At thirteen. Your first child, a daughter, born on Mamacita’s birth day. At fifteen. And it would take every drop of red courage, womb strength, to arrive where we stand now at seventy, Super Girl.
My experience with addicts is once they’ve sobered up, for their own coping necessity, they move forward and expect others to do so as well. Or perhaps it’s simply because they cannot fathom the scar tissue they’ve left behind.
I am proud of the people who are brave enough to risk their life for their country. For other people. For freedom.
I am honoured to know them. Heroes are humans. So are their families.
Everything I have ever made will ultimately be a pathetic response and so, if we are not careful we do nothing at all. The truth is that it is frustrating sometimes that every response you have to offer will always be so so little compared to the world you imagine and in addition to that, it also may not work out exactly as you hope.
The second year my mental health crumbled like the apartment across the hall from mine, gutted from the inside out, plaster and fiberglass swirling the air. A life-long anxiety disorder flared and surged through me, leaving me sweating, shaking, breathless, and terrified during class, while teaching, at restaurants, in my own bed.
For years, I starved my body trying to never become a woman. At least, that’s what pop psychologists say. Female sex abuse survivors turn anorexic to make themselves forever children, suppressing secondary sex characteristics: hips, breasts, pubic hair, periods.
A couple days before she died, as I was pushing my mother in her wheelchair, I got up the nerve to tell her that I loved her and shared how much I loved spending time with her. This felt very intimate to me, thereby unfamiliar. After all, my standard share was a peck on the cheek and a distracted “love you.”
Then my beloved wife Kate was diagnosed with cancer; she spent a horrifying 6 weeks in New York hospital hell and I was dashing back and forth from home to office to hospital, trying to take care of my wife, my kids, my teaching, afraid to think about the future, or about much of anything really. The only thing that provided me any relief was working on Come Away; because it was both about my own anxieties and impending despair but also totally not about that. Working on the book was like going into a trance or something. I finished the first draft the day Kate died, in March 2012.
