When the little angel was a baby, we lived in This Old House. If you're new here, you may not know that This Old House was a beautiful Arts & Crafts with a screened-in porch in the Waldo neighborhood of Kansas City. It was built in 1921. It had push-button light switches that sometimes threw sparks, it was not ducted for air conditioning (making my home office nearly unbearable in the summer) and it had decorative metal grates with holes big enough to pass my fist through, lovely as they were.

While in the throes of postpartum something, I became convinced that snakes could climb up through from the leaky, Silence-of-the-Lambs basement through the ductwork and slither out the very large grate holes into my daughter's bedroom. Every time I looked at those grates, I had to push the thoughts away, but it was hard. It was so hard. These thoughts, I now know, are called intrusive thoughts, and they are closely associated with anxiety disorder, OCD, eating disorders, and psychosis. I still have them from time to time, but they are much lessened after medication and meditation and all manner of my managing-my-anxiety-disorder daily rituals.

I feel a kinship with Stephen King. Here is a man who must suffer, as I do, from intrusive thoughts.

I first read PET SEMETARY in high school, and then I thought it was a horror novel. I've been rereading it this week, and I now understand it is a book about grief. A parent's grief.

I got the ebook copy, and there is a foreward in this version written by King in 2000, in which he admits something very similar to what happened to Gage in the book happened to his own son (almost) when his own son was two. He wrote:

"But a part of my mind has never escaped from that gruesome what if: Suppose I hadn't caught him? Or suppose he had fallen in the middle of the road instead of on the edge of it? I think you can see why I found the book which rose out of these incidents so distressing. I simply took existing elements and threw in that one terrible what if. Put another way, I found myself not just thinking the unthinkable, but writing it down."

What would King have done with my grate snakes?

And what is a parent to do with the fear that comes of losing a child through any manner of preventable horrors? What would we do, what lengths would we be willing to go, if we thought we could (fix them) protect them from everything?

When my girl was two, a co-worker told me about a little girl he knew who swallowed a great deal of water while learning to swim and dry-drowned. I didn't know such a thing existed, and I immediately suffered a solid week of nightmares and became terrified of letting my daughter in the water, even as I was insisting she learn to swim. This week, she's at horse camp learning to walk and trot and canter, even bareback, and each night as I lie in bed next to her as she drifts off to sleep, my mind tries to send pictures of all the awful accidents that happen in barns, even though I myself owned a horse for three years in my childhood and took almost exclusive rights to the hard and personal care of him, picking his hooves and brushing him without tying him up and walking carefully around his back away from the hooves that could go misplaced even though that dear, sweet horse would never hurt anyone intentionally. As much as I loved my horse, and as much as I love to swim, I've never lost a healthy respect for either large animals or water, as my brain easily produces full-on, Scorcese-directed mind movies of all the horrible ways to die dealing with either. 

I've learned at 40 that the best way to deal with intrusive thoughts is to bat them away like horseflies. Letting them rest even a minute allows them to bite and gather until the only way to break free is to flail in the most embarrassing and overwrought way when I can't take it for one more minute. I've had minor breakdowns from my intrusive thoughts probably a dozen times over the course of my life, and it's never been pretty. I'm not proud of how I've turned my fear into anger and stabbed out at those around me. I'm trying to learn to handle them better. My intrusive thoughts are merely the worst possible course of what if, and a life well lived is a life spent in the now, breathing deeply and remembering that no matter what, I can get through it, and it probably won't even happen. I can't worry about the bad thing happening until it does. The ironic thing is that sometimes when the bad thing happens, it's a relief, because there's no more anticipation of the bad thing; there's only dealing with it.

I think that I can make these decisions, because I have to in order to manage my anxiety disorder. The truth, though, is that our subsconscious minds decide things, and then our frontal lobes take credit for them. A study done in 2000 found:

Participants in the study were asked to make a decision about whether they would use their left hand or their right hand to press a lever.  By using fMRI scans of the brain’s activity, the researchers knew the participant’s decision by analysing the activity in the frontopolar cortex of the brain.  This information about the participant’s decision was available up to seven seconds before the participant had “made” a conscious decision.  The researchers used the information from the scans, to predict with success, the 36 participant’s decisions before they had consciously made them!

What does that mean for someone with intrusive thoughts? What is really more frightening than imagining you've lost the ability to control your own mind? In PET SEMETARY, as Louis Creed drives to his son's grave to do you-know-what, he thinks:

"He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None."

Because, of course, subconsciously he'd already decided to hop on the Micmac Indian train and ride it to the end of the line.

Brain research is fascinating, but it also brings into question the moral compass, free will and how easy it would be to slip into distressing thought patterns. I know, in my rational mind, and I'm sure I knew then, that it would be really hard if not impossible for a snake to climb up two stories of slick ductwork, and quite frankly, if a snake wanted to eat my baby, all it would have to do is climb the stairs. Heaven knows the basement door didn't really shut. That my brain conjured this elaborate lie out of turn-of-the-century grates still amazes me.

But then it doesn't.

Writers observe things, details. Details make the story interesting. But they also lead to the what ifs, and sometimes those thoughts are better off dead. 

In mid-April, I ran a half-marathon. A few weeks later, I developed a stress fracture. Since then, I've been building back up from that. I had a boot for two weeks, then I got out of the boot and was only able to run a mile and that mile gave me pain, so I cut back to an even more conservative plan that had me building up from three cycles of 9 minutes walk/1 minute run to today's final six cycles of 5 minutes walk/5 minutes run. After a rest day tomorrow, I should be able to run three miles for the first time in more than a month on Friday. I want to get going again. I've signed up for another half-marathon in November. I'm tired of babying my feet.

Except now my calf hurts. And my friend and co-worker Diane just got diagnosed with a blood clot. And all I can think about is that this a blood clot, even though when I used my foam roller, my calf was ridiculously tight, and there's every reason to believe I've been overcompensating on that leg whether I realize it or not. And when I found a lump in my breast it hurt so bad the day before the mammogram and not at all the day I was cleared as "normal." And the lump in my leg throbbed until it came out and I discovered it was a harmless lipoma and no other lump in my leg (and there are many) hurts because I assume now they are all lipomas.

So I'm going to my doctor tomorrow morning to have what is in all liklihood a muscle sore from being really worked again after a month or so of lighter workouts checked out to make sure I'm not going to drop over dead. Because that is where my anxiety goes -- straight to dead. Rational? No. Logical? No. But if I let myself think about a blood clot for more than five minutes, my chest goes tight and I feel like I can't breathe, and then I wonder if it's a panic attack or a pulminary embolism from my blood clot that I probably don't have. And even if I do have one, Diane has one and is most certainly not dead, and I won't be dead, either, because I will take the medicine and everything will be fine.

So far, the tightness in my chest has not been a pulmonary embolism. It is totally anxiety, which can be a tremendous bitch.

But I'm going to the doctor, more for my anxiety disorder than for my calf. This is what I do now, at forty. I do not try to convince the anxiety disorder that things are no big deal. I just go get facts, and most of the time, things really are no big deal. But I no longer wait around to see if the cat throwing up means anything special or if the lump in my breast is a cyst or breast cancer. I just go and let a professional person tell me what is the what.

Then, on Friday, assuming there is no blood clot, I'm going to RUN.

My daughter is a worrier. She worries about things she doesn't want to do. She worries about things she does want to do. She worries that if she makes the wrong decision, everything will go awry. I get it. I'm a worrier by nature, too.

A while back I got advice from a professional. She said I should instigate a Worry List and some Worry Time each day. The Worry List is just that --writing the things you're worried about down on paper. My sister writes them down and puts them in a ceramic cupcake to let the cupcake do the worrying for her. My daughter prefers a whiteboard. Many times I've walked into her playroom where the whiteboard is to find the list has been revised. It's like a window into her psyche that I really appreciate, because my biggest worry is that I won't know what she is worrying about and she'll suffer in silence.

Aren't we fun?

More interesting to me than the Worry List is the scheduled Worry Time. If my daughter tries to tell me what she's worried about outside the Worry Time, I'm supposed to redirect her to table it, kid, leave it on the field, wait until Worry Time. When I first heard this idea, I thought it was ridiculous. Not being allowed to worry whenever you want seemed cruel and unusual, and also worry-inducing. But I started trying it myself, and, well, it totally works.

After spending years planning out how every scenario could turn out in increasingly horrifying ways, I'm finding it easier to bat away my fears until it gets dark. While it's not great that they come back when it gets dark, at least I get twelve hours of respite from the never-ending treadmill of anxiety I used to have. 

The other nice thing about Worry Time with kids is that you can discuss each worry and whether or not the kid can do anything about that thing she is worried about. In the case of wanting to quit ballet and not being able to until the end of the semester, she has finally figured out she can worry all she wants, but it's not changing anything. We dug in our heels hard that she finish this round before she hangs up her leotard. Over the past few months, we've gone from me stuffing her in my friend's carpool car bawling her head off to mentioning that she hates ballet on Monday and Wednesday nights at Worry Time and usually once for good measure on Tuesday and Thursday mornings while we're getting ready for school and work. In the case of being worried about the school spelling bee, there is actually something she can do about that -- she can study the words. A little bit of worry is a good thing, because it gets you off your ass. And if she doesn't tell me this stuff, I don't know she even needs to study. A fringe benefit: Her worrying alleviates my worry that she'll have a spelling bee and not be prepared and I never even knew about it in the first place.

Learning to worry at specific times is hard. Worrying makes me feel like I'm doing something about the problem, even though intellectually I understand that I'm not. My daughter and I have worked on visualizing windshield wipers to sweep problems away (works for me, not for her); taking deep breaths (works for both of us); and diverting ourselves with something else interesting, like reading a good book (works for both of us). I find it is difficult for me to read something really good and captivating and worry at the same time. I can't even worry and listen to a book on tape at the same time. (I know, I've tried.) 

What my daughter and I have learned is that Worry Time is not really so much about Worry Time as it is not worrying the rest of the time. By containing the worry, you free yourself up for the rest of the day. Sometimes, I figure out a solution in that time -- or if not a solution, at least a step I can take in the right direction toward alleviating the issue causing my worry. 

A good way to end Worry Time for us is to pray about what she's worried about, but also to be thankful for things that are going well. I've morphed in my personal beliefs to a place of thankfulness. I don't focus on what I've done wrong the way I did when I was growing up listening to sermons every week. Now I choose to focus on the grace. I do try really hard to be a good person, and it's impossible to be a perfect person. In some ways, organized religion and its emphasis on wrongdoing made me more anxious than I was even normally, and it's one of the reasons I now homeschool my religion for myself and my daughter. It is much easier for me to be kind to others when I am being kind to myself, too.

I've wrestled with myself so much in the past ten years to get myself to a place of gratitude and looking at what went well instead of looking at what went wrong. It's so much more fun to complain, really, it is. I have no idea why, but it's true. But complaining makes me feel like shit. My friend Sandee would always say, "The water is too wet, and the sky is too blue and the sand is too sandy." I say that to my daughter when I find myself complaining. Gratitude goes a long way toward staving off anxiety. A surprisingly long way.

I'm supposing a lot of you figured all this out before you had to tattoo the word "now" on your forearm to remind yourself that in this moment, you are fine, just FINE, stop WORRYING. I told my daughter when I got the tattoo exactly why I needed it, and I hope by telling her that and by helping her learn to contain and combat her worries, she won't need ink when she's thirty-nine. Or at least not mood-regulating ink.

Tomorrow the little angel has a ceremony to go to for school. She has been bugging me to iron the flounces of her skirt to make them stand out prettily, and of course I keep forgetting. This morning, she left me a note on my laptop. Mommy, please iron my skirt. I wrote it down on my work list: Iron skirt.  And I remembered! I ironed it.

I got to the second row of flounces before I started crying.

There I stood in my basement, holding an iron in my hand, thinking about how proud I am of my girl who tries so hard in school. I also thought about the worry list she wrote on her playroom whiteboard, how she's been counting down the days to know if her team won, how the combination of that looming childhood worry combined with a school spelling bee this week has her seriously spinning.

She will be fine, of course. Competition is healthy. She doesn't play sports, so this is her opportunity to learn to be a good winner or loser, to look forward to things, to be rewarded for a job well done, to celebrate or mourn with a team. Sports are great and all, but they aren't the only teams in schools. 

So I stood there, trying to get all the wrinkles out and knowing because of the way the flounces were gathered I would fail, trying to keep Kizzy from burning his little black paws on the steam he so desperately wanted to touch, thinking how fast it is going and it will be like a roller coaster that took forever and only thirty seconds between now and when I'm steaming her high school graduation gown. 

I'm doing all I can do. She was so wound up she had a lot of trouble getting to sleep last night. I know tonight will be worse. We've scheduled some worry time for after ballet (not sure I wrote about how she decided two weeks into September that she can't handle the step-up to two nights during the school week, she still hates ballet, quitting at the end of the semester, and I will be very happy not hear a daily litany of how much she hates ballet after that). I'll work on PARKER CLEAVES while she's in class so I won't be sitting there at bedtime thinking how every minute ticking by is a minute I'm not writing before the 11 pm mental shutdown. I'll be fresh. I'll remind her what a good coper she is. We'll breathe deeply. And tomorrow, win or lose, we'll celebrate, of course after the ceremony and school and my trip to the blonde fairy that has already been rescheduled twice. I'd like to clear my calendar for her, but Beloved is traveling till Thursday and, well, dammit, I need my hair cut.

I'm not writing this for you all, I'm writing this for me, you see that right? I just realized it myself.

I can do this. I can stand by her through this excitement and anxiety all by myself sandwiched between two ballet sessions she hates and amidst taking out the garbage and carpooling and scheduling things ahead for Thanksgiving at work and laundry and cooking and writing. I will not let my own anxiety about managing my job and my kid and the house alone affect my ability to teach her to cope, because the better I cope, the better she will cope. 

Fucking hell, being a good example is SO HARD. 

Thanksgiving posts have taken over the internet, and everywhere I look I am confronted with pictures of food. 

When I was anorexic, Thanksgiving was my least favorite holiday. My extended family got together, and someone always made pie that not only had half the calories of my daily self-imposed limit, but also came attached with happy childhood memories and the knowledge it was made by someone I loved very much.

Holidays can be hard for any number of reasons, but for anorexics and their people, they contain so many potential landmines. If the anorexic has been hiding out under baggy clothes, her condition might not be noticed as much by those who are with her every day, but it will be glaring to someone who hasn't seen her in six months or a year. When an entire holiday is about eating too much, not eating or eating very little makes everyone else sit up and pay attention. Someone not eating can make someone who has overeating problems feel doubly defensive. Plus, family. Just family. It doesn't take much to set people off who have been forced to leave their own houses and spend an afternoon crowded together being thankful.

Then there's being thankful. It's hard to be thankful when you're depressed or in the grips of anxiety or OCD or an eating disorder. My head was extremely crowded in those years, mostly thinking about food I wouldn't let myself eat. 

I'm thankful every day that those painful Thanksgivings are behind me now. This is the first Thanksgiving I've had something to offer besides a blog post for those who are anorexic or those who are going to find themselves sitting across the table from a very thin person and worrying this holiday season. For less than the price of a turkey, I can offer my novel. 

I haven't done a lot of promotion in the past six months here, but I wanted to share the background of my book again for anyone new. 

“Everyone trusted me back then. Good old, dependable Diana. Which is why most people didn’t notice at first.”

"Your shirt is yellow."

"Your eyes are blue."

"You have to stop running away from your problems." 

"You're too skinny."

Fifteen-year-old Diana Keller accidentally begins teaching The Obvious Game to new kid Jesse on his sixteenth birthday. As she buries her shock about her mother's fresh cancer diagnosis in cookbooks, peach schnapps and Buns of Steel workouts, Diana both seduces athlete Jesse and shoves him away under the guise of her carefully constructed sentences. As their relationship deepens, Diana avoids Jesse's past with her own secrets -- which she'll protect at any cost. Will Diana and Jesse's love survive his wrestling obsession and the Keller family's chaos, or will all their important details stay buried beneath a game? 

Praise for The Obvious Game:

"Lovely, evocative, painful and joyful all  in one ... much like high school." --Jenny Lawson, author of LET'S PRETEND THIS NEVER HAPPENED 

“I couldn’t put down THE OBVIOUS GAME. Arens perfectly captures the hunger, pain and uncertainty of adolescence.” -- Ann Napolitano, author of A GOOD HARD LOOK and WITHIN ARM'S REACH

"THE OBVIOUS GAME is a fearless, honest, and intense look into the psychology of anorexia. The characters—especially Diana--are so natural and emotionally authentic that you’ll find yourself yelling at the page even as you’re compelled to turn it." -- Coert Voorhees, author of LUCKY FOOLS and THE BROTHERS TORRES

"Let’s be clear about one thing: there’s nothing obvious about THE OBVIOUS GAME. Arens has written a moving, sometimes heart-breaking story about one girl’s attempt to control the uncontrollable. You can’t help but relate to Diana and her struggles as you delve into this gem of a novel." -- Risa Green, author of THE SECRET SOCIETY OF THE PINK CRYSTAL BALL

"THE OBVIOUS GAME explores the chasms between conformity and independence, faith and fear, discoveries and secrets, first times and last chances, hunger and satisfaction. The tortured teenage experience is captured triumphantly within the pages of this unflinching, yet utterly relatable, novel. -Erica Rivera, author of INSATIABLE: A YOUNG MOTHER’S STRUGGLE WITH ANOREXIA 

Book Information:

Publisher: Inkspell Publishing

Release Date: Feb 7th, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-9856562-7-0 (ebook), 978-0-9856562-8-7 (Paperback)

Paperback Price: $13.99

Kindle: $4.99

• THE OBVIOUS GAME on AMAZON
• THE OBVIOUS GAME on BARNES & NOBLE
• THE OBVIOUS GAME on INDIEBOUND

Thanksgiving is a time when things start coming to a head for Diana, who started out "normal." The novel follows her thoughts and feelings into the abyss ... and back out. If you're a family member or friend who wants to throttle their anorexic loved one, this book can help you understand the psychology of suffering from this condition. If you're full-blown anorexic yourself, I'm so sorry. This book contains the sentences that helped me break out of the mind-space that could have killed me. If you just have a weird relationship with food, you might find yourself examining why you initiated your set of rules that determine when you can eat, why, with whom and how much. And if you just like contemporary young adult novels that ask really hard questions about growing up, you might like it as a read.

The next few weeks are going to be really hard for a lot of people who struggle with their relationship with food. For some, it's never "just a doughnut." If you're anorexic, taking one bite more than you planned can feel like bungee jumping off a bridge. I remember wondering why these people who loved me kept asking me to put myself through that. So be kind if you see someone staring in misery at her plate on Thanksgiving. Eating disorders are nobody's fault, and recovery takes a village. Take care of each other.

Beloved lost his old job on September 28, 2012. He got an offer for a new one on December 21, 2012. He starts on Monday.

We are returning to the land of two incomes and kissing that unemployment debit card goodbye.

I am exhaling, finally. We aren't going to go over the fiscal cliff as hard as I feared when Beloved's unemployment benefits ran out in March.

Growing up, the fear I fixated on was my dad losing his job. It was probably a bigger deal than Beloved losing his job, because at the time I was fixated, my mom didn't work outside the home. Sometimes I worried about it alone at night, in my bed. I don't know if the little angel has been doing that. I don't ask her, because I don't want to plant the fear if it's not already there. She hasn't had unexplained stomachaches or trouble sleeping or showed any other signs of kid anxiety, so I've tried to be very breezy about money in front of her.

My girl knows the reason we haven't been going out to eat or buying anything but the bare necessities these past few months: because we were waiting for Daddy's new job. She knew we had enough to be safe but not enough for the bubble gum every time we went to the grocery store. She accepted the cancellation of the full-on pumpkin party in October and the homemade birthday gifts for her friends during the fall. She asked when we could have a party again, and we told her after Daddy got his new job. That was pretty much the answer to everything. We reassured her she would still have a nice Christmas, that we would get each other smaller things so she could have a nice Christmas. And she did, mostly thanks to grandparents and my sister, who pulled serious weight this holiday, and for which I thank them.

I'm trying to unclench.

My restricting anxiety has been operating on all gaskets since September, and I haven't been able to resist tracking every penny we've spent on a daily basis. My sister asks why I would do that to myself, but it's comforting to me in the way counting calories in the margins of my high school notebooks was comforting. I know that once the income streams open back up, I need to stop that. I need to go back to being careful but not obsessive. I need to look once every two weeks, not every day.

The anxiety wants to keep restricting and pay off every single credit card as soon as possible so if something like this happens again, we'll at least have credit. Thanks to Beloved's work expenses and our own years of recession backpedaling, we had more on the cards than I could let myself think about and there wasn't much room to move. I'm glad that in three months, the only thing we put on there was my flight to ALA Midwinter after a friend offered to let me stay with her if I wanted to go to learn about librarians in relation to THE OBVIOUS GAME. But we paid the minimums for the first time in our entire marriage for three months, and it made me absolutely insane to not see that amount go down more.

We will pay off the cards in a realistic timeframe. We talked about it on New Year's Eve over dinner. We've learned our lesson. But just as I went on and on about my wishes to be debt-free, my husband told me as nicely as humanly possible that my clothes are all threadbare and my once-beloved J. Jill sweater looks like "matted felt."

It's true. Even when things are good, I am not good at spending money on clothes, and eventually I look down and realize the t-shirt I'm wearing is older than my daughter and is of an unknowable color. He said it really nicely: "Honey, you're prettier than you're dressing. You should buy yourself some new clothes." Of course, as with any painful truth, it was a little hard to hear, but your lover should be able to be honest with you about such things. I heard the love in what he was saying. Not "you look like a slob," but "you're only 38 and you should get some v-necks."

The answer with spending, as with eating, is somewhere between greed and starvation. I refuse to charge anything that doesn't absolutely have to be charged. I want us to be throwing piles of money at those credit cards, and we will throw the piles in as reasonable a manner as possible once we are back to normal, income-wise.

But I have to go to Target tonight, because I threw away all but three pair of underwear yesterday.

Things are going to get better now, and for my mental health, I need to stop counting things.

One thing about social media: It teaches you you're not the only person with problems. My connection to hundreds if not thousands of other human beings each day has made me more grateful for the good things in my life and more tolerant for the bad. No, everyone else is not sitting around on unicorn-fur couches sipping ambrosia -- they have cancer and bankruptcy and also new babies and cute puppies and lottery winnings. We are all in it together, for good and for bad.

As Beloved's job situation stretches on, I've found myself in several doctor's offices making sure the thing I have now -- my health -- is intact. Last week I went to a dermatologist to get my first-ever full-body skin cancer check. Basal skin cancer seems to be all the rage in my hometown for the farming crew, and I let my fair-skinned self turn lobster red way more times than I should have in my youth. I also tanned before prom, just sayin'. Luckily this time I came out clean, and I made an appointment to get checked again around my birthday every year.

Today I'm going in for a well-woman appointment. I haven't had one in years. Unfortunately, I was inspired to do so after a dear friend lost her cousin to sudden and unexpected girl cancer. Like two weeks unexpected. Though I don't even know this woman, I'm taken aback by the speed in which she was taken down, and it scared me enough to immediately book a Pap smear. I tell you this so if you are a woman, you will be sure to get one, too. So many girl cancers can be treated if caught early.

I'm not perfect with my health -- none of us are. And I try not to think too hard about my health, because I have anxiety disorder and if I think too hard about all the crazy-ass things that could give me cancer or brain damage or whatever, I'll freak out. It's so much easier to avoid breaking a bone than getting a terminal disease. I have a close relative who is dying of something completely awful right now that scares the shit out of me.

I try not to think about that.

But there are some easy things that I can think about, and one of them is skin cancer checks and another is well woman checks.

And then I'll go back to my job and hope everything else in my life works out just fine.

I feel ... pummeled. I went back to work too soon on Friday, still high from hydrocodone, glued together, sore. Ma and Pa left for home on Friday, then I realized I needed them to come back because Beloved had to make a last-minute trip. They turned around and came back, bless my wonderful parents. It got better, then it got worse, then it got better, then it got worse. This morning I had pain of a new kind, a more normal kind, but pain all the same. I hobbled downstairs at six to get ibuprofin then back to bed to apply counter-pressure and wait the twenty minutes for the Advil to kick in so I could stop moaning and get out of bed, because today is Monday and I need to go back to work and Beloved has another two-day trip. The poor guy stood there this morning no doubt wondering if I would indeed get out of bed and get the little angel on the bus and go to work or if I would just lie there and moan all day. I admit I was wondering, too.

I don't find out what was in my leg until a week from today. Until then, I'm not supposed to exercise, which I shouldn't want to do because it would hurt and might tear the glue and stitches, but that is how I regulate my anxiety easier. 

So I'm sort of sitting here looking at this list of shit I have to do and giving myself the best pep talk I can, because there is no one else here to do this life for me. I want nothing more than to lie down and dissolve into a puddle of needs, because there is nothing like having the guy in the coffee shop ask you if you got bit by a spider while gesturing to the black bruise on your hand and having to tell him, no, that was just where they put the IV two days ago to make you feel old and tired and sore. It wasn't major surgery, but the in and out and the forced ejection back into normal life before the shock even wore off has spun me around and left me wandering, disoriented, through my house, wondering if the cat has been fed. 

I don't want to push off the little angel, who wants to have all her friends over tonight for a Play-Dough party in the driveway. I will let her have it, of course, but there is a huge part of me that would prefer to scream FUCK PLAY-DOUGH. LIFE, PLEASE JUST STOP AND LET ME CATCH UP, THANK YOU. 

I know the truth is that I'm just allowing myself to have these few minutes wallowing in my pity party because I'll hit publish and open my email and dry my tears and maybe go take a shower so I don't feel like such a worthless blob and try to find some pants that don't squeeze my incisions and figure out how to haul myself through today and tonight and tomorrow when I have another doctor appointment to try to figure out what's been going on with my gut for the past three years. 

I feel so old and so tired today. Accomplishing something will probably help a lot. God, I can't even stand to read my own writing, I sound so whiny.

As the Corolla sits stinking up my garage, Beloved is back in the Ozarks. And it's occuring to me I don't actually even know where. Have I learned nothing? I mean, I talked to him last night and this morning, and I forgot to ask both times. He was somewhere last night and he'll probably be somewhere different tonight, and after ten or twelve different times of him road warrioring his way across Missouri every week, I've grown more accustomed to this new life of ours. The only problem is my absent-mindedness. I have my head in my novel, and that means I forget to do stuff like turn on the coffee pot and ask my husband where he's sleeping.

There. I just texted him.

And printed my boarding pass for my flight tomorrow to Dad 2.0.

My parents will be here soon to be here for the little angel when she gets home from school because Beloved will get in late on Thursday.

I worry about my parents driving down here. I worry about Beloved driving around Missouri. I worry about me flying to Austin. But that's what people do. They move freely about, even though it's a dangerous world out there. It does no good to sit in your house and hide from that world.

When the worry comes, I try to imagine a big windshield wiper sweeping across my thoughts and pushing them away. Sometimes it helps.

Sometimes I just crawl back into the novel in my head, where I control whether or not there are tornadoes.