Summer Dreamin: Nantucket

Nantucket beach image The Getty

" For me, this small house, which I stayed in every summer from ages 6 to 35, has always been framed:house as House. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and John Rauch completed it in 1972, and shortly thereafter it gained renown. Architectural historian Vincent Scully called it “what modern architects have always said they most wanted: a true vernacular architecture—common, buildable, traditional in the deepest sense, and of piercing symbolic power.” It is also where I lost my virginity, was proposed to, had my biggest family fights. "

Photo and words from Anne Trubek, at Dwell

Flux Capacitor Sponsor: Daydream Lily

Daydream Lily

Daydream Lily is a gorgeous blog where I am always finding new treasures- art, home decor, photos, designs, blogs. Lily's home has been featured recently on The Design Files, which you can find here. See her sponsor ad on the left of my blog!

for one moment she stops and presses her abdomen agains the sink

bone china in my right hand.
up against the wrist, the white
slice of handle, the blue river vein:
a baby could be crying. a kitten

mouth is open, violent and right.
red brown food skids across the
linoleum, skids into the places
where things fall and disappear

in a kitchen: my ankles crack.
from the other rooms other lives,
my husband's smell is thick.
the cleaver is out on cutting board

the cutting board slides into the places
where things slide and emerge clean,
up against my wrists, my fingers,
slick water and the pinprick of blood

hanging from white bone
china. there is no clock.
there is time, or not time.
blood, or not blood. red, or not red.

this place, or not this place.
this kitchen, or not this kitchen
this day, or not this day.
in this sink, or not in this sink

the scald rises like a baby's red bottom
up on the bone white, a gifted hive,
a matter of principle, the place
where things burn when

erupt and come dirty, the kitchen.

maggie may ethridge

After All, You're My Wonderwall: Marriage and Bipolar Disorder

With my husband's permission I am going to write out the story of his breakdown and diagnosis of Bipolar 2 in the first year of our marriage and it's effects on our life since. This story will be told in segments. The stigma of Bipolar is enormous and has not begun to decrease in power as it has with other mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety. This story intends only two things: to be entirely honest in it's telling, and for that honesty to help break down some of the stigmata of it's truth. In writing this I am assuming a level of respect toward my husband and his story in the comments, as well as an understanding that this is a man I love deeply and have committed myself to.


The words accrue- breakdown, psychosis, unstable- until the person in the chair, hands sweaty and folded in his lap, feet pressed together, head lowered- progression, irrational, medication-feels sure he is entirely made of this hardened skin now, just these words- chronic, genetic- forming layer over layer in a reverse scleroderma, thickening from the outside in, hidden inside of a disease both corrupt and stigmatized.

IN THE BEGINNING

One year into a marriage, he wakes in the morning, puts on his workman's shoes, pulls up the half cut green shorts and collared tee, grabs his lunch, looks at his sleeping wife and feels nothing. Oh, he thinks, I don't love my wife anymore. He looks around his house, all the objects unforgiving, cold, pointless, and realizes I don't want this. In the back of his mind a small voice is turning, turning, whispering something he leans inward to hear but cannot dredge the concern to wait for. Turning from his wife, his children, his house, he steps out of the door and is overwhelmed with the engulfing certainty that he is stepping into a vortex, an entirely different emotional life and reality that before had been hidden, but now in his dry, clear assessment is as true and pointless to avoid as the leg he must move in front of him to get to the truck which he will move to get him to his job.

The day moves quickly and he is thinking quickly and jokes fly out of his mouth in loudspeaker, his points are sharp and his comebacks sharper, his laughter at one point rising so high that he stops, wondering for one moment- but no, he moves on, working, laughing, talking, sure that when he gets home he will sit his wife down and explain to her that he cannot and does not love her or this life they have made, and that it is right. Then there is lunch-break, where he pulls out the turkey, spinach and mayonaise sandwich his wife has made for him and takes a bite before gagging on the thing rising from his abdomen, a grief as great and senseless and shapeless as the certainty of the day had been hard and clear and purposeful. His hands are shaking and his eyes are filling with humiliating tears; he grabs a napkin- she has scribbled I love you on it, like he is a goddamn grade schooler- and presses it to his face, feeling the working of his cheeks and the grinding of his teeth against this thing. He is gripped with the desire to bang his head into the cement pavement, until his skull is cracked and the thin white fluid of his brain leaks out it's yolk.

The sun moves over his short cut hair and the trembling stops. He takes a deep breath, another, holds his hands out in front of him. They are still. He lifts the sandwich to his mouth and begins again.

At home, his wife is holding the baby, the two boys rolling on the couch. Dad! Dad! They shout, and he is happy to see them, happy to high five them and rough their salty hair. His wife's face makes him feel sad. He remembers how he used to love her and reassures himself it couldn't have been just yesterday- this must have been coming for a while, he was denying it, he is now stronger and can face the truth that he does not love her or want a family life. He looks back at her with this reminder on his tongue and feels a great anger. She makes this so much harder than it has to be, he thinks. She is exhausting. No sooner does the thought enter his mind than he feels exhausted, leaden, his arms and legs pulse with deep fatigue and a hard ache, his eyes droop and he yawns.

I have to talk to you, he tells her. She brings the baby to the kitchen table. He sits across from her and begins to tell her he does not love her, cannot do this anymore, and wants a divorce- only after cannot do this anymore the look on her face sends him swimming in that vertigo and the vomit rises again and he cannot say the words. He watches her fingers turn indigo in her grip on herself and travels from the fingers to her face and shakes his head yes in answer to her questions. She is sobbing and the boys are silent in the next room. The baby begins to cry.

She pulls out a heavy breast and nurses the baby as tears curl round the baby's blue eyes and fingers on the breast from her mother's face. He looks at his own hands. He looks at his wife's hands. What is wrong? She is asking, and he shakes his head. I can't, he says, I can't. She is saying words about love and commitment and when she sees those words are bouncing from his shape like pebbles from the side of a dam, she moves toward him, cupping the baby's head in one hand and taking his with the other, demands him to look at her, look at me, she says, sweetheart, my sweetheart, please... And he stands and leaves the room knowing in this thing he is a bastard but not knowing why and not able to feel it, feel guilt or shame or care, not able to feel anything but the great rough and suffocating confusion and vortex of the yellow yolk and thin white fluid of the thick of the center of his brain.

desirable levels

photo: anna aden

I want to lay naked at nighttime but the chills erupt. My thyroid is low. Too low. Finally, a recommendation to an endocrinologist, which I requested from Kaiser at the beginning of the pregnancy: denied. Now at 13 weeks my thyroid result came back .25. Normal being .40 - 4.00 and desirable for pregnancy is to be on the high level of normal, to prevent the developmental delays that can come for a baby in a low thyroid mother. I added another pill four days ago, when I got the online results and did not need a doctor to tell me it was best for baby to add more thyroid. I am angry at my doctor you couldn't possibly be having symptoms already, we just changed the dose... it's not necessary to test you yet... and angry at myself for not being more aggressive. It's my fucking baby.

I am slack jawed and fuzzy eyed, achy limbed and exhausted, throwing up a few times a day again and spending the time in between sick and tired. The workweek is exhausting. I come home from work and collapse on the couch while Mr. Curry makes dinner and wake to eat, homework, tidy, shower, and collapse again.

This week is the hardest. It is when I miscarried. That baby died at 10 or 11 weeks so I am past that danger point, but somehow it is still this week, when the baby slid violently out of me, that is the hardest to get through. I am down to half the Zoloft I was taking before I became pregnant; the weight of this physical unhappiness and engulfment is becoming harder to handle gracefully. I find myself complaining more to Mr. Curry at home and fighting the urge to sulk. It is amazing how the physical suffering of the body can force out the personality with the ease and strength of a wave pushing the swimmer underwater. All the rest of the world's people and their chatter and cares and conversation murmur around me like traffic outside the window- real enough, but inconsequential. A smiling face, interested eyes, appropriate responses- all these at work are actual work for me right now, with my body constantly calling out, squeezing, aching, vomiting,shuddering. I find people who demand bright chatter extremely annoying.

I am desperate to prove myself as a novelist. I must finish my book. It is good, very good, but I don't know if it's great- but it's very good and I have absolute faith it will get an agent and publisher but I must finish those final pages!!! Please send me strength of spirit and mind to type those words, those sentences, and finish my novel. I am meant to do this, I know it, and it gnaws at me every night as I sleep that I am leaving my passion to the wind. The unhappy physical state of the last few months have made writing so much more difficult. I remind myself nothing will get easier when Biggie Pea is born. I must finish before November, when baby is due.

New Sponsor: Angela Simione

Please take time to visit Angela Simione, a new Flux Capacitor sponsor, an amazing artist (and poet)
whose work is for sale at her shop, little black fences

unknown daughter
sisters portrait

Where The Wild Things Are

Every ordinary day begins with the extraordinary fact of life, my own strange and intense and wild conciousness, physical body, the fluxing and working of my heartbeat on the soft of my arm as I fall asleep; the life of this world, it's trees bending in stillness and dance, the bacteria rich soil underneath, the flowers and weeds and plants and large mountains around town, the birds that caw and scrape through the streets, the racoons and coyotes and rabbits, trying to find space for their lives amidst dense suburbia; the lives of my children, the miracle that remains a miracle no matter how many times it is duplicated and experienced, that one body and another body come together and by three months along, an entirely new person with fingernails and legs and eyes and ears and legs that bend and stretch exists deep in the abdomen of the woman: the last miracle, my unborn baby, 12 weeks along, as vigorous and lively and beautiful as the sluice of bird wing through the Spring air, the tremble of wind on leaf, the stamp of my daughter's foot in
puddle.

The First Trimester Screening went easily, 20 minutes of movie viewing for Mr. Curry and I, watching our Biggie Pea kick, bring arms above the head, roll over, push the tiny feet against my uterus in a perfect picture of every bone in the foot. My thyroid is underperforming again, so I'll be upping my dose tonight. All other indicators are good.

The normal for me has always been excrutiating, a fact that absolutely works against a functioning mature adult life. I can guess at my calamatious childhood and it's constant tremulous swingings- the dramatic fights with my parents where my father threw fruit baskets and pots against the wall, screaming, my mother locking herself in her room, also screaming, crying. The constant moving, the evictions, the marriage on the edge of divorce but never falling through until the girls were 17 and 15, already a childhood lived. The poverty, the lonliness, the isolation, the lying, the cruelty. The stories of my parents great love, in the beginning. Thier passion. As a child these things are taken in and received as Communion and forever after you can tell yourself it is not what it was, while your blood boils and believes you not. As an person, I have always craved the elevated, the shaft of light on my face, the eruption of laughter, the timeless love, the absolute convictions, the bright intelligence, the painful struggles.

Every move toward stability- being on time, working the same job, having children, sticking in a marriage, eating the same healthy foods, taking the same healthy vitamins, brush teeth, spit, shower, rinse, repeat- it has taken me my entire adult life to find joy in this. Looking as hard as I possibly could until my eyes teared, to see the possibilities of joy. Reading has been, as always, a great help and equalizer. Lives unseen by me but still experienced and understood, inner workings explained.

I work, I come home, I rest, I clean, I parent, I love, I do as we all do, and this Biggie Pea rides on those calmer seas. I can find wild things, I can make wild things, in bed, with my children, on weekends, in mud puddles and sunshine and beaches and showers and midnight hours and novels and art and singing and whispering and even the fighting and worrying and frustration.

good morning sleepy-head

foxfire

*gone to mrs. basil's files

maggie may ethridge