. like, d.o.n.e. DONE. i'm finished using these saggy, irradiated boobs for anything other than entertainment purposes. they nourished my babies for 5ish years, and well. and now they feel like lopsided time bombs. i read the studies (ALL the studies). i know i'm at 8x higher risk for having had hodgkins/radiation/anthracycline etcetera than the average woman (who has roughly a 1 in 8 chance of developing breast cancer over her lifetime). i'm also more likely to get bilateral cancer and die of it than the average breast cancer patient. so yeah, take them. please. i'm not under the false pretense that this will be some walk in the park; it is at least one major surgery, maybe a few, including reconstruction. that said, cancer isn't a walk in the park and honestly, neither is an annual breast mri.