Category Archives: Memoirs

Bright Pink Lipstick

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I’ve spent the last several years writing blog posts about the Recession. Here’s how it started: an old friend of mine got ahold of me. It turns out he was an editor for a website about the new economy, and he wanted me to write my story. This is a familiar sort of occurrence among people of A Certain Age: thanks to the wild accessibility of really pretty much everyone through Facebook, we are all reconnecting with folks we were too drunk or too careless to keep in contact with. For some time now, I’ve been ludicrously rewarded for decades of bad behavior. Turns out that all of my exes and a whole bunch of lost friends are excellent people, which makes me feel a whole lot better about my taste, but even worse about my carelessness and the time I lost.

Which brings me to: carlessness. My word processing program doesn’t want to even acknowledge it’s a word; it’s just a snippet of the zeitgeist and that takes longer to integrate. It’s too close to carelessness, and maybe that resemblance is a bad thing. You see, outside of places like Portland and maybe New York City, not having a car–especially when you are the suburban mother of three–is a sign and symbol of having Blown It Big Time. But we are without a car. It was an easy decision at the time: we couldn’t pay the rent. What we had was a paid-for, valuable hunk of metal parked in the driveway and a roof we preferred to keep over our heads. Some people make another choice: to move in with family, perhaps. “Temporarily,” of course. But it was no accident that we had found ourselves in Northern California, far away from both of our parents’ households in Texas. We had severed the ropes of that safety net and had no regrets. You see, there are some sorts of safety that are so fraught with danger and damage that calling upon them feels like a sort of suicide.

So we carry on, working menial jobs and trying to shake money from trees. We take our children on errands in our bike trailers, pedaling in the sweltering heat or in downpours, faces held in caricature expressions of grim determination. It’s been an adventure. A noble experiment. So many others around us are in similar straits, so this whole thing–newfound poverty–has an air of camaraderie to it, and whole new ways of doing things have taken root. We’ve done it all: bartered, gotten backyard chickens, grown a vegetable garden. I’ve written so many essays about the New Simplicity that I’ve started to think of my style as “Chicken Soup for the Recessionista’s Soul.” This ghetto for my writing is eye-rolling in its tendency to put a positive spin on things but still keeps my work out there, in front of appreciative eyes.

But something horrible has happened to me this year, and I don’t know what to do. At some point–was it after the hundredth “no?” The thousandth? Was it day number 1350 of not having enough, or maybe day 1351? But somewhere along the line I realized this is not going away, and that struggling to pay the utilities is a monthly reality with no end in sight. That making Top Ramen for dinner had stopped being an amusing indulgence in crappiness, and has become–at times–economic necessity. I look at my children and I want to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry you’re having to wear this need and pretend it’s okay, I’m sorry there are no birthdays at pizza parlors or dance lessons. I’m sorry I can’t send you with a handful of change that I don’t have so you can get a candy bar at the corner store. I’m sorry you notice what other families enjoy–simple things, a drive to the country and a weekend of camping–and you notice the difference and have to ask me why. I’m so sorry I cannot provide for you the things that were provided for me. I’m sorry that a simple trip to the doctor to check for pinkeye has to be a negotiation based on the twenty bucks in co-pay expense versus what may be curable with time and the hive mind of online medical care advice. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I wear bright pink lipstick and have my cruiser bike decorated like a parade float. I let my children dress with hippie freedom. We played by the rules and we lost everything that offered us safety and security, so to hell with the rules, I teach them. You will get screwed-over six ways to Sunday, so find the hidden magic, I say. Do you see that smooth brown stone? Pick it up and shift it towards the light, and you will see small bits of glitter like tiny stars. I try to tout this lifestyle as one we would have chosen back when we were flush with income and silly material wants, and YES: there are lessons we’ve learned. Yes, you can be a band of hobos in satin and velvet castoffs, and yes, there are blackberries that grow wild all over this town.

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But I’m done. The truth is that I’m toiling for not a lot over minimum wage, and those chickens in the back yard have come home to roost. There’s only so long you can go on before all your resources are tapped, and the barrel you’re scraping has well and truly reached bottom. I know we are required to be  grateful for what we have: no one in the family has chronic health issues, we have good public schools for our kids to attend, and we live in a patch of paradise that makes living without a vehicle or air conditioning a tolerable option. We have–praise ye gods!–health insurance from my husband’s soul-sucking, low-paying retail job. We have a marriage where our struggles manifest themselves in silent regret and disappointment (and a lot of space between us in our marital bed) versus thrown fists or addictions. But no amount of health-insurance-provided antidepressants can prop me up forever, and it’s me who has to keep this ship afloat. It’s doubtless my lifelong sense of entitlement that has probably contributed to my lack of ability to turn things around and make something from nothing, which is probably a story for another day. I’m forty-two years old. I have three children. I pull them where they need to go. I look at my husband while we sit on the porch and the hand I reach out to him is conciliatory. Apologetic.

My Husband Had a Vasectomy and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

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(This piece first appeared in the Huffington Post)

My husband is the introverted type, so out of respect for his privacy, I’d like to talk to you about his vasectomy.

We put it off longer than we should have. I guess the ideal time might have been between baby no. 2 and baby no. 3, but we’re super happy with the one that slid underneath the closing door, all Indiana Jones-style: “Waaaaiiiiit you have one moooore!” But at some point you have to just make the arbitrary decision that you’re done meeting new offspring.

So we finally made the call that it was time to turn the spigot off. An informal survey revealed that getting a vasectomy was the birth control method of choice among the vast majority of older parents in our circle. It’s minimally-invasive, complications are rare, and (who knew?) our insurance covered it. Seemed as though the only prerequisite was a few days’ freedom to convalesce on the couch and several bags of frozen peas.

We described the procedure to our children, the youngest of whom is five, figuring they’d naturally wonder what was going to make Daddy walk around the house in a half-crouch in a Vicodin-created fugue state. We spent some time describing the vas deferens, and the special seeds that help Mama’s egg become a baby, carefully playing up the benefits (no additional sibling rivalry!) and downplaying the discomfort (it won’t hurt more than getting a shot).

Yet still, the very next time I brought my youngest, Molly (who’s five) out in public, she announced to any and all within earshot: “My daddy’s getting his penis cut off.” I protested with nervous giggles the first few times, but after awhile took great satisfaction in merely raising my eyebrows and glaring silently.

In honor of the procedure, my husband’s coworkers served two types of cheese balls with carrots and celery sticks, artfully arranged. Oh: and mixed nuts.

I kind of assumed I’d be on The Pill until menopause rendered my womb a windswept desert nurturing nothing but a bleached rock outcropping and occasional tumbleweed, but lo! Verdant and lavishly fertile, and already relieved of the threat of childbearing. It’s a medical miracle.

I’d like to chalk up the following unsuspected side effect to the array of painkillers my husband was on when he came home from the surgery: when I arrived from taking our Molly to her first dance class, I sat next to him, all propped with pillows and sipping water through a straw, and flipped through the photos I’d snapped on my phone. Molly’s leotard and tutu are far from new — like all of her clothes, they’re hand-me-downs several times over. So the crotch hangs to mid-thigh and the tutu is torn and hanging low on one side. There’s a small rip in one knee of the black tights. At first glance there is nothing pathetic about this picture; she’s a happy girl, hands on hips, looking off to the side. She has the sort of hardscrabble disposition you would expect from the youngest of three. But of our children, she is the only dancer. Music moves her physically. My husband slid past this picture and then slid back and regarded it silently for a moment. I felt the wonder and grief behind his simple words: “That’s my last baby.”

And in a flash: my own times of bed confinement, postponing early labor. Cups of crushed ice and marshmallows, surer signs of pregnancy than a positive test for me. Vernix-covered little red crying faces, one after the other, lain against my chest. There was the cutting of the umbilical cord, always a bittersweet moment, giving that baby over to the world and all its variables, the concept of protection an illusion. And then there is this last cut. A “relatively pain-free procedure.” And just like that, we say goodbye to all of it, say with certainty that we are done, we are parents to these three and no more, no longer getting to rewind the tape with each newborn, to relive that particular kind of falling in love.

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Great Phosphor Clouds of Mini-Stars

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A low-level funk is like a low-grade fever, in that it leaves you far more uncomfortable without the dramatic cleansing blaze of a fully feverish kiln-bake. Being semi-blue lingers. My body even feels it. I don’t like mid-range. I don’t even put fans on Medium, it’s go full-blast or go off altogether. This is the having of an itch you can’t find. You chase it listlessly for the sweet small relief of scratching, but wherever you go it vanishes from your fingertips and you’re left twitchy and dissatisfied. I need a purifying burn, a rake over the coals. I think it’s mostly the silly suburban allergies complaint. New spring life brings chartreuse tender leaves but also great phosphor clouds of prickly yellow mini-stars invading all my soft and vulnerable places. I wish I could sneeze.

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Moving to Villa Villekulla

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This piece  first appeared on my blog at shareable.net.

We were moving from Texas to northern California, under economic duress. There is something about driving long distances (as opposed to flying) that makes it easier handle the change from one environment to a vastly different one. In the course of your journey you can see the land swell and flatten, observe the terrain and climate change from curving mountainous roads to vast swathes of desert, and note the commensurate architectural adaptations. These are microhabitats, with each community and household navigating a different course.

We were leaving an exurban planned community that had seemed as desolate and unwelcoming as the lunar surface. When we arrived in the house we had chosen and rented by proxy, what was immediately surprising and thrilling to me was how urban it felt. Railroad tracks were a few hundred yards away from our small one-way street, and the corner strip of businesses included a mortuary, pawn shop, donut shop, and a narrow convenience store with two small aisles stacked high with Mexican pastries and cheap wine.

My positive reaction was short-lived. Although our house had a lovely rock facade, a deep and cozy front porch, and an apple tree whose blossoms were in full flower, when we went in, our economic downturn took a shift to the visceral. The walls were cheaply paneled, the aged carpeting was a matted and mottled light brown, the appliances were vintage early-eighties, and the windows either had rotten and water-logged wooden sills or cheap metal frames.

We sat on the decrepit spiral staircase (which looked hand-built by a carpenter of dubious abilities) and snapped a family portrait. Day One. Our faces in this photo are tired and apprehensive, the kids in a weary cluster at our knees.

Your home is wherever your bed is, and that very first night, we were all tucked into clean linens in our strange, new, small and oddly shaped rooms. But in the light of day, we still saw the funky junky-ness of this new dwelling of ours. There was a moist quality to the air, and a noticeable whiff of Dogs Who Had Come Before. Where once a balcony had been, there was plywood attached with foam goo forming a new “wall.” The backyard was shabby, with one side of the privacy fence leaning at a near forty-five degree pitch.

There had been a beige luxury to the house we lived in during affluent times. The carpet was so plush, you left perfect footprints squished into its thickness as you made your way (barefoot, naturally) across the room. There was a garden tub with large corner windows inside an expansive master bathroom, quietly humming central heat and air, and appliances with a heavy luster to them. The walls and ceilings met at right angles, with no softness or crumble to the plaster and drywall. Just the crisp reliability of a brand-new home and the suburban neighborhood in which it sat–gated, landscaped, predictable.

In the new/old house, creaky as a wooden ship, you can drop a marble in the farthest interior corner, and it will take a hilariously random path through the rooms, down invisible slopes and channels, until it finally clicks to a stop in the corner that tips deepest into the earth. And there’s even a basement, which is unusual in California. There are Christmas lights swinging from dusty cords down there, and the walls smell like soil and wet concrete.

One room is too small for furniture. But it is not a closet. It HAS a closet.

We added the magic little-by-little, as we went through this transformative journey from the comforts of what we had back then, and into our new, low-income recession life. Like the marble in the corner, we slid down . . . over . . . and through until we came to a stop and stayed. And that was when we painted the walls yellow–an acid citron, like the world’s ugliest crayon, because that’s the best kind of pretty. Against that went aqua furniture, and pink fabric in great swaths over the windows that don’t quite close. Red shag rugs, lamps from thrift stores, a multicolor dollhouse we rebuilt as a family. Silk monarch butterfly ornaments hang from mirrors and door frames, and cuckoo clocks from my husband’s German childhood occupy much of the wall space.

The man who owns this house is mostly a name on an envelope I mail every month. He has a beard and his eyes twinkle when he smiles. He remembers raising his sons in this house, twenty years ago. They kept rabbits in the backyard, and chickens like we do now. We eat oranges, pears, and apples from the same trees that they harvested and turned into jams and sauces.

Wild Bill watches over everything on our block. He’s the big, bald tattoo artist across the street, and a minor celebrity in this town. He leaves gifts on our porch: a fruit-picker, a pint of leftover soup, a wagon for the kids.

When everything is rough and ragged, the logical course is to festoon it with as much multicolor madness as you can muster. At least that’s my instinct. There was an untouchable sterility to the perfection of “success,” like if you made too sudden a movement, you’d disrupt the delicate balance that held it all together. The beige walls stayed beige, all rooms were regulation size, there were no chickens anywhere nearby, and a dropped marble made a small spiral and sat, solemn and as still as a stone on the kitchen floor.

With Apologies to the Hungarian Cafe

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I think a lot of us who suppressed artistic pursuits for years are revisiting the possibilities now that we’ve lost our “real” jobs. Among my own circle of friends and acquaintances, I’ve seen a sales rep become a photographer, a realtor start up a home-grown theater program, and a downsized tech guru switch to consulting and focusing on his music career.

A couple weeks ago, I traveled back to New York City, the place where I nurtured my dreams as a young adult. As a teen in Long Island, I’d occasionally catch the commuter train in the early morning and spend the day in the Village, maybe take in a Woody Allen retrospective at a theater, drink coffee and smoke Camels, all without any awareness of the irony such cliches deserve. I left the area for college but moved back in my twenties, lived in a fifth-floor tenement walk-up and worked at a bookstore. I went to cafes as a pretension, sitting there and making a half-hearted attempt to write, or at least to pretend to write. “Look at me, won’t you? I’m writing in a cafe. Regard my thrift-store hipster clothing.” (I’m sorry, Hungarian Cafe near St. John the Divine, I don’t think I ever covered the rent on my chair all those hours.)

In college I majored in journalism. That was the compromise I made with my parents, who were, after all, fronting the bill for my tuition. There was one thing I was sure I could do, and that was write. In fourth grade I began announcing that I wanted to be an “author,” but despite years of trying, I couldn’t seem to translate that desire into the role of “journalist.” I wanted to write about emotions and memories. I didn’t want to chase after reality and chronicle it, I wanted to create my own, or at least poetically interpret what I saw, and I didn’t see how to do that in media.

I’m sorry now for my shortsightedness, and for the fact that I didn’t explore my options more fully. When I was asked (which I was, often, throughout my life,) “why didn’t you ever ‘do anything’ with your writing?” my pat answer was something along the lines of, “But I have. Everything I’ve done professionally and personally has benefited from it.” That’s a load of crap, and I know that now. I could turn a phrase in a thread of business emails, and express myself decently when I needed to put my best face forward. Resumes and cover letters came easily. I also wooed my fair share of lovers through my written sentiments and wordy rhapsodies.

When Facebook entered into the picture, I started to rediscover old college friends I’d been either too drunk or too careless to maintain contact with. Interestingly, many of them had become editors, were working in publishing, or were authors of books. I felt fleeting bitterness: I could have done this! Why didn’t I do this? After awhile, one or two of those friends began to quietly mentor me, and then I had a blog, and then a few more writing assignments came here and there.

I had to have the bud of a writing career lain blatantly in my lap, on the heels of professional ruin. Thank goodness for confessional blogs.

My professional experience as an independently-contracted sales rep became, ’round about 2008, an extraneous luxury for the companies I represented. If they didn’t completely change their business model to eliminate that position, at the very least the commissions dried up to nearly nothing. But now, years later, I’m sitting at a cafe around the corner from my house, writing long and hard for the few places that pay me to do so. It’s my work and I love it. And you know what? I’m noticing a lot more people writing here. It’s become difficult to score one of the good tables with an electrical outlet, now.

I think a lot of us who suppressed artistic pursuits for years are revisiting the possibilities now that we’ve lost our “real” jobs. Among my own circle of friends and acquaintances, I’ve seen a sales rep become a photographer, a realtor start up a home-grown theater program, and a downsized tech guru switch to consulting and focusing on his music career. I will never downplay the struggles of our poverty, but I greet this artistic revolution with gratitude.

So I had my short trip to New York, in order to meet with some people who have been instrumental in my fledgling writing career. I got to sit on the subway not as a bitter and unfulfilled bookstore employee, but as a writer. I got to look at those long avenues with their rivers of taxicab yellow as a (very lightly) employed “creative,” and I felt younger than I ever felt when I was a resident of that great city, several long lifetimes ago. It was so good to come full circle with those lost dreams; to walk up to the brownstone building of My. Literary. Agent! I’m not embarrassed to say I cried.

I’m a person who is prone to crushing sadness. It’s a thread that has remained constant throughout everything I’ve done and written. As cornball as it sounds–and I’m actually cringing as I write this–I take comfort in what was my first spoken word: “light.”

That said, I am overdue to honor my mentors: Robert Feinstein, Jeremy Smith, Neal Gorenflo, Lisa Belkin, Candace Walsh, Brian Doherty, and Laura Jackson among the many who’ve shown me The Light, and other unnamed benefactors who let me have my moment. I finally get to be a writer now.

Craigslist and Other Intimacies

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reprinted from my blog about surviving the recession at shareable.net

This is what people love to call a first world issue. I’m sitting at a cafe, trying to write with the vague promise of money for my efforts on the horizon, while my under-employed husband plays with and tends to our two youngest (healthy, brilliant, and adorable) children. My dream is that sometime soon, my memoir will be published, and I will be a real, professional writer, and we might not be quite so financially strapped.

Again I assert that I know my troubles aren’t Real Troubles. They’re Spoiled White Girl troubles. To use the parlance of the Californian New-Agers that surround me, I’m wondering when I’m allowed to “own” my struggles and stop sheepishly apologizing for them, as though by virtue of the things I have been given over my relatively easy life, I am not permitted to acknowledge my current suffering. I’m wondering: does it have to be, that I take a bus back and forth to a minimum-wage job in a dangerous part of the city to say I’ve truly “tried everything?” Nothing is beneath me; I will clean port-a-potties, I just don’t want to disappear far away from my life and my children day after day for the kind of money that wouldn’t ultimately make much difference for us.

I sold a bicycle my oldest had outgrown, a few days before Christmas. Craigslist is strange and wonderful. It’s so intimate. It’s like this complicated and nuanced Recession marketplace, and we’re each other’s saviors sometimes. A woman wanted a Christmas present for her school-age daughter, and I needed money for our holiday grocery purchases. I sent her photos of the fork, the derailleur, the pedals that could be adjusted as, like mine, her daughter’s limbs grew suddenly long and lanky.

We met on my porch. It was only seven or so, but dark enough that the dangling strand of half-lit, half burnt-out Christmas lights hanging from the leaf gutter provided the only illumination. I was glad for the forgiving darkness; maybe she wouldn’t mind the scratches so much. I knew they would buff out with minimal effort, and I doubted her daughter would mind. But then my words stumbled over themselves getting out, and I heard myself trying to give her an excuse to not buy it. “I understand if it’s not what you’re looking for. It’s not perfect, maybe not perfect enough for a gift? I could negotiate on the price, I understand.”

She eyed the bike, silently. “It’s not a problem if you need to change your mind. I understand.” I stopped the flow of words at last, and let her look without my interfering. I tried not to think about what the $125 would mean to us, and what it would mean if we didn’t get it after all. I didn’t want to wear that need.

The other day at the park, I spent hours chatting with another mom from the kindergarten, who is aerobicized and pony-tailed, yoga pants in a Lincoln Navigator. We had much pleasant conversation, and I was happy to open up to her and her world and see where we could connect. She had funny things to say about her twins, about how one of them is so tender and empathetic that he cries when he sees someone else get hurt. How she looked down at her own hands grabbing the rails of her hospital bed when she went into sudden, dangerous, early labor with them, and about how that’s her most vivid memory of that time: how her hands looked. She commented supportively about my son’s shoulder-length hair, and complimented my thrift-store dress. It was only later, when talking about the house they rent in Tahoe and the ski boots she bought for the boys, that she spoke haltingly, embarrassed. She talked about discounts, about Groupon, about her car and her life and the decisions she makes. She mentioned being poor as a child and how that’s not what matters, that it’s not what she remembers and that it’s not what my children will remember.

I can be abrasive, and when younger, I wore my convictions with a blazing cloak of righteousness. I’m still a person who doesn’t know when to shut up, but I’m hoping that in my dotage (!) that I am less judgmental and more approachable. I had not wanted this other woman, this mother like myself–familiar with the same set of vulnerabilities, hardships, and smelly clean-ups–to feel anything but at ease with me. But still, there was this chasm between us, of needs and not-needs, and she filled it with her own embarrassed rationales. I sat, smiled and nodded, full of sympathetic head tilts and raised eyebrows. I touched her arm, made dismissive noises, reassured her. This would have been me, had the Recession not hit us so hard and so relentlessly.

The other day, my husband’s employer told him that due to ongoing financial struggles, they would be reducing his hours from forty to thirty-two a week, for the indefinite–but, we’re told, absolutely temporary–future. This is confusing news. It allows me more time to write, which right now is the only (potentially positive) variable in income flow for us. There is the fact that we have our (much-needed) healthcare coverage still, and that against all odds, he remains steadily employed. There is also the opportunity to pull our heads out of our ostrich holes (do ostriches really do that? anyway . . . ) and see what other options are out there.

The woman bought the bike. She hurriedly and awkwardly passed me some folded bills, and I thanked her quickly and put the money in my pocket without counting it. It’s a business transaction, but the intimacy of it makes it feel like a social one, as well. We worked together to fit the bike into the back seat of her sedan, negotiating the position of the bicycle by micro-amounts to allow closing of both doors. It was the kind of thing you do with family when you’re loading a moving van, or wedging an oversized purchase from IKEA into your car in the parking lot. Eye contact, very little words, body language conveying the small adjustments that need to be made. I was struck with the urge to hug her goodbye before she drove away; my already loose boundaries are becoming even looser as these emotionally-challenging times continue. Also there aren’t established rules-of-etiquette for Craigslist business, at least none that I’ve thus far integrated.

So I’m writing this in a cafe, having had the ongoing good fortune to peel two rumpled single dollars out of my wallet to get a cup of drip coffee and use their Internet on a near-daily basis. Today, our monthly food budget resets, and we can finally fill in the gaping holes in the refrigerator. The children don’t suffer from want for anything, but there’s an unfair amount of pasta dinners during the last week of the month, which I know isn’t an experience unique to my family. I’m determined to write our story for as long as people want to read it, and for this time–one day in the far future–to be a time that brought us many great and surprising changes. I also hope, though, that I don’t have to decide which bill we can pay in a given month, and which we can put off for awhile longer. There is no romance in that, I don’t care what people try to tell me. But this morning, as I slept for the last precious hour or so before waking, I dreamed of eating bacon and lo! when I awakened, there was bacon.

Dreams come true.

I’m Too Lazy to Write This Piece

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reposted from my blog at shareable.net

I don’t know how we’re going to keep paying the rent, and we’re going to have to make some more tough decisions in 2012. The crisis has reached a secondary level, and for everyone I know it’s the “new normal” now. But I see inertia creeping in, and I wonder if we are conditioning ourselves to less effort, and using the extended economic downturn as an excuse.

“Now Mom, I’m going to have you sit on the floor in front of the hearth. Sisters, can you sit on either side of your mom? Put your hand on her shoulder, there . . . that’s it. Dad, can you hold Brother in your lap? Okay, hold that smile, perfect!” Five matching white shirts in a row, before an artificial fire.

That was a small moment, an attempt to mimic relaxation and family togetherness for the sake of a Christmas card. Now, five years hence, I’m fearful that we may be becoming too relaxed, this time in front of our wall heater on shabby carpet, no professional photos for the last several years, and wondering: is this recession making us soft?

The one unforgivable crime in my family culture when I was growing up was laziness. When I was an adolescent, struck with exhaustion from newly-active hormones and lengthening limbs and longing to sleep late on the weekends, I was routinely strongly encouraged to get out of bed at eight to go mow the lawn or otherwise be of service. My ancestors’ work ethic gained near-mythological status in our family’s oral history. Solid Midwesterners and Southern Protestants, of vague northern European background, stalwart and duty-bound. My grandparents were of that generation that could do no wrong, who suffered through the Great Depression as children and World War II as young adults, and handled both with noble aplomb.

My husband and I used to spend a lot of time preparing for the Christmas toy-buying season. It’s one of the opportunities of sanctioned shopping, and no one looks askance as you whip out your credit card time after time. No one wants to see the children get shortchanged, right? Writing long lists to Santa is a treasured childhood ritual. Missing any of the components—all the way down to the bulging stockings hanging from the mantle—is just downright unsporting. I don’t know how we determined the gift-quantity-to-child ratio, but it was generous. We would get fat catalogs stuffed in our mailbox every day, and it was no wonder, as we were probably on every marketer’s mailing list as affluent, profligate spenders. We weren’t really living beyond our means, as we had a year’s worth of savings when we lost everything. And before the holiday season arrived, we made sure to go through the toys in the playroom with each child and fill big garbage bags with donations.

But this year marked our third Christmas season of living below the poverty line. Each child gets one carefully-chosen “big” present, and my husband and I put things on layaway in order to afford them. I know that it is easily morally defensible to live in this more austere fashion. This year, though, I’ve been having an inner struggle, trying to reconcile the choices I’ve made with the values I was raised with. I know for a fact that most of my (estranged) family would respect me more if I were taking a bus to an overnight fast-food job an hour away for example, rather than do what I am doing, writing and working here-and-there when something comes up, while my husband suffers underemployment at a punch-the-clock low-paying job. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing or how and when it’s going to change. The first couple years of the recession left us struck dumb, all of us holding the bag and wondering what would come next. Our family made some dramatic decisions that allowed us to cling to the edge of the survival cliff, but it’s not cute anymore. We downgraded our lives, moved out of our tame and tidy suburban comfort, sold our only car, and learned to live without some of the more obvious luxuries. At the time, and for a while after, people respected our choices. Now, though, I see that inertia creeping in, and I wonder if we are conditioning ourselves to less effort, and using the extended economic downturn as an excuse.

Could I be doing more to provide for my children? Is it time to get back on the fast-moving train of ambition? I can’t even remember how to do that, and I don’t know if my bicycle will take me there.

Today we rode our bikes in the winter cold, eleven miles round trip, to enjoy a special and rare meal out at a favorite restaurant. We don’t make things too easy for ourselves, and the self-immolator in me likes that. I don’t want to wander down the garden path unless there’s some discreet auto-flagellation happening as well; it’s how I was raised. Our resources are drawing thin, though, and it’s happening everywhere. People are losing their extended unemployment, relatives and friends can’t be supportive forever, and the bottom of the barrel we’ve been scraping is really and truly turning up empty.

I can’t feel unhappy about my life. There is the joyous jangle of the sort of freedom that “fuck-it” buys you, and the color and clatter of our chaotic existence now gives me more pleasure than my corporate affluence ever did. It has to be an evolutionary imperative, doesn’t it, that we let some of the stress recede when it’s been suffered in perpetuity? My Scandinavian and Scottish ancestors populated Oklahoma Territory, and my Cherokee relatives endured the Trail of Tears and joined with them, relocated against their will to an inhospitable annexation. That land, that time, and the people that embraced these challenges mark each snarl of sinew and synapse of myself, and I struggle with my stasis now.

I don’t know how we’re going to keep paying the rent, and we’re going to have to make some more tough decisions in 2012. The crisis has reached a secondary level, and for everyone I know it’s the “new normal” now. For me, I just need to concentrate on the map inscribed at a cellular level and dig up the strength and capability to lift my family up and carry us through this.

Incandescent

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My latest shareable post, this time on why I have a fetish for string lights and a stubborn attachment to incandescent bulbs.

http://shareable.net/blog/incandescent . . . and while you’re there, can you click on a star? And carry moonbeams home in a jar? You’ll be better off than you are.

As a child, I was known for being a daydreamer, a ceiling-gazer. I wasn’t looking at the ceilings though, it just appeared so. I was looking at the light fixtures.

My first word was “light.” My son’s, too. I love light in many forms: vintage lamps with yellowed shades, strings of Christmas bulbs, paper Chinese lanterns, the golden glow from windows at night, fireflies blinking in the Texas evening, the multicolored circles in a lens flare streaking across a shaft of sunlight in a late afternoon photo.

I’ve been known to put up our pink Christmas tree the day after Halloween. Not because I relish the holidays–in fact, it’s emphatically the opposite–but rather, because once the sunlight dwindles from the days, I need to be sure it blazes from a thousand twinkling places.

As a child, I was known for being a daydreamer, a ceiling-gazer. I wasn’t looking at the ceilings though, it just appeared so. I was looking at the light fixtures. Modern cubist installations, globes on staggered lengths of wire, glinting chandelier prisms. At home, I made mosaics with my Lite Brite and created “stained glass” to hang in the windows by melting crayons between sheets of waxed paper. I would stare mutely at the sparkling chaos of dust motes in bright sunlight. Hold my hand over a flashlight to see the fine network of life that’s invisible under normal circumstances.

I feared dusk because it meant the arrival home of the scary dad, so I would go around the house and start flicking on light switches once the tell-tale dimness settled over the rooms. When I spent time in other family’s houses I was introduced to the wonders of dimmer switches, recessed lighting, and spotlights artfully arranged to highlight the landscaping.

I’m supposed to wear glasses but I usually don’t, because unadulterated, my eyes turn every street lamp into a parhelion.

Overhead lights and the shadows they cast make me feel the smallest bit panicked, like nothing will stand up to the blazing illumination. I’d rather squint to read small print than have that naked blast from above.

I miss the neon lights of city living, though I get stars now, in exchange. I tell my children that they’ll go back to the stars someday, when they ask me about death and dying. It’s nice to have a visual aid for such an important parental lesson. You’re mine but you’re also a mote of light, and that life in you is fire.

This time of year gives me a feast of lighting pleasures, and I stop and pay it proper attention. I see the reading lamp through the lace curtain, the fireplaces in small warm living rooms, this cafe that looks like an especially inviting harbor in the premature darkness. I’ll take one humble strand of old-school Christmas bulbs and their candlelit haze, however, over an entire display of cold LED pulsars. I know I need to move past this obsession with the incandescent and the crackle of its inefficient filament, but for now I am going to lay claim to it and the specific warmth of its glow. It’s how I make it through, until spring comes.

The Worst Kind of Fool

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(reprinted from my blog about surviving the Great Recession at shareable.net, with deep gratitude to Jeremy and Neal)

Earlier this week I wrote a self-pitying blog post for shareable.net. I’m happy to say that it didn’t get published before I had a chance to review it and revise it. Below are excerpts, which I’m embarrassed to share, but shame is sometimes an important emotion to feel, I think. It’s corrective, like guilt. The key is not to let the guilt and shame overwhelm your ability to improve yourself and your behavior. Let’s call this an exorcism:

I keep forgetting we didn’t do this last winter. We lost our car in March, and even though the dual-season monsoon climate of California still held us in its wet weather grips at that point, were nearing the end of that onslaught. Every week was a little drier, a little sunnier, a little more forgiving than the week before. Now there’s the relentless moving toward darker, colder, wetter days, and even at two p.m. the shadows are long . . .

It’s hard to engage in my sanity-savers, so my sanity is not being saved. My alone time used to be in the jealously-guarded evening hours, when I would put on my earplugs and listen to music on my long bike ride to the gym, through the rough neighborhood near the rail yard, where families sit on couches on the front porch, and there is shouting and tricycles and the smell of dinner cooking. Afterward I might find any excuse to wander through some store or other, maybe on a banana-obtaining excursion to Trader Joe’s . . .

What do I do, now? It’s dark, and it’s cold. It’s often raining, that wind-driven sideways kind of rain. I’m supposed to be bearing up, but I’m not bearing up. There’s not enough French toast in the world for this kind of bone chill and boredom. I can’t remember what I might have done back when we had disposable income and a vehicle or two. Did I find a reason to go to Target? Or Bed, Bath, and Beyond? Were there maybe more purchasing expeditions, outings that were diverting enough to alleviate the tendency to flop around the house in frustration, sighing, while the kids bicker and the dirty dishes accumulate in the sink? Is that why they invented Christmas—to give us all something to DO?

Pity me! Pity me!—right? Woe is me, I can’t go to the gym or idly shop at big box stores. I will say that the mood had a legitimate genesis though, and I can trace it back to a couple of events that happened over the past week.

One evening, my oldest, Rainer, had a choir performance and it was cold and raining hard. In order to be there to see her and support her, we had to bundle three little children (our two younger kids, plus a sweet little guy whose parents were paying us to babysit,) hitch up the bikes to the trailers, attempt to create waterproof cocoons for them, and bicycle hard against the clock, mostly uphill about 2.5 miles (not far by our usual standards) in freezing rain and wind. By the time we arrived, my skirt was clinging to my legs, soaked, my cold ears throbbing painfully in time with my heartbeat. The babies were warm and calm, so I left my husband to deal with finding shelter for the bikes and offloading everyone while I ran full bore to where the choir was supposed to perform in a minute or so. After shouldering through the crowd, all carrying umbrellas and posing for pictures in front of a giant outdoor Christmas tree, I finally found the choir director. They had already performed. They were trying to beat the worst of the weather, so they had started earlier than planned.

I kept calling and texting my ex to try and track Rainer down. Finally, I was told they were having dinner with a group of friends in a restaurant nearby. At that point, bitter disappointment and grief led to tears that I couldn’t seem to stop. I was soaked, freezing cold, and so ashamed that I didn’t have the resources or ability to get to where I was supposed to be, for my daughter. I couldn’t go into the restaurant like that. Instead, I stood outside the restaurant window while my ex sent Rainer out so I could hug her, at least. And apologize. The thing that hurt the most was her confusion and concern; I don’t think she understood my visceral sadness. I had to leave her behind to return to that warm, golden room, and go back and pick up the pieces so we could make our way home in the storm.

At this point, my self pity was getting a nice, running start.

Credit: In Her Image Photography

A few days later, I went to a grocery store to buy our Thanksgiving dinner ingredients. Things were going to be slim this year for sure, but we would be together in our house, relatively healthy, safe, intact and grateful for it. I spent a lot of time in the crowded market, making small talk with other shoppers, joking about my skills in the kitchen, getting advice from store employees, and planning our first home-cooked Thanksgiving meal. I went to the checkout with a cart full of groceries. When it came time to pay, my card didn’t work. That’s when I lost it.

We weren’t going to be able to pay. I didn’t know how, but I had miscalculated everything. There’d be no taking home these groceries, and it looked like we weren’t going to have any sort of traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Now let me be clear: we always have enough, and with the dried beans and grains, canned soups, tomato sauce and pasta, and assorted nuts and seeds in the larder, our family will not go hungry in the near future. It was just that this was going to be the first year that we couldn’t provide the traditional trappings, and that was the just last brick on a pile that was sitting on my chest. I cried right there at the checkout. Hard. I think I might have begged a little, telling them to please try the card again, and again. I remember making quite a spectacle of myself, and things progressed from there, involving getting escorted out by a man in a uniform, but I’ll just leave it at that. Hours later, I had been driven home by a friend, and my head was aching from the crying. No one in the family was able to sleep until the wee hours of the morning. It had been a hard night with lessons learned about expectations, and humility, and gratitude.

I am writing these words on Thanksgiving. Unexpectedly, a friend picked me up this morning, and drove me to the one grocery store that was open today. We had some money left on a food stamp card after all. Now I can smell turkey cooking, and along with the other most fortunate Americans we’ll be having the canned cranberry gel, the mashed potatoes and stuffing, some corn and peas, some pumpkin pie. About the only complaint today is that I forgot the whipped cream.

Fall and winter are always a time of reckoning, not just for me but for lots of people, I think. Short days mean long hours spent at home with your thoughts. The sun encourages extroversion; the lack of it turns your thoughts inward. Holidays bring joy to many, but for lots of us they are emotionally complicated, full of memories and some sadness. It’s a time of extraordinary parental pressures to provide abundance and tradition to the children.

This holiday season had a rocky start for me. This is the first time we’re doing it without a car, and without any money to provide the kind of comforts that the long, dark cold time takes away. But we have a pink Christmas tree, and if you have that, you can’t be hurting too much. A single strand of multicolored lights turns our porch into a warm welcome home in the darkness, and you don’t even need to squint to make it look beautiful. I was the worst kind of fool for not realizing we have absolutely everything we need.

Blackberries Are Free

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(a version of this appeared in my ongoing diary of recession living over at shareable.net)

And then there’s the foraging we are able to do when we’re communing so close to the neighborhood flora. Blackberry bramble grows wild all over our town, and many consider it a menace. It’s invasive, and it will choke everything out and take your fence down in the process. It’s easy to identify, with spreading thorn-covered vines and broad elliptical leaves. Sometime in the late spring, it’s covered with white blossoms that eventually turn into tight, chartreuse clusters that mature until they become soft, darkly purple berries by July or August. It’s hard to buy blackberries: they’re fragile, and so expensive. You pay a king’s ransom for a half-pint container, and by the time you get home, the bottom layer has burst and run with juice, and maybe you’ll find one with a faint moldy fur that quickly overtakes the rest.

I’m not sure why more people don’t pick them. It’s true, you have to keep your eye on them so you don’t miss the window of time after they’re no longer too sour and before the summer sun has finally had its way with them and they’ve become hard, shriveled black husks. There are micro-climates, like the broad swath of shade underneath the highway where they ripen more slowly but in far larger numbers, you need to notice that. You also have to be prepared to wrangle with the thorns. It’s not like roses (to which they’re related,) where you can clearly identify the spikes and avoid them if you’re careful: blackberry bramble has those big visible spines too, but they also have a more insidious, fine and imperceptible brand of prickles that seem soft until they’ve covered your forearms with itchy misery.

So what I’m saying is, you have to be observant and you have to protect yourself. We kept watch on them every time we’d pass a patch on foot or on our bikes. Over and over, we’d come across new thickets of them hidden along roadsides or beside the trails. You can really get good at spotting them if you know what you’re looking for, and in the spring when they’re blanketed with blossoms, it’s like a patch of melted snow where the sun hasn’t quite reached. We watched, made note, and shouted to each other about what we saw: there’s more here, we need to remember this spot. There’s some pink on the berries now. When the time had come, we piled the kids into the big orange gardening wagon and set off for some of the closer thickets, just to start. We brought jelly jars, but not big ones—big ones would mean too much weight on the bottom layers. Larry and I traded wagon-pulling duty with Rainer, who moaned and complained. It was hot, and we were wearing long-sleeved shirts as armor against the thorns.

When we got to the best, most abundant spot, we propped a long wide plank up against the bramble to give access to the higher areas. Everyone had a jar, and we wore layers of latex surgical gloves and stripped them off as they became shredded. We worked quietly, some happy buzzing but mostly just commenting on finding a good one or avoiding a bee. Molly worked too. Everyone ate about one for every three picked, which was the tax we exacted for our labor. We talked a little about what we’d do with them: Rainer wanted to freeze a few quart bags for smoothies. Molly does most of the chicken chores, so she wanted them to have the ones that weren’t quite ready. “Dan’s got peaches ripening,” Larry said. “I’ll bring a few jars to trade.”

Some teenage boys passed us on the other side of the busy street. They asked us what we were picking, and then if they could come join us. I glanced over at Rainer to search for embarrassment and found none, so I handed them some gloves and a jar. I asked them, “Did you grow up here?” and was surprised when one said yes, they had. I wondered: do their parents not care about blackberries? Because you’d have to actively not care. Here were blackberries! So cherished that they cost about the same as caviar. They’re available for such a short time, and specific to this part of the country. There aren’t many places on earth where something so succulent comes at such low cost: the only price you pay is in scratched up hands and stained fingertips. The new pickers took awhile to get the appropriate technique down, and Molly warned them against the ones that have “too many red bubbles,” as they are too tart and not yet sweet and juicy.

We worked for a few hours, long enough that the teens who joined us eventually mounted their skateboards, leaned back, and rolled off with lackadaisical efficiency. They didn’t say goodbye, but it was a benevolent parting, and it was clear we had earned a little of their admiration. After that, we got quieter and more focused as it became harder to find worthy berries. Rainer looked up at me and said something after awhile; I was busy and lost in thought, and I couldn’t be sure I heard her right. I had her repeat it: “I love our life,” she said. “I’m so glad we’re doing this.” And I am glad that she won’t have to grow up in northern California without ever having learned about picking blackberries.