Therese Oneill's Blog

I’m so excited to introduce my third book of historical weirdness and wonder, Unbecoming a Lady, due in bookstores everywhere March 2024 and available for pre-order now!

Allow me to introduce you to 18 remarkable women who triggered change in the world, but did so in the wrong way.

You’ve not heard of them, and if you have, you haven’t heard the full story. They weren’t pretty, graceful, or quiet, and so history didn’t know what to do with them.

MEET:

Aida – She produced, choreographed and starred in the first All-Black performances on Broadway, and she’s the reason you call an easy job “a cakewalk.” She also performed in minstrel shows in vaudeville, and a lot of people still don’t want to talk about that.

Carrie– She created the first battered women’s shelter in America, funded by her side hustle of throwing bricks at bar patrons and setting fires in saloons. It might not have been that way if she hadn’t believed her own daughter to be such damaged goods.

Lena– A teenage immigrant who made millions when she decided fat and pregnant women deserved to be seen in public. But even today her name (and you would recognize her name, if it weren’t for that 1905 bank typo) makes many women uncomfortable with their own bodies.

Aimee– She introduced joy and prosperity to Christianity and created the Foursquare Church. That along with building America’s first mega-temple and her owning one of the most popular radio stations in the country made her one of the ealiest super-celebrities. Which is actually quite stressful. And could explain she faked her own kidnapping, ran off with her (married) sound engineer, and paid another women (not enough) to take the fall while lying about it all under oath.

And many more women who did amazing things, but refused to fit in the clean and tidy spaces History allotted for amazing women. I wrote this book to celebrate the messy, blousy, loud and brilliant women who make people uncomfortable. The world needs them, and seldom says ‘thank you.’

Unbecoming a Lady Complicated and powerful women who were unbecoming as ladies, forever changing what ladies could become.

(Take a sneak peak inside to brilliant original illustrations by Lisa Jonte and historic curiosities galore, all popping with the attentive care of Simon Element’s brilliant design team. …All while kindly ignoring how bad I am at using WordPress’s editing software!)

Chapter One! Filled with Fun Fact and Factoids about my Freaky Fems! This is Dolly Dimples! You simply must meet her. And Poker Alice! We should probably give her some space…

And finally…here’s some places to Pre-Order!

Simon & Schuster

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Thriftbooks

Lucian Freud’s, ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,’ 1995, was briefly the most valuable painting on the planet by a living artist, selling at auction for $33 million dollars. The model, Sue Tilley…went on a diet.

Some day I’ll be able to talk about my 2020.

Not today; I’m going to skip most of it today and bring you to Spring of 2021.

This is so I can tell you why Spring of 2022 is.

(And since you’ve survived the endless last two (billion) years same as me, I bet that sorta makes sense! Either way, hold tight, Friends. Here we go.)

Crystal’s Thigh Gap

My roommate in the psych ward was nice. That was important. Because though the facility does try…it’s not a nice place. Most of the patients are too damaged to be nice. But Crystal sat cross-legged on the zebra print throw she wasn’t supposed to have on her bed, a yellow legal pad in her lap. She was gonna help me. She ended up changing my life.

“I’ll make you a list. There are some just lovely, I mean truly, beautiful spirits here. But some…” she slapped the pad and looked at me. “Well I’m just going to say it. Helga is a real bitch. Do NOT talk to Helga.”

Helga had threatened to kill her the night before I came.  Well, Crystal wasn’t about to take THAT sitting down, and by the time the guards intervened she (now standing to re-enact the scene) was doing a “The Shining” Jack Torrance-lurch down the corridor, her sporty red aluminum walker held about her head in place of an axe. (Crystal, though outwardly the picture of MILFY, pony tailed health, suffered fibromyalgia and other debilitating “invisible” illnesses)She said the pure anger had pushed out the other pain and she became The Hulk.

“You should have seen me. I had the walker over my head I swear I would have just laid her flat out if I saw her and I was screaming like [“like”…sigh…bless us…fools all] a crazy person, ‘Hellllga! Stop hiding, you bitch!!”

I nodded, sympathetically. I’d only seen Helga in the Main Room. She was a young, hard-faced woman with a Russian accent that came and went. She was wearing a blouse as shorts when I’d arrived, legs through the sleeves. It was bold, but diaper-y.

“She’s jealous,” Crystal whispered. “I’m just…like…good with guys, right? I’m nice and they’re nice back and she’s so pissed that they talk to me. But it’s because I’m nice and she’s … (here she looked around our room as if for anyone overhearing. I don’t think anyone was; not because we had privacy of any sort – the cameras in our rooms surely had audible capacity – but from what I’d seen from the nurses and guards behind the locked enclosure in Reception, they found us, in the low-security wing, too boring to tune in to. Apparently even too boring to keep from stalking each other with aluminum walkers.

“She’s fucking Satan,” Crystal hiss-whispered.

I was not that okay that first night. I was…tired…in a way that I’d never felt before. But my survival instinct had kicked in the same time my rights as an autonomous human were taken from me along with my clothes. Survival meant regaining or faking sanity as quickly as possible. Crystal helped me get my feet under me a bit; I was having a sorta-conversation.

I use humor, always. My last safe place, my last weapon. So I said, with all the worn wry I had left, “Well, I’ve seen your thigh-gap, girl. It’s like a ten-year-old boy’s. I practically wanna kill ya myself.”   

Crystal barked a laugh and launched from the bed again, a flight of ideas winging her to a new topic.

“Oh my gosh, that’s not even real. These aren’t real either!” She patted her tightly pert breasts.

“I had weight loss surgery,” she explained, “and then there was so much loose skin I just had to have everything lifted.”

Weight loss surgery. Severe excess skin. Huh. I thought back to a special I’d seen on TLC a decade ago. “Oh! Did you get the…like where they like pull everything upwards and cut off the extra?” I like the idea of grabbing the top of one’s sagging body and giving it a good tug, smoothing out the flaps and wrinkles like a fitted sheet.

“Sorta!” She said. “Wanna see?”

Would I ever get such on offer again? Would there be any other place or time when it was appropriate?

“I’d absolutely love to,” I said.

Crystal pulled her cougar print leggings to her knees and lifted her rhinestone “Mama Bear” t-shirt.

Her breasts were positively popping forth from her chest. They were uneven, but, ehh, most breasts are. They were scared underneath and in the areola, and the nipples sat a bit wall-eyed; but it certainly wasn’t less appealing than the average middle-aged woman’s breasts. Just…differently so.

Her thigh gap didn’t look artificial, but she spun around when I complimented it and humbly showed me the rounded ‘m’ rouge scar that cradled the top of each buttock. Unsightly, but again, no more so than the buttocks of any woman succumbing to time and gravity. Or an ill-aged tattoo. Just different.

“Thank you.” I said. “That was fascinating. They did a great job, you look really good.”

On The Edge, Safe. But Look Up There.

That’s all I want to say about that time right now. Except that was the day the idea was planted in my head. The idea that weight loss surgery could actually work. It won’t keep you off the crazy ward, fair enough…but that was a very respectable thigh gap.

I’ve spent the interceding year covered in bloody gashes (some metaphorical) crawling up and away from the freezing filth of Rock Bottom. Over frozen jags that tear flesh and infects the wounds. I kept climbing. Now I sit on the side of that old well, the one with the broken plywood cover I’d stomped through, dangling my scraped and healing heat over the side. Not scared anymore. Scarred, but that’s okay. Scars are healed. I can see mountains with berries and billy goats and ancient carvings. I wanna go. I bet I could. They can’t be harder than where I’ve come from. I want to climb them.

But…I can’t right yet. My brain doesn’t understand the Industrial Revolution has come, and I don’t need to spend 2000 calories of energy to survive a day. It can’t even comprehend how deep into The Computer/Internet Age it is, where my entire life could be lived with 60 paces a day. I wore a pedometer and counted those paces at the height of the pandemic, when I was at my most heavy and still. That’s what I did in a day. 60 steps.

You can’t climb mountains if you can only go 60 aching paces.

Why Doesn’t This Sound Crazy?

I began noticing all the people in my life who’d off handedly mentioned having a bariatric surgery in their lives. There were a lot. Except for Crystal, they were mostly still chubby, but not painfully obese. They were also universally pleased with their choice.

Drops of information began to trickle into an actual knowledge pool

“They do it laparoscopic now. Five little holes the size of a penny, and you’re up and walking the same day. Home the next morning.”

“Does it hurts? Well…one incision was pretty sore. But they gave me Tylenol. Oh. I had really serious gas when I woke up, tho. That hurt.”

“No, you eat whatever, just less once you’re healed.”

“They don’t even do that thing where they tie the intestine to the esophagus anymore [the procedure I call “the Human Centipede” but the medical world calls a far more attractive “Roux en Y” gastric bypass.] They don’t ‘bypass’ anything. They just take like…crimper scissors and snip snip titanium staple the round part of your stomach off, leaving like a banana shape instead of a football.”

“It’s so safe my sister had it done for $5000 in Tijuana. That includes airfare! She wasn’t fat enough to qualify for American surgery, she only wanted to lose 50 pounds. She’s a size four now. I’m sooo jealous.” (That one was from a nurse.)

Meanwhile, I tried another diet. Bring the total since I was seven years old to…well…all of them.

All the diets.

This one I had great hope for, though. Even though every time the diet was advertised, it appeared with a legal disclaimer “Average weight loss 12 pounds.” But SOME people have lost 200! And won marathons! So there’s always hope!

And it worked! Until it didn’t. Like always.

“Average weight loss 12lbs.” A great diet for people tired of sucking their stomachs in.

The Great Fat Hope

A word about hope.

Fat people have for a century insisted their food intake is not commiserate with the degree of obesity they suffer. They say in bafflement, obviously born of denial, that they eat very little, and they DO exercise…as much as some slender friends.

But even if they’re mystified, most still take full blame for their unacceptable fatness.

We have to.

Fat people have to believe it’s our own fault. Like sweet dear candy-striped shorts Richard Simmons told me through my childhood and adolescence. “YOU held the fork.” My own indulgences and indolence caused this.

It HAD to be my fault, my delusion, my wishful thinking. Because if it’s not my fault, if I were really born to be fat, if my body truly metabolizes calories directly into the storage of fat faster and more efficiently than slim people…

…well then I can’t fix it. And then…I’m hopeless.

I’d be fat forever. My lack of discipline and self-respect would forever be the FIRST thing people notice about me. My lack of femininity and style. My indolence, my willingness to sit life out. All of that is on full display the second you see a fat person across the room.

If it wasn’t my fault I was helpless to change. I haven’t managed yet, but I’ve been trying since I was seven, so something’s bound to work!

Right?

Grandma Never Sat Down, Tho. Also all that science.

The 20th century and it’s eternal focus on fat women has shifted. We’ve watched up close, not just our own fat but our mother’s and grandmother’s.

We watched them live and die. And it just didn’t add up.

Women with the self control and diligence to run a households on $90 a month. Women energetic enough to raise eight children after having raised their own siblings from the age of nine. Women with the impetus and strength to become EMTs, running out in the middle of the night in trucks they’d chained themselves, piecing together bodies broken on icy mountain passes. Farmwives keeping 200 head of cattle AND the men that tended them fed, clean, and fully cared for while running the business of an entire farm and still making it to church every week on time with a passel of scrubbed little kids in tow.

THESE were the woman too lazy and useless to lose some goddamn weight?

And then they died. Because fat DOES kill. Because maybe their bodies were made to survive, not titillate. Maybe the brain’s wiring gets confused when, for the first time in the history of the human race, there is so much food that poor people are fat, and rich pay extra to be thin.

So they died at 66 of heart failure, after eating fortified gruel for a year in a nursing home… still 120lbs over weight. And the instinctive “that doesn’t seem logical” is snicked, over run by the lesson deep in our (“You’re not big-boned”) bones…”They should have eaten less and exercised more. They obviously lived unhealthy lives.”

(All photos “farm wives” “early 20th” from NYPL Archives)

That didn’t add up. But…it must! We must…we must just be missing the 1000s of calories they must have snuck. Just look at the old recipes! Real butter! Well that must be it, then. Even thought they only made that batch of cookies once a week and by the time the kids were through they’d only had two. Plus they…churned the butter themselves from cows they milked… But somehow… lazy and lacking self control?

Wait…no. No. Just STOP.

As we entered the 21st Century, their must have been some scientists who observed the same.

Science Suggests Some Fat People Are Fat AND People.

TheoryAuthorsDescriptionThrifty gene hypothesisJames Neel, U.S., 1962Human history was marked by feast or famine. Humans who had fat reserves — who were exceptionally efficient at storing fat — were more likely to survive.Drifty gene hypothesisJohn Speakman, U.K., 2008A counter to the thrifty gene theory. Fatness was not a survival advantage. It just stopped being a disadvantage when humans no longer had to run from predators, so obesity drifted into the population.The thrifty
phenotypeSeveral authorsA handful of hypotheses that revolve around the idea that poor nutrition in the womb encourages the development of diabetes when food is abundant in adulthood. Genetically
unknown foods Riccardo Baschetti, Italy, 1998Obesity and diabetes occur when populations are introduced to new foods they have not adapted to. Aggression controlPrajakta Belsare et al, India, 2010As humans relied less on fighting and aggression to survive, a propensity for obesity emerged. Over­indulgence becomes less of a problem when being docile is no longer a life-or-death calamity.Climate
adaptationsDyan Sellayah et al,U.K., 2014Survival in cold parts of the world favored genes that help preserve body temperature — a higher metabolic rate meant lower obesity and diabetes. In hot spots, lower metabolism meant the opposite.Sources:  E. GennÉ-Bacon/Yale J. Biol. Med. 2014; D. Sellayah et al/Endocrinology 2014

I like to gather information. Aside from talking to as many bariatric people as I could find, from 18 years post-surgery to 18 months, to taking them out to lunch to watch in fascination how they ordered real food but only ate 1/3 of it, no regrets.

I learned every time you go on a strict diet, your body still thinks you’re trying to starve it. It panics and grabs each calories it can get and turns it to fat (by slowing you metabolism, since it needs to store that energy). And if you started restricted-calorie intake when you were seven (Hi! That’s me! And some of you!) and never stopped…by your 40s your metabolism is DONE with this bull. This constant but unexpected deprivation (“yo-yo” dieted was a cuter name) and your metabolism will be damned if they’re going to fall for it again. They’re holding on to every calorie. You’ll thank them when drought season comes!

It occured to me, after all this information had been gathered…that my entire system was corrupted. My body and brain would never give me aid nor quarter. It would demand calories and increase fat storage until it killed me. (I would say an iron willed woman would be able to defeat this demand and remain slender for life, but…one word, “Oprah.”)

It would demand and I would fight and fall and fight and fall, until it killed me like my parents.

Unless…heh.

Unless I got to that bitch first.

“PLEASE Take Our Money, Fat Friend!”

One of the more realistic (non-bikini non plastic surgery retrofit) before and afters)

Last October…I typed “bariatric” into my insurance company’s search bar.

Holy shit.

That was the night it became real.

The bariatric surgeries the insurance company would pay for had their own page, and it was easy to find. The one I liked best, the snip snip foot-ball to banana one, the “Gastric Sleeve” (not the “Band”…no one does that anymore.) cost $32,000 dollars.

If I qualified, (and I sure did!) the insurance paid around…$30,000 of the procedure.

Ho-leee shit!

It wasn’t the affordability that affected me. It was the fierce mercenary purposes of insurance companies. They HATE paying out money. They employ stone-hearted math geniuses and lawyers and brilliant medical teams to figure out how to NOT pay money.

And their research showed them that this expensive, preventative “elective” surgery saved them money.

Saved them prescriptions to diabetes meds, blood thinners and heart medicine. Saved them Cpaps and sleep studies. Saved them joint replacements and physical therapies. Saved them therapist bills and anti-depressants. High risk pregnancies and infertility treatment.

Saved them two years of useless home care after a fat clot choked off half my father’s brilliant brain, until he died slowly of pneumonia.

Saved them the three months in the Cardiology ICU, and the costs of the triple bypass that ended up not saving Mom’s heart.

TL:DR = I’ve Decided to Live

I’ll go to sleep on Tuesday morning in a hairnet and wake up to 2/3rds of my stomach removed. Football to a banana…a more reasonable size for my needs and lifestyle, and one my brain, even if it rebels entirely, will not be able to fully override. Unless I hook myself up to intravenous milkshakes, I cannot regain this fat.

It’s rough and dirty, it’s extreme and scary. I wish I didn’t have to do it. And I’m so grateful the procedure I fantasized about when I was ten has become safe and common enough to save me.

My friends. I’m having bariatric surgery. It’s not the easy way out…it’s the only exit.

I’ll shrink and you won’t have to wonder why. I had the surgery. And…I’ll still be chubby in the end. No amount of weight loss will make marathon training look appealing or make me swear off two delicious spoonfuls slowly savored of potato salad). I’ll have weird skin, likely. I’m predicting looking a bit like a gnome candle left in a hot garage. I’ll be irritable as I try to figure out a new and peaceful relationship with food. I’m irritable now! I’m on a two week liquid fast (medically supervised starvation!) to shrink my friggin’ liver and I really hate soup.

But I’m doing it.

Because

I’ll be able to walk anywhere by autumn.

Around stores, airports, my yard. I’ll see the ghost towns along the Oregon Trail.

I’ll chaperone my kid’s field trips.

I’ll take them to the lake in my little row boat I still can’t use because of my size, to find private picnic spots in lakes.

I’ll fit in booths and seatbelts will cross me in planes with no raised finger and knowing nod exchanged between me and the stewardess to bring an extender.

Dropping my keys won’t be a rush of despair followed by bracing for pain. I’ll be able to sleep through a power-outage, for the fat now is so thick near my windpipe I suffocate if I can’t power my Cpap.

I’ll be able to empty the dishwasher without seizing back cramps. And if I can do that…maybe I can clean and have my big white pretty house be TRULY a home.

I’ll be the first woman in my matriarchal line to live past 68, maybe. And if I die early…maybe it will be from water-skiing or something awesome.

Still Therese

I’m Therese. I’ll be getting thinner over the next year. It’s not because I’m the paragon of discipline. It’s not because I’m better than any other fat person.

I’m getting bariatric surgery because I can afford it through insurance. Because I believe it’s my only chance at a sustainable non-obese weight. I believe this after intense research of every kind, sleepless nights, my family’s wary support, and with full knowledge that this will be hard.

I will still love food in my head. I will still be Therese with sparkly rainbow of non-fat related problems, not a 20 yr old manic pixie dream girl in ripped jeans when it’s over. I will be eating the rest of my life like Richard Simmons had always told me and my mom to… except this time it won’t be miserable and doomed to fail.

Repeating the same behaviors and getting the same terrible results isn’t the definition of insanity, it’s the definition of despair.

I’m getting bariatric surgery because I don’t despair. Because I am scared but brave and ready to do hard things. And because I want to be alive.

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That there up above? That’s the real deal friends. I signed the contract a bit ago, but in publishing it’s not real until PM Deal Report sez so. Happy to announce the birth of my next book, (wt) “Unbecoming a Woman.” to Simon and Schuster’s newest imprint, Simon Element.

First of all, give me a damn cookie. Because it was REALLLLLLY hard to sell a book in New York during lockdown. My agent is brilliant and she did it. Also, I am brilliant and I did it. My editor is also brilliant and she bought it.

It was hard for a lot of reasons. Try thinking of a topic worth reading that didn’t also sorta piss you off and make you want to punch people these past 18 months. Big Publishing was interested in a select handful of those topics, but deemed every other one controversial and tone-deaf. Everything took on lonesome angry suspicious overtones during that bad sad time. New York Publishing was under duress, a business who’s lifeblood are nice lunches and brainstorming meetings regulated to Zoom meetings in crowded city apartments.

BUT…it is New York and these folks are there in the first place because they be fierce.

I do not live in New York, tho. I live in Oregon. On the soft side of the state, with the people who take organic farming certification of one sort of mushroom very seriously while legalizing the microdosing of other kinds of mushrooms all in good fun.

I’m very proud of my pansy ass for dragging myself around after Zooming third-grade, putting piles of weird books by my toilet until something clicked…until some idea seeded that not only made me feel like I was adding (some funny burns) to The Great Conversation but doing so in a marketable way.

And that is why I deserve a cookie. And this publishing contract.

Honestly, I didn’t want to write a “Bad-ass Bitches of History!!” book. Because…well they’ve been done often and well. What could I add?

When I found her…I found what I wanted…needed, to add.

Claudette Colvin. I could add some Claudette Colvins. (She’s not in my book, I’m serving up even lesser known and stranger fare, but she’s the thrust of it).

Claudette: Mouthy dark skinned teen motherRosa…as a Barbie. I mean God Bless…but…BARBIE.

You probably already know about Claudette, but she’s not a house-hold name like her successor, Rosa Parks.

Claudette did it all first, tho. She was feeling churlish and hormonal and she told a white lady she wasn’t going to move on that bus. And…you never heard of her.

Why? Because…history prefers it’s ladies to be a certain sort. Attractive in face and demeanor. Ladylike. A bitchy minority teen, no one wants to listen to that. But it’s the bitchy outliers that tend to have just enough crazy in them to DO stuff like tip off a revolution.

The Civil Rights Movement saw the value in what Claudette did, and recast the whole thing with a light skinned respectable lady, Rosa Parks. No shade on them, that was what they had to do to be heard across the country. They had to use a demure woman that would make people say “Well that’s just nonsense. That Rosa Parks lady is obviously being wronged.”

If you’ve lived to read this in 2021 you know that humans have weird and ugly mixed in with their layered warmth.

And I thought…who else did History leave out because she wasn’t the right sort? History wants a clear heroine, what of the women who were slutty, greedy, annoying, or did good things but also bad ones? Especially ones violating our 21st century values? (Margaret Sanger, y’all. She’s not in my book, neither is Claudette, but she’s an example. The woman who worked her whole life to create Planned Parenthood…but she abhorred abortion and believed in sterilizing people who couldn’t care for their young. So….whaddya gonna do with them apples?)

I’m writing a book about them apples. Those sour, rot spot, hard little apples. Because there were so many times in history where they were the best thing on the menu.

The Rules: You don’t have been a genius like Lovelace and Curie, a Homeric legend like Tubman, a Saint like Joan of Arc…and you can’t just have been an appendage to a great man, nor can you have gotten by on being attractive: you just need to have left a big important mark on history that nobody really appreciates. Cuz you were annoying, fat, weird, or unpopular.

Sometimes all of the above. Ha! I am writing about my people. (And yours too, if you read this blog).

Anyway…it won’t be out for a bit. I…have to write it. Then Simon Element is going to make is SPARKLE. They have to to compete with our internet addled attention spans. OH! I have an illustrator this time too, Lisa Jonte. I picked her, she’s mine. She draws my brain-cartoons. Better than I do in my own head.

NEW BOOK my friends! All hail the fatties and the butterfaces and the loud mouthed sluts! For upon their crooked and unlovely backs, a nation was built.

It won’t be out for awhile…so …. go ahead and buy one of the other books I’ve written. They’re all quite, quite good.

“Are you six like me?” the little boy tottered unsteady on the river rocks in front of Jack. He was much slighter than my son, still…they seemed oddly similar in age.

“I’m ten.” Jack said. Numbers are easy, and his speech patterns didn’t twist on such a simple answer. He was looking past the little boy and said, without rancor “Moof out myway.”

“JACK!” Ellie catches every wrong thing her brother says or does, for this is her mission in life.

“‘Excuse me, please,'” I correct, and Jack repeats me cadence for cadence before I’ve even finished. The little boy is named Auden and he was blocking the Water Monsters that were floating down into Jack’s waiting ambush.

It’s like when a scene in a cartoon allows the viewer to see a child’s imagination morph a stick into a waiting stallion and a tree-fort into a Roman fortress. I can see what Jack sees, a bit. It wasn’t moss and flotsam trailing an eddy in the three inches of river I was allowing him to stand in. They were Water Monsters, in organized attack after being summoned by the “swirlypool” he’d conjured with the wand he’d found on the bank. He’d spun in circles splashing while I fed him a magic spell “Abberkadabber! Floatin’ Potion! Water…martyr.” (I’m surprised to realize how few words rhyme with water.)

Auden’s sister was probably eight, bigger than Jack, sweet and chatty with me while their dad fished on the riverstones just to the side of our chaos. Jack wouldn’t talk to her, and for maybe the first time, I didn’t explain “Jack doesn’t talk much, hon”. I just talked instead, debating over the best quality skipping stones. Ellie was folded into herself on the stones, too old and in a foul mood. Not just because she is 14 but because the drive from lunch to this park had been a long scolding for her.

And she’s right, it was a small thing. It was a dandelion.

We’d come to the riverfront from our town’s little airport. There’s a humble but dependable breakfast and burger joint there. You can sit outside and watch the Cessna’s lift and buzz. The grass around the picnic tables were full of dandelions, of which our yard has none. (The reason is named Juan. He and I have exchanged maybe 200 words in seven years and two houses. I have no specifications for my grass or shrubs, which he likes. He’s not particular about when I remember to pay him, which I like. We are apart and peaceable. But he is good at what he does, and so Jack doesn’t see many dandelions.

I’ve been told “not to look at it this way.” But I do. That the universe gave me a daughter of unusual beauty, intelligence and inner/outer strength. A girl who can grab this world by the literal nards (turns out she’s a SuperAmadeus at Shao Lin Kung-Fu) and do anything.

And a son who is a cool and bubbling brook of peace, an ideal little boy shoving his truck that he built himself through the mud and falling over giggling at Captain Underpants fart jokes. He reads at a near adult level despite talking like a toddler. He writes and illustrates long, authentically mind bending little books and comics. Easy-going, a good sport. Happy.

At home.

The world outside home…Jack is on foreign soil. He’s calm, brave, but he is a stranger here and may always be. His eyes slide over people’s faces. They speak too fast words he doesn’t understand; words that get lost on the tangled synapse from ear to brain. He says almost the right thing to cashiers and waitresses but not quite. He tends to want to chat extra. “I wan a … please it’s a COLE choklit milk not hot. COLE is better. Yes an also, we’re campin on TOOSday.” He thinks they might like to know.

As we left the restaurant, Ellie picked up a very plump and puffy dandelion and held it out, commanding “Blow. No, Jack, blow on the dandelion!” He approaches her cautiously, ready for something boring or bad to happen but, interest piqued all the same. I came closer as she said, “Like this, Jack” in exasperation, because he is literal and was puffing his cheeks out to blow on top of the flower.

So she blew…and the wind caught it, or she thought it would be funny, or it was just dandelion fluff, and it went straight into his face. He flinched, covered his face, ducked down. He didn’t cry, he didn’t say anything. But he didn’t like it. The butt of the joke again. Something that might have been cool turned out to hurt a little. He tuned back out of the world and went on his way to the car.

And she smiled.

My most beloved sunshine, my daughter, my pride, the finest composite person I may know. She had on dark mirrored glasses that made her face too adult, hiding the child’s soul I would have seen in her eyes, and she smiled that she’d caused him discomfort. It was fun that he was hurt, just a little.

I spent a lot of money to argue with a therapist that when your older siblings make fun of you or call you names or screw with your head when you’re a kid … that it’s teasing and that’s how a lot of people show love. And I still partially believe it. For me.

Not for my son. Not for a heart was made without jealousy or cruelty. Not by one of the three people destined to love.

“You do not treat your brother that way,” I hissed. “Get in the car.”

Ellie was shocked. It was a dandelion. It was funny. He wasn’t hurt. It was a joke.

“Fun? Did he LIKE it?”

“No?”

“Then it’s you bullying your brother. Not teasing. I watched you. You didn’t smile until you saw you’d hurt him and then …that sick wicked little grin. NO MORE.” I was sputtering and too spare on intellect or reason. I knew my own stuff was burbling through, acid biting holes through my careful parenting. But I was so appalled. So betrayed.

And I hurt my girl. I pinned her like a butterfly, just because she existed, not because she completely deserved to be pierced and put on display. What older sibling doesn’t torture their younger ones? She doesn’t see him as “special needs.” She doesn’t see autism. She doesn’t see how non-obnoxious he actually is as siblings go…seldom interfering with her, rarely asking for anything, not even protesting the many times he’s shafted.

And she doesn’t see what lays ahead for him. How every bit of strength we give him now is a stockpile against what’s coming. She just sees Jack.

Today I needed her to understand. I can’t force her to take up the mantle of her brother’s protector and help him grow. But she must know what it all means.

“He’s ten, Ellie, and he’s never had a friend. Do you get that? All he has is you and me and Dad. And me and Dad aren’t always gonna be here.”

“He’s not a good friend to me he says NO all the time when I ask him to do stuff with me…”

“When you turn a nice walk to the playground into him being an automatic loser by shouting ‘let’s race!’ and taking off? When you make him get on the trampoline and forbid him to bounce – he has to stand their and appreciate you?”

“He doesn’t ACT like he loves me.”

I slammed the wheel with my fist, “He doesn’t act like he loves even ME, Ellie!” I was crying but I caught it, I caught the swirlypool before it gathered tsunami force. I’ve been working on this since he was three years old and began shrugging away from hugs. I remembered what I’d been taught and parroted it for her.

“But it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love us. He just doesn’t show it in the way we want him too. We need to work with what he can show us.”

Jack, sitting in the back without even thinking to claim his turn in the front seat, watched the world pass from deep inside his comfortable mind. I had to make the point finer. I called over my shoulder, and remembered him the two children who’d spent the last 40 minutes within three feet of him, calling him by name, playing with the same rocks and swirls and sticks, the ones that ran to say hi to him on the basis of his “only true fans will appreciate” Spongebob Goofy Goober t-shirt. “Did you like the kids you met?”

“Din. There’er no kids, Mom. Well…dere were some kids…but I had a stick and d’magic in the swirlpools.”

I stared at my daughter. Do you see? Do you hear? Can your heart make that leap now from competitive sibling to Big Sister? Please, PLEASE!

“I love you So. Much,” I told my daughter, tears down both our cheeks. “Baby, Jack is YOURS. Do you understand that? Not just yours to screw with for fun. He’s YOURS. Your own brother. Your precious thing, your challenge. I can’t make you love him but I will make sure you understand what you lose when you don’t.”

via Heartstring Gifts

“I do love him!”

“Thoughts aren’t love, Baby! Grown-up love is when you do extra for someone else, give up something comfortable, inconvenience yourself. Wanting them to have it as good as they can and helping make it that way. Love is something you do in our home, not just feel.”

At home Jack watched the Green Fairy scene from Moulin Rouge on repeat. Which I used to do before he was born, but he found it all on his own. I waited a half hour before I went to my daughter’s room and rocked her on her bed while she cried about everything, about friends and loneliness and being shamed and how unfair unfair unfair. And she was right, she was right. Everything she said was true. But so was everything I had said. So I just whispered to her, “I love you my only sunshine. I love you. No matter what I love you.”

A half hour ago I heard down the hall, “Ellie?? You wan play toys ouside wit me? I play zoob n you can have Barbies?”

“Uh…yeah. Yeah okay.”

“Dank you Ellie!!” and four loud feet downstairs and the backdoor slamming.

Thank you Ellie. Thank you so much.

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*The following is a work of fiction except for the true parts.

Oh don’t be sad. Build a support system through outreach, activities, and kindness. Gather to you family and friends. When you begin to hurt, to fall, reach out to your community. Don’t put all your problems on any one person. But let friendship, affection and kindness help you back into yourself.

But what if they’re all so weary all ready? And what if you’re very hard to handle, so heavy even in good times. Too probing, too invasive, too needy, near incapable of gentle polite society.

When this happens you go to the last people who have to love you. Even if they don’t like you.

At rock bottom you have that one person who’ll hand you a clean blanket and a flat pillow for the night, and help you find the first couple handholds the next day. Or keep you covered until you’re ready to seek them yourself.

I…knew better. This was foolishness. My brother talked to me briefly after our mother died, and then never again in the eight years since.

Can home live inside another person’s voice? The resonance of your father when he wasn’t angry? The tones of accidental utter kindheartedness taught by your mother from toddlerhood? The sounds of a nervous but adored teenager comforting you when you burned your leg on the engine block of the little green Honda motorbike when you were five?

I knew better, tho. I mean, he can’t have been clearer unless he’d actually ever talked to me. He has…never talked to me.

He blocked my number, from me and from the snoop-website I once paid to locate it. His email goes to his wife. He lives secluded on the last fading line of the “grid”. I went to his home once years ago, when I realized with shock I wasn’t supposed to. But he wouldn’t talk to me and threatened to call the police for trespassing.

“Why?”

“Leave now!”

All in shaky texts I sent from the cattle gate at the bottom of his land. I stopped because the texts were showing up 150 miles away, popping up on my little girl’s Minion Rush game she borrowed my ipad for.

Why? Why?

I wrote letters. I looked for intercessors who could explain it, even broker peace. There were none, either all dead or unwilling to get involved. Or not nearly fond enough of me to try.

But I kept at it. Because…see…see…there’s been a mistake.

I told her, after I signed the paper alone in that hospital room, after I told them to turn off the machines, that she could go, we’d take care of each other. I held her and told her she’d done so well by us… we’d all be all right. We had each other.

I lied to her. I lied Mom.

I had…three random pieces of information. My brother’s name. His town. A rough idea of what his work was…but researching what is forgotten and buried is what I do.

The first time no one answered the number I found I was relieved. It wasn’t meant to be.

Two weeks later…it just happened. A squint at the digits on the laptop, doublechecking for transposition as I stabbed them one by one into my phone…I always get numbers transposed. Especially in dreams, and I have had this dream a lot.

A woman answered and I asked for him by the name everyone has called him since he left home at 18, not his real name. Only a few people are left call him his real name.

“Who should I say is calling?” The lady sounded like all the ladies I knew in that town. Tough and always looking for the wool you might being hiding behind your back. Not over her eyes, Sunshine. Not today.

I don’t carry wool. It makes me itch.

“His sister.”

A door opening…a machine grinding down while that name that’s not his real one was called sharply.

“For you. Says she’s your sister.”

“Hello?”

Don’t think o his voice it’s him o big brother home home home big brother please dad mom sister laugh family remember remember home?

“Big brother. It’s Therese. Things are bad. Can I come to you?”

“No.” He spoke without pause, without a stumble, in a light inflection, good nature. No, I don’t know where I left the remote. No, I don’t think you’ll need to put on the snow tires.

People were listening.

“This is my work line.”

When I cry every word is hyperventilated and stilted.

“No. Other. Way. No other. Phone or way. To talk. To you.”

Cheerful but with a anger in the undertone, I’d hear it, but the people around him wouldn’t.

“Did you try (his wife)?”

I have. For years. In every way. I don’t try anymore.

“She’s. Not. My Brother. She’s not. My brother.” Forcing words over wet and slippery jags in my throat. My time is ticking down I only have seconds. I have to…I have to…”I LOVE YOU.”

“I love you, too!” Cheerful and easy again. The words I think I need to hear so I can get put together again. But they tear me instead, with the kind of force that can rip flesh and leave it bloody and ragged. And perhaps, that is not, in my case, a metaphor.

I love you doesn’t mean the same thing for us. For me it means, “I will get dirty hands for you. Dirty to my neck. If someone talks shit to you I will shove you out of the way and decimate them…I can talk very fast. I will forgive as soon as the flash of anger fades. I understand why you’re being rotten. I will try and see where you are empty and offer to fill in what I can. I will forget that I love you, maybe a lot. But it will come back to me like lightening wakefulness, a phone ringing in the night, if you need me.”

I don’t know what he thinks it means. I don’t think he was fibbing for the sake of those around him. But …. I think it’s a placeholder term. “I have your same blood. So I guess I love you.” Maybe just an acknowledgment of shared DNA.

He hung up, because it was a work line. I felt him slip off and drop away and I wailed and I’ll never see him again or hear that voice, beautiful voice. He’s older than me. I’m not young. He doesn’t want me and he will die without need to see me, talk to me. I will regret the thing I don’t know what I did every day left in my life.

So I don’t know all what I did or said then. He’s not the first to reject me this year but he is the only one who I can’t convince myself has a right to. The historical society “friends” I made, well that’s just a shame. My old best friend? I cause her pain and she has plenty.

But if the one who threw and caught you when you were four cannot love you and catch you…won’t even reach out a hand to snag your shirt…who ever will?

If he finds me unbearable, who will ever bear me?

And so I slipped over the event horizon, alone in a corner of a big house.

When my husband, whose love I don’t always understand anymore, but was that day a thing of action, came up and saw and said “You have to go to the hospital” I said no…I’ve already been. The stabilize you medically and kick you out and it cost thousands and you feel humiliated and stigmatized and more lonesome than you can imagine. Besides if you force me they can only hold me three days and I’ll just act sane…I have had so much therapy and I’m very smart in that particular way, and they are harried and tired and narrowly focused.

I can remember flipping from grown to child, sharp and bright to suffocating smog. Gus is a fine man to try and reason with that.

He said “Three days might be long enough to save you.” he started desperately noticing the once harmless oddities in my office, the orange medications in my pretty blue chocolates tin, our great grandfather’s straight razor in my display case, the leftover strychnine tablets we found in an ancient doctor’s kit screwed into a display box on my desk.

He…I can’t remember. I couldn’t see him. I had a pillow. I held it and it was like holding me but tiny when they loved me. And I told her I loved her and it would be okay.

I recited my own dull version of Dorothy Parker’s poem. Important things must be done carefully. Thus:

“It would take at least four full bottles of these to be fatal. No jump from a building under five stories can guarantee fatality and there aren’t any that high here. Wrist cutting is for the movies or the brave; it would need to be done with near surgical precision to bleed out before I’d change my mind. And I’m scared of hanging and guns.”

You might as well live.

But.

“I like the ocean tho,” I said. “So cold and clean and it’s infinite and it roars like it loves you and you walk in when the tides right and no one would have to find you…you’d just go into the infinite. The suffocation would hurt but not so bad. If the ocean has you you’d be safe no matter what, you know?”

I do remember looking up from my pillow and saying, “I know I have thinking errors.”

I acknowledged that I’m forgetting how much I love my children, and that they wouldn’t be all right without me. But it didn’t really…matter? The furthest cliffs of your mind are buried in clouds. You can’t see clearly and your oxygen is thin.

We settled on a cheap but clean hotel forty minutes away. Far from the ocean. I had him drop me off in the car, I checked in for five days. I knew in the back of my brain that the tiny losses of comfort and being forced to make do all on my own would redirect my thinking. And that would be enough to reset me, likely.

That had been my plan, I guess, when I asked to go to my brother. I’d sleep in his garage. A tent in his yard if he didn’t want me in his house. Just I’d be safe and I could think and love would be there. He’d fight it but mom said…mom always said he was so gentle and loving and couldn’t bear to see anyone suffer so he’d remember if he couldn’t ignore me, and he’d hold me with his arms that are like mine by stronger, like Dad’s but tighter, like Mom’s but rougher.

But I KNEW better. I knew better than to call and I knew better than to give Gus my Resume…I knew but I didn’t feel.

Gus knew a little, tho. Before Gus let me go into the night I needed to find my way through, he bent near me ear in the shower where I sat listless, jerking out the words “But. He’s Home. He’s all that I. Have that’s still. Home. He said he’d. Take care of. I told mom. I told mom.”

“Home died with your mother,” Gus said, his own eyes red in fear and empathy. “That man is not your home.” I’M your home. We’re your home, he pleaded with me. You ARE home. But he was trying to talk to a grown woman who wasn’t there. The child on the floor of the ugly tiled shower knew better.

I knew better. No wool today, Sunshine.

I stayed on the fourth floor of the hotel. In the hospital, that used to be the mental ward. Not high enough to guarentee fatality, even if the windows opened more than a crack.

And then I came down.

And I hurt so much because all the problems were waiting down here. But I can see them now. They’re small enough to see. Not infinite like the ocean or buried at the top of a cliff. So I will be okay. And I can see my son wants Christmas to come. And my daughter wants to talk about her sad teacher. And my husband needs me and he is a good man. I’m their home.

I’m my home.

It’ll be ok.

Pioneers used buffalo turds for fire fuel, y’know. They had too, there’s long stretches of treeless-ness in the middle of America. But “buffalo chips” are Nature’s Duraflame logs. Grass digested, compacted, dried by sun with a spark friendly infusement of methane perhaps…the words of one pioneer diarist I’ve read said “You might think it unpleasant, but the rain and the elements have washed away anything one would consider disagreeable.”

This was the logic I was using this morning, crawling around my back yard, flinging dog crap with my bare hands. I’ve got a tool…of sorts. It came with the house and I imagine it’s somehow for the moss-choked and twisted fruit trees I accidentally own (it was winter when I bought the place…I didn’t know all the 50 year old scraggle trees in the backyard were load-bearing). It’s a small spindly rake, and I use it to scrape and scoop the crap left by my three dogs off my grass.

Or I mostly do. It’s September, I haven’t de-pooped the back yard since April. I was bad at balancing the poop on the little rake and badminton-ing it into the bushes. So I considered history and relative hygiene practices of the world at large, and then proceeded to hold myself to a very low standard.

I began to consider each turd on an individual basis. If it appeared to be of an age at which the elements had washed away all…or most…of what would be disagreeable, I just snatched and tossed the clump of sun-cemented hairball, bulk kibbles and bright undigested food wrapper shreds with my thumb and and pointer.

This is not how I want it. Not really.

My lawn and my life should be a glory. I have all the basic parts. A guy that mows it and keeps it trim. Sprinklers, though our dog ate the wire that connected the automated system, so someone has to put their head fully into a hole by the corner of the house and twist one of four pieces of plastic that control random banks of sprinklers. I can never remember which way to twist and which tiny wheel controls what area of the land. I bet he pooped that wire out somewhere in the lawn, too. I should have that fixed.

I love grass. But you’d not believe me. Mine is every shade of sadness. Crispy brown neglect, dog-pee acid yellow, and random, lush patches of mossy fairy-tale green made sad by their earnest and unsupported existence.

“This is what is wrong with me,” I said. “This yard is my life. O, the potential. The beauty. The sturdy round picnic table modeled on the indestructible sort Dairy Queen uses. The double wide hammock with heavy duty frame. The foodstuffs falling from trees, sweet and burrowed through by bugs more industrious than I. I could have cans of home preserves. Ciders. I could have a fort deep in the laurel trees for the children. I could fix the sprinklers and lay in my hammock in shade and sun, cracking the hazelnuts that fall into my lap. They are always green or rotten with worms because I’ve never learned how to harvest them.  I could run my dogs with tennis balls and colored ropes twists so they’d stop digging out from under the fence from boredom to be picked up by the cops down by the college stadium.

I’ve set the components up for to have all that is Splendid. 

But I leave those parts out there in the sun and I am in here, in this room. Only staring out at one tree. And even it is more of a bush.

I could I could I could.

I don’t. I roll myself around until the sun is too high (11am) scratching dog feces loose from the grass and throwing it into the nearest bush. When I’ve shuffled too far from bushes…I stop collecting the poop. It just doesn’t matter and my back is sore.

I have been waiting for this lawn since I left the one my father tended to precision care 25 years ago. Lawns are a privilege.  There are no obstacles to glory. It’s all in place and it waits for me to descend and innervate it with love and life.

But my life’s motto is layered across my neck, my tongue, my chest, in leaded paint. “Don’t go outside. It’s just easier to wait for the elements to dry up all the shit. Stay put til then.”

But when that happens, the it will happen because the dogs will be dead and the children grown and the fruit trees dried out and exhausted.

How do you figure out how to care?

 

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Sharecropping family, colorized, 1935. Also known as Rednecks.

 

“Redneck.” My daughter asked me what it meant. I’d never been asked that before. And I’d never known the answer til I said it.

“It’s a derogatory slur for the poor and working class.”

It’s a word for someone who likes different music than you do. It’s a word for people who couldn’t or didn’t go to college. It’s a word for people who like Bible quotes as much as poetry. It’s a word for people who didn’t get to stay inside during Quarantine. It’s a word people use to make themselves feel superior.

Those necks got red from bending over outdoor labor to put food in their bellies, don’t forget it.

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How necks get red. By making our food. 

Now, “hipster,” that’s still an acceptable insult. Squick. All those poser-dorks can go pound salt.

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tal·is·man
/ˈtaləsmən,ˈtalizmən/
noun
“an object that is thought to have magic powers and to bring good luck.”

I have a deep abiding love for convenience stores. They are clean and succinct. They don’t require anything extra of me, neither bra nor brush, conversation or confrontation. They give me protein, caffeine, and those pillowy  “Bon Appetit” cream danishes that can set the worst of worlds to rights.

There are lots of convenience stores in this small college town, and each owned and operated by different immigrant families. There are many generations working different shifts in most of them. The wend and warp of accented English decreases with the youth of the employee; while the ease of the (“fake”, I heard a Ukrainian describe it) Polite American Smile increases.


Americans do well with politeness. Maybe a holdover from a time where everyone was struggling and reliant on community in this strange new land, or because, to quote the nearly impenetrable Robert Heinlein whom I’ve never read, “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”

For whatever reason, Americans tend to try to put strangers at ease.

No one is at ease lately.

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My State is enforcing masks in all businesses, including, fantastically, ones that require use of the mouth. Except briefly in Lincoln County,a coastal town, which briefly decreed the law didn’t apply to People of Color. Which made everyone just lose their shit, as is to be expected, because we are all barely maintaining the integrity of our collective social sphincters as it is.

This is how masks work in my town.

I walk into any of the convenience stores and watch sweaty cashiers hurriedly put the straps of their black utilitarian masks back over their ears so quickly it must sting. They move with the kind of furtive misery that comes being caught in an immoral act their body desperately wants to continue. They are so tired. Tired from standing for eight hours or more, stocking shelves with bound mouths and wrenching an undesired elegance into their aching wrists to give change back without touching skin.





I say, “Dude, I’m only wearing this for you. I don’t…don’t really need ’em.”





I don’t?





The headlines still scream for a firm, fear-based click, but the charts they lead to aren’t scary to me anymore, now that months of increased data and knowledge have cropped the frightful height of their lines and winnowed the width of their thick bars. The cases rise, but that isn’t useful information, as I’ve nothing to compare it to. I believe cases rise because testing has risen.





Now that “underlying condition” follows the description of those who’ve died, making these pandemic deaths hard to distinguish in number and detail from that of a standard obit page.





Now that I’ve seen the disease pass through friends and family with the same tepid aggression and unfair selectivity of any bad flu.


I don’t think Covid is fake, nor do I think it’s a barely contained world-ender. I think it is a bad and very scary virus. The scariest part being that we didn’t know anything about it.  Remember, this is the Information Age. We are used to knowing EVERYTHING with a well worded Google Search. But the return hits on Covid were nothing but confirmed death mixed with speculation. It’s all we had.

So we took precautions until the data pile was large enough sift. And it was good that we did. Now we have to balance that data, which suggests the danger is less than we prepared for, with fear that we still aren’t sure. And then do one more balancing act…knowing that you can’t protect everyone and deciding to let go and let life trip back into sloppy, risky motion. That is very difficult.




I’m not particularly at risk, nor anyone I love. It affects my lens on all of this, naturally. If my father were still alive, suffering his last years with a blood clot burned on his brain, and lungs choked up with debris, I’d be afraid yet. I’d keep him separate and safe as possible. Because the masks wouldn’t.
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via futurism.com

But that isn’t how it goes in the convenience store in my town, in your town. The cashier first relaxes in the shoulders, then push their masks up their hot brown faces to cap mussed hair, and I slip mine down my chin to smile.

Then the door jangles again and we’re both caught criminals, hurriedly pulling the masks back. But the guy who walked in came with his t-shirt collar over his nose. He’s not really worried, then. He was just doing it for us, too.





And we all three reveal ourselves, like recognizing Masonic rings or distinct religious terminology. Guilty smiles, relief. We’re all “cool.” That is, corrupt, non-believers in the magic of the talisman, but still trying to respect our community by wearing it.


We’re Americans. And Americans, for the most part, try to be polite and make others feel comfortable. So we wear the masks because we know some people need us to. Not necessarily to protect them from a virus, but to ease their wrecked spirits and divert the weight of their fears.

We can do that. Masks are the current Polite American Smile, and fake or not, it’s how we do things here.

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Barb and Mr. Barb (in two years, I’ve never heard his name) have been good neighbors. They made peace with our dogs and children and the constant brutal cacophony of “memories being made” and “vengeance being wrought on the weak” that comes constantly from our side of the fence. Mr. Barb doesn’t talk except the explosions of swears that time (well, fourth time) our German Shepherd dug into his yard.

But that he kept the F bombs down that long speaks well to his character.

We were the first “young family” to buy a house in this neighborhood since it was built in the mid-sixties. The houses are old suburban-grand, heavy and wide, with yards old enough to support healthy sequoias and laurel bushes grown tall and twisted enough to meet their bows.

My best friend, who is a jaded and artistic man, says pictures he receives of my home life are a mixture of Andrew Wyeth crossed with a Diane Arbus. Which is very flattering and quite spot on.

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Arbus

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Plus Wyeth

 

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Equals Oneill.

 

I have not left the house since March 9th, except twice to drive my kids to the woods so that they might stand looking cold and put-out in a more natural environment than our yard, and the three times late at night to look for my dogs because animals hate quarantine also. I succeeded once. The police where very nice the other times. Interesting note, the soil under a 60 yr old sequoia is very pillowy and light, being mostly made from old pine needles. Not pine. Pine? You know what I mean.

I spent a few days of preparation in the back yard… mostly me laying a dirty Pendelton towel on the mud-soft grass, wiggling my legs in the air and shouting “MOUNTAIN POSE! WARRIOR POSE! HALF MOON DOWNWARD CORPSE POSE!” and other faintly remembered yoga terms from the required PE credit I took in college. I swigged a caffeine shot, put on my teal Plus Petite Half Off Clearance Price Blowout Woman Within “yoga” pants…and the pink “running” shoes I bought at same sale…they are striped and wide and made of mesh…I went on a walk.

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Now turn up your filters ’til you can really SEE that teal. Cuz it’s so so SO TEAL. (Bonus, window overlooking Barb’s yard!)

Leaving the house caused a fracas. They all wanted to come. I should be grateful. Family…and…all that wholesome…yeah.

It’s just that, alone, I’m a tubby lady in teal stretch pants perambulating. With the rest of my household I’m the caboose of a frickin’ gypsy caravan. The kind townsfolk would tell to move along while holding pitchforks. I explained “I’m doing this because I haven’t been moving for months and my back is starting to seize up when I go further from my bed than the place I hide my chocolate from you guys. I’m not telling you where but you can bet it’s very close. So I’m just going down the street.”

They were desperate to get out. To have a purpose.

My son put on the clothes I’d devested him of earlier that day as a statement of intent that he WOULD take a bath. I’m not allowed to bathe him anymore -he asserts his right as an autonomous human to pick which family member creeps on him while he’s naked and soapy and I am last on his list. His teenage sister is ahead of me. He’d rather be licked clean by the Chi-zu. My constant refrain “Scrub between your butt cheeks for REAL, Jack” will be something he rises sweaty from in a nightmare 30 years from now.

So back went on the stained and tattered jeans, the robot shirt he’s slept in for three days.

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My daughter isolates in place while in place.

My daughter was freshly showered and in a new nightshirt, for these are days of such things. To this she added an enormous Slanket creation, and thick white geriatric tennis shoes, peeling veneer and toothless Velcro no impediment. Gus..ehh he’s fine. He still goes out and thus is ready for excursions. He did run back twice through, like the original housewife of this home might have done in the 1960s, worrying that the dogs might escape again through an open door, or eat the Oreos left on the counter.

We walked a small loop. I’ve never seen so many neighbors out and about. Dogs walked, hedges trimmed, flowers potted, grandchildren (fully dressed, hair combed, not screaming) holding clipboards to check off homemade neighborhood bingo.

And not one person sustained eye contact with us.

And that is how today I realized we’re “That Family” in our regal old part of town.

And we DESERVE it.

By the corner fire hydrant Jack shouted in his Minionese patter, “I got the lead on this, guys,” which his sister disagreed with by planting a huge hand (seriously huge hand for a 13 year old girl) directly on top his skull and yanking backward. He squeals like a dying rabbit being chomped by a dying piglet? But so much louder. She finds new ways to cause him to make that horrifying noise every day. At least four new ones on that walk alone.

Initially I try to offset this behavior by loudly observing “THESE GARDENS LOOK SO HEALTHY AND WELL KEPT!” as we wheezed and rattled past the well-to-do retirees in sun hats and matching gloves. The walk is not easy on me, my body is a sloppy affair, muscles bunched and bones moping. I have teal pants. Have I mentioned the pants? That are teal?

Jack falls face first in dramatic repose on the corner of a well trimmed lawn and my immediate, pinched nerve snap of:

“HEY! Get up right now! No turds are to be left on the grass!” morphs into a pleading “HEY…don’t be turrrrkeys…guys.”

“Punch nicely pulled,” Gus murmurs behind me.

Meanwhile my son decides to walk the journey with his eyes closed as a personal fitness goal. My daughter keeps running in different directions to check all license plates in the vicinity, because some number combinations allow her to come screaming back and punch her father twice on the arm.

And I begin to shout…it’s just not worth the effort to both walk and appear to be one of the Nice Sort. Turkey becomes turd. Pleads become threats. Threats become close-leaning toward small ears whispering of terrors to come.

We trundle into our cul-de-sac while the couple next door leave it. They are young and beautiful and they are renting. Their dog, clean and not the sort to crap in the kitchen, seems willing to make friends when Jack chirps “Hey Dog-guy!” but the couple walk on with eyes harshly averted. I consider being offended, but wait…for two years I’ve been meaning to check how much of me can be seen when I’m on the toilet from their house…the bathroom has no fan so I always keep the window cracked a couple inches. So perhaps they have every right to feel uncomfortable.

Barb,  I told early on, “I noticed the sun never shines directly into my office, so…I’m not gonna bother with curtains. Funny thing is I don’t always bother with clothes tho, so, heads up!” Ha ha but seriously…seriously Barb. 

She made a dismissing wave. “That’s fine. He (Husband Name Withheld) used to sunbathe naked in the back yard.”

“That’s neat!” I said. Eighty year old fellas should be able to happily air their junk in their own backyards, I think. None of my kid’s windows overlook their yard anyway, just the office I will be stumbling naked into over the next few decades.

“No.” Barb is kind but suffers no nonsense. “No I put a stop to that.”

Turns out you coulda have let him, I think, Barb. The neighborhood’s going downhill.

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Kookaburras sit in the old cherry trees…trading screams and making memories.