For the past 21 years, I have been overseeing these back-to-school mornings, taking pictures of my three kids as they hoist on new backpacks filled with freshly sharped pencils that smell like sawdust, packed alongside clean binders and pristine notebooks, as they lace overly bright fresh-out-of-the-box tennis shoes, adjust new school uniforms and comb fresh haircuts.
"I shouldn't use that, right? I mean, everyone will get mad at me, right? Never mind. Yes, they'll get mad if they read the book. But I'm not talking about them. It's more like an over-generalization with a ba-DUM-dum at the end because it's true."
"And it's funny," he said. "Don't get rid of it.”
When I feel discomfort, I no longer whine. I no longer curse anyone or anything. I instead sit with it. I feel it in my body, and I ask it: “What are you trying to say?”
No one can make you feel shame. Only you can do that. And yes, of course I grieve that my hearing is not as good as it used to be, Of course, I wish I didn’t have to wear hearing aids, but I’m also navigating a kind of holiness, a kind of gift.
In therapy, I unraveled the loss of babies, loss of self, the fear, the wanting, the needing, the spilling of my selfishness, my unmotherly inability to bond. How the years slipped past me. How the romance transcended into something stable and forever. I had left Boston a free-spirited woman and came back a mother and wife.
The problem with mental illness is that it does not sit cold in the oven. It marinates the whole house. It’s the maggots, the turkey, the bones left under the bed. The quiet throb when you read newspaper obituaries for people you never met, only, all of the people are you. It is the sliver in your thumb that always seems to find it’s way into your nervous system.
You will be surrounded by voices. They will make food a moral object and in turn, a moral judgment about you. Food is not naughty, forbidden, sexy, powerful, dirty or clean. You will be told that it is.
By Kelly J. Riibe
The dark back-stories for the players in Kate Abbott’s thriller, Asana of Malevolence, could all have their own novellas. Each character...
When my kid hurts, I don’t feel like holding strong. I feel like disintegrating into a powdery pulverization of sadness right alongside my child. I can’t cave in like sand at water’s edge every time a wave crashes.
