Where She Could Tell I Was Not Myself.

Today’s post is essentially the chapter of a book. Please enjoy. Please reward long form writing such as this, where some is free (but please consider becoming a full time supportive reader to see the rest, and to help provide reader scholarships for anyone who asks), and some (a lot) is a THANK YOU to those kind enough to support this work, this ongoing memoir, and last week’s “free week” while recovering from the hospital.

THANK YOU!

It’s 1 minute until midnight as I begin to write this…

And I am completely alone.

In the last few weeks I have realized a terrifying, embarrassing, shame-soaked secret that I could consider taking to my grave except for the fact that I just watched my first few episodes of Better Things.

(I dove, impetuously and inexplicably, into Season 4 despite having never watched it before because I am of the fretful and fraudulent “read a few pages of the book before you buy” plot ruining types, but never find a manic-pixie-saturated sugar in reading the end; That’d be blasphemous, even IF someone like Reese Witherspoon would do so adorably in the second meet-cute of a movie or something, so that our protagonist could fall madly in love with her reckless, ritualistic habituation towards spoiling endings. Except, nowadays, the real sour to the American-sweetheart-sweet is that they’d probably have someone like her daughter play the role because, even though Reese is a replica of the same human-bean I feel in love with in her Overnight Delivery days- a movie most people don’t know about, but starred a novice Paul Rudd as well… and my sister and I watched it over and over and over again until we can now quote it by heart, and take an embittered ownership to the fact we loved them first. Before ‘Sexiest Man’ or her wink-and-a-smile style Book Club: They were ‘ours’.)

But THAT’S not how the world works, Dear Daughters.

We are only as relevant as we are relevant, and that becomes completely irrelevant the minute you realize how irrelevant we all are as soon as our pheromones smell like wisdom, and recipes meld from paper to our minds, and gardenia plants and garden beds fall beneath our fingernail beds (my sister’s, not mine), and the stretch mark creams we research but never buy give way to tenure tattoos that feel like something far too punctilious to be infantilized with popsicle names like “tiger stripes” or “glitter beams” or whatever.

“I should be dry brushing the backs of my thighs,” I think as I get out of the shower, knowing that the Paltrows of the world swear by it.

Everyone wants their lymphs drained all the time… and all I want is my heartbreak drained at recognizing that the only way to understand my accidental but natural family dynamic is by watching a show on FX (Hulu) written by Pamela Adlon, which most people would be appalled by, - think outlandish and garish- while I Shazaam with wild fury (not a single episode of this early foray has let me down thus far) and swallow the validating, overwhelming, lemon-like pucker on your tongue that happens when you see the circus that is your artistic, strange, woman-led, hyper-emotional household depicted on script to screen by someone else.

“Watch this,” I want to say, with as much shame at the thought as relief: “This is what it’s like to be in the arts, and mostly unconventional, and raise just-daughters, and still feel as wild and free and brunette as Reese in Overnight Delivery while recognizing you’re just as weary and wise as the Witherspoon who makes book clubs.”

It was 1 minute until midnight as I began to write this, Dear Daughters… And I was and completely alone because you encouraged me to be so.

Here’s the thing:

There are rules for women around mental health that no one has ever formalized in any ink that I’ve seen (but perhaps that just because our publicists aren’t as natured and nurtured as we need them to be) but that hold true nonetheless.

And, by writing them here, and writing about this, I just want you to know that I could be exposing myself to: “But can we really trust her to do that job?” And “But is that herniated disc in her spine we can see on 5 mylograms really flesh and bone ‘on’ silver emulsion, or is it just how stressed out she’s been lately because she’s pretty sure she has perimenopause but her PCP said he has to send her to someone else to talk about that?” And, most of all, “Why is she sharing this ugly truth with us? This is just… ugly.”

And it is.

Being unwell is funny that way.

If a woman needs help, she must do so discretely… because otherwise her children will not only bare the lashings of a social standing where people whisper things (forever) like, “Didn’t her mom have to go in the hospital or something?”, but her children might be wounded by these inequities forever. They will feel discarded and hardened. They will be damaged in ways they shouldn’t have to be. But that, I’ve come to realize is the great wound of parenting.

We will damage our children through our own damage no matter how carefully we package it, because even when we do the right thing and protect them from the greatest evil around (often, us)… They see right through us.

They ARE the X-ray…. And no one gives them enough credit for it.

If a woman feels like her rocker is tilting in a wayward direction, she can’t be a woman who is also physically sick, because healthcare will brand her file with a giant HYSTERICAL stamp forever more- blood red ink- and then, all of her real life symptoms and real life side effects and real life somatic sucker-punches will be newly joined by a ‘subtle’ eyebrow raise or an ‘under-obvious over-blink’ that physicians think we won’t notice, but we will because, the weird thing is… We are humans too.

(Of Note: Deaf patients notice every facial-muscle-minutiae you think we can’t see threefold, so nothing is off limits.)

She will never come back from it. It will f*ck up the seriousness of her care for the rest of her life in health”care”, no matter how much she’s hemorrhaging real life blood red ink.

If a woman feels like something is not right in a history of being “just a really neurotic person”, and unable to focus on any of the things she hid in her house, growing grayer and grayer without the gardens (again, the latter is her sister’s skill)… She has no place to turn. Only inwards. Because the outside is no place for a woman.

Even our own mind is no place for a woman…