New Tattoo

A week ago this morning I got a call from my favorite tattoo artist, Alice, that she had a sudden opening in her schedule due to a cancellation. Would I like to come in? Sure, I thought, why not? So we set it up for 11:30, right after I’d drop my first grader back to school, because he was going for his regular check-in with his autism specialist.

Who diagnosed him with Tourette’s that morning. Because we really needed another neurological diagnosis right about then.

Wait, I take back the sarcasm. She’s an excellent PMHNP and couldn’t exactly ignore the three sets of tics rolling through his body (one verbal, two non-verbal), while he was trying to explain the intricacies of Pokemon. It’s been discussed before, Tourette’s, she just felt like there was no more denying it. Now it’s up to us whether it warrants another medication, or is something he’s coping with okay. And that decision doesn’t have to be made now. The tics will come and go, and if they become unbearable, then we can try something new.

So despite Tourette’s being no big deal once I’d read up on it, my first reaction to another neurological diagnosis in a kid already loaded down with a few, is “Oh god.” Which made a couple hours of torture seem like a great distraction right then.

Okay, I don’t find tattooing torture. As the tattooed biker chick on Fringe said (just before she was offed by the serial killer known as The Artist), “It’s a good pain.” The one on my ankle smarted a lot, and there’s a spot on my wrist that was pretty unbearable, but otherwise, it’s not so bad and well worth it.

Plus, my tattoo was coming months before I expected it. I’d made an appointment with Alice at Infinity Tattoo on Monday, and the only opening was in July, so I took that, and asked to be put on a waiting list in case of a cancellation. Three days later, lucky me!

It only took about an hour. All my tattoos are fairly small, very symbolic, and in places easily seen. I don’t have to pull down my pants to flash my ink, though this one takes a pretty low neckline for full exposure. I will have to explain it sometimes, because Scottish Hooded Crows are common in the British Islands and parts of Europe, but not in the Americas. Alice knew about them because they appear in Celtic mythology, and birders may recognize the species.

Our three kids were quite blasé about the whole thing. I left a sticky note on the counter that read “D & A, gone to get a new tattoo, love B-B”. That was fun. Our older son asked to see it when he got home, responding with “cool,” and his girlfriend checked it out (she knew a Scottish Hood Crow by sight!) and heard the story of the note, responding, “There’d never be a note like that in my house!” Our daughter liked it and has plans for her own when she turns eighteen.

Always unpredictable, our first grader hardly noticed the window of plastic over my right breast, but took great care not to touch me in that area for the last week, knowing it was tender. He also managed to be safe around my tummy for the whole six weeks it took to recover from my abdominal surgery in November, which was amazing. He loves his family.

The tattoo is almost fully healed. I love it. And can’t wait for February, March, and April to fly by, so that it becomes possible to expose enough skin for someone to see it without freezing; like many of my fellow Portlanders, I’m tired of wearing two layers of fleece around the house and keeping a space heater under my desk.

Until summer I can share it with my wife. And if I really want to show someone, I can always unzip my fleece a little and say, “Hey, wanna see my tattoo?” Which when you’re a forty-five year-old mother of three can surprise people. Then again, they might surprise me by showing me theirs.

PS My wife took the photo, she thought the cleavage was needed for context.

Annual Exam

Not long ago, my wife finally called her doctor’s office to schedule an annual exam. It had been, maybe, eight years since she’d had one, so she needed the works. On the phone, the nurse asked, “Will you need a Pap smear?”

And my wife thought about it for a moment, then asked, “Do you need a Pap smear on someone with a partial hysterectomy?”

And the nurse asked, “Do you have a cervix?”

“I don’t know,” my wife answered, “Shouldn’t you be able to tell me?” thinking they’d have access to the surgeon’s notes about that partial hysterectomy about eight years ago, the details foggy in her mind after all this time.

“Well, we’ll figure it out when you get here,” was the nurse’s final comment.

My wife should have just called me.

Not that it matters a ton whether she gets the Pap smear, she’s a Gold Star lesbian and has about as much chance at cervical cancer as she does getting hit my lightning. But medical protocols must be followed.

At the appointment, our doctor came in with her Karmic sparkle and dazzling smile, an air of bonhomie and all-business and attention to detail, crackling with energy. I know because she’s my doctor, too.

“So,” she says, “You don’t know whether you have a cervix.”

Ahem, my wife is texting all the time; she could have asked me in the minutes between blood pressure and the doctor’s arrival in the room.

“Yeah,” she says instead, “I can’t remember whether the surgeon took it out or left it in.”

This makes more sense when you know that it was three or four hours of surgery involving two separate surgeons, two organs getting removed, her ovaries burned and she emerged from surgery with about seven holes in her body, including a five-inch incision.

“Well,” our doctor says, shifting into professorial mode, “the cervix is about so big,” she indicates with her hand, “And feels kind of like a nose…” her voice trails off. She remembers who she’s talking to. “But I don’t need to tell you that. You know what a cervix feels like. Let’s just find out, shall we?”

Out comes the speculum.

After what seems like a lot of searching to my spouse, the doctor announces, “Yes, there it is, you do have a cervix!” and gives it that annoying poke feared by all women (with cervixes) during their annual exams, followed by the usual health-oriented chit-chat and the physical exam.

That done, the doctor sweeps from the room, taking her Karmic sparkle and dazzling smile with her, and tosses out, “Laboratory, blood work, down the hall. And schedule a mammogram on the way out,” before disappearing into wherever magical physicians go between appointments.

My wife puts on her clothes, safe in the knowledge that yes, she does have a cervix. And dutifully schedules a mammogram.

Federally Nonexistent

We’ve been engulfed in college funding applications since January 1st, and my wife finally tackled the FAFSA yesterday, and sent this email to me about the definition of parental status on the form:

Gotta love this....makes it pretty clear doesn't it? Sigh...

“This question cannot be left blank.
Select the answer that describes your parents' marital status as of the day you submit your FAFSA.
"Married/Remarried" does not mean living together unless your parents' state of legal residence recognizes their relationship as a common law marriage.
According to the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), “...the word ‘marriage’ means a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” Therefore, same-sex unions are not considered marriages for federal purposes, including the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
If one of your parents is widowed or divorced and has remarried, answer the questions about that parent and your stepparent.”

I wrote back:

Pretty fucking clear.

Fiction

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be an artist and a novelist. Never a doubt. I might have considered vet school somewhere along the line, definitely clothing design, but the artist and novelist part were a done deal.

The artist I slogged away at, discovering, I think, that my friend Nancy was right, and that I’m an artist with a lower-case “a” not an upper-case, and being okay with that. But the novelist part has been harder to get a handle on.

It’s easy enough to write one, a first draft anyway. But completing one, that’s the toughy. I wrote a complete first draft novel at thirteen, at nineteen, at twenty and one I worked on pretty hard at twenty-seven and twenty-eight. The one that four readers threw across the room. I’m almost proud of that.

And then there was last 2008’s National Novel Writing Month novel, that I fully intend to finish, and this last year’s, which I am working on like a crazy woman during the editing stage, first wave.

Luckily, a lot of words don’t scare me. I’ve written hundreds of articles and a memoir of around sixty-thousand words, so putting things on paper isn’t hard, it’s getting them right. And sticking to it.

Currently, I’m in the honeymoon stage. The part where the characters are telling you what they’ll say next, and inserting scenes that fill out the story. I have to run and grab paper a few times a day because I’ll get an idea for dialogue, a scene, a fact that needs to be explained.

My plan is eight full edits: a chronological re-write, a pass through for dialogue, for tone, for pacing, for scene arc, for descriptions, for character consistency and then for fact details that involve Googling obscure geographical references and behaviorist vocabulary.

This is how I did my screenplay. That sits in a drawer. And won a contest. And became obsolete when the bottom dropped out of high-tech. Sigh.

But it’s all good for writing. Cynthia Whitcomb of Willamette Writers and “Holidaze” fame (the play she co-wrote with Marc Acito), says in her column that writers need a certain number of words on paper (or was it hours of writing) to gain mastery as a writer. I can’t remember the number, it must have been enormous, but whatever the number, it was an encouraging idea.

I’ve said it before, that the years of writing for independent newspapers and magazines without much pay has been my apprenticeship. And maybe four or five books under my belt is part of that. Maybe this will be the one that becomes just right. Or right enough. I’m willing to try.

If nothing else, I think February is National Edit Your Novel Month, and I'll hardly be alone.

Oh Baby!

You’d think, with a past that includes dancing in front of an audience of 400 in nothing but heels and a g-string, that shopping for lingerie with my wife would be a no-biggie. That I could pick through corsets, thongs, satiny negligees and lacy teddies without batting an eye. That I would eagerly look forward to a fitting-room extravaganza.

Strangely, you’d be wrong.

Oh no, my boy-mom wife and my fourteen year-old daughter are more comfortable shopping at Oh Baby! (a fantastic lingerie shop on NE Broadway with a friendly staff surprised by nothing) than I am. I’m not quite as freaked out as a friend of ours (who needs to be liquored up to sit in the man chair while her sweetheart tries on frilly undergarments) but it did take a lot of guts for me to enter the store with my wife on our anniversary a couple weeks ago.

Anti-anxiety medication is so useful!

It isn’t really that it’s underwear hanging all over the walls and strewn artfully over a four-poster bed in the center of the store. It’s the idea that I would be worthy of wearing any of said underwear, or that my wife’s hard-earned dollars should go to a few square inches of polyester or silk, when there are bills to pay and there’s got to be something cheaper at Fred Meyer.

I still have class and money issues after all these years of being a dependent, with enough to eat and a nice roof overhead (even if it should have had a complete tear-off ten years ago). I like to buy my clothes and shoes at Target. I’m delighted with the $23 dress I got at Macy’s. My jeans are Levi’s on sale and my makeup is drugstore not Clinique. There are worse things than being a cheap date.

But Oh Baby! I wish I could have afforded the stuff at that store when I was young and had the body for it. My wife, bless her heart a thousand times, still seems to think lingerie is a worthwhile investment (after 23 years), so who am I to argue? Just blush, stutter, cringe at the price tags and try things on with as good a grace as I can manage and suck in my gut. She might have kept the camera out of the changing room…

I may, in fact, be the most bashful in the family when it comes to lingerie. When I opened a box containing a satiny negligee for Christmas and held it up, our almost seven year-old son looked at it and said, “Ooh la la!” as if on cue.

What can you do but laugh?

Annual Young Adult Literary Roundup

Okay, so ever since last year, when I wrote a first-draft YA in November, I've been reading Young Adult fiction like there's no tomorrow. This is a change of pace for me; I've been reading mysteries virtually non-stop for decades, and suddenly I discover a whole new genre, and the subgenre of paranormal YA to boot. I'm hoping it will help the editing of the first-draft Young Adult novel I wrote last month, with werewolves.

Reading Twilight was only the beginning.

So for anyone who likes YA or has a YA-loving girl in his or her life, here's the latest list of YA I love:

Impossible by Nancy Werlin
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Strange Angels & Betrayed by Lili St. Crow
The Morganville Vampires series by Rachel Caine
Wicked Lovely, Ink Exchange and Fragile Eternity by Melissa Marr
Just Listen and Dreamland by Sarah Dessen
Ready or Not and Missing You by Meg Cabot
The Mortal Instruments Series by Cassandra Clare
Ash by Malinda Lo
Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick
Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Thinking About Dad

As often happens this time of year, I was thinking about my father this morning. The first thing one needs to know when picturing me in my kitchen, making coffee and pondering, is that this is no sentimental journey down memory lane. The man is dead. Happily so. For everyone. Himself included.

Cause of death wasn't listed as "suicide" but that was what it was. Drinking yourself to death intentionally takes time, but it can be done. If he'd been truly successful the paramedics (or his landlady) would have found him dead on his kitchen floor, naked among bottles, garbage and urine.

Instead, his landlady arrived too soon with an eviction notice for unpaid rent, and he was unconscious but alive. He survived through five days of delirium tremens in the hospital before becoming mentally aware of his situation--by then my sister and I had been contacted and were there--and made no secret of his desire for it all to be over.

My spouse and I cleared up the truckloads of garbage, bottles and rotten food from his apartment, and loaded his few possessions into our van and then our spare bedroom to await the next development.

The doctors were shocked he survived as long as he did. There was no blood pressure to push the morphine through his system toward the end, yet he managed to breathe and communicate. His kidneys and liver gave up the ghost and I got the call asking whether extreme measures should be used to revive him.

I felt no compunction in saying no. He wanted to die.

It's been about twenty years since then, and as I get older, I feel more compassion for him, even as I realize how deeply he dragged me into his depression and madness, and how open the scars are and their impact on life.

He was a "rocket scientist" stuck in a town he despised and made no secret of his derision for others. He had no intellectual peers except his wife, who had to work double shift just to keep food on the table, while he drank coffee and smoked, when he wasn't on a bender and out cold on the floor.

He thought he was a misunderstood genius. He was right. Partly through the fault of psychiatric medicine--the host of antipsychotics, antidepressents and bipolar stabilizers available today weren't even in the works--partly because he chose to separate himself from other humans out of a grandiose sense of superiority based on reality and fantasy and probably fear of others.

He failed to see that humans are complicated creatures. Even the ones who seem so different from us. It isn't necessary to have the same background to find similar ideas, and he missed connections that might have made a difference.

Instead he had his daughters. I was never quite smart enough, and have a kink in my brain that keeps me from discerning when someone is using sarcasm, the only language he spoke. My sister was smart enough, but luckily older and able to be away from the house more as his mind deteriorated into darkness.

So our house is decorated to the max with holiday ornaments. Coffee is made. And I spent the morning thinking about my father, when I could have been wrapping ornaments. Compassion for him comes in waves. The fear, the anger, the inability to separate until death managed it for me, is mostly in the past.

He left a legacy I think he'd regret. I feel for him. I wish, for so many reasons, that his life could have been different.