A seven-year old and his mom dance at the
​NW Folklife Festival 

​I saw that look you gave across the line. The look that says, “Why have you people come to ruin my amusements.” You, with your faded purple moon-child skirt, your salted, mousy hair, your well-earned wrinkles, mouth parentheses from frowns, not smiles. At least not smiles to earnest little boys, with hands the size of sparrows, and a heart beating just as wild and fast.

You take pride in your community of folk dancers. You welcome everyone, from the non-binary male in a tutu, to the un-deodorized scrawny boomer, to the smatterings of lesbian couples, to the teens in steam-punk garb. All these stereotypical outcasts are embraced here, and it’s a wonder, a joy, to behold. But you, you are just happy they know the steps. The casting, the pixie turns, the cross-heys. They have a firm grasp on your fingers and on their lefts and rights. So yes, you welcome them with self-satisfaction as you glide in perpetual motion down your dance, pat yourself on the back of your natural-fibered flowing tank top, lift your chin a little higher when you simply see “partner” across your aisle, with a studied liberalism that surely flies from your mouth in condescending and learned phrasing, but has never roosted in your heart.

Oh, you should have seen us earlier! He learned to Cajun dance, his bony shoulders squared to me, his quick-quick-slow sending me steadily across the dance floor, his hot head against my belly, reminding me he fit there inside me once. He never ran us into other dancers, just turning and grinning and sighing with contentment. The instructor praising the great job he did.

So he came here now, to your dance floor, proud and excited, just wanting to dance with his mommy again.

Is it that he is unabashedly a boy? Is that what set you askew? No matter. You decided your role the moment the music began, and I’ll never know from what rotting root it sprung.

And your decision was this: you shamed and embarrassed my son, you manhandled and growled at a seven-year-old child, you shoved him into the hands of strangers, then you snapped at his mother, hissing for me not to help him. And for what? Your moment to shine? Your moment to prove to the other dancers that you were one of them? That you were not some amateur mucking up the 1s and 2s? That this wasn’t just a hobby to enjoy, but a skill to be conquered and you veni vedi veci-ed like a Wagnerian Valkyrie? As if it weren’t obvious to everyone that a little boy was struggling to turn the right way, just waiting for the part he got to swing in a circle in the middle with his mom.

We were with you for less than thirty seconds of a fifteen-minute dance, but your utter scorn for my boy reverberated through his still soft and supple mind. When I ask him to dance swing with me later, he will decline. And both our hearts will find new fissures.

But not yours. No, yours is intact, swelling with satisfaction at your swirls and your twirls and your allemandes. Completely oblivious to the scoop you took, like a spilt-flavor gelato, out of my son’s sunny heart.

It isn’t kind of me to wish you ill, and kindness is the number one rule in our house. Yet somewhere in the quiet hollows of your mind, perhaps clawing all the way back to the places you do not visit, the places of your own insecurity, your own failings of courage; like the princess on her towering pile of mattresses with that incessant, insistent pea, I hope you feel a modicum of the shame you cast so blithely on my boy. So that the next time a child, with eager eyes and a snow-cone-stained smile stands next to you in the line of your precious, precise dance, you will bend to his height, look him in the eyes and say, “We are going to have a wonderful time.”

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Three dead people live with me.
 
I don’t think about them much, unless I’m in the basement, alone, searching for something stuffed in some corner on some shelf. Two of them I’ve never met, and yet they are my burden. 
 
They don’t frighten me, though I’ll admit to startling when I bump the side of a black rectangle box about the size of a football. What they do is make me existentially morose.
 
They had lives and loves and cares and woes and tears and passions and pains and joys, that I know nothing of and that my husband barely recalls. You see, they are his grandparents— my mother-in-law’s parents. And also his father, though I knew him, but not well.

Will I wind up in some box in some woman’s basement someday with a name that only registers because it is the same as her own now?
 
But it is more than the recognition of my own insignificance and mortality that depresses me. It is the fact I must determine what to do with these long dead that sends me to the furthest depths of futility.
 
Why. Why does this fall to the woman? Why have I allowed myself to take these ashes? Why is it somehow expected? We women have a long history of taking care of both the quick and the dead, which can be beautiful and life-giving. Yet when it is forced, when it is subconsciously delegated, when one’s mother-in-law has two sons who never had to lift a finger for themselves in a society where it is the women who arrange things, and so when no woman is available, dead people stay in dusty basements, that is when I call foul.

My mother in law is fairly healthy, whip smart, but not exactly organized (again, her parents in boxes). But she’s nearing ninety. She has not, as they say, put her affairs in order. I was the one to find the estate attorney, to make the appointment I had no seat at, to discuss money she resents me having any say or control over once she is gone. So why do I do it? Why haven’t I learned the two little letters: no?
 
I grew up believing a woman could be and do anything she desired. And while, the essence of that is still true — being a woman does not make one inherently less human, less capable— I know it is not a sentiment I can share with my own daughter. All I have to do is look at the way our almost First Female President was, and continues to be, treated, even by those who claim the word feminist. All I have to do is see that my country chose a man who assaults, excoriates, and cages women, to lead us, to speak for us, to be our face to the globe. All I have to do is watch what this nation and these politicians did to a victim of sexual abuse who was brave enough to try and save us all from a Supreme Court with two sex offenders presiding.
 
This world is not a place for my child to be and do anything. Already her education has been curtailed by four boys—four in a class of twenty-nine—who disrupt learning to the point that the whole class has had to skip science, music, drama, math, because these boys are uncontrollable. These are not boys with special needs. They are white, privileged, smart, undisciplined. And yet it is the others in the class who must adjust themselves to accommodate these boys. My daughter brings noise canceling headphones to class, avoids certain play equipment at recess, and has nightmares. My daughter is the one we will be pulling out of this school. She bends, she breaks. But the boys go on “being boys,” growing up to be men who will still behave like their worst selves. Because we all make room for them.
 
My next novel is about Jezebel, from the Bible, a woman who was expected to keep her place, to mold to her spouse. She refused and was killed for it. And to this day three major religions dance on her grave. So perhaps it is her echo, the threat of joining these dead basement dwellers that keeps me chained to the patriarchy which still reigns in our progressive, contemporary society in my progressive, contemporary city. And my daughter doomed to repeat it.
 
So I sit with the ashes of dead strangers. With no answers. Just the gnashing of teeth.

​Normally I serve as my literary wife’s silent arm candy/trophy husband, but today she is letting me guest pen her blog.
 
You know how a movie or book can be so horrendous that it actually becomes more entertaining than a moderately good offering? To the pantheon of Showgirls and Joanie Loves Chachi, add the audiobook for Nancy’s Mysterious Letter.
 
The first seven Nancy Drew books were penned by Mildred Wit. Not literature by any means, but solid, classic kid material. And those first seven audio versions were all narrated by the incomparable Laura Linney, who could read a Microsoft user agreement with understated grace. They have been family car trip favorites.
 
Then book eight, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter.
 
Back in 1932, the publisher apparently decided, “Why re-hire our writer gal Mildred? Let’s hire Cpt. Walter Karig, who has, up to that point, only written books on World War II naval operations. What could possibly go wrong with letting him take a stab at getting inside the psyche of the teen girl sleuth world?”

It goes without saying that the plot and characterizations are unbelievably bad, but the most bizarre portion is an extended non-sequitur depiction of a meaningless football game, which chews up valuable space that could have been devoted to, say, flushing out a wooden story. But that is only the one example of consistently dreadful writing, several rungs down the ladder. And I didn’t think there was that far to drop in the first place.
 
What makes this a perfect storm is that in 2004, probably having blown their audio narrator budget for the entire series on retaining Laura Linney, the publishers apparently cast the next narrator from an Open Mic Night, or perhaps a “bring your child to work—and then actually put the child to work—day.” That’s not hyperbole; I listen to a ton of audiobooks—80 last year alone—and this is the absolute worst narration I ever endured.

​I need a little Christmas. Right this very minute.
 
And nothing gets me in the cheery, warm holiday mood like a Christmas themed book. Ok, after the tree, the stockings, the waxy chocolate advent calendar, and the eggnog latte, nothing gets me in the cheery, warm holiday mood like a Christmas themed book.
 
The problem: a really great holiday read is harder to find than you think.
 
You’ve got your old standby A Christmas Carol – which I read every year starting right after Thanksgiving. This year, I have the joy of finally reading it out loud to my kids. But where to go after Dickens…
 
How about Terry Pratchett? Yes, his books are fantasy, which may put some readers off at first, but this fantasy world does not take itself so seriously. Pratchett created a realm called Discworld - no, it has nothing to do with CDs or Frisbees – where fairies and wizards and even Death tromp around together making stories of hilarity, parody, and profundity.
 
What’s also great about the series is you can pick up any book in it and not feel lost as the plots are not sequential.

By 2065, it's estimated that Facebook profiles of the dead will outnumber profiles of the living. I can’t be the only one who finds that unsettling.
 
When my friend Brent died in his sleep in 2005, Facebook was still a yacht-measuring contest on Ivy League campuses, and My Space was peopled by your cousin’s garage band and that dude in high-school who still plays D&D. 
​
The only way I could determine the truth of his passing was through word-of-mouth. Because I saw friends shaking in each other's arms, saw the cut-to-the-bone grief on the reddened faces of his family, because I baked cookies for his funeral, his death was made real.

​I had closure, if not healing. 

​But times have changed.
 
Last Saturday, my friend Jeff from high school died of a massive heart attack. We were in a comedy troupe together, and I’d seen him a handful of times since graduation. I followed him on Facebook as he became a talented visual artist. But my favorite memory of him was high school biology class.
 
There were four of us in this lab group. Three of them swirled about in the upper-echelons of popularity: a female soccer star; a male blonde-hair, blue-eyed, slightly tanned, dimpled paragon of Americana; and Jeff, a footballer, incredibly funny, and I believe voted part of the homecoming court.

And then there was me.

​Oh, I wasn’t dorky enough to be picked on, but I also wasn't part of their scene and thus generally not worth their time. Not in a malicious way, just in that way America (used to?) patronize Canada. Only noticed when pointed out. Or when they get cheaper epi-pens.
 
But Jeff would have none of this. Jeff treated me to the bear hug that was his personality, enfolding me in his graces without prejudice. And the rest of that lab group followed his lead – and maybe I did too. Maybe I had some assumptions about the “Heathers” of my high school that needed to be broken down by this jolly, kind, mass of teenager.
 
But, when Jeff died, unlike Brent, there was no closure, no reality of demise. And it's Facebook's fault.

​Because our adult relationship is mediated through digital means, and ultimately, being the Breakfast Clubby Gen-Xer that I am, digital is both real and unreal. And thus the fact of his death is both real and unreal as well.  

​Yes, a bunch of Jeff’s friends have posted heartfelt goodbyes on his FB page. Yes, many of us have changed our profile pictures to one of his art pieces. And yes, the stark post announcing the stopping of his heart and of his life is right there on his page. But the struggle to find closure, the struggle to truly believe he is gone, continues because his page continues.
 
Right there is a snarky political post from two days before he died - here he was tagged in a photo - over here, an ad for his upcoming art show…. He’s not gone, he’s just gone digital.
 
I hazard a guess Millennials feel differently – the whole “it’s not real until it’s Facebook real” would perhaps give them the closure I seek. And perhaps not. Perhaps there are swaths of we under 50's who are caught in the “denial” stage of grief, bouncing between it and depression, never able to reach acceptance, because our loved one’s are still staring us in the face…book. 

​There’s a fantastic episode of the show Black Mirror with Hayley Atwell where Atwell’s character encounters a new service that compiles all the digital data available on her dead loved one and is able, from that data, to produce a computerized voice version of that person, which the living person can then talk to on the phone. The “person” sounds just like the deceased, answers back with the same inflection, same inside jokes. I won’t spoil the ending, but on the surface, this seems like an appealing development. What I wouldn’t give to, say, hear my Nana laugh one more time.
 
And yet, what the episode explores, and what I’m puzzling with here, is whether, in the end, we are served by this immortalization or harmed by it. If we can’t ever move on from the space of denial and depression to acceptance, can we ever fully function in our every day lives again? And would our passed loved ones want us to remain in this purgatory?

​I still get random spam from Brent’s email address sometimes – his family either doesn’t know how, or doesn’t want, to shut down his account. I don’t know if I would have the strength to take one down of my husband or my child, either. It was bad enough deleting my Nana’s phone number – I wept openly, in public. But a page, a blog an Instagram? It would be like erasing them completely. Control-alt-deleting their existence.
 
And yet there can be a dignity in deletion. I know I wouldn’t want my social media preserved forever and ever amen. I’ve said and done some embarrassing, mundane, poorly executed and now all recorded, things in my life. I don’t want these cemented in the minds of my loved ones. Heck, I even cringe sometimes at the Facebook “memory” posts that pop up every day. Did I really say that? Did I really wear my hair like that? 

​Of course there’s the good stuff too, but just like having to go through a beloved’s belongings - their clothes, their trinkets - perhaps we should just save out the jewels of our social media lives too, like my grandpa’s old maroon sweater that after nearly thirty years I still wrap myself in on a rainy Sunday, or the charm bracelet of my Nana’s that I wear when I want to feel confident. Save out the very best, most special things, and let the rest, rest.

Every once in awhile I want to write back to those jarring emails from Brent. "How you doin' bud? We miss you down here." And I've been checking Jeff's page every day. Almost as if I'm checking to see if his death is still true, like watching Titanic and thinking this time the boat won't sink.



​But it always does, and they're both always still just as lost to me. 
 
I guess, in the end, I'll put my passwords in my will.

It's time for the election, and if there's ever been an election to stress eat over, it's this one. 
​
But not to worry, for I'm here to help in your omnivorous distress.

Back in 2008 when we were all hoping and changing, my family inadvertently started the tradition of the red state vs. blue state buffet. 

Stereotypes, true, but if we can't laugh at ourselves on election day and drown our sorrows in PBR or raise a locally sourced craft cocktail in jubilation, then, really, when can we? 

So for those of you scrambling for an election night menu, I've got one for you.

But for Dessert,
we all put away our differences and eat flag cake.
​God Bless America. And cake. 

​I know this is dating myself, but I just had my first mammogram. Yes, I am saying publicly that I have breasts. Shocking, I know. And if I want to keep them, I must have them annually squashed like hand-therapy balls.
 
When the technician said, “It doesn’t hurt as much as they say,” while she compacted my left breast into a buckwheat pancake, it occurred to me that men would never put up with this. Especially if it involved something of a similarly stretchable consistency and integral to their idea of man-ness.
 
I’m of course talking about the penis.
 
If men had to put their members through what we women have to put our twins through, there would be a new mode of testing right quick.

,Imagine if you will, a room of cancer researchers deciding how to detect penile cancer (which is a real thing and I do not make light of it):

Guy A: We really want to make sure we can see all the tissue clearly…

Guy B: What about a normal X-ray? (Author’s note: This, by the way, is what they do for penises.)

Guy A: What if we stretched it out between two cold plates of glass and then slowly compressed it until it was wafer thin?

All Guys in Room: LOLOLOLOL

Guy A: LOL! Of course we’ll just do an x-ray!
 
Yes, all my researchers are men. Because, patriarchy.
 
But say Guy A wasn’t kidding. Say all men over 40 had to take a peniogramTM every year.

It might look something like this:

​Let’s call our patient, well, Dick.
 
Dick checks in for his peniogramtm, stating the reason for his visit in quiet tones, mildly embarrassed by the women in the waiting room giving him furtive glances over year-old Oprah magazines.
 
He sits, and surprisingly, only makes it through the ad section of Sport’s Illustrated before he’s called back. He’s mildly disappointed, because he wanted to read that one article on LeBron.
 
“Is this your first time?” The male technician says with a practiced, emotionless smile.
 
Dick nods and follows the tech to what could be a late 80’s Banana Republic dressing room.
 
“Take off your clothes and put on a robe…”

The tech walks away, then stops to shout back, nary a care for who might overhear.

​“Did you put on any lotions or Gold Balm down there?”
 
Dick, halfway behind his curtain, turns pale.
 
“If you did, just use the moist towelettes to clean yourself off.”
 
Dick obeys, unwrapping a one-by-one inch square of alcohol doused rice paper. He can’t quite decide to be proud that he needs seven of them to do the job, or if he should be concerned that his Buddy is recoiling into his body, turtle like.

​The machine whirrs to life.

“You might feel some slight pressure now.”

The tech is all business, as the glacial glass panels press tighter and tighter. Dick sucks in his breath.
 
“Don’t move!”
 
The machine clamps harder, flattening his noodle thinner than a Parisian crepe. Surely this machine will pull his penis off. No seriously, it is pulling his penis off. He will never have sex again. Or pee properly.
 
The machine beeps, releases.
 
“See, that wasn’t so bad.”
 
Are you m-fing kidding me?
 
“Three more to go!”

​Dick believes if the machine does not bite off his Johnson, it will fall off from frostbite. His testicles are already nowhere to be found. 
 
Finally, mercifully, the flattening is finished.
 
“You’ll be a little sore the rest of the day and maybe tomorrow.” The tech is too chipper.

Dick’s dick is twenty times more sore than when he went through puberty - and his whole drawer full of tube socks.
 
“And, just so you know, on your first time, they may call you back because they’re not used to what your tissue looks like.”
 
Yeah, that disease your best friend was just diagnosed with and just killed your other friend? The one that had two of your friends having preventative peniosectomies because their risk was so high and they have little kids and are frightened bald to leave them fatherless? That disease? We’re probably gonna f-up and make you think you have it for a week or so, just about the time your penis stops feeling like Mr. Gadget’s. But ya know, were just getting to know your tissue. Chuckles again.
 
And for the next week, Dick obsessively looks to his phone, willing the clinic not to call.
 
Poor Dick.

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I was honored to be a part of Elizabeth Ogle's photography series Authors: Stories Behind the Books. Her blog captures her work as well as an interview with me about writing...and there just may be a little hidden reveal in there for all you Realm series fans...Enjoy! 

Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of thousands of hipster parents grabbing their neck beards in horror, downing mason jars of locally distilled whiskey, unable to show their faces at the free-range parenting play date. “Why’d we name our son Atticus????”

Today, Go Set a Watchman, the much-anticipated pair to our beloved To Kill A Mockbird, hit the shelves. And the book, it turns out, well, it might make Boo Radley come out of hiding, simply to shake his head.

Apparently, in this new, but actually really old, book, Atticus Finch, the archetype of all that is good and holy for liberal-minded white people and first-year law students alike, turns out to be a racist. And not just any racist, blissfully unaware of his privilege to drive a car and not be pulled over or shot at, but a bitter, angry one. He's joined the KKK. He says things like, “Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” He reads pamphlets titled, “The Black Plague.” It’s kind of like if Jean Valjean turned out to be a pedophile.

Thankfully, for all of us with white-guilt fueled outrage, Scout at least, basically equates her father’s ideas to Hitler. Phew!

But before our dearly held characters are decimated, let’s keep a couple things in mind.

My advice? Pretend in your mind that Harper Lee didn’t write this. Pretend the characters are wholly other than those you’ve come to name your children after. Sort of like how, if you pretend M. Night Shyamalan didn’t write and direct The Village, The Village is actually a pretty good movie, instead of you just wanting it to be The Sixth Sense all over again.

Take it on it's own merit, unclouded by the years of adulation heaped upon its predecessor. 

And try not to fixate on Atticus. These are Scout’s stories after all. And Scout, now Jean Louise, is a woman before her time, heart reaching for the not-yet second wave of feminism, that will still only pay her seventy cents on the dollar to a man, but where she’ll at least she be able to actually hold a job by her own merit. Until she wants to have a family. But let’s not go there right now.

Think of this story as an interesting exploration of the struggles with racism and sexism we still have today, now much more hidden, and perhaps because so, now much more insidious. Use it as a springboard for further change toward reconciliation, restitution, and justice. 

But do, please, stop naming your children Atticus. 

I’m sure the Duchess of Cambridge has prepared herself for her birth.

I doubt she popped over to the hospital to stick her hand in a cup of ice while William told her to breathe funny and count to three, but I’m sure she’s got some resources. Yet, no matter what hypno-birthing-in-a-tub-he-ha-ha-breathing-scented-candle-meditative-state you’re planning on Your Grace, I have some terrible news: it ain’t gonna work. Your “birth plan” even imprinted with the royal seal, will be tossed out the window. 

Why? 

1. Birth is pain, to paraphrase Westley, and anyone who says differently is selling you something.

It is going to hurt. Badly. And that type of pain puts your brain in a space you cannot predict. I think people in Micronesia heard my screams as I dilated six centimeters in twenty minutes with my second child. This is physical pain that you truly could not imagine. People say “I thought I was going to die” in a tongue-in-cheek way these days, like "OMG, I stubbed my toe on the ottoman and I thought I was going to die." But I’m telling you, I. thought. I. was. going. to. die. Or kill the entire nursing staff because: a) they kept talking so loud b) they kept being so blasted nonchalant, as if women have babies every day or something. 


2. Even if you get an epidural, as I did with my first, there will be pain involved. 

They’re called needles. And they’re as long as Estimate, the Queen’s winning horse’s, legs. And then you get all loopy and can’t go to the bathroom…it’s very undignified.

3. Because of the above, your reaction to birth will not be as planned. 

The first go ‘round, I realized in the midst of our birth class that my husband counting in my face and telling me how great I was doing annoyed the be-jesus out of me. Yet, when he did or said something funny, it was distracting. Great! So off to the hospital we went, suitcase full of Eddie Izzard, The Daily Show, Hot Fuzz, and, just in case, the entire Harry Potter DVD collection. But I did not watch a single thing the entire time. Little did I know that would be the last time in five years I would ever be able to watch anything start to finish without interruption. The point being, I thought I would want one thing, and in the end, I just wanted it dark and quiet and peaceful. And I wanted that baby out. 

4. You will agree to interventions you don’t want because what you really want is a healthy baby. 

I didn’t want pitocin – the drug that helps to induce contractions – as I had heard it statistically leads to more C-sections. Someone on the internetwebs said that. But my first child was taking her sweet time. My water broke and apparently there’s a time limit to how long a kiddo should be hanging around womb side after the pool’s drained. So we got the dreaded p-word in my system and things started to move. But not fast enough. My baby’s heart rate was faltering – decelerating. I didn’t want to use any means other than my killer kegel muscles to get her out, but without a suction, I would not have a scrumptious near five year old bounding about my house.

5. Your discarded birth plan means bupkis.

Do not, for one instant, berate yourself for not having the birth you dreamed of - or others dreamed of for you. Whether it was covered in rainbows and unicorns and lavender and ended in ecstasy, or it was forty hours of pushing followed by a c-section, what you will have (hopefully – we’re praying for you!) is a happy healthy baby and a happy healthy mommy. Being one of the most famous women in the world is hard enough without adding weight to the schmucks who will try and critique how your baby came in to the world. So hold your head high. You've just birthed an heir and in an instant, become a mom.


*note: this is a re-post from pre-George's birth.