I haven’t been writing here much lately. I mean, I have, sort of, inasmuch as I continue to post here – photos, guest posts, links to stuff that I’ve written elsewhere – but I haven’t really, you know, written here. About things that are going on in my life, beyond the canoe trips and the vague allusions to some exciting things going on that I can’t quite summon the energy to talk about right now, okay you guys?!?, the sorts of things that I would have written the shit out of a year ago. Maybe even just six months ago. I don’t know. I don’t know when I start feeling all, you know, private.

It’s not just to do with the Really Big Changes going in my life (here’s a tidbit: we’re moving to New York. Like next week, or thereabouts. It involves immigration. It’s no small thing), because it kind of started before then. I didn’t write all that much about our trip with Tanner to DisneyWorld, nor have I written all that much – at all – about the fulfillment of his biggest wish, his wish to live out his life at home, which required a kind of Extreme Home Makeover, which is going on right now, and which is kind of an extraordinary story. And I’ll share that story – I owe you that story – but right now it feels, I don’t know, kind of sacred, something that I need to hold close and live with, before I write about it. Same goes for the story developing around my mom, the story where she’s pretty sick, and I’m scared of her dying, and things just turned a little scarier, and so I’m flying out there in morning, and, yeah, I’m scared. Once upon a time I’d have written a whole post about that, about being scared. Maybe two posts. Hell, I devoted months of posts to working through my grief over the death of my dad. I wrote to survive, emotionally. Why don’t I do that now?

Part of the answer is, I suppose, that my life has expanded so far beyond this writing space – for a long time, this was my only space. It’s not, anymore. I have other things to do. Things that are really, really exciting, and distracting. I’m not leaving this space – damn, y’all, I just renovated – no way. This will always be my sanctuary. But it feels like it’s changing. Like maybe parts of this space are my really personal space, my sacred space, and other parts are just fun spaces and other parts are whatever they are, and I just need to figure out how all those parts fit together, and how they fit with all the new parts of my life, digital and otherwise.

And I suppose that part of that ‘fitting together’ means asking myself what I’m writing for, and why I’m writing it. Some of the stories about my children feel so much more, I don’t know, private now. Jasper’s having behavioral struggles – do I write about that? Emilia has been developing what can only be called Freudian theories of gender that problematize – in every sense of the word – the penis. Do I write about that? (Actually: hell, yeah, I’m going to write about that. I just need to figure out how.) I’ve always written about everything. Now I no longer have the bandwidth or the will to write about everything. So.

All I know is, I’ll continue writing. Writing is like breathing for me: I’d end up flopping on the floor, clutching at my throat, gasping like a hooked fish if I tried to stop writing. So I’m not stopping, no way. But I am… editing, beforehand. Curating my own impulses. Moderating my own words.

And I think it will be good. I know it will.

First, though, I have to go see my mom.

Happy birthday, Mom. You are, and always have been, and always will be, the best mom ever, the mom whose momness I will always aspire to emulate, the mom who taught me how to laugh, who taught me how to love, the only mom, my mom, you.

Love you.

My mom sent me this email yesterday, for my birthday. It caused me to miss her, badly, and also to spend a solid twenty minutes ruminating on the singular unattractiveness of my toes.

Hi Sweetheart

Today, I woke up thinking about you and, as always, remembering this day as it happened 41 years ago.  It seems like yesterday that I was counting your toes twice because they were so long that I thought you had more than ten.  I love you and will be eternally grateful for the wonderful gift of you.

Happy, happy birthday.

xxxooo

Mom

This reminder about my prehensile toes unnerved me, and so I counted them again, just to make sure. Then I checked my numbers against Jasper’s feet, and was reassured: I only have ten toes. Jasper, however, seems to have twelve, and, apparently, Sasquatch DNA.

Which means, I suppose, that I will one day send a similar email to him:

It seems like yesterday that I was checking you for fur, because your feet were so gigantic that I figured you must carry the genetic code from a long lost family line of Sasquatches or Yeti.  I love you and will be eternally grateful for the wonderful gift of you. Please don’t feel badly about your feet.

Happy, happy birthday.

Love,

Mom

The family that worries about their feet together, stays together. Or something.

I think that Mother’s Day is as good a time as any to break out the heavy emotional artillery, don’t you?

I can’t say that I regret having had an abortion, but I also can’t say that I don’t. It’s complicated. Its complicatedness sometimes hurts my heart. Which is precisely why people talk about the emotional consequences of abortion. Because many women find, like I did, that their hearts hurt. Because many women struggle to figure out how to reconcile the complicated tension between regret and not-regret and find that they’re unable, and because many women do so while bearing their children, their wanted children, in arms.

But that struggle – that is, my personal experience of that struggle – is one that can, most of the time, be compartmentalized, tucked away on some back shelf of the psyche and forgotten until some event – pregnancy, say, or miscarriage, or one’s own mother’s admission of having given a child up for adoption – prompts one to go rummaging around on the shelves of Buried Hurts and Ambivalent Regrets and Things That I’d Rather Not Think About Unless My Sanity And/Or Moral Stability Depends Upon It. My mother’s struggle with her longstanding conflicting emotions around having given up a child for adoption is not – has never been – something that she can just tuck away on a shelf and forget about. She has never passed a day, she told me, without thinking about her lost boy – without looking at the faces of strangers who seem about his age and wondering is it him, without reading in the newspaper or hearing on the news something about any male person of his vintage and wondering is it him, without casting back to that baby in the blue blankie and wondering what became of him what became of him what became of him?

And that is so hard for her. I have seen the heartbreak on her face. Some 45 years or so after the fact, and the heartbreak is still there. I see the heartbreak on her face and I tell myself, there but for grace went I. And, thank gods for that grace, that I did not go.

I do not tell her this. I dare not tell her this.

Because it is not so simple. It is not nearly so simple.

That’s from an essay that I wrote (developed out of a post that I wrote a couple of years ago) for an anthology of essays on the theme of stories that I’ve only told – or have wish I told – my mom. Mine fits kind of awkwardly, because it’s not really about a story that I only told my mom – I kind of told the whole Internet – nor about a story that I didn’t tell my mom – the whole discussion that this piece emerged out of was a sharing of stories – but it does address the whole question of what it feels like when we do share our stories but then edit out some of our feelings. My mom knows this story. She doesn’t know the depth and breadth of my confusion about this story. Although maybe she does now. Hi, Mom!

Anyway. Mine is not the only story here. Not all of them are so heavy, either. You might even laugh some, which, you know, is always nice.

There are amazing essays here from Laura Mayes and Cecily Kellog and Meagan Francis and Jane Roper and Katie Granju and Heather Spohr and a bunch of other really super talented writers in whose company I am honored to be. So, yeah. It would make an awesome gift for, I don’t know, a mom, maybe? Maybe on one of those holidays where moms are celebrated? I can’t think of one just at the moment, but you know what I mean. You can buy it/download it here.

(I leapt into the dark, dark world of e-readers just for this, you know. That’s how compelling this book is.)

(Don’t forget to make a dedication to a mom that you love, over here at the mothers2mothers Tree Of Hope. Because, this.)

(Speaking of moms, my own assures me that she is going to live, if only so that I can support her in grand style and take her on holidays and stuff. So. I’m going to hold her to that.)

I should know by now that when my sister posts on my Facebook wall, it’s a bad sign, because my sister – bless her – believes that Facebook is the best way to reach me when there’s something urgent to communicate. That she could also reach me by phone or email – I’ll grant that I do not always answer my phone, but I do check my email regularly, and in fact only get Facebook messages through email, because I ALMOST NEVER GO ON FACEBOOK – is a detail of modern telecommunications that she has chosen to ignore. She alerted me through Facebook that I needed to call her when my grandfather died, and then again when my dad died, and – here we get to the thing that I really want to talk about – again last night when I needed to be informed that our mom has an aneurysm that is growing at an alarming rate and needs to be surgically removed at the earliest opportunity but, oh god, the doctors aren’t sure her heart can handle it and all of this was signaled to me by a public Facebook posting of CATHY YOU NEED TO CALL ME OR MOM. And then: LIKE, TONIGHT.

So, yeah. This is why I don’t like getting Facebook messages from my sister, who I otherwise adore. When those messages landed in my inbox, my heart dropped, and it dropped hard.

I called my mom immediately. I knew that the news had something to do with her – if the news pertained to Tanner, Chrissie would have just said CALL ME – and because I knew that she’d had a CT scan late last week, I knew that it had to do with the aneurysm, which we had all been hoping was not growing and not going to pose any threat to her life. So I knew that if my sister was freaking out on Facebook about me needing to call Mom, it was because the aneurysm was now posing a threat to her life. As I said, my heart dropped.

“Mom.”

“Sweetie! I was just thinking about you! And I was just opening my computer right this minute!” Presumably to log on to Facebook. Or post her prognosis to Twitter, or to her blog. God, my family.

My mother is probably one of the funnest people on the planet. Even when life takes its grimmest turns, my mother can always find some point of humor. Even when she’s angry, she makes jokes, and cracks herself up, and it was one of the banes of my teenage existence that every time I was mad about something, she would make faces at me until I laughed and forgot what I was mad about, which usually made me madder. It was complicated. She’s complicated. I adore her

“Mom, if I’d gotten an email from you that said oh, hey sweetie, things have taken a turn for the worse and I’m facing life-threatening surgery, but don’t worry! I’d have had to never speak to you again. These are things you call about. Like, immediately.”

“Oh, Catherine Ann.” My mother is able to communicate the rolling of her eyes over the telephone. She did so.

“Oh, Mother.”

My mom and I have gotten to a stage in our relationship wherein our roles are more often than not reversed. I nag her and pester her and give her unsolicited advice. I complain that she doesn’t tell me anything. I complain that she doesn’t call. I say things like, you know I worry. I said it last night. I said it, like, five or six times. You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll call when you get news like this. You know I worry so you need to let me know the minute you hear from the doctor again. You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll take it easy.

You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll be okay.

You need to be okay.

You know I worry.

I do worry. I worry relentlessly about my mother, and have done since my dad died. When my dad died, it was the realization of my worst fear, the fear that I knew would be realized someday but had nonetheless managed to stay in denial about because, god, it is just easier on the heart and soul to believe that your parents are immortal. It doesn’t matter if death is already your shadowy companion, a persistence presence in your life, because even when you know, you know, that death is inevitable, you can still deny it, and you do, because death is just not conceivable until it happens. So it is that we all of us in our family live with Tanner’s prognosis in a manner that is best described as ‘mindful denial;’ we know that his death is inevitable and proximate, but we live with him in the spirit of death’s impossibility. The Tanner-less future is inconceivable. Or, rather, has been inconceivable. It is more and more difficult to deny that future. That’s a crushing thing, and it’s because it is a crushing thing that we’ve compartmentalized it for so long.

My dad’s death made all these things more complicated, because his death, as I said, was the realization of my fear of his death, and the confirmation that, yes, death happens, which is to say, it made death conceivable in a way that it just never before had been for me, not even with the death of my grandparents or my beloved cat Sam or that one baby bird that I saw get run over by a car that one time. It made death real. It showed me what the world looked like without my dad, a world that had heretofore been unimaginable to me. And it made it possible for me to imagine a world without other people that I love. It made it possible for me to imagine a world without my mom.

My mom and me, in our world, back when it was still black and white.

I am terrified of that world. Terrified. I don’t even have words for that terror. It’s a terror that makes me feel small, that takes me back to being six or seven years old and slipping into my parents’ room in the middle of the night, blanket in hand, to sleep on their floor so that I could make sure that nothing happened to them, that they didn’t just somehow disappear.

But I know that the day will come when I will have to live in that world. I know that because I am already living in a world without my dad. I know that it’s inevitable, unless something happens to me first, which, god, is a whole other bag of soul-rattling anxiety related to fears concerning my children and my own role as a parent. So I have to live with that knowledge, that fear. I have to live with it, but not let it get in the way of living and loving, and living with and loving my mom. I have to not let it get in the way of celebrating my mom. I have to let it be a reason – to be more reason – to always celebrate my mom, to exult in the wonderfulness of my life with her.

Because she is awesome, and I am lucky to have her, and that’s all that matters.

I just need to keep her off Facebook.

(I had intended to write a post today about how my mom was and is my mentor mom – she’s the original bad mother – but I’ve been so rattled by the news from last night and all I can think about when I think about my mom is all the hand-wringy stuff that I rambled on about above, which is entirely against the spirit of the last few lines of that post, but this is a process, people, okay?

Anyway. I made a dedication to her here, at the mothers2mothers Tree Of Hope. You can make a dedication to your own mentor mom. Celebrating moms is a good thing. Celebration is a good thing, full stop. I need some of that spirit today.)

To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come

– Christina Rossetti, 1881

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And happy, happy day to all mothers, everywhere: your hearts are so many quiet homes.

(My own ode to my mother is here, in this post about one of her greatest gifts to me. And my reflections on how I love my own children are here, in this post at the Huffington Post. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go enjoy my children, who are expressing their appreciation for me through half-eaten cookies.)

My mother was and still is an inveterate teller of tall tales, especially in conversation with children. She delights in the wide-eyed fascination of children with all things fantastic, and decided very early in her career as a mother that it was part of her job to keep the eyes of her own children and those of any children who accidentally wandered into range of hearing as wide as possible.

Accordingly, I grew up in a home in which it seemed entirely possible that there were sea creatures living in the plumbing and gnomes hiding in the closets. There were fairies and elves and imps and other magical creatures in the woods behind our house, and they lived in harmony with the animals there – the squirrels and birds that I saw every day, and the raccoons and skunks that I saw less often but knew well from the tracks in our backyard, tracks that my mother was very careful to point out and explain as evidence of the late-night forest creature moondances that occurred a few times each month. I knew that the forest creatures maintained harmony in their community through the frequent town-hall meetings that they held in a mossy stump – I knew this because my mother showed me exactly where they all sat during these meetings and held up various broken twigs and branches (used as benches) as evidence. I knew that I should never, ever pick toadstools, because if I did so I would be destroying the shelter of the littlest creatures of the forest.

I also knew that my sister and I came from a cabbage patch, and that if we unscrewed our bellybuttons, our bums would fall off. When I got old enough to start doubting these tales, I would confront my mother upon each telling: are you telling me a story?

Of course I am, my darling, she’d reply. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not telling you the truth.

There are some who insist that telling stories is lying, and that lying to our children undermines our credibility as parents. Do you tell your child that Santa (or God) wants them to put their toys away? When your child asks where the sun goes at the end of the day, do you tell them the truth or do you say, a la the Von Trapp children, that the sun has gone to bed and now must they? If you do, you are lying – say those who do not believe in the power and utility of stories – and by lying you are undermining truth, and by undermining truth you are undermining reason, and undermining reason is harmful, and bad.

I think of my mother when I consider these arguments because my mother never let the hard facts get in the way of a good story. She had it on good authority that the sun left our neighborhood at the end of the day so that he could go light up the neighborhoods of other children, who needed light so that they could play outside. She also had it on good authority that Curious George’s favorite food was lima beans, and that both God and Santa were always very happy when I picked up my toys. She knew the Easter Bunny’s phone number and corresponded regularly with Tatiana, Queen of the Fairies. She told me about the phone calls and shared Tatiana’s letters. If I was attentive and careful and respectful of animals and nature, she told me, perhaps one day I could correspond with them, too.

The question is, was this deception? And if it was, does it matter?

In Plato’s Republic, the character of Socrates explains that there is a very great difference between a noble or fine lie, and a lie of the soul. The latter is the sort of lie that deceives in the most fundamental way – it turns a soul away from truth, puts that soul (understood as the seat of reason, among other things) on a path to ignorance. This is the worst kind of lie, because it corrupts the part of our being that is most uniquely human – that is, our reason, our ability (and desire) to seek out truth. The noble lie, on the other hand, tells the truth figuratively. Plato, among other classical philosophers, suggested that not every human soul was capable of perceiving and comprehending ‘truth,’ but that every human soul – every soul possessing the uniquely human faculty of reason, even in its most nascent form – could be turned toward truth. Set on the right path, oriented toward more correct opinions. Noble lies accomplish this work – they orient the souls of those who aren’t able, or are not yet able, to pursue truth directly.

When my mother told me that toadstools were shelters for magical creatures that I couldn’t see, she was, it might be argued, telling me a noble lie. Her lie did not obscure the truth; rather, it illuminated part of the truth for a mind that was not ready to perceive it in its fullness. Toadstools do indeed protect and nurture many creatures that human eyes cannot or do not see, and I should indeed be respectful of toadstools, and other flora and fauna, when I come across these. They are not mine to trample or use for my own amusement, and there is far greater potential stimulation to be gained from them in appreciating them as the remarkable works of nature that they are.

A very young child might not be capable of understanding the laws of planetary motion and the principles of a solar system, but she can understand that the sun has disappeared from our view, that it does so every day, and that it has something to do with the cycle of the day. We can explain that straightforwardly, or we can wrap it up in a story. Wrapping it up in a story presents the truth, or some portion of the truth, in terms that a child can understand. In terms that capture the child’s imagination, and so their curiosity.

There is something to be said for serving up the truth straightforwardly to children – for telling them the facts about the movement of the Earth and the sun, and the facts about the North Pole and about existence or non-existence of Tooth Fairies, and the truth about how little we know about what happens to us when we die. I certainly believe that we should never underestimate children’s capacity for reason, and their ability to appreciate and understand ‘facts.’ And I believe strongly that the ‘truth’ – so far as I or anyone understands it – about the natural world and everything in it is as fascinating as any story that my mother ever concocted.

But I also think that what we gain from wrapping the truth in a story – and, occasionally, weaving fantastical tales that seem to incorporate no measure of truth – is this: we communicate to our children that the world is not prosaic, that it is a place of wonder. We teach them that the world, that life, holds many unanswered questions, and that even those questions that seem to have been settled are worth interrogating. We teach them to believe, and to doubt. We provoke their curiosity – we make them lovers of discovery, which in turn makes them lovers of wisdom. Philosophic puppies, as Socrates had it, but only in the best sense: joyfully bounding towards that which they do not know. Experiencing the unknown as an opportunity for play.

Still… my mother’s insistence, for years, that if I unscrewed my belly-button my bum would fall off is clearly an example of maternal deception. As was her insistence that there were never any mushrooms in her spaghetti sauce, that marshmallows were made of whipped cloud, and that if I lied the bottom of my tongue would turn black. And there’s an argument to be made that the belly-button lie might have contributed in some small part to some body-image confusion. But do these lies matter? My mother approached motherhood, and every second of interaction with her children, as an opportunity for fun, and my experience of childhood was entirely shaped by this ethos of laughter and discovery and play. And it had everything to do, too, with developing my love of story and books and ideas (supported, obviously, by the abundance of books in our household and weekly visits to libraries, but that’s another post.)

None of this is to say that deception qua deception, deception in the form of lies of the soul, should be embraced wholeheartedly. Only that it might have a place, alongside the nobler, poetic forms of lying, in making the worlds of our children rich and vibrant and alive with possibility. So it is that when my daughter asks me, are you telling me a story? I tell her, yes, yes, I am. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.

(What do you think? Do you tell your children stories in this way? Or are you a committed rationalist? Do YOU believe in Santa? And – what fantastical stories did your parents tell YOU? Do YOU tell?)

There are trolls, and then there are trolls.

There are the anonymous trolls that live under the virtual bridges of the Internet, coming out to swat and bite and snarl. And then there are the trolls of real life, the trolls that you know, the trolls that you maybe even loved, the trolls that you didn’t know were trolls until, one day, the claws extended and the fangs bared and the shredded hem of your pants told you – if the sting from the venomous spit of the troll hadn’t alerted you already – that something was amiss.

Some stories I don’t tell here. Many stories, I don’t tell here. Between the stories that I do tell there are interstices, some shallow, some deep, and in these interstice lay the stories that I do not, for one reason or another, tell. In the interstices of last summer’s stories about death and loss and more death and loss there was another story, one that I did not tell, about another loss, about the loss of – the destruction of – family, about trolls, the real kind. I didn’t tell it because it was one more hurt piled upon a tower of hurt and poking at it might have brought that tower crashing down upon my head. I didn’t tell it because I didn’t know how to make sense of it and there were other, deeper hurts requiring the attention of my confusion. But mostly, I didn’t tell it because it was not my story to tell.

It wasn’t my story to tell, even though it hurt me deeply. It took the ragged edges of my grief and yanked and tore until nothing was left but shreds, but that, that was nothing compared to what it did to my mother. It tore at her understanding of who she is and who she was and what our family was and everything that she thought it always would be. It tore her. It’s her story.

She’s telling it in her own words, in her own space. Please give her some love.

In the last year of my parents’ marriage, my dad had an affair. I’ve always known this, my mom has always known this, it was something that we all talked about, in later years: his regret, his remorse, over this thing he had done, its effect on my mother, its effect on our family, the fact that it led to a divorce that nobody wanted and that everybody regretted and that remained the great tragedy (and yet in some ways the great gift; this is a complicated story among many complicated stories, best left for another day) of both my parents’ lives.

He had an affair, and we knew it. But the fact that we knew it, and that we knew he regretted it, did not lessen the emotional blow of finding letters from this woman among his things.

It was my mother who found them, of course. I found the innocuous things, and the bizarre things,  the wonderful things – the pipe cleaners, the stash of pot, the robot – yes, the robot – and some terrible things – the suicide note from fifteen years ago, the agonized letters to my sister and I apologizing for his imagined failures as a father – but it was my mother who found these, these love notes from another time and another place, these pages that my father would have least wanted her to see of all his pages, all the pages of his story. We cried together, she and I, after she found them. We cried, and then I said all the right things about how that had been such a brief period, such a blip in a much longer history, and, too, how depressed he had been, what a mistake it was, how he had said so, how he had insisted so, and as I spoke it seemed to me – me, so spooked these days – that the very air rippled with tension and I wondered whether I was saying the right things, the truthful things. Had it been nothing? Had it just been a relationship borne out of his depression, a symptom of other problems, of deeper issues that had nothing to do with love? Or had it been more, something more, even for a moment?

Later, we found pictures of this woman. He had wrapped them in multiples layers of packing paper, and taped them up, tightly, and shoved them in a plastic shopping bag and stashed it at the back of his closet, under a bundle of old clothes, hidden, as though he couldn’t bear to be reminded of them, as though he very much wanted to forget them, but couldn’t bear to throw them away. My mother didn’t look at them. She turned away and said, trash them. Toss them in the dumpster. Trash them. And then she left the room.

I wrapped them back up in their paper and put them back in the shopping bag and tucked them back in the closet. I will trash them later, I thought. With the letters that I had stashed in my pocket. Later.

Later never came.

The pictures are still stashed in that bag, in the closet. I’ve been working around them, packing things away, taking things to Goodwill, sifting and sorting through the stuff of my father’s life. I’ve been working around them, pretending that they aren’t there, because I don’t know what to do with them. Do I throw them away? I can understand totally my mother’s desire that they be thrown away. I would desire that they be thrown away, if I were my mother, if it were the love of my life who had received such letters and retained the pictures of their author. I do desire that they be thrown away, or at least, that childish part of me that wishes to deny that part of my father’s history desires that they be thrown away. But therein is the rub: now that my father is gone (so suddenly gone, so absolutely gone), I recoil at the idea of denying any part of his history, any thing – any word, any image – that forms any part of the history that made him him. I don’t know whether or not he loved that woman. In a way, it doesn’t matter whether or not he loved her. She was part of his life for a short time and for whatever reason he chose to not erase her memory, entirely. So I feel – I think – that I should not erase her memory. For whatever reason. For whatever it’s worth.

So I have these pictures, and these letters, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to keep them, but it feels wrong, somehow, to just throw them away.

I have these pictures, and these letters, and I don’t know what to do.

(What would you do?)

When I was a kid, my mom used to joke about her boobs. “They’re tube socks!” she’d hoot. “I have to roll them up to get them in my bra.”

I would cringe and recoil. “Mom,” I’d hiss. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Why are you so red, honey?”

“Because you’re embarrassing me.”

“I’m just talking about tube socks.”

“You’re talking about your boobs.”

“Sweetie, my boobs are tube socks because I bore and birthed you and your sister, so if hearing about it embarrasses you, well, tough.”

Then she’d cross her eyes and stick out her tongue at me. I’d run to my room at that point and discreetly peer down the front of my shirt and wonder whether I’d ever have any kind boobs, let alone the tube sock kind. Although I’d have preferred not the tube sock kind, at that point in my adolescence I’d have been happy with just about anything.

Ah, the deluded innocence of youth.

I grew boobs, eventually. They were never all that impressive – I was always skinny, with the type of cleavage that, in nature, attends skinny bodies – but they were there, and they were kind of cute. Perky. The kind of breasts that you never called tits or gazongas or hooters or even just boobs. You referred to them to them in the diminutive – boobies – or in the unsexed abstract – chest. So it was that when I got pregnant and, later, began lactating and those puppies grew – like, seriously, epically grew, like frightened puffer fish – I was both alarmed and thrilled. I had hooters. I had gazongas. I had BOOBS.

For a few uncomfortable but nonetheless thrilling years, I had a rack, and it was spectacular.

And now it’s gone.

Gone, disappeared, deflated, defunct. It’s as if, after watching me wean Jasper and my husband get his parts snipped, Nature herself gave my body the once-over and said well, you won’t be needing those any more, will you? and unceremoniously removed them from my person.

They’re gone now, and I miss them. I miss them, not only because they really were kind of epic – and what girl doesn’t fantasize, occasionally, secretly, about what it would be like to have epic boobs? – but because Nature, in all of her douchey wisdom, did not restore my chest to its modest but nonetheless entirely presentable profile. Nature, being the stone-cold bitch-goddess that she is (the very same one who gave us menstrual cycles and the pain of childbirth and the indignity of random chin hairs), turned my boobs into tube socks. Just like my mother’s.

Except smaller. Small tube socks. The tube socks of an adolescent boy with irregularly-sized feet. Because, yes, one is actually – oh, god – smaller than the other.

Which is why, when I found myself, yesterday, in the fitting room of the lingerie department, desperately trying to find a bra into which my breasts would not just disappear like a pathetic wad of crumpled tissue, I lasted all of three minutes before bursting into tears.

It’s not that I want – what are the kids calling it these days? – a bangin’ bod. I’d be happy with a bod that just pinged a little. I just want to not to not look in the mirror and cringe. Which I know goes against everything that I said a few months ago, but a few months ago I had boobs. Muffin-tops and extra ass-padding are one thing when you have the upper curves to balance everything out. They’re quite another when your upper body looks like a deflated pool toy.

I’m straining to accept this new incarnation of me, to learn to love it as I’ve learned to love all the other incarnations. But I am finding, now, as summer approaches and I wrap my head and heart around the fact (is it fact? is it? I am still struggling with this) that I will have no more children, that I am still, in my way, vain, and that I want my beauty back. Maybe not the same beauty, the same body, the same sweet boobs of youth, but something, anything, that makes me swell with just a little bit of pride when I look in the mirror.

Or maybe just a tit-inflater. Anybody got one of those?