Down

I hesitated: will they be tired of the ups and downs? Then an evil glee: a validation: imagine if you so .00000001% are tired or a little annoyed by this square dance, imagine how the dancers feel, swept into the middle of the field with hands on their backs and jaws clenched, gripping the fabric of their lives with as much dignity and grace as such a graceless disease allows for.

It's interesting how trapped human beings crave such different things to feel free. Some crave ridiculousness and escape into Disney tee shirts and figurines cluttering their houses well into middle age. How lovely the lines of a cartoon, how hollow the deaths of an indestructible animation, falling to the rocks to spring back up, flowers in hand, birds aflutter above their overly round heads. Some crave seriousness and lose all sense of humor: they are dictionaries, studies, psychologies, theories, abstractions, suffering, a mouth made old. They are disapproval. Some crave highs: sex, drugs, Everest. Some crave to forget themselves and fly like a ghost into the bodies of others: perpetually giving, modest, filling mouths that never fill.

What do I do?

I answer that every day. I write. I mother. I run at night. I feel self-pity and cry in the bathroom, howling into the white towels that I bought on sale at Target that smell like the chlorine bleach I use to remove butt stains, or floor wipings. In the car alone, I scream. While screaming, I start singing opera, and laughing hysterically, then catch sight of myself in the mirror am mollified. I am supposed to be ashamed of this behavior but I am absolutely not. I am embarrassed though. If anyone sees me, they won't know I haven't lost it. They will wonder, is Maggie safe to be around my kids? Is she really someone I want to hang with? I don't know. Am I? I cook dinners with organic foods and spices. I practically make out with our cat Maybelle, a feline love of my life. I belly laugh with  my children. I work my ass off. I do squats and butt thrusts and other overly aggressive maneuvers to  hoist my ass to a place that makes me feel strong, like a bull. I like to feel my ass working while I walk. I like to feel the power of my own body carrying me through this life. I talk to friends. I help anyone in front of me I can help. Strangers, friends, whoever. I try to smile at every person I see. This can be extremely annoying for me, which then makes me laugh at myself. I read books. I stand in an empty line at the checkout store when I was supposed to be getting toothpaste and toilet paper, and read US Magazine and eat a Snickers bar. I work on my novel. I masturbate, but much less than all the befores. It's crowded in this house. No place for a plump banana. I like to make perverted jokes. I like to be infantile when I can, and completely responsible and adult when I have to. I like to listen to comedians and laugh until I am red. I like to flirt, but nicely, almost gently. I like to probe minds like Martian Manhunter. I like to communicate telepathically like Wonder Woman. I walk in nature. I wash my bedding once a week and lie down after a run and a shower and think what a lucky bastard I am. I pray. I take care of my kids. I mostly take care of my kids. They are everything. Rachel Zoe says that about clothes, but she's all wrong. It's kids, man. It's the baby pulled from the rubble of the earthquakes, his fat tiny arms under his chin, eyes shut, held in the hands of adults who would die for him. That's everything.

That's what I do.

People In Your Neighborhood

take a seat and read!

What a fascinating read: Spalding Gray's Catastrophe in The New Yorker

Poor Bennie Cucumber!!!

This is my girlfriend's natural soap and creams shop Bean Tree Soaps, she is awesome, this store is awesome. 

I am on the hunt for a job. My job ends May 30th and I'm looking for a SMM editorial/content position. This How To Score A Job Through Facebook is awesome.

One of the few blogs I've been reading for years and years where I know nothing about the 'real life' writer, not on FB, Twitter or anywhere else. For me, she only exists here: What Possessed Me

An important story of a mentally ill daughter recently lost to suicide, in The Washington Post, by Doris Fuller.

Nas' documentary on breakers and rappers in Uganda. People are amazing.

Jemima Kirke on her abortion and reproductive rights.

Why Your Teenager Gets So Annoyed With You by Joshua Wayne The more we understand, the more patience, compassion and creativity we move in.

'We are trained to misinform' a pharma rep's story.

Olivia Bee's images of teenage years Love, love.

7 Kids Who Were Literally Raised By Animals

Truth

truth: truth feels more more when spelled without a capital t. capitals presume some kind of fixed point that real truth can't claim. perhaps only writers would think so. but the way words are spelled, capitals or no, punctuation, all of it resonates intensely with me as the subconscious text to what i am saying.

truth: mr. curry is not sick with bipolar right now.

truth: the fact of his wellness is terrifying, exhilarating, joyful, fearful, anxious, love filled, tentative, beautiful, embraced.

truth: mr. curry, himself without the disease that lights his brain up like a Halloween decoration in a MRI, is without a doubt the person i want to be around and enjoy being around more than any other person i've ever met, friend or lover. i love him so irreplaceably. everyone wants to believe you can be just as happy without the person you're in love with. i can be happy when mr. curry is ill. but just as happy? no, no i am not. in fact i am sometimes a drumbeat, a full moon, a stubbed toe away from despair. in fact i am also stubborn as hell, loyal, joyful, loving, grateful, sexual, strange and occasionally conniving as hell. i am a woman. and the woman i am when in the embrace- metaphorical and otherwise- of this love is more empowered. empowered because mr. curry sees me in a way that no one else does. he understands me. he knows me better than anyone and he still loves me unconditionally. that is powerful and i feel that power when i am plugged into it. when he is ill, i am powered down. of course i turn to other sources. but there is nothing like love, after all, is there. 

truth: mr. curry has been well for less than a month. for the better part of two years he has been sick, with only a handful of weeks clutched safety in between all those endless droning weeks of bipolar depression, irritability, fatigue, anger, irrational thinking, withdraw. 

truth: at one point about two years ago i realized if i didn't stop taking care of him, i was going to have a mental breakdown. i was close to a nervous breakdown. i wasn't sleeping. i was having night terrors like a toddler. i was shaking. i was losing weight. i was in physical pain, mental pain and spiritual pain. i felt dissociated. i felt despair. i felt nothing.  i had to let go. i did. have you ever had to let go of someone you'd die for? i have. our children, i told myself, sternly. focus. it was the right thing to do, i'd do it again and i probably will have to. and it still makes my stomach hurt.

truth: often the right thing to do can make my stomach hurt because it's so damn hard.

truth: often the right thing to do makes me feel more alive than any other thing because it's so damn right.

truth: i want to cram mr. curry in my mouth like a chocolate bar, i want to devour him because i am starving and the food may disappear at any moment. when he walks next to me i feel the electricity between us, warm. that same electric current is what i have to cut off when he is ill. the charge becomes life threatening. 

truth: if someone offered to make him well forever, if i would give up my hand, or a whole arm, i would.

but that isn't an option. and i'm not a child. so right here, and right now, the option is to love, or not to love. to love, to love, to love. there is not always black, or white. there is not always gray. sometimes there is only this unnamed color that hangs in the air and changes with the light, and you move yourself into the color and the light and the darkness, and you accept that not all colors have names, and not all truths are known.

Arms

Lola's arm.
Dakota's arm.

2015

People In Your Neighborhood

take a seat and read!

Are you in the middle of life, in the thick of family and work and ALL THE THINGS? Check out The Mid. They are awesome.


Anna's post on the trade-offs and work of marriage is why I started reading blogs in the first place. I'll Have The Salad Wedge


An awesome crash course in cultural appropriation by Amanda Stenberg, 16. I watched this with Lola and Mr. Curry.


I have an unsettling attraction to Shia LeBeaof, which apparently he's determined to kill.


An abducted two year old was found after his babysitter saw his missing picture on Facebook. Sharing images for missing kids WORKS. Please share. You can find the Missing Kids latest posters on the left side ( scroll down ) of my blog.


This mummy is truly incredible.


Jemima Kirke does a short video on her abortion for The Center For Reproductive Rights.


Don't Hate On Sansa Stark's Powerful Femininity in Bitch Media



I love how Aline Ohanesian entertwines her son's rejection and hurt with her own as a writer.

simple life

i have arrived home at 9:30pm.

run five miles in dark suburbia. wait- hours before, at 4pm, the whole family walks to pizza. i get gluten free with veggies and it is delicious. we get ice cream. i get kiddie sized chocolate and peanut butter and it is delicious. one mile there, eat, one mile back. wait- hours before, at 1pm, Mr. Curry comes home from work, dashing in on his way to a job site, to help Bodie, our 12 year old golden, get up. his hind legs are not working well, one leg hangs useless and splays like a donkey foot underneath his bulk. Mr. Curry lifts him and finally he get his leg up, takes off, pees, eats, we praise him and give him wet dog food and pet his grey face. arthritis or cancer. the picks of the aging body are slim pickings. we will need to take him for an x-ray. Wolfgang, our 11 10 year old mix, has been licking a place on Bodie's lower back right above his tail, for weeks. Mr. Curry and i discuss stories of dogs who can smell cancer and eye each other sadly. still, in that moment, i wonder if i could get Mr. Curry in the bedroom alone. wait- hours before, i wake with Ever and Lola, Lola being home, on Spring Break. wait- hours before, the night before, the three of us have slept together. we went to bed late. Mr. Curry, who wakes at 4:30 am, went to bed at 8:30 the night before. I read three books to Ever, cuddled her, kissed her muffin pits and her face, told her i loved her for the 30 or 40th time that day, put her to bed, and then Lola and I watched one Modern Family and one 30 Rock. 

we wake and i feel the tendrils of joy throughout my body. i tell Lola, if I had to do one thing for the rest of my life, it would be to be with my family. i have told my kids since they were little, if nothing else ever happens to me, being your mother, being the daughter of my mother, being Mr. Curry's wife, being in this family- it's more than enough. i would not feel cheated. i would love to do more. but that more does not haunt me or drive me. it motivates me. it excites me. but i am deeply satisfied with love.

everything is possible

this isn't a comeback i've been here for years, re-birth, awakening, existential realization, sensory health,  vitamins, cod liver oil, the legs and arms pistons through suburban night ( coil, spring, pain ) hormonal recalibration, don't call this mid-life i've been here for years

i am afraid of some of the things that i know. i know them, not the way you know your bed, the way you could slide the covers down- and probably do- in darkness, moving your pillow into just the right position, avoiding the corner of the bookshelf, pulling your feet up into just the right spot on the mattress, leaning over without seeing but feeling for the reading lamp and then, just beyond, the glass of ice water you set just minutes ago. not like that, but close. some things i know that i am afraid of are that so far, in this unfathomable infinitesimal blink of life i've been gifted, when i do what i believe i need to do, no matter how impossible, ridiculous or injurious in other ways it may be, if i believe it is really, gut wrenchingly the one right thing to do, and i do it, everything works out better than it was before.

and then i think, no, i just have a very supportive mother.

People In Your Neighborhood

take a seat and read!

One of the best essays I've ever read online. Keep an eye out for Lisa Marie Basille. She's got it. Translations

A sharp and cutting and beautifully crafted Rumpus Sunday essay by Alexis Paige, on a night in the drunk tank: The Right To Remain

Regardless of what you think of PETA on the whole, this is an important cause and worth the two minutes it takes to sign the petition to stop painful tests on animals.

The Paris Review created a magazine for young readers, 8-12 years old. I bought this month's Paris Review ( for adults ) and it was quenching, beginning to end. I loved each interview and fiction and non-fiction and most of the poetry. The interviews with Hilary Mantel and Elena Ferrante alone are worth it.

What happens when one partner wants, and gets, more children than the other? This is a painfully honest and self-appraising look at one marriage with children in Salon,  by Lauren Apfel.

The No-Bullshit No-Drama Friendship Manifesto by Janelle Hanchett on Renegade Mothering

I am a wee bit obsessed with Jemima Kirke. Here's her 'not to get skinny but to get thick and strong' workout at a workout studio run by Cadence Dubus, who Jemima also painted naked. I also have a whole Jemima Kirke Pinterest page. 

One of the funniest things  I've read online in a while: on Distractify

Costa Rica is now running completely on renewable energy

Do you know how to save a choking baby? Take 41 seconds.

I'm always interested, as a writer in a world where I have promote everything I do, in how to do a better ask. Five Tips On How To Ask People for Shit So They Will Say Yes on Shewrites.

theory of relativity

my days are work, Ever and Lola and phone/FB w. Ian and Dakota, Mr. Curry, our backyard cat and two dogs, writing, housework, running/work-out and read/netflix/sleep. repeat.

i am a lucky human  being who has had much bad luck in life. there is a lot of outcry that we should not 'measure our pain', that our pain is what it is and not in relation to anything else. i cry foul. everything is in relation to something else, even the very essence of what we think of as 'reality'. there is a theory in quantum physics that nothing is real which changes with perspective, and this would therefore include the components of space itself, our astral bodies, our ancestors and home. my own theory of relativity includes the reality that during Queen Mary's reign  ( Bloody Mary ) where she burned heretics- in the hundreds for her few short years of sovereignty- one was a pregnant woman named Perotine. you can decide for yourself if you can bear to read poor Perotine's story, but the unbearable reality of what she experienced kept me awake in the wee hours last night, contemplating not only Perotine, but all of humanity who have suffered unimaginable grief or physical pain.

i know to be true for myself that understanding my place in the scale of human suffering has been incredibly important to me. it has increased my mental health in the long run, despite the agony of empathy one naturally endures after reading true accounts of such despair. my mental health, shaken and at times close to shattered by life events as a child and young adult, has been been strengthened because i am able to take the realities that have happened to me and accept that others have experienced worse, far worse, so in the random lottery of life i am luckier than many, and that many of those people have done well in life, have given back to society, have been kind and good and found gratitude for the wealth of beauty and goodness there is in the sheer fact of a butterfly, opening its wings on the grasses outside my window, or the red breasted birds that hang on our bird-feeder, pecking at the glass with resounding thwacks before realizing the seed lays below, or the arms of a loved one around my neck, or the feel of hot water running hard on my face and down my body, or the joy infused unconditional love of my child, her hands on my face, her wiggly little body in my lap.