Revalations in a San Diego Airport Bar.

 I figured something out this weekend, and it is so goddamned sad.  

I have spent my whole life thinking my mother doesn't love me.

 Like, she says she loves me, and she is always trying, but I for sure believed with my heart of hearts that she was just being nice.  That I didn't deserve her love and would never really actually get it.

That was reserved for other people, like my brother.  

But I guess I never thought it out loud...said it out loud?  I felt it in my heart, but I never thought it consciously.  

And then this weekend we talked.  And she did her usual song and dance about trying to make things right, that she thought I was too smart for her to parent me, even when I was in kindergarten.  That she was intimidated by me....even before kindergarten.  And it still sounds tinny to my ears, like a half truth, but this time I actually heard her.

That, coupled with two other things, has convinced me, though, that she might love me. 

The first happened weeks ago; I got a hold of some old family films from when I was an infant and a baby, and I watched them with her.  I had already watched them with so much self judgement, so little empathy for the little human I was, the child I saw on the film.  But she said instantly, instinctually, what a beautiful baby I was.  And I realized she meant it. And my heart broke.  

Then, this weekend, the morning after we talked, I snooped in her phone a bit, just to see what there was to see.  It's an old, shitty habit I've almost broken, but I indulged.  You learn so much about people this way, after all.  And the first photo that popped up, the last thing she was looking at, was a photo of me.  Which is crazy, because why would she choose to look at a photo of me unless she had to, or wanted to.  And she didn't have to.

So I guess she wanted to?

Even though I was just in the other room, just sharing a bedroom with her yesterday.  

She still wanted more of me.

Fucking crazy.

I think she might actually love me. 

 

Kiss Off

 Of all the people who have left me

of all the people who stopped loving me

of all the people who I succeed in pushing away, 

scaring away

running away from

Of all the people who decided I was too much

too loud, too wild, too obnoxious, too much

You are the biggest surprise.

I never thought you would leave me, not completely.

I should have known, you've let me go so any times, picked so many other lives over me 

But somehow I thought you would always love me in the end for the you in me

the loud, the wild, the obnoxious, the too much came from you 

and now you use it against me

like feeding me poison and then punishing me for my illness.  

but in a way it's perfect, because if not even you can love me, then I can connect all of the dots, and see clearly that I was built for this life of loss by you

slowly, over the years, each little chip and fracture adds up to make me who I am, 

Imperfect in every possible way, 

yet a perfect reflection of you.

And now, because you don't want to speak to me anymore, you'll never have to look at that perfect reflection

and see who you are, what you have wrought, what your choices look like in the psyche of your child.

Actually, it all makes perfect sense.

How You Walk Through Fire

 Charles Bukowski once said, "What matters most is how well you walk through the fire".  Or he wrote it, honestly, I haven't fact checked this, but I saw it on a beautiful piece of graffiti art, and after spending plenty of years reading Bukowski like he was the genius he thought he was, I am compelled to reflect.

And it might feel insensitive to use fire as a metaphor while California is burning, but it might also be apt.  And, frankly, it's 2025.  It feels like someplace on earth is always burning; if not California then the Amazon, Australia, Gaza, Canada, the Notre Dame.  We are always burning, the world is on fire. 

We are on fire.

And we all have to find a way to walk through the fire.  The literal and metaphorical fire, the personal and the communal fire.  And how we walk through this fire will dictate what the next fire looks like.  How we weather the next fire informs the fire that follows, it's intensity, its heat and influence.  

And it doesn't feel like the fires will ever stop coming.  Maybe in the past, in previous years, we imagined a world where this fire was a once in a lifetime fire, a once in a decade fire. These days the word unprecedented has become a thin parody of itself, worn out from use. The economy, the climate, the political sphere, even how humans choose to treat each other seems to have reached a crescendo.  We have found new depths of suffering, pain, and harm.

But as we walk through this fire, I choose optimism over pessimism.  Because we walk through this fire together at least as often as we do alone, we find new ways to commune with each other and support each other.  These unprecedented times are ripe with potential for growth, for kindness, for community.  

And that's how I choose to walk through the fire.  Every time I witness need, there is an opportunity to help, to alleviate suffering, to reduce the need.  And in that opportunity a universe of potential exists, a tiny mass of potential, ripe like early spring fruit.  That is my wish for the new year, my resolution for the next round of fire that is already upon us.  May we find in each moment of suffering , the potential for love and growth.

I did that!

 In April of 2023, my son was attacked by a dog.  People differ in how they like to describe the situation.  My mom calls it a dog bite.  My cousin, who owns the dog in question, still doesn't believe there was a bite, so I'm not sure how she would describe it.

My sweet, 40 pound six year old was standing next to his grandmother, when the dog in question pulled himself free of my aunt, who was holding his leash, to jump on my child.  I heard all of this second and third hand, but I saw the shredded t-shirt, the puncture marks on his hand, the scratches around his neck.

The grown ups in charge at the time gave him two bowls of ice cream and bandaged him up on their own, eventually getting him into clean clothes and to a safer space.  I was asked not to seek medical attention, not to report the attack as a dog bite, not to tell the police. 

Instead I did all those things and more.  I got him in front of a doctor and two mental health professionals to process his trauma.  I bought children's books on dog bites for us to read together, and talked to my child about PTSD.  My child and I constructed narratives about good dogs and bad dogs, friendly dogs, helper dogs, and dogs that shouldn't be around kids.  We spent more than a year slowly reintroducing him to dogs and healing his trauma, with the help of friends and strangers.  And today, my son is fairly comfortable with most dogs, and cuddles his favorite big dogs with ease.  

Today I was asked how I thought it happened, that my child could be so resilient, could get over this thing so quickly and easily.

First off, he is amazing,  He is a strong kiddo, and I am so deeply proud of him.  And a lot of friends and dog owners spent time talking to my child, sharing their patient dogs with my child, and generally being awesome.  

But also, I did that.  

I held him, I read to him, I talked to him.  I made appointments and drove him to professionals, and asked for advice and took time out of each day to help my child heal.  And it was absolutely worth it, because he is an amazing child who deserves to live with joy and without fear.  But it was also hard work, and I did that work.  He did that work, too.  We did that.  

And I will say it with my full chest. I did that.

Don't Collude With His Shadow Self

 I found this phrase written on an index card in my journal, while searching for a poem I wanted to revise.

It is a note I made during a therapy session almost exactly two years ago.  I had started doing this only recently, probably as a guard against the combined effect of age and chemo on my memory.  

"Don't collude whit his shadow-self.  Asking for help/telling the truth is letting him in, taking the pressure off.  The good parts come from sharing"

I find it such a striking phrase today, two years further into our relationship, two years deeper into my life, two years of growth and experience under my belt.  How easily our sick parts seek companionship with the sick parts of others.  how quick we are to let the small, broken, damaged bits of ourselves link up with the small damaged bits of others, replaying those old, hurtful patterns again and again because they are familiar, even though they are destructive.

Don't collude...

Like it's a secret, yet powerful meeting between the hurt child in me who does not trust and the hurt child in him who grew without tenderness.  Like they, our shadow selves, are out there somewhere, trying to drive us into self destruction and mutual destruction.

Like there is a me, desperate to keep things the same as they have always been because the hurt and betrayal are so familiar that they've come to feel like home.   A me who would rather never admit that I need help or support, and then can rage at the isolation an betrayal with a sense of vindication.

Because to break the pattern, to betray the shadow self, would be to have to live a different life, a different truth.  Live in a world where I am worthy of love and so is he, and we can give it to eachother freely, without contempt or compensation.

Because the good parts come from sharing.

Buying Peace

 Driving in to my office yesterday, I picked a playlist at random.  Some Spotify-created summer rewind playlist. 

It was all sad songs, angry songs, songs about resilience.  Songs about heart break, divorce, loss, and recovery.  The occasional bop from a Disney movie.  

It took me about half of my 30 minute drive to figure out what summer this playlist was from, and pinpoint the emotional state I was in that summer.  And then, dots connected, the songs spent the rest f my drive taking my body back to that time.  I started to feel the music resurrect the anxiety in my muscles, the sadness and betrayal in my bones.  I felt the way I gripped the same steering wheel five years earlier, when everything was entirely different.  And then I did the most important thing.

I remembered the wishes I had then, the hopes and plans I sketched out roughly in my mind while I listened to this same collection of songs in this same car on these same roads.  And I felt pure gratitude.

The peace that I have purchased over the last five years, through sacrifice and love and work and luck, is so valuable.  The woman who listened to Liz Phair's Divorce Song on repeat in between mournful used-to-love songs by The National would have chaffed in the relative comfort of the life I live now.

And so I walk these days in gratitude for all the things I take for granted now, that I was afraid to wish for a few years ago.

And I remember that the goal is to continue to buy peace, find joy, build a world anchored in love, respect, and growth.

Holding my heart in my hands

 In the morning, before he wakes up, I hold my son in my arms and smell his breath.  Inhale him.  He is getting older, longer, smellier, but he is my own flesh and blood that I made from my body, raised, sweated and bled and cried for every day of his life and many days before. 

And then I think about what it would be like to have him taken from me; to have to watch his beautiful, perfect little body be broken in ways that cause pain, in ways that don't heal, in ways that can't be fixed.

I think about the absolute searing pain I would feel, if I couldn't press his sleeping forehead to my lips, or his clean hair to my nose, or lift his body into my lap, his hand into mine.  how would  I live if he was taken from me, broken, burned, beaten.

I never used to think these thoughts, until Gaza.  Until I began to track the suffering of the Palestinian people as they watched their loved ones be beaten, crushed, burned, cut, violated, tortured, frightened, maimed, and massacred.

And now I can't stop thinking about it.  I catch myself crying at the absolute unfairness that is the relative ease and safety of our life.

The almost overwhelming privilege that exists in my ability to promise my child that I will protect him, keep him from harm, keep him safe, fed, clothed and clean.  What an absolute load of bull shit.  A government could take that ability from me, break my promises to my child, in a minute with their weapons and their heartless, soulless violence.  And render me powerless to do the one job that matters in this life, protect my child.  

Everyday I think about what a friend of mine said when her teenage son committed suicide.  She reflected on all the time she spent cutting grapes in half to keep him from choking as a baby. 

We do that, as parents, as care givers.  We strive to protect them from the tiniest risks, to shelter them and herd them into maturity, relative safety, hoping they arrive in adulthood intact and capable. 

But what happens to all of those efforts when your child is ripped from you by an occupying army, and imprisoned for years without contact?

What happens when a bomb or a sniper's bullet pierces your child's skin, tearing through the flesh you carefully nourished and cleaned day in and day out.

What happens when your child's fears are no longer irrational fears of monsters under beds, but very real fears of death, destruction, and unthinkable loss.

What happens when your child is hungry and you are powerless to feed them, when they are thirsty and you are powerless to quench their thirst?  What happens when your child needs to be comforted by love and hugs and kind, soft, nice things, but you are dead and your poor child is huddled alone in a tent, bandaged and hungry with all of the orphans of a genocide that global powers refuse to admit is taking place.

How is anyone walking around right now, functioning?  How did we pay our taxes and plan out meals without remembering the mother who asked to cut of her own hand to feed her child, the 2 year old orphaned and amputated alone in a tent, the child crying for help, isolated in a car full of dead relatives, and the bombed out ambulances driven by aid workers murdered in their attempt to rescue her from what must of been a horrific final day of her incredibly young life.  

There is so much pain, suffering, frustration and angry boiling in my broken heart, and you have the audacity to discuss the appropriate way to protest, the right time to speak out, the civility of sharing images of the destruction my government has spent billions funding?

Fuck all of the way off.  I will help burn this system down until a new one is born.

New Year, New Bullshit

 There is a tradition, at least around here,  of beginning a new calendar year with a statement of goals.  A reflection of the last year and a resolution or two for the new year. 

I respect this tradition because I truly believe that as humans we need to mark time with traditions like this.   I respect the ways the goals of my past new years have helped to shape the life I have today.   

But I don't really have any real resolutions for 2024.  I've heard a lot of people lament this past year,  and I get it, globally a lot is going wrong; the climate deteriorates, civil rights are deteriorating, global conflict has intensified in violence and severity.   But my life was good.   2023 was a good year for Andrea.  I am cancer free.   That's huge!!  I grew in my career at Sac State,  and at Folsom Lake. I gained recognition, confidence, and grew in my sense of self.   I am watching August grow as a human,  watching my relationship with Chris grow and watch him grow as an individual.  In watching Nathanial grow,  my friendships grow.  Everything is,  as I like to say, on its trajectory.   Things don't need to be perfect today,  and they aren't,  but they are getting a little better every day. 

So what are my goals for 2024?

More.   Keep going, do a little more. 

I want to keep doing what I'm doing,  because it's working. I want to keep being me, keep being healthy, keep growing in my career and relationships. 

I want to get weirder. I want to get Witchier.  I want to do more Wiccan things,  more earthy/crunchy things. I want to trust my instincts more often.  

I told Chris,  twice now,  that I'm going to get weirder.   But that's short hand for what I want to say in a more complicated way,  which is I know who I am now, and I'm not pretending anymore. I'm going to be more me, and I'm not apologizing to anyone.

Fighting the Tide

 There are times when things seem to go our way, when the energy flows, good things, come, and we feel as though we are being taken by the hand through the universe with kind admiration and support.  Good days.  Found a parking space, no line for coffee, someone brought donuts kind of days.

And then there are those days where the universe seems set to destroy us, or at the least our spirits.  Everything seems to be aimed at obstruction and we struggle with simple tasks.  Step-in-a-puddle days.  Days where it feels like you are the fly and life is the windshield.

We seem to regularly need reminders to be patient during the dark times, but we fly through the good times, bouncing from one morsel of goods news to the other as though there is no end in sight.

The hard but valuable thing is to remember that we are just grains of sand along a vast beach.  The tide comes in and then ebbs, leaving us.  But no matter how long the tide's absence feels, it is always temporary, it always returns to bathe us in its salty fresh water.  

 

i think that is one of the great benefits of time...after years of living through these ebbs and flows of life's fortunes, you learn how temporary each state is, how inevitable each next phase is.  

Port Day

 Next Friday I will have my chemo port removed. 
For those not in the know, this is a big milestone; the chemo port was surgically implanted to help protect my veins from the chemotherapy drugs, and was the site of so many saline flushes, painful sticks, and colorful bandaids.  Because it was difficult to place and is a easy to remove, the protocol for taking it out means it's another step closer to achieving 'cured' status.

It has been 16 months and a few weeks since my initial diagnosis, 15 months since the port was implanted and I began chemotherapy, and 13 months since I had my first clean PET scan.

I hated my port when it was implanted.  It was the last of a series of quickly scheduled surgeries, procedures, and scans.  The previous surgery, performed by Dr. Natasha Bir, had been a surgical biopsy of my lymph node to diagnose the cancer I knew was there.  She was patient, kind, and relatable.  She talked to me about my cancer and how treatment would affect me as a person, a mother, someone who planned to work full time through treatment.  Her incision was clean and healed to the tiniest scar.  I trusted her.

The surgeon who placed my port was new.  He said he could tell by the sun damage on my chest where to place the port, so I ended up having to wear low cut tops to every chemo appointment.  The scar, perhaps inevitably, was larger, more obvious and more visible to the world.  I hate that scar.  

I hated my port.  It was sore for months, and August would accidentally kick it regularly when we played, making me feel like 'sick mommy' more than ever.  My seat belt irritated it, and the generously provided port pillows were kind but made me feel ridiculous.  It was a visible outward expression of my internal illness.  I have been waiting for the day it is removed since it was first implanted.

And now that day is coming, and it feel anti-climactic.  The new daily reminder of my illness is this awkward haircut that refuses to grow out, and my port no longer aches, is no longer irritated by my seat belt or painful when kicked by August.  I sometimes even forget about the scar, and wonder what new scar the removal will leave.

I wonder when I will get my hair back, if I will ever feel the same as I did back on February 1st, when I excitedly made an appointment for a physical as an early 40th birthday present to myself.  

I wonder if  "Stage 3-B Hodgkin's Lymphoma" will ever feel like a real diagnosis, or if I will ever feel like I have truly beaten this thing.  I wonder what will come next, now that my body has been through some of the most rigorous drugs on the market.  

And I want to celebrate this port removal, like I wanted to celebrate shaving my head.  But I am afraid to celebrate it, afraid I am asking for too much, afriad it will turn out odd because it is still so near the surface (like the port!), the vulnerability around being sick, getting better, trying to define this new cancer survivor self that I am.

Which is all a very long way of asking, would you like to go out for cocktails and appetizers after my port removal?

A Story About Recovery, Nine Months Later

 Nine months later, and my hair is still so sparse.  It's thicker, to be sure, because people are commenting optimistically in careful tones about how great it looks.  Talking to me like I'm a sick person, because I am.  I was...I am still at risk, still vulnerable...still recently 'recovered'.  

I am still processing the feelings of this all...how to feel, who to be.  What does it mean to be a cancer survivor?  It sounds so cliche, so much like someone else, like not me, but it also is me, definitionally.  I am a person who has survived cancer, I am a cancer survivor.  So now I have to figure out what that means to me, for me.

Which is not to say that cancer or recovery define me, but I am undeniably changed.  I supposed that's the weird, back-handed gift of my short hair; every morning I wake up to a reminder that I am never going to be the person I was before February 2022, before that first physical, that first imaging appointment.  Before I felt that little lump start to grow in my neck and then, later, saw the bugling image of my cancer straining against the barrier of my collar bone, struggling to grow beyond the confines of my body, my neck, my spleen, by shrunken stomach and infected heart.  

It makes sense, something like that, seeing an invader lit up in bright yellow inside the deepest parts of your own body, entwined with your lymphatic system, impossible to cut out.  Something like that should change you.  No one should be able to stay the same after that. 

And after everything that came after that.  The many tiny losses.  The total physical change that slowly overtook my body as I gripped my past life, my 'normal' life with white-knuckled fists.  

I comfort myself with all the things I managed to keep, all of the normal I managed to preserve and insert in that time.  Rather than focus on the loss.  The times I told my son I couldn't because I was too tired.  The times I felt myself start to faint.  The time I fainted, and lost a bit of time between when I was standing, focused and alert, and when I was on the ground, the man I love standing over me looking as scared as I have ever seen him, me not understandinghow I got down there in the first place.  

The times I would enter the hospital to undress, don those paper gowns and be scanned, imaged, cut open and sewed back up, explored and biopsied.  

The many, many, many ways I lost control over my own body. Or, really, gave away control.  But is it giving away if it is under threat?  If you don't do this you might die, that was the constant fear.  And I am nothing if not obedient in the face of authority and death.

So now, here I am.  Trying to keep up the same face, the same facade.  But now the fear and adrenaline and fight are all gone, because I've won the fight.  

And I am just left here with my body, altered forever but technically health.  My mind, also altered forever but reeling from everything that has transpired.  My thoughts, also reeling, flying from memory to invasive thought to missed deadline to next task, as if getting back to normal is the new goal.  As if getting back to normal is a weighty enough goal to replace my former goal; beat cancer with a smile.

How can anything fill the hole in my to-do list that Beat Cancer With a Smile left?

Best/Worst, Cancer Edition

 Here are some of the worst things about my cancer/chemo journey, not that anyone asked.

Worst chemo side effects?

Bone and joint pain!  oh, i hate this.  It's like a dull, nagging soreness in my knees, shoulders, wrists, ankles.  In my arms and legs.  Especially at the end of the day and first thing in the morning.  Tylenol will knock it out usually, but I am always worried about timing the pills so I can sleep through it.

Hair loss.  The journey that I have been on with my hair this year is long and complicated.  I look like a crazy person almost every morning.  I started trimming my hair as it thinned, doing a half-assed job.  Finally got it cut in July, and it looked like healthy hair again for a few weeks before even at that short length the hair loss beat out my attempts to look like myself.  I no longer ask folks what they think because I am terrified of hearing the lie in their voice when they say they haven't noticed.  I wear my hair up every day and am not far from putting a scarf over it all. 

Tired is not the right word.  My body feels like someone else has used up all the fuel, all the youth and strength, and I am left piloting a vehicle with no gas in the tank, trying to turn the radio off to conserve juice.  It comes at awful times when I want to push through...baseball games, birthday parties, August's school picnic.  Sometimes I cry form exhaustion, or faint.  It is embarrassing and frustrating.  I have never not been able to will my way through a situation before, and I hate feeling so tired, so weak.

Best?  That's easy.  The people who came though for me in a thousand small and big ways.  Chris, holding my hand as they punctured my port the first time.  Emily sending August ice cream money.  Promising to visit if I would just ask.  Jenna surprising me, traveling down for our not quite chemo weekend in a hotel.  Marsh, Omo, Dave, Delaney, Mom, Jon, Diane, and Steve all pitching in to help with childcare so I could focus on work and my health.  Sheila sending me articles about head shaving and information so I wouldn't have to do my own depressing research.  The flexibility offered to me by David Lang at work.  Oh the sweet, thoughtful support of my amazing students.  The words from folks I'd lost contact with over time.  The jammies from Melanie and my cancer guidance and gifts form Aunt Joanne.  Chris taking care of August, making me a milkshake or soup or dinner.  Chris telling me I look the same as I did when we started dating 6 months into chemo draining all the rapid multiplying cells form my tired body.  Chris sitting with me at the infusion center, putting on ancient aliens and the price is right.  Trish, calling to check in day after day, making sure I am okay after every day.  Emily, tracking my chemo schedule from Indiana.  Jenna, being the place I put my fears, my safe place to be honest and sad and scared, so I could be happy and positive the rest of the time.  Trish organizing my meal train. Nathanial and Belinda picking up where Chris and I leave off with Squidy.

Strangest?  The journey progression that hair loss has been.  It was not a single day, a moment.  Hair loss was a daily reminder of being sick, evidence of chemo hanging off me and staring at me from the mirror morning after morning.  I started to dread shampooing because the unmanageable handfuls of lost hair I had the frustrating chore of collecting each morning.  I cried in the shower about that one a lot.

Sitting in the big comfy chairs at the infusion center every other week, I was surprised but how much my fellow patients complained.  I get it, to some extent.  We're sick.  But isn't that the best reason ever to try to see the bright side, to take control, in the face of such loss of control over our bodies, of how we feel and react?  I get that I might sound naive, but for me that's what made this whole process simpler; the control I had over me.  I lost control of my body and choices in so many ways, between the surgeries and scars, the implanted port, the limitations on what would make the chemo worse, and the ways my body responded to the chemo with more limitations.  So smiling and laughing in the face of all of it felt like the way to win, the way to pass the time with all of the wonderful nurses who made it as painless (literally and figuratively) as possible.

 

Silver Linings and Rainbows

 Yesterday I had a bad day; I was feeling crummy, feeling sorry for myself.  A pulmonary function test showed decreased lung function, which implied the strongest of my four chemo drugs might be causing permanent damage.  Pulmonary Fibrosis.  This meant a 12 day delay in chemotherapy and a new batch of unknowns after feeling so confident in my chemo routine.

Yesterday a tiny misunderstanding sent me to Chris' room with a scotch and a couple of comfort foods.  Today, I woke up newly committed to feeling okay, even as some of the unknowns stubbornly lasted through my 'education'.  Then, in the nearly empty infusion room where I get my treatments, I overheard the nurses talking about a patient.  Apparently this patient came in for her oncology appointment, only to be told she'd been referred to hospice.  This woman was only a few years older than me, also with children, and was apparently not expecting this news.  

Hospice is a word people have used with me before.  Somehow it manages to escape some of the awful connotations other words, like cancer, carry.  It doesn't sound immediately like death, but it is.  It is a promise from the medical community to help you be comfortable, but that promise feels condescending and insulting to those of use who are still fighting.  Like I am.  Like this poor woman who could have been me thought she was.  That's why the nurses were discussing it; they'd had to help this woman bear the news, asked her if she wanted comfort care now or to go home.  She thought the fight was still on, but her oncologist had already made arrangements for her surrender to the disease.  In that moment her diagnosis went from being a protracted struggle to a slow submission.

I remembered all the worries I had briefly, before I learned how manageable cancer of the lymphatic system is.  How confidently I get to tell folks that my cancer is curable, is already undetectable in my body.  Even though the chemo is no picnic, and risks and uncertainties keep popping up, no one is asking my insurance for permission to make me comfortable.  And I suppose that's the lesson; I am healthy enough to keep being uncomfortable until  the doctors are confident I can return to a life pretty close to normal.  I can wrap up chemo today and have a slice of pizza with my man, a snuggle with my boy, and plan the next trip.

I am so damn lucky, and the light of all that good fortune banished shadows of doubt and self pity back to the darkest recesses of my mind.  Because I am the lucky one. 

Just Stop.

 Everyone wants to talk about your weight loss until they find out it's because you have cancer.

Maybe stop talking about peoples' bodies.

Borcherding

 I still cry when I see his name. 

He died years ago, 8 now, and at the time I remember if it was fair or right that I felt so sad, so wounded by his sudden departure, that my loss felt so great.

And there here, hundreds of miles away and 8 years since saying goodbye, and I see his name in a footnote and tears rush to my eyes before I can remember why.  The feeling is reactive, immediate.  It is not a thought, it is a reflex.  I still miss him imperfectly loud as he was, inappropriate, brilliant, and supportive.  I still think of him, what he would say and how he would react to the new realities emerging in his absense.

This is the surprising thing, the way loss is its own dynamic secretive thing.  It can emerge from the thinnest of memories and take hold, pulling you back into the void of the person no matter how much time and space you have but between them and you, no matter how many relationships and memories you layer over the old treasures.

I see his name, and I cry.

Fine. Everything is fine.

 Stress Dreams I've Had Recently

• The key to my office door broke off and it was my fault and I couldn't fix it
• I got Covid-19 again, but, like, super Covid?
• My mom tried to pick me up from the post office but just ended up dragging my around the parking lot and running over me, and I tried to explain that she was driving poorly and hurting me, but she kept saying she couldn't use the break or she would cause it to rain.  I called her irrational and told her I would drive but she refused and left me in the parking lot
• My brother hates me
• My family hates me
• I am in Thailand with my brother, boyfriend, and son, and we're trying to check out of the hotel and leave the country but I can't get my son out of the hotel room and they're cleaning it around us and my brother and boyfriends are disappointed in me and going to leave without me.
• My mom is mad at me for not having another baby
• My son runs into a parking lot and is almost hit by a car driven by my cousin
• and I am still married to my ex-husband
• and he is a dick, and leaves us to wait in the parking lot
• I am responsible for 8 other 5 year olds and we are for some reason at a warehouse, and some kind of big gun deal is taking place and I get captured by the bad guys
• I am responsible for a bunch of kids and they want a snack, which I make, but then they won't eat it. 
• I'm traveling to Europe with my boyfriend and another friend, and halfway there my friend says I am a bad friend and we are stranded in an airport.
• basically, I am a bad person.
  

Bigger Isn't Better, Actually.

 I lost a bunch of weight.

I mean, I gained a bunch first.  During Covid, switching from running around campus lecturing all day to sitting in a desk chair on Zoom for 8 hours straight changed my body, as did finding comfort in meal time. 

But then, after a summer of trying to make good food choices and incorporate more movement into my daily life (which did nothing), the weight started melting off.

I think it was stress?  First I stopped eating and enjoying food, and beer started to upset my stomach.  Then I became anemic, which somehow made food even less appetizing, plus I began throwing up occasionally.  Stress?  Maybe?  Who knows. The weight melted off, quickly enough for the uninvited comments from older acquaintances to pile up in one week.

Here's the thing folks don't realize.  When you say, "Wow, you look great, you've lost weight!" what I hear is, "We noticed you got fat and we didn't like it.  So glad you are back on team-thin, where we want you.  You are a much better person now than you were when your pants size was bigger."

more or less.

 At least that's how I feel.  I had close family members insist I was getting healthier, even though I felt tired, stressed, fatigued.  The connection between thinness and health so strong they could imagine that I hadn't taken up a secret gym membership somehow, or stopped gobbling pints of ice cream to lose the weight.  I haven't.  No one seems to care.

What they care about is that my body is smaller, more acceptable.  "Buying clothes will be so much more fun!" my mother exclaims, as if we have identicle preferences.  The feedback is consistent and omnipresent; I am better for my smaller body.  Everyone is proud of it, prefers it.  It is a great way to make people I'm not particularly close to happy with by existence.

 So, it feeds into my codependency nicely. 

What Isn't Owed, Actually...

 Just a friendly reminder that we are allowed to be depressed.  We are allowed to make space for our feelings.

We don't owe the world perfection while we glue ourselves back together.

So, ya know, give yourself time.  Nothing in nature blooms all of the time.  Be patient.

What makes you think...

 I think it is a uniquely feminine problem, exacerbated by social media and this perception that people may *always* be available, that men think they are entitled to women's time.  

What on Earth makes you think I want to be your Facebook pen-pal?!

I understand that you lonely old boomers are bored sitting on your piles of money and easily won prestige (it's a lot easier to compete when whole swaths of society are marginalized), but in what world do you think I have the time or inclination to carry on some "friendly chat" with someone I've never met!?

Fuck all of the ways off.

All of them.

This sense of entitlement, that you are entitles to the time of a woman because you find her compelling, even in a seemingly innocent way, is wholly toxic because it ignores the reality that she may have no time for you.  No interest in chatting with you.  My dear, I have enough friends.  I'm sorry your wife dies 14 years ago.  I hope you find some other poor sap to listen to your meadering stories and thinly veiled pleas for pity and attention.  I would rather work, or write, or talk to people I am actually interested in.  Or fucking sleep, frankly.  Watch TV?  Play Sudoku?  Yup.  Those all sound more fun.  Those are things I actually choose to do.

Talking to random men on the internet is not something I choose to do.  It is not my fault that toxic masculinity means you've never learned how to form emotional ties with another man and now seek out female friends to help you deal with your mountains of repressed emotions.  I am actively working to destroy the hetero-normative cis-gendered racist capitalist ableist patriarchy that made you, I do not also have time for you.  I have my own damaged men to deal with.

So please, kindly, fuck off.

Baseball

 The other day my roommate said to me, "I had no idea you were so in to baseball."

Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, baseball felt like an inevitability.  Wasn't everyone this into baseball? It felt like part of the fabric of daily life.  T-ball, Giants games at Candlestick, A's games with Grandma Kate.  Will Clark and the way he wound himself up when he really took it out of a ball, Jose Canseco and his legendary attitude.  The Bash Brothers.  The Battle of the Bay.  My Grandma Kate and my dad had a friendly rivalry as an A's fan and Giant's fan, respectively, and that felt like the only real rivalry in the world, to the point where I barely registered the betrayal when I moved to Los Angeles and started attending Dodgers games.  I remember even after the Giants moved, and I moved, going back to South San Francisco felt special because that was where Candlestick park was, and that was a special place.  

Moving to Indiana in the summer of 1993 meant going to Wrigley for the first time and watching our beloved Giants play the Cubs.  Learning that my dad could also be a Cubs fan, and watching him slowly disown our Giants felt like a parallel story to the one we were living; trading the Bay Area in for the Midwest, learning to see my father as a much more complicated person with desires that might be contrary to my own, or to our family's. 

I remember going to so many minor league games over the summer in Indiana, usually coupled with blues music and barbecue.  The baseball felt like a thin string connecting the past to the present, to some bright future I would have to imagine.  I did not always enjoy these games; triple A ball felt like a cheat, like a trick my dad was using to make things seem normal when they weren't.  It felt like having an off-brand Disney character show up to your birthday party.  But now I look back on those games with fondness, treasuring the idea that you could always see good baseball at great prices if you could find a minor league game.

When I moved to Arcata for college, discovering the Humboldt Crabs felt like a revelation.  It was minor league ball with all of the things I loved, was learning to love as an independent, individuated person.  Cheap tickets, cheap hot dogs and beer, loud local crowds and a rowdy band.  If felt like home on those aluminum bleachers.  The Crabs were an easy symbol of what made Humboldt County feel special to me; the quaint small town feelings wrapped up in hippie-dippie nonsense at a price I could actually afford.

When I started going to Dodgers games, it had been a few years since I'd been to a ball game.  I was responsible for teaching my immigrant husband all about the sport of baseball, why it mattered and how it was played.  He latched on to some of my favorite elements, the camaraderie found between neighbors, the bitter sweet of the overpriced beer, and the thrill of shouting at the great plays and terrible calls.  Dodgers games became part of our Summer tour for visitors, and I watched him teach his little sister about the game a few years later.

Last Friday I went to my first baseball game in 2 years.  I'd watched half of a Crabs game two summers ago, and it had been years before that.  But We got great seats at Oracle park and watched the Cubbies play the Giants in the chill of a San Francisco summer night.  I felt alive.  It felt like it was for me.  After the first few innings I barely paid any attention to Chris, because he didn't seem to care enough about the game and one thing I know from being a sports fan is that you have to care.  It's bad luck not to.  It felt good, like a homecoming.  The city has changed a lot, and I have spent a lot of very different times there under very different circumstances over the years, but it felt like I was where I was supposed to be.  And that's a good feeling.

I guess, in a way, that is my point.  Sometimes that's the way a good baseball game makes you feel.  It makes you feel like you're at home.  I don't get that 'home' feeling a lot, so I treasure it when it floats to the surface.