Beyond that, I’m not sure what else to say before I’ve had a chance to process it all. The therapist seems to genuinely want to help me, and I genuinely would love to be helped, so my first actual appointment is scheduled for Monday.

It’s strange how much of a psychotherapy session it turned into. I wasn’t expecting that. Good thing I wasn’t, I suppose, for if I had been, I wouldn’t have gone. I’m not into other people telling me what my problems are. I’ve got me to do that for me. I’m pretty good at it. And my services to myself are free and/or covered by most insurance plans.

I’ve enrolled in the six-month weight loss program, which sounds weird since I was originally there to get my brain retrained and rewired toward better housekeeping. Maybe the hypnosis center is running a promotion. After the screening, I was too exhausted to be skeptical, plus anyone who knows me knows I’ve been angsting about this extra 50 lbs., so fine. Fine.

New and prohibitively expensive adventures on the way to a better life in comments…
 

 

“What’s the reason you’re trying hypnosis?”

I knew the receptionist was gonna ask that question, I just didn’t want to answer. Why am I telling this woman over the phone—with all the super-surveillance happening these days—how crazy I am?

“Well, my basic reason is to zap into the ether my messiness and terrible housekeeping,” I say as I reach over to the nightstand for my day drink, “but, as I was browsing your web site, I see you can help with my anxiety disorder as well.”

I’ve probably told her all she needs to know. The space on the intake form, I’m sure, was only so long, but I was now on a roll and she’s the one who asked, right?

“Don’t let the anxiety take over the original reason, though. If you can handle only one thing at a time, I will continue to self-medicate that part.” Nervous laughter, I crack myself up.

I made a joke on my old blog once about how weekly hair appointments are affordable only for rich white women. Woo boy, the blowback in comments. Seemed there were a lot of non-rich, non-white, non-women who read my blog and, apparently, enjoyed their weekly hair appointments, so I sarcastically backed down from my insensitive claim. I will not make that mistake here, but, dude, if there is any extra expense that screams “for rich white women only,” hypnotherapy has to be one. I’m behind on every bill I’ve ever incurred (hey there, four years out of the workforce). I owe my dad money, I owe friends money. The owner of the tree-lined suburban rental property we’ve been squatting in for three years has superhuman patience as she waits by her bank account each month.

Dunno. I’m feeling kinda hypnotized by the common sense of cancelling that appointment. Think I’ll go clean my room.
 

 

My aunt, who was in the room for the first go-round of this declaration, insisted all I needed was a little exercise. At the time, I weighed no more than 110 lbs (50 kg) and for some reason felt saggy and unattractive. Nearly 20 years, two more children and fifty extra pounds later? Still no exercise, still feeling saggy, and, by God, elective surgery has to be the proper response. Two things have stopped me before now: free time-no money/money-no free time and the fear of dying on the operating table during elective surgery. Dying on the operating table during a potentially life-saving procedure? Tragic and maybe necessary. Dying from cardiac arrest or medical error during a tummy tuck/boob lift? Mark me down as dying from embarrassment.

I also need two wisdom teeth pulled. They are impacted and decaying and there was that time when I was 19 and getting the other two wisdom teeth pulled and there was blood everywhere and the whirring of circular saws and I was fully awake and watching tooth bits and tissue spewing all over the place and the receptionist was like when are you coming back to get the other side pulled and I was all Neveruary the fifth because that’s how ’80s teenagers delivered news of what was never gonna happen and here we are 25 years later wondering if I’ll survive blood poisoning from the current infection, but handling the muffin top comes first. My entire body looks like I’ve given up all hope. I rushed out without a bra a few weeks ago and two moms in the preschool pickup line threw pity coins at my feet before speeding off, the “26.2″ marathon stickers on their SUV rear windows giving me the slow wink.

Ask my poor teenager: I am not above sneaking in extra surgical procedures when someone is gonna “be under anyway.” Jordan went in for scoliosis correction surgery and got a bonus tendon-snipping in her left leg because her doctor happened to be a pioneer in a procedure that found clipping the tendon right behind the knee in kids with extra muscle tone would free their movements a bit and whatever, Jordan was going under anyway, so what was a surprise cast on her leg when she woke up from major back surgery and, gaw, I’m a horrible mom who is now probably looking for a combo oral/plastic/reconstructive surgeon who won’t accidentally kill me during a molar extraction/tummy tuck/boob lift/electroshock therapy.

Craigslist, right?

It was the second panic attack of the day. The first one came that morning. I found my husband available in SMS on my phone and kept texting him every fear every thought every anxiety until he asked if I was free for a phone call. I wandered in circles of this new building having no idea where I could hide for a private, personal conversation until I gave up on stumbling over some type of secret, smoky den with generous leather furniture, dark walls and open bar, then slipped into the closest bathroom.

And cried. It’s been four years since I’d been part of a corporate America culture and I’ve forgotten the basics of how it goes. Do people say good morning when they see me for the first time that day? Do they bless me when I sneeze? Do they poke their heads into my cubicle just to say hi if it’s been a few hours since I’ve had contact with anything other than my laptop docking station? No, they do not, and I feel lost and confused and fired. Because this freezing out is what happens when you’re about to be fired, right? The whispers, the closed door meetings, the gathering of paperwork. The silence.

Nobody has time to babysit you, Erica.

Yet here was my sweet husband babysitting me all the way from Washington, DC, leaving a client’s building in search of a secret, smoky den in the middle of a busy K Street sidewalk. I could see him leaning in a doorway, cupping the mic of his cell phone earbuds, sporting an IT guy’s vintage Doors or Spider-Man t-shirt among the $1700 custom suits rushing past. Convincing his wife to return to her cubicle and get back to work. I fucking love him so much.

Three hours later, I was back in the bathroom, this time hiding in the stall. I’d left my phone on my desk as a prop. In case someone peeked into my cube, I wanted everyone, anyone to know I’d be right back. That I wasn’t hiding in a bathroom stall playing on my phone. That I wasn’t hiding in a bathroom stall rocking back and forth talking to myself like a mentally ill homeless person. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, goddammit. I love homeless people. It was during my 70th repetition of “it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re okay” the woman walked into the bathroom and into the only other stall in the room.

I stopped talking. My mentally ill homeless person pep talk could wait. How long could she be? God, what is she doing? What’s that paper bag rustling? Is she messing with the various courtesy items in the stall trying to wait me out? Was she having her own panic attack? What the fuck was taking her so long? In the stillness, I got myself together and left her to work out her business without me.

Trying again tomorrow. It’s all I can do.

Working it all out in comments…

A few Thursday updates if anyone is still reading:

1. Thanks for the encouraging comments
2. Turns out, there is a silent cubicle policy, which I am all for. Found that out by reading the breakroom bulletin board since, you know, no one talks in the cubicles. Or says bless you when I sneeze. It’s all good
3. Once I’m eligible for health coverage in about 45 days, mental health treatment is covered 100% and that should delight my husband tremendously
4. I am being too hard on myself, and this I acknowledge
5. Used to being the star hire, I am off-balance because I’m not integral to any strategy. However I am loving my “communication strategist” title
6. I sent my 11-year-old to school this morning with a minor, mysterious condition of lip swelling while thinking only twice he’s either going to die or I should stay home and monitor the whole situation
7. I am getting there
8. Thanks again, everybody

The woman in his apartment was approvingly looking from room to room. Her daughter, about twelve, dragged a heavy foot five steps behind her, this probably being normal, but unsettling.

He’d met Marley in the grocery store standing before the community bulletin board. She was looking for a cheap place to stay and he lied, saying his previous boarder had moved out and he was there to post the vacancy. If she’d mentioned the daughter at all while in the store, she’d probably been drowned out by the perfection of her breasts screaming to be let loose from her t-shirt, and he’d heard nothing of it.

She stood now in the middle of his two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, “dream view, great neighborhood” apartment for which he had no authority to take in a roommate without approval from the leasing office. Deep in the ground, he kept digging.

“You say all utilities are included?”

Lie.

“And the room is available immediately?”

Another.

Marley felt genuine relief, treading lightly with her next question. Kendall. My daughter. You’re sure? She’s a good, quiet kid.

Straight ahead. Look straight ahead. Do not turn toward the kid. Do not turn toward her and feel any sympathy. Look straight ahead and do not listen to Marley’s breasts screaming oh Adam. Look straight ahead and answer with the truth.

Annnnd another.

Kendall needed help with her math, her weakest subject, and it wasn’t made any easier by some asshole kid Tyler who entertained himself and others by imitating the sound of Kendall’s foot dragging on the tile floor of their math classroom. Marley worked odd hours, so it kind of fell to Adam to pick up the slack and, he felt, handle this Tyler shit. Six months of being roommates—and Kendall really was a good, quiet kid like her mother had promised—made them a family. Adam made his way to the school, waited throughout dismissal for Kendall to point toward Tyler as she climbed into the truck, no real need since he’d memorized Tyler’s crazy from Facebook.

A few laughable Tyler-threats to sue and call the police over Adam’s infringing his personal space. More than a couple Adam-threats to Tyler’s personal space if he ever again breathed in Kendall’s direction without niceties. Some grow ups, some be a mans flying in both directions. A well-meaning teacher asking if he could help, everything explained away as Adam’s being Kendall’s father who was finally, permanently home after seven U.S. Marine deployments and who just wanted to meet a few of Kendall’s friends. Something about the boy triggered his PTSD. You know how it is. Then it was over.

In their house fire, of which Marley rarely spoke, Kendall had lost a life’s worth of ticket stubs, celebrity autographs, photos. The one thing she really wanted—to start again—was the card Adam had been planning to post on the community board the day he’d run into her mother. Would he have kept something like that? As he started the truck’s engine, she asked if she could have it.

I’m not one of those (black) women who clings to long, straight hair as an important self-image. I’ve worn my hair different lengths, various textures, sleek and corporate, wacky and bohemian. I’m one of the lucky ones of any race or culture who can say with confidence “it’s just hair.” Not everyone can be so cavalier about it, and I acknowledge that. Too thin, too kinky, too fragile, too uncontrollable for such a dismissive attitude. If you erase the entire 1980s when dark-skinned black girls living in the American deep south were the opposite of standard beauty, I’ve had a pretty good life on behalf of attractive people everywhere.  Well, there was that period in the ’90s that could have shown me a little more respect, but I’ll take responsibility for not understanding how some people could be such assholes.

This current cut comes courtesy of my now-failed effort to switch careers. The last time I was able to completely change what I did for a living was in 2001 when I went from not-for-profit marketing communication to oil and gas technical writing. I wasn’t trying to leave not-for-profit, I was trying to leave the poverty level set by the U.S. government. I bullied a creative agency into taking me on (I had nothing resembling a portfolio or what one may call “experience”) then my agent was supernaturally convinced I had the talent to translate technical documents into plain English for her engineering superpower client. That began a very long, very boring career of arguing with engineers over comma placement, but I could now afford food and trips to Target. I had the means to boycott Walmart on moral grounds. I bought a real car instead of one that pretended to be a car, mainly on Wednesdays.

Once I was laid off nearly four years ago now, I figured that was a good time to get back into marketing communication for some exciting corporation or small firm that concerned itself not with micromanagement and low wages, but coffee quality in its marble-columned break room. Mother-of-pearl inlay break room coffee cups, people. Wait, no, a golden coffee cart wheeled past my office.

It never happened. And that’s okay. If all goes as planned, in a few weeks, I shall return to the oil and gas industry with a new corporate, non-bohemian haircut and a renewed spirit. A much-needed income with a new goal of getting out of debt. A long ass commute when, four years ago, I would have turned down the gig based on it being too far from my house. My very own cubicle on a cubicle farm among product managers. Use your speakerphone for personal medical conversations about your mysterious mole, I will help you Web MD that shit from my desk and email you probable causes.

I will open up my project management schedule and get started on my day, running a hand through my silky, chemically relaxed pixie cut. Hell, I may even take a photo of it for you after grabbing my coffee that tastes gloriously like Styrofoam and paychecks.

Coming to your senses in comments…

I’d moved my kids out of our house and, while we were waiting out the school year, it was a no-brainer to move in, as full-time caretaker, with my beloved grandmother who was in what we thought was early Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t early. It was full-on, Mach 5, all systems go ‘head on with your bad self Alzheimer’s, but we didn’t find that out until much later.

Grandmother hated Vanna White with a passion that has gone unexplained to this day. Even before her illness, she admitted she didn’t know why, she just did. But for 36 years, I watched Wheel of Fortune with her like we were being paid. The phone would ring from some random church member and she’d brag how her granddaughter had “solved another one” with only three tiles showing. We laughed and laughed the day some prudish lady lost a large sum of money because she refused to say the “damn” in a FRANKLY MY DEAR SCARLETT I DON’T GIVE A DAMN puzzle. Grandmother never used profanity, but she must have said damn 10 times that day just to trash talk that poor woman.

Grandmother knew who I was. I was her first granddaughter Erica. Around 12 years old. Who’d been dropped off for the day by my father.

My then-10-year-old daughter Jordan was, of course, my younger sister Kara who had also started spending several days with her for some odd reason. Who was my grandma to judge?

The problem became my then-4-year-old son Jon Alex. Because my actual brother is older than I am, my grandmother had no place for Jon Alex in her memories. He was, to her, some kid my sister and I kept bringing over every single time my father dropped us off to visit. Always unusually generous, Grandmother began to complain she didn’t have enough food to feed this boy y’all keep bringing. It was her way of saying my son didn’t belong.

It got dark and confusing when my father never picked us up. She was angry and resentful how we were sleeping there every night in her late husband’s bedroom. I learned to stay away from the house with the kids all day, including Saturdays, until Wheel of Fortune was about to start. She was expecting us, having not seen us in months (hours) and she was glad to entertain.

This day, Jordan and I arrived without Jon Alex. He was away at a football game in San Antonio with my parents.

Grandmother (as we walk in the front door): Hey! Where’s Jon Alex?

Jordan (excited her great-grandmother knows who she is that day, and who also suffers from short-term memory loss from her traumatic brain injury): He’s at a football game in San Antonio!

Grandmother (after some considerable Vanna hate once the show starts): Hey! Where’s Jon Alex?

Jordan (probably just as unaware she’d just answered that question as Grandmother was unaware she’d just asked it): He’s at a football game in San Antonio!

Grandmother (back on her grandma game passing out cookies and soda cans during a commercial break): Hey! Where’s Jon Alex?

Me (stepping into the madness because it’s what I do): He’s at a football game, Grandmother.

Jordan: He is?? Where?

That’s my favorite Grandmother/Jordan memory loss anecdote, y’all. Among many. No, I never married that guy, we never moved to California. My grandmother died peacefully at home the next year and Jordan’s less-affected long-term memory does the heavy lifting with help from family and friends.

Solving the puzzle in comments…

As a girl, I had three important things on my grocery list: children, husband, writing career. I sat at my mother’s kitchen table reading the back of the Kellogg’s packaging and thinking: somebody has to write the words on the back of this box. Why can’t it be me? Of course, I was too young to know the person writing those words on the back of that box had been likely plotting for years his fiery escape from a copywriter’s cubicle with a complicated scheme to take Martha from payroll down with him as payback for the great vacation day mishap of ’78. I know now his name was Jim.

Because I am American, it’s not enough that I eventually checked each item off my girlhood list. Simply checking off is for Scandinavians and a few indigenous Turks. Pure Americans like me are constantly weighing and measuring themselves against another American’s idea of personal success. Eh, my kids are good kids, but how is my parenting? On a scale of one to eleven, I give myself a two. Wait, a three. Points on because none of them is the class bully. Points on because they all own toothbrushes. An extra point for not making them forage for dinner behind the local office park.

Subjecting my poor husband to me as his life partner: points off, points off, points off. Points on for love, though. You hear me, Jeffrey? Points on for love.

A writing career, the third item of my list, is all points off. I went from dreaming on the back of a cereal box to later losing confidence as a fiction writer. In my teens, John Steinbeck encouraged me to pick up a pen. In my twenties, Gabriel Garcia Marquez knocked the pen from my hand with a deft left hook and some trash talk. My thirties watched in horror as Oprah—Oprah!— crowned kings and queens of literature cheered on by a Greek chorus of housewives. My writer’s suicide note was found written in blue ink on the proper side of a job application.

From our work cubicles, Jim the Kellogg’s copywriter and I fight over the serial comma. We offer oil executives trivia lessons on typography. We know the exact moment people stop caring about what we know and just want their goddamned report edited by five on Thursday. My success as a writer is no longer measured against dreams, but against my willingness to adhere to an overly strict policy of font usage. With eyes dead from arguing how many spaces go after a period (one, just one) Jim gestures toward the break room. The coffee’s done.

________________________

Reprinted from my hacked free fringes blog. Originally published January 9, 2012

His wife, who was not my mother, was inside the cabin, packing boxes. They’d sold everything, I’d read in one paper, on their way to a new start. A brand new start claimed the writer of the article, sympathetic to a man and his wife who’d been attacked in their home on a quiet suburban street by the man’s oldest son, a “mentally ill” teenager who’d spent most of his life living in the streets full of resentment for those who had all the good things.

First, I’m not mentally ill. Second, there is no second, that entire article was bullshit. What would you do if you found out your father who’d abandoned your family was living in some mini-mansion with his two new children and owned fucking lakefront property with some woman they called Mom? Mom.

I never got to call anybody Mom because I never had any parents, just two cokeheads too busy for open house and PTA. Cokehead One dies, all five of us get put in foster care. Cokehead Two is no where to be found until I happened to see him just driving by one day with this look on his face that said “I have never been anybody’s cokehead or ruined anybody’s life or sent my five sons to school in raggedy-ass brown leather shoes covered in dog shit and now I am on my way to soccer practice with my fat and happy toddler.”

I don’t know what you would do, but I followed him. First, in this chick’s car, to the goddamn soccer fields. Then to his house where I watched through the windows everybody inside get all excited about leaving that night for the lake. The what, you’re now saying with me? The lake.

Me and the girl—and no I did not steal her car or force her to go with me to the lake that night, no matter what the paper said—we just wanted to see the lake everybody was so excited about. The judge even said if she were me, she’d have been a little curious, too. So me and the girl spent that weekend watching my father come and go as somebody’s dad. Me and the girl consensually fucked in the back seat whenever somebody’s dad was doing something boring.

That Tuesday, I entered the mini-mansion through an unlocked side door and, while the family slept, punched somebody’s dad in the face and head until he lost consciousness.

I was arrested, counseled, tried by judge, counseled some more, put on probation and got issued a few restraining orders. Though understanding, the judge was serious: “You can never go back there.”

After this time, I won’t.
 

 

Q’s comment: I think I’m in love with you.

Erica’s reply: um, security.

We eventually met and liked each other very much.

Right after, I tried several times to push him away because, seriously, who could love me, amirite? I live inside my head, I’m grumpy, I just wanna be left alone most days. No disrespect to the African diaspora or the Trail of Tears, but my dating life before Q stumbled over my blog had killed far more spirits, deferred many more dreams. In my former dating life, when people died from dysentery and exposure, it was called Tuesday afternoon.

So by the time Q fell off the cabbage truck, a wide-eyed 26-year-old who’d never lived more than three feet from his parents, and into the apartment of a 38-year-old mother of two who had, let’s say, a few abandonment issues, it became a simple matter of who would win this battle of wills we’d set up for ourselves.

Sometimes silly:

Erica: I need you to drive those pesky 325 miles to my apartment because my brother is having a few people over and I don’t wanna go by myself.

Q: Tonight??

Erica: Yes.

Q: Not gonna happen.

He would then show up three hours later at my door because he’d been on the road on his way to me two hours before I’d even called.

Sometimes serious:

Q: You are the love of my life.

Erica: You’ve known me two weeks (okay, months).

Q: You are the love of my life.

Erica: I have a date tonight.

Q broke up with me after that one. I was sad. And not just because the guy I had plans with stood me up. Q was sad. I called Q the next day, and got his voicemail, so that was that until he called back and said he’d been in a meeting and I said let’s do it but take it slow and he said okay, let’s totally take it slow will you marry me?

I do not think you understand what it means to take it slow, I said.

Jordan tried to kill him a few times, Jon Alex has always adored him, oh look, hey, okay, let’s have a baby, why not because we don’t have anything else going on. My uncle married us with Ehren in my belly at the house he shares with my aunt, one of my favorite people in the world, and we told no one else. Not my parents, not his parents, just the HR department at my job. We’ve tried to get rid of one another a few more times since getting married, but whether we’re being silly or serious, one always reminds the other: I’m not going anywhere. I am unflushable.

On the days we feel the most unloved, that is good to know.

_________________

Topic prompted by The Scintilla Project. Adding it to the grid of my people over at the yeah write #101 weekly writing challenge.