To illustrate my problem, make a fist with your right hand. Now, cup the top of that fist with your left hand. This represents the hip joint — if you swing your right arm a bit, you’ll get a sense of how the hip bone moves in its joint when you walk, or run, or bend. Now, flatten your left hand atop the fist. If you swing the right arm, the fist slips away from the left hand. The joint doesn’t hold. That’s me. That flat hand atop a fist — that’s the hip I was gifted at birth. I was unfinished.

The hips are the center, the seat of power, the pivotal hinge. The hip is a ball-and-socket synovial joint, synovial essentially meaning lubricated. When the femur swings in its ball joint, as it is meant to, we have locomotion. Our bodies can then power over land, or through water, and stir up all sorts of trouble. If, however, the socket is a sandwich plate, the ball slips with movement and progress is impossible. Mine was a janky body and, without interference, would never walk, run, or bend the way it should. I was going nowhere.

Cue the interference.

***

My parents were very young and critically naive in 1963. They were kids, really, and one night they unknowingly made a broken kid of their own. The marriage was shotgun and brief. With no gods to fault for her defective baby, my mother blamed my father. He took his new, pregnant bride to see The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman’s tale of Death and chess on a beach. The dark film, an allegory of man’s search for meaning — a dense, plodding, Scandinavian affair — was not my mother’s genre. She is drawn to nature documentaries and feel-good romance. The Swede fractured her rose-colored glasses and broke the baby in her womb. She was sure of it; it was her best explanation.

The problem was detected quickly, thanks to the Barlow maneuver, a physical examination performed on infants to screen for developmental dysplasia of the hip. This was just two years after the conclusion of the test’s clinical trial, so I count detection as a bit of luck. The maneuver is performed by bringing the infant’s thigh towards the midline while applying light pressure on the knee. If the hip is dislocable — that is, if the hip can be popped out of its socket — the test is considered positive. I watched doctors do this with all four of my own newborns, holding my breath while they stirred the babies’ little knees around and around, solemnly feeling for skeletal irregularities. They were all fine. I avoided Bergman while pregnant, just in case.

The first few years of my life, I wore a cast on the broken side of my body. Daddy — the keeper of the tale — says the cast extended from armpits to knees, keeping my tiny body splayed like a spatchcocked chicken. There was a hole for diapers; they were just pushed in and pulled out as needed, no pins or fastenings, the cast being the container. It must have been a miserable mess.

I have no memory of it, but there are pictures. Girl in a cast. A tiny smiling girl, splay-legged on a wee trike; a shy, pale girl, stiff-legged on a bouncy horse; a goofy, curled girl, wide-legged on a blanket on my grandmother’s floor. It was all I ever knew — the trauma was largely for my parents to manage. They say I was hell on that trike, dashing about madly and terrorizing the small dog. We are adaptive and, without the ability to walk, wheels were my adaptation.

My distant ancestors would likely have abandoned me to the wolves, needy little broken thing that I was. In low moments, I sometimes think I wasn’t supposed to survive. But that’s ridiculous self-indulgence. Claudius, the Roman emperor who conquered Britain, is rumored to have been hard of hearing and walked with a limp. Queen Elizabeth I suffered panic attacks and all manner of tooth and gum traumas. Stevie Wonder’s birthright blindness didn’t stop him. History is a parade of defect, people climbing over their hurdles and getting on with it.

Perhaps my early breaking had big plans for me.

***

At an annual doctor’s appointment, through all my growing years, he would monitor my development and the severity of my infirmity. My parents were warned that I would always limp, and these appointments included a runway judgment of my gait. The doctor would instruct me to walk down a long, narrow hallway, away from him and back, as he inspected me for imperfection. I remember the discomfort of scrutiny as I got older, my blossoming girl body already edging into the harsh glare of the world. In my 14th year, he proclaimed me a miracle. Something about my walk that day, or his perception of it, must have been close enough to good. My grandmother, until her death, called me her “miracle child.”

My mother doesn’t speak of it; never once has she discussed my origin story with me. She gave me a plush pink bunny from my newborn crib and recounted her status as the only nursing mother on the ward — but not a word about my brokenness. My father says she was in denial. All the stories are from his perspective.

He tells how the hospital offered “extra exams that cost more” and how he said “yes,” in spite of his youth and his dollar-an-hour job. How it was one of those extra exams that discovered the problem. How the receptionist wouldn’t let him take my mother and me home until the bill was paid. “She stays until you pay.” He tells how he begged money from his father to spring us from the hospital and how he got aid to cover my subsequent treatment. How the doctor lectured him, after seeing my mother and grandmother shopping in town. “If you can afford that, you can afford this.” He tells of taking me to the Washington Sanitarium to have my cast changed, and about the pure, pit-of-gut terror he felt the first time he saw the doctor with what looked like a carpenter’s skill saw. The doctor promised the blade wouldn’t cut skin, and it didn’t. Daddy still seems to remember that terror with particular acuity — a man with a blade, aiming for his baby girl.

He has also mentioned taking me for traction. These sessions are largely lost to the mists of time, the work of a mind erasing the toughest bits, as my father can’t remember anything about it. He can barely recall that it occurred, but I remember him telling me years ago that it was the traction that haunted him the most. That, and the saw.

I remember none of it.

***

In all my memories of childhood, I am active and athletic. I rode horses and bikes, played tennis and softball, and was the fastest kid in primary school. A tomboy to the core, I spent summers up trees and underwater, and was fiercely committed to beating everyone on fields of play. The story of my first few broken years — the story of casts and traction and doctors — is just that, to me: A story. In it, I was a tiny brave heroine, unfettered by the cast and unfazed by the poking and prodding of professionals. If there was trauma for me, it’s not in the memory banks. It must, however, be part of the fabric of me; learned trauma a thread in the weave of my life. Perhaps the traction explains my occasional claustrophobia; perhaps the saw and my father’s infectious terror set the table for panic. I’ll never know. My father says I was never bothered by any of it, seemingly at relative ease with the odd medical rituals.

In the beginning, my parents were told that I would never walk correctly and managed it in divergent ways. My father soldiered through, filing away the terror for future stories; my mother chose the path of denial and was spared the worst of it, I imagine, by him. At night, I slept in something the doctors laughably called a “cookie” — a metal bar with two shoes on it, designed to keep my legs in the same position at all times. It sounds medieval; my mother’s denial is not surprising. Daddy carried me on his shoulders. The cast rubbed holes in his shirts and left him with wounds. This is his story, the details stored in his consciousness, and he only shares when I ask. That is past, but prologue to what?

***

The body is the foundation, the house in which we build a life, the architecture of being. The set of the bones lays the groundwork for the rest. Short, tall, wide, narrow, brittle, or resilient, the skeleton is the underpinning of the whole machine. It determines how we grow, how we move, how we rest, how we thrive or not. We want a house with “good bones” for good reason. We all want good bones.

As an adult, my hips are likely like yours, aside from the story. I walk distances and lurch ungracefully around tennis courts. I do yoga and ride my bike. I’ve had four uneventful pregnancies and four births that people would call easy, though each was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I squat to pick strawberries, bend to tie shoes, and carried children on each side for years, like saddle bags. These hips are solid now, even the broken one, providing me the foundation to live the life I’ve built.

When my yoga teacher says, “hinge from the hips and bend,” I do so without thought for the fact that I couldn’t, in the beginning. And it feels good. It feels normal, natural, an expected function of a body that works. The beginning is a story, told to me by my father, gauzily supported by a handful of old, black-and-white photos. The hinge was made whole by years in a stabilizing cast and some forgotten sessions in a traction torture chamber. My yoga teacher says the hips are the seat of emotion: “We hold a lot of shit in our hips,” she says.

I worry, because of this story, what does my future body hold? Will this forced socket support my aging? Is my hip up to the natural weakening of the bones? Are my emotions trapped in that makeshift joint? Midcentury modern medicine wrestled my bones into submission, shaped my skeleton like clay, and crossed its fingers. When the hip complains, as they both do here in midlife, the part of my brain that has memorized the story lights up and panics. Is this it? The beginning of the final breakdown? Has my origin story written hip replacement surgery into the late chapters? I’ve taken this aching, aging hip to acupuncturists and massage therapists, along with the story, and they work out the kinks but don’t seem to know what to do with the narrative. Mild curiousity is all I’ve ever been able to inspire.

My infrastructure problem is theoretically hereditary. The same genes that gave me hazel eyes, an ample backside, and a quick temper also gave me a misshapen critical joint. The same genes that built me, broke me a little. Those genes gave me a first project, a challenge, and a mountain for my parents to climb. Trauma, perhaps more theirs than mine, was whipped up in utero and delivered along with me — their oops baby in a season of blushing youth. Having a baby as a kid will make you grow up fast. Having a broken baby will test you in the fires of fate and lay the groundwork for your big girl, or big boy, life.

Beyond the genes, though, it’s interesting what we do with the stories we’re told about ourselves.

You were a good baby.

You were born with a heart murmur.

You never slept.

You were premature. Breech. Late.

You were broken.

***

There is a nest of phoebes in the barn, one of the babies hanging over the side, its leg tangled in woven grass. We imagined it had been hanging there for a while, but it was still clearly alive. My husband carefully took it down and we delicately unraveled the material twined around the baby’s toothpick leg. He then carefully placed the tiny bird, who seemed spirited and quite well, back in the nest with its siblings. Three times later that day, the bird was on the ground beneath the nest; three times, we carefully put it back. The third time seemed the charm, as we saw no evidence of the baby outside the nest into the evening. The next day, however, we discovered the tiny body, dead in a bucket, just below the nest.

Had the mother bird rejected the broken baby? Was the dangling from the nest enough to damage the leg, causing her to kick it out? Was this some real-time Darwinian drama at work in my barn?

I sit here, post-yoga, with an aching hip. Aging? Hormones? Or is this the shadow, long-delayed, of my birthright brokenness? Motion is lotion, they say, so I’ll get on my bike. I’ll pedal slowly to town, maybe buy a bottle of wine, balm for the middle. I’ll get on the floor, or stand in the sun, and stretch. I’ll get a massage and take analgesics. It may be, however, that no amount of pills, pedaling, stretching, massage, or wine will calm my strange bones, artificially muscled into place in my unknowing baby body. Those years of immobility in the hinge of my center may have coaxed correct bone growth, but it robbed me of early training in motion. Though I am, supposedly, a miracle — walking well when no one expected it — perhaps I still have a hitch. My left side, with its attendant aches and complaints, whispers to me daily of those early years. Perhaps my wonky left knee and my troublesome left foot are all born of my compromised left hip. Perhaps the broken isn’t broken at all — perhaps it was just a failure to fully form, a bun too soon out of the oven. Perhaps I wasn’t finished, and the finishing had to be cobbled together later, with casts and saws, crossed fingers, and sessions with strangers.

As birth defects go, mine is but a sneeze. Babies are born with all manner of abnormalities, from benign to fatal. Many suffer great hardship, many are born into a brokenness from which they will never recover. Some are broken down and forgotten. Some don’t live past the first days — they know only struggle, and their parents endure a brief, horrid window of hope and grief, followed by a lifetime of questions and mourning. To build an imperfect body elicits guilt, shame, anger, sadness, and a chorus of “why me’s?” And, as in my mother’s case, denial and magical thinking. “It’s Ingmar Bergman’s fault. Damn Freddy for putting me through that dark, Scandinavian nightmare.”

But this is the body I was given, and this is the body that has given me four children, buckets of strawberries, long walks, and bike rides. This is my structure and my story.

***

There’s a picture of me, on the beach, about five years old. I’m leaning on an off-kilter beach umbrella wearing a jaunty, navy blue one-piece. My hair is gold straw and my freckled face is full of sassy attitude, one hand on a cocked hip. Summer child, full of herself, staring down the camera and the sun with overbrimming confidence. It’s not the picture of a broken child, not the image of mending. The broken child, however, haunts me still. Even without memory, even with only a story — a distant tale filled with gaps and questions — my hip is still a haunting thing. It’s a thing I grapple with in sickness, a thing I worried when pregnant, and with the bodies of my babies. I was skewed and now I’m not. Or am I? I am still skewed somewhere, somehow. I must be.

I write to connect, to find my place among my fellows and share a common experience. But I also write to know myself, to untangle the threads of my story and see if there’s an instructive truth in it. Is my temper my grandmother’s, or is it the hours of traction I endured with no language to complain? Is my caution inbred or is it born of baby trauma? Are these tears caused by the sappy advertisement or the mute sadness of broken beginnings? There is, ultimately, no pure truth hidden in these psychic haystacks. It’s like a stew, with each element touching and flavoring the next. Our bodies — the shape and structure, the very sinew of them — are infused with experience and emotion. The fact of the body is fleshed out by the stories we tell and are told about it. My body was broken in the beginning because I was told that it was. There’s a supporting narrative and — look! — there are pictures. See the cast? The cant of my legs?

***

Origin stories are filled with magical thinking — season, time of day, zodiac, complications, attendees. Born in a car, in a field, early, late. Born screaming, silent, born with a thatch of hair, bald as a cue ball. Born with a caul. My husband is told that his mother had all signs of a miscarriage while carrying him and, yet, here he is. The story is a twin, evicted by my husband, a ghost sibling in the tale he tells himself. I saw a shooting star through the skylight as I labored with my youngest, and now it is part of her origin story. Does it mean anything? Probably not, but it’s hers now. Conceived under Hale-Bopp, born under a shooting star. She’ll tell this story to herself, and to her future.

My parents were told a tale about me; a tale about a broken baby. It started with a problem, named at the beginning and setting in motion a narrative. Our origin stories are woven into our identities, fact and fiction, for better and worse. Who I am is who I was is who I will be. There are stories in bodies, and there is meaning in stories — because we put it there. We name the problems, set the stage, and watch the stories unfold.

Lisa ✨

I’ve been working on a collection of essays about menopause (in my mind) and am miserable. Why am I doing this? Who would read this? It’s tedious and horrible, unsavory and ugly, not unlike those long nights, spooked days, endless years. I’m realizing, however, that it’s not a thing to write about, like politics or the moon. Menopause is not the subject. It’s a place, the background of a story, the setting. Everything after is seen through its lens.

It’s hard to write about menopause because I want to write about anything else. And now, everything else is somehow informed by those difficult years. Nothing is the same and, also, it’s all the same. I feel somewhat deranged, as in things are dis-arranged. Rearranged. My mind and body, my sense of self and everything outside the self has shifted, like a cubist painting. I am the nude descending the staircase, all shattered planes, except I’m wearing a gingham shift that seemed cute and kooky, but is just frumpy comfort.

Everything — the wind on my arm, the evening light, the fritillaria in the backyard — is different now. Or nothing is different but me. I am different.

There’s a bunny outside the window that is bigger than yesterday’s bunny. Is it the same, only bigger? Is it another? These are the questions I had no time for, in the before. Before I began descending the stairs in my shift and shattered planes, I didn’t much notice the bunnies. Or the butterflies. The noticing is new, the sudden interest in trees and birds, bunnies and butterflies. A lot is new.

There’s a clarity here, after the storms. Were hormones obscuring the view before? Was that confident, sassy preadolescent girl closer to the real me, before the decades of swimming in a chemical sea that was designed to make me a mother? The chemicals still smudge the clarity, as I pull myself from the sea and rest on the shore. It’s different here. I’m getting my bearings.

This is not about menopause. It’s about a woman noticing the world in a different chapter of her life. Menopause is the setting, perhaps, or maybe a minor character. A story set in Paris is not necessarily about Paris. There’s a story and Paris is there, maybe the story even needs Paris. But it’s not about Paris. I wouldn’t be writing any of this without menopause, because I wrote almost nothing until the middle shook me and insisted on it. But it’s not about menopause. It’s not about Paris. It’s about the world through the eyes of a shook midlife woman in an old lady shift, descending the last staircase slowly in a scrim of shattered planes. Waking to a funhouse mirror.

I’ve been frustrated that menopause hijacked my story and made it tough for me to write about anything else. And everything else is where the interest is. Mine is not an unusual story, but if well-written, it’s a good one for personal essay nerds like me. And women who have visited the same place. I went to Paris (I did not), the food was great, I crashed and burned, saw the sights, and here’s what I thought. I’d like to write it all.

So I’ll write about flashes and insomnia, I’ll write about pain and fear and the radiant rage. But I’ll also write about bunnies and flowers, books and paintings. Because life goes on, in spite of the internal storms. Those storms provide new color and perspective. They inform the future. It’s a story, and there are storms. But it’s not just about the storms. It’s not about Paris.

This is me trying to get my arms around a story, and a place. Skirting the issue, sidling up to the beast, nibbling at the edges — how to write about the nightmare that was menopause without it being just a catalogue of symptoms, a map of misery. A dry account of decline and derangement. How to tell the story of Paris, when there’s so much more to it than maps and weather?

And moreover, how to write anything in this mad burning world? A rant for another day.

Lisa 🥂

Things to share:

• The brilliant has given us a must-read: It’s Not Only The Violence: Women are Enraged by Men’s Cultivated Ignorance. As she writes, it “might make your blood boil, but might also help have better conversations about hard things.” Read it. You must.

• Francine Prose’s Oldster Questionnaire is great. “I hope to keep writing and have the fact that I’m a nonagenarian (I am knocking on wood here) not be the diminishing patronizing lens through which an old person’s work can be seen.”

• Love this little essay about loss (and oranges) by . “I know you can’t have the softness of the sweet without the rigor of the pith.”

  Thanks for reading The Long Middle! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

You are not (or were not) prepared. It is likely that your body, without your knowledge or consent, will suddenly upend your perception of yourself and the universe. It will suck.

We’re taught to read and tie our shoes, how to drive and pay our bills. We’re given endless relationship advice and plenty of tips on cooking and parenting. There are whole sections of libraries and bookstores devoted to unraveling the mysteries of life. Why, then, the dearth of guidance and information about the “change,” an event that more than half the population will face? There are books, articles, and podcasts that speak of peri/menopause — but the event (or, rather, the slow train wreck process) is a sneak attack in our youth-obsessed culture. No one is told to seek information or educate themselves before the wreck, when it could help. No, we seek it at 3 a.m., in a panic, in the middle of our lives, and devour it in the hope that something, anything, can save us. No one will prepare you, and on the eve of your commitment, your mother will say, “Now that you mention it, it was difficult at times. I do remember crying for days on end.” Thanks for the heads up, Ma.

The female body is an amazing, fierce thing. It has ferried you this far, with its cycles, its ebb and flow. You’ve nurtured your world and built a big life on the foundation of this body — a brilliant machine. But there is no intelligent design here. No design in screaming, chaotic hormonal fluctuations. No intelligence in the scattershot crippling of sanity. The design is flawed. Sometimes it seems more like a freshman art project. At a party school.

What Will Happen:

• You will wake in the wee hours, drenched in sweat. You’ll strip, towel off, and sleep again. In the morning, you’ll recall this and think, “Hmm…must’ve been hot last night.” In February.

• Your tween daughter will look at you, hand on cocked hip, head in that “Girlfriend?!” tilt. Eye-rolling will increase, as will stomping and slamming. You can’t blame her — you’re useless in the face of her own design issues.

• Your teen sons will regard you as if you’ve sprouted a third eye. Then they’ll leave. You’ll weep like a baby despite the fact that their departure makes your life easier.

• Your partner will shop and cook and try to love you. Heavy sighs will increase, though, and it will piss you off.

• There will be nights when you don’t sleep at all and feel madness creeping (or rushing) in. You will drink Rescue Remedy and chamomile and toddies and somehow survive, but you will never forget the edge of that particular abyss. It will nearly break you.

• You will make appointments and say yes to parties and dinners, calm and well-intentioned, but you won’t make it to half of them. 11 a.m. next Friday? We don’t know what that looks like yet.

• You will weep over everything and nothing. You will feel sad and silly, hopeless and giddy all at once. It will make not a lick of sense.

• Your doctor will look at you, a 45-year-old woman with night sweats, insomnia, anxiety, and crazy eyes, and say, “No, it can’t be perimenopause if your cycle is still regular.” She will be wrong. You will hate her.

• You will see the world, by turns, as a glorious Eden full of unlimited possibility and a dark dead-end hell full of worst-case scenarios. You’ll be right on both counts.

• You may find previously mundane tasks, like driving and waiting in lines, maddening and nearly impossible. You must avoid the depths of brightly lit big-box stores. I am noticing, when I dare, that these places are filled with young parents, oldsters, and men. Where are my midlife sisters?

• You will look at the people in your family and wonder, “Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want from me?” Keep this to yourself.

• You will want to be alone, and you will want to do nothing. Chase it. You will also want to turn the world upside down with the creative storm in your head. Chase that, too.

• You will reconnect with old friends, and you will overshare. It will be a relief and a delight when some do the same. Cull the others.

• You will see another doctor who, after an hour wait and a 10-minute visit, will hand you a prescription for an antidepressant. You will hate him.

• You will find sex alternately mind-blowing and nonexistent, emphasis probably on the latter. This is because your brain vacillates between two messages: “Take me immediately,” or “Touch me and die.” With emphasis, probably, on the latter. Your body may scream, “Take me immediately!” when (and if) you ovulate because biology wants you to propagate the species. Clearly, there is no link between biology and common sense — I’ve propagated the species four times and am just trying to keep everyone (including myself) alive.

• You will suddenly have a crone’s joints. Your hips, thumbs, and knees will all complain. You will read entirely too much about it and buy things that promise magic. Results will be mixed, at best.

• You’ll begin reading obituaries, which will remind you of the great sport you had, years ago, ribbing your grandmother about this same activity. You will feel guilt and remorse.

• Your good dog will sense your new vulnerability. She will place a gentle paw on your lap and gaze into your eyes. Your bad dog will turn up the stress with his incessant barking and toxic stench. Note the genders.

• You may try to ignore the messages from your body. You will cook, clean, chauffeur, cater large events, stay up too late, and nurture everyone’s happiness. And then you will fall down. Your body will eventually stop suggesting. It will keep you down until you tend it.

• You will see a third doctor who will take your hands in hers, look deep into your pinwheel eyes, and say, “You’re not crazy. This is perimenopause.” You will love her. She will move to another city.

• You will sniff rose oil and tape dried beans to the acupressure points on your wrists. You will drink foul Chinese potions and slather wild yam cream everywhere. You will mutter affirmations like a madwoman.

• You will, at times, hear the voices around you as a cacophony and you will want everyone to shut up. Don’t tell them. Or do, if it helps. The rules are flexible here.

• You will become unhinged. You will suddenly, bizarrely, love all romantic comedies.

• You will want to drink. A lot.

What to Do:

• Read. Find your people, they will know and it will help.

• Go easy on caffeine and alcohol. Drink tea, and sometimes one glass of wine with dinner. Leave the espresso and tequila to the grad students.

• Find a fabulous acupuncturist with supplementary degrees in nursing and nutrition who happens to be married to a guy who does craniosacral massage. Do everything they tell you.

• Eat fish pills. My acupuncturist said so.

• Walk. Every day. Don’t stop. I’ve recently noticed, now that I am one, the hordes of middle-aged women walking, everywhere. Mostly alone. This isn’t the chatty stroll with friends and strollers of days gone by. This is a purposeful “walk to save my sanity.” You can see it in the eyes, the set of the jaw. It works, better than anything else.

• Have your vitamin D levels checked, especially if you live north of the 40-degree latitude line. Supplement accordingly, immediately.

• Keep a journal of the madness. You’ll see how it tracks with your cycle, somehow, and at least be able to anticipate the worst.

• Eat really well. You know how. Just do it.

To those of you on the early side of this ride, those in your twenties and thirties, take heed. This train is a runaway and headed straight for you. If I knew now what they should have told me then, I would’ve armed myself. If the body is in great shape when this design flaw kicks in, it will be a much easier wave to ride.

I spent decades birthing, nursing, and nurturing four children. I earned my crazy pants and deserve a break, some respect, and some space. Our culture doesn’t know what to do with us. We need a midlife version of The Red Tent, perhaps a year or so of escape, where the women who have made this journey can lend a guiding hand, a lantern, or a drink. I’m told there are great things on the other side of this bridge. Until then, keep in mind the positives:

• Menstruation will eventually stop. My mother wept at the “loss,” but I did not for one second miss the tyranny of the blood.

• Your family may remain a bit wary of you. This can be useful.

• You will, hopefully, prepare the young girls and women for the ride. If we don’t, who will?

• You will leave behind all your fucks and rise in righteous rage. A glorious cohort of women forged in the fires of midlife is just what this broken world needs right now.

There is a calm, present power that comes after menopause. We learn new things about ourselves, and our priorities shift. The midlife journey is a rich and complicated thing — meet it with a smile and kick its ass.

Lisa 🌷

A junco smashed into the dining room window while I sat at the table, staring dumbly. The fat doves are mourning at the top of the bean tree. Two foxes crisscross the back field, the deer come and go. We watch from the house, fretting about the world. The critters follow the directives of instinct and the sun, concern themselves with food and warmth. They care nothing for the news.

I don’t believe in god, capital or lower case. I believe in something, but it’s not a face or a figure, definitely not that white man in the pictures they’ve shown me all my life. A religious friend says I’m the most spiritual person she knows, whatever that means. I’m a cynic and a skeptic, but I need a place to put my awe and dump the junk. A place to ask for help.

Mary Karr, in her brilliant memoir Lit, wrote of needing to pray but not (yet, in her case) believing in an entity that might receive such a thing. So she sat down in tough times and called on Higher Power. I can do that, I thought. Vague, nameless, faceless — an amorphous something in the ether. Higher Power.

So each evening, I sit on a yoga mat to stretch and end with a message to Higher Power. I felt a little silly when I started, but now it’s my reliable daily prayer. It’s always the same:

Thank you. Please send help.

Thank you for the birds, but WTF? Thank you for the cookies but OMG? Thanks for this, help with all of that. What other message could we have for the universe, the gods, the mystical powers we do not understand or know? Awe and desperation. Gratitude and confusion.

It doesn’t feel like the beginning of a year. 2026 seems like the continuation of a long, ugly, increasingly shrill nightmare and it doesn’t look to be improving any time soon. Thank you for the breeze through the pines, the little red squirrel that leaves gifts by my door, the new winter cocktail, and also what the actual ever-loving fuck?

So, this year — this turn of the calendar page — does not mean what it has in the past. I’m feeling a hard NO to the new. We need to clean up the old, round up and get gone the demons still bedeviling us. No resolutions. No new me, no goals, no big changes. We all need to STOP. Stop moving so fast, pause the big dreaming, draw a line in the sand. Stand arm in arm, strong and quiet, and put up with this nonsense NO MORE.

No bullshit.
No madness.
No ICE.
No war.
No to all the shrieking headlines.

So, thank you Higher Power for all the pretty things. Thanks for the sustaining things, the delicious things, the healing things. And please send help, for the love of all gods and goddesses.

I will continue to say yes to love and sunsets, coffee and champagne. Yes to reason and kindness, empathy and morality. Thank you for this sweater and these friends, the spaces that hold us and allow us to breathe.

Thank you. Please help.
Are you there, Higher Power? Asking for a planet.

🙏 Lisa

Things to share:

• I fell in love with Sex of the Midwest, a perfect ‘novel in stories’ by . A charming snapshot of a small town, these characters capture what it is to be limping along, in all our glory and complexity, in this mad modern world.

• Love ’ Fallow January and her thoughts about ‘winter work.’ Also, Toni Morrison. Always Toni Morrison.

• Speaking of fallow, my writing has completely stalled out. The ideas, the motivation, the language when I try — it feels like that poor little junco lying in the leaf litter after its encounter with the window. Dead. I’ve been toying with journaling (never a consistent thing for me), dipping into The Book of Alchemy by and enjoying the little essay prompts by so many interesting writers. I’ve even scrawled a sentence or two.

• Winter Stories by Ingvild Rishøi is a lovely, haunting little collection set in a Scandinavian winter. It’s also an objet d’art, of sorts — small hardcover with gorgeous cover art, feels lovely in the hand. It was a gift, and feels like one.

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“I wanna pull on your coat about something ...”

I was 15 years old — a moody, swooning teen hiding in a fern-papered bedroom, spinning tunes and parsing Kerouac — when I discovered Tom Waits. I was weaned on jazz and blues by my sweet poet daddy. The culture gave me dreamy Jackson Browne, mischievous Tull, psychedelic Floyd, and a funk backbeat. Throw in Tchaikovsky and some Barber, big band and bebop, and you have a rough sketch of the soundtrack of my childhood.

Then, like a foghorn from a new country, I heard Tom.

“An inebriated good evening to you all.”

Here was the one, the only, the growl from the belly of the brilliant beast. Misfit voice. It shook me, broke me, built me up new and showed me the parallel reality that I had suspected all along.

Nearly 50 years later, I’m still on the ride.

〰️

Tom is humor and pathos, bathos and brine. Huckster magician, snake oil salesman, carnival barker. Downtown Shakespeare, a dreamer gone to ground. Trains and tears, crows and crooners and always the moon. Tom is vaudeville and broadway, burlesque and bowery, all thrown in a blender with a dictionary and some good dirt. Tom is a walking bass line and an upright piano, bullhorns and tin cans, whiskey and a cigarette. Grunge and lullabies, cabaret, crooning and scat. Bard and balladeer, wailing and warbling, pitching his whole broke heart at the thing.

Tom Waits taught me that language is pliable; it sits in the mouth waiting to be popped like gold dusted grapes. He taught me you can marry words like hooligan night, dragstrip courage, grapefruit moon. Words are pictures.

It’s raining hammers

The piano has been drinking

I’ve hawked all my yesterdays

Dye your hair yellow and raise your hem

Tomorrow morning there’ll be laundry

Tight-slack clad girls on the graveyard shift

Tom taught me the music of language. And the language of music.

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

He showed me that unabashed romanticism can be tough and that the underbelly is beautiful. He taught me to look under rocks and to listen to the world’s great noise — saws and glockenspiels, doors and rain, roosters and bumblebees, car horns and bullhorns. Percussion is the heart of the machine and the machine is sentimental, in the right light.

He showed how to stitch all the words with all the others, excess is success.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, he taught me, the power is in the reduction.

“I love you, can’t you see?”

He makes me want to write a poem and sit in it with gin and a good hat.

He makes me want to point my small light at the ground.

He makes me want to eat the stars, and he makes me unapologetic about the cheesiness of that sentiment.

〰️

You’ve probably bumped into Tom without knowing. You thought it was Springsteen (“Jersey Girl”), the Eagles (“Ol’ 55”), Rod Stewart (“Downtown Train”), Norah Jones (“Long Way Home”), Queens of the Stone Age (“Goin’ Out West”), on and on. But it was Tom who built it.

“They say that I have no hits and that I’m difficult to work with. And they say that like it’s a bad thing.”

He’s worked with Bette Midler and Keith Richards, John Hammond and Philip Glass. Crystal Gayle, Rickie Lee Jones, and Bonnie Raitt. He’s channeled Bernstein, Sondheim, Burroughs and Bukowski; Kurt Weill, Berthold Brecht, Lord Buckley, and Cole Porter. He’s made movies with Francis Ford Coppola, Jim Jarmusch, Terry Gilliam, Robert Altman, and the Coen brothers. On IMDb, he currently has 249 soundtrack credits, 61 actor credits, and 54 composer credits. He was Shrek’s Captain Hook and went Fishing with John. He’s been active in theatre, contributed to literary projects and tribute compilations, and others have mined his catalogue to pay tribute to him. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Neil Young. And in 2016, he and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, received the PEN/Song Lyrics Award. Brennan is the woman behind the curtain, his closest collaborator in all things, it seems. She deserves her own gushy homage.

The man is prolific in an explosive, cross-genre way rarely seen in this modern, one-trick-pony world. He’s a showman, an artiste, a maverick, an outsider crashing the staid inside.

A jester in a trilby, genius in disguise. And funny as fuck.

“Popular music is like a big party, and it’s a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat, gets a chance to speak.”

〰️

His songs are lush and raucous, by turns. Ballads and barnstormers.

His songs are poetry and prose, posies in a locket.

… and then I broke her heart …

His songs are often stories, with the best first lines in the business;

Well I pulled on trouble’s braids and I hid in the briars …

Dot King was whittled from the bone of Cain …

Hey Charley I’m pregnant and living on 9th street …

Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with …

Romeo is bleeding but not so as you’d notice …

Well, he came home from the war with a party in his head …

“I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.”

〰️

What I really want to do is sit down with you and some wine in a low lit room and make you listen to Tom. I want to take you on a musical journey through fields of sonic disorder and forests of stringed romance. Let Tom tell you every good story. Gently grab you by the collar and show you the goddamned truth.

“You gotta meet me by the fall down tree …”

But I can’t. I could sprinkle a thousand links in this little mash note, but it seems contrary to the character. Antithetical to his throwback mission.

“I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.”

If you don’t know him, or haven’t yet embraced his sideways vision, I suggest you sidle up. He’s brimming with surprises, a changeling, and may have something up his sleeve just for you.

“I’ve always been afraid I was going to tap the world on the shoulder for 20 years and when it finally turned around, I was going to forget what I had to say.”

Happy December!
Lisa 🥂

“Did you bring anything sinful?”

This is the question that greets me as I enter dad’s apartment with a bag of groceries. Zero fat yogurt, hummus, one banana, apple sauce, frozen vegetarian dinners. He wants a hot dog. A cheeseburger. PB&J. Like a child.

I give him these things occasionally, the burgers and dogs. I bring bars of high test chocolate, takeout pork fried rice. I serve him dinners from home (where he’s invited but won’t come), soups and chili, sauces for his brown rice pasta. Egg salad and avocado toast. I’m trying to balance health with yum, just like I did forever with four kids. It’s like having a kid again. Every night.

He won’t leave the apartment, except for appointments. He’s missing important teeth and managing diabetes. No bread, wine, crackers, sweets. I give him the bread sometimes, because he loves it — the tiny, skinny, whole grain loaves that lie about their nutrition. Crackers, too, in moderation. No more wine, which he says he doesn’t miss. He misses the cigarettes, though, and reminds me regularly.

He’s one of my favorite people, among the very best. Kind, brilliant, big-hearted daddy. Jazz aficionado, political scholar, Zen spirit, he sits welded to his couch, muscles atrophying, sadness a veil over his days. He seems to have given up.

🍁

The leaves are changing, the air crisp and sweet — he could walk outside with me and drink it in. Remember autumn in DC, where he was born and lived most of his life. He remembers music, asked me just this morning if we could find information about Toshiko Akiyoshi, a jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer. Her music was in his head all night, he said. I’ve never heard of her. His knowledge is encyclopedic, wasted on me and the four walls.

He reads all the books, my suggestions and his requests. Currently, it’s Geraldine Brooks’ Horse and Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s memoir. He’s in love with Arundhati, has been for years. Political firebrand, brilliant writer, a beauty. I’m a little in love with her, too.

He doesn’t like the lentils, doesn’t want my soups — perfect choices for toothless diabetics. About the toothless part: He has teeth (in a glass), he just won’t use them. He won’t use the hearing aids, which is why he only enjoys Akiyoshi in his head. He uses the walker to get to the bathroom and the kitchen, but still marvels at the need for it. He never goes out to see the sun or visit a neighbor. Never to get the mail or a cup of coffee. He’s part of the couch now, smaller and weaker every day.

🥒

I’m in the produce section, seeking the smallest cucumber. Maybe he’ll slice it and drag it around in the hummus. More likely, I’ll slice it, serve it attractively on a plate. Otherwise it gets soft and slimy in his bottom crisper drawer. The grocery has been a trigger for me, my least favorite place throughout my hellish perimenopause. It’s better now, though the whole wide world is a panic. Trying to feed him, feed myself. Trying to calm down.

He says he doesn’t care about dinner, “whatever is easy.” When your diet is so restricted and you’ve lost the ability to chew, you also lose the ability to give a shit. He barely walks anymore and, therefore, is losing the ability to walk. If you don’t walk, you can’t walk.

“It sure is taking a long time to die.”

To be clear, he’s not actually dying. Not obviously, anyway. His diabetes combined with prostate trouble, gastric issues, kidney scares and a slow, incomplete recovery from months of hospitalization and rehab has knocked him low, but not all the way down. He’s been through a lot these last years — surgeries, a pandemic, the death of his difficult wife. If he would just do his exercises, take an occasional walk, call an old friend — I don’t know, CHOOSE LIFE — he might actually feel better. This seems like good logic, to me. My logic, from the outside.

🏛️

America has fallen and she can’t get up.

We watched the East Wing crumble on his TV. It was renovated by FDR in 1942, the year of dad’s birth, in his hometown. The building was a symbol; its demolition a symbol. Nothing like the lives taken, the lives destroyed; nothing like the greater grift and scam. But a powerful symbol, nonetheless. Let’s hope millions of us in the streets is a worthy counter to this petulant destruction. Smashing the material symbols perhaps pales in comparison to all the bodies in all the cities saying NO MORE. Perhaps. We can hope.

My one-eyed, alcoholic aunt visited for a few days, lectured me about her vegan lifestyle and tried to get dad off his ass. I’m drinking wine nightly now (it’s 2025, rules are optional), but can’t keep up with her. Maybe she’s on to something — stay a little drunk and look away.

Daddy —radical old lefty, more fluent in American history than anyone in this administration — is alarmed and appalled. He’s given me history lessons all my life and is astounded at the full-view, daylight crime ring in the White House. There’s nothing new about the con of US government, but the rapid demise of democracy, the quick slide into authoritarianism, boggles the mind. He shakes his head and sighs loudly.

🌭

He’s given up, but it’s not that easy. The world will fall down around our ears and he’ll be sitting on his couch, waiting for a hot dog, missing his cigarettes. I tell myself to find the joy, even in the rubble, while tending this lovely, joyless man. It’s getting hard. Is aging hell, all on its own, or is it just joyless aging that is hell? Is this a choice?

He sighs and moans, say’s he’s “half miserable.” He reminds me of the grandfather in Little Big Man who waits for the death that doesn’t come.

“I was afraid of that.”

He seems to be at a fork — choose life, or not. The second choice isn’t, unfortunately, “choose death.” It’s “sit in your increasing misery and cranky discomfort for possibly years.” I’ll bring the food and the books, but it won’t be pretty.

The world is still outside the window — not the TV world of crumbling monuments, the firehose of bad news. The world of leaf color, raindrops, windy mornings, and peaceful nights. Mama deer and her two late babies, the little monk squirrels that beg for peanuts. People still bring love, treats and, yes, lentils. We get the mail and the meds, portal the doctor and plan meals. We wash the dishes and the laundry, bring boxers and books. We show up for holidays and appointments, I show up nearly every day to chat and cook. Fill the water bottle, open and close the windows. He is grateful, I know. He is big-hearted and kind, but he knows too much, has been beaten by the world and his own history. His light is dimming, I see that. He’s waiting for the end, an end that may be a long way away.

In the meantime, I just need some good easy meals for a brilliant, grumpy, toothless diabetic.

Cheers! 🥂
Lisa

Things to share:

• So pleased to be published in again. Don’t Count Us Out is a somewhat hopeful rant about women, aging, and creativity. Thanks so much to for including me. If you don’t read Oldster yet, what are you waiting for!

  Oldster Magazine

  Don't Count Us Out

  I fell apart in my mid-40s. The story is messy, like life. Life in a female body, in a world that eats girls, caught up to me and I fell down. Literally. And when I got up, it was hard to stay up…

  Read more

  9 months ago · 267 likes · 74 comments · Oldster Magazine and Lisa Renee

• Also thrilled to be included in ’s delightful collection about boobs. There’s so much to say about them and 20 writers said it.

  Distracted by Pretty Things

  The Boob Chronicles

  Earlier this year I was thinking about my boobs, and I realized I had some stories to tell. In February, I published “Let’s Talk About Boobs.” Turns out most women have something to say about this subject. Our cups runneth over with stories…

  Read more

  8 months ago · 23 likes · 13 comments · Leslie Senevey

• I did it. I went to California and it was wonderful and not so hard and also exhausting and not nearly long enough. I’ll write about it sometime, probably, but for now — I did it.

  

  Thanks for reading The Long Middle! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I knew things had changed when I flipped off the speeding truck. Sending a hearty “fuck you” to a stranger was a thing I had almost never considered before, but it seemed oddly, perfectly natural. I briefly reconsidered the wisdom of it when he doubled back. And then I did it again.

Out for my morning walk, a jumped-up pickup truck with a tiny red-hat boy at the wheel came roaring by at an unreasonable speed. Frightening, aggressive speed. When he rounded the corner and saw me on the side of the road, he floored it. It scared me, but it also enraged me beyond caring for the fear. Just as he passed, the massive and menacing truck feet from my body, I shot my middle finger high up in the air, thrusting it in his direction with my best angry face. I was shaking, but it felt like power. Reclaiming my space.

I heard his loud engine slow and stop at the far end of the road. Then it started up again, hurtling back in my direction — he was rounding on me in his dirty gray truck. He looked younger than any of my kids and smaller than all of us. But he was armored in his noisy vehicle, empowered to terrorize a middle-aged woman out for a walk on her quiet country road. I actually thought, “What would his mother think? Would he treat her this way?” Then I realized, of course he would. He’s mentored by a culture that tells him he’s in charge because of his gender and his race — he can behave any ugly way he’d like. Swagger and bluster, slash and burn. Such a tired, old story.

As he came screaming back in my direction, pumping up his speed at regular intervals in a menacing display of power, I felt a new wave of fear. Terror, even. What was I playing at; who did I think I was? Me, on foot, without weapons save a stream of words and a finger against a rage boy in a big, loud machine. He had the advantage, for sure, though it wasn’t right. It wasn’t respectful or neighborly, and it laid bare the ugly core of our national shame. I felt my anger rising again as this incident felt like a metaphor for so much. He was bearing down on me fast, and I was shaking.

As he swept past me again, gunning his engine just feet away, I threw both of my middle fingers in the air, holding them high above my head as he receded in the distance. I wanted to be sure he saw that I had also doubled down. I would not be bullied. The little asshole.

Again, the engine slowed and stopped. I could hear its idling threat at the end of my short road. My righteous indignation vanished and was replaced by pure quaking fear with a healthy side of regret. What exactly was I doing? This was not a game. I turned and started walking quickly for home, which was not far. “Maybe I can make it,” I foolishly thought. “Maybe I’ll beat him. But then he’ll know where I live! He probably already knows; everyone knows everything out here. Shit, Lisa, now you decide to be a tough chick?” Still, the thunderous idle a quarter-mile away, me race-walking home. Then, a tiny red car appeared like a beacon, heading my way. My husband, home from the grocery. Home to save me from my folly, the public debut of my midlife rage. He escorted me back and the truck, thankfully, didn’t return. The change was complete, and no one was more surprised than me.

🖕

I have rarely unfurled the “fuck you” finger. Once or twice at road ragers from the safety of my car, probably a few times at my husband. I regret that second bit; he probably deserved it, but it wasn’t nice, and I’m sure it made nothing better. I’ve never been particularly mouthy, and though it didn’t often feel right on the inside, I’ve been pretty measured on the outside. My grandmother’s favorite expletive was “sugar,” and “hell’s bells” was the extent of my mother’s swearing. There wasn’t much profanity in my life until I married a New Yorker, who will say things like, “These are some great fucking potatoes.” I also once heard him say, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck.” It was directed at a nasty guy in a Lower East Side parking lot and was jarring, but I learned to live with it. He calls it “dialect” and “colloquial,” and it comes easy to him. Sometimes it’s funny (and sometimes it works).

My fifties — headlined by a perimenopausal chapter straight from the bowels of hell — coincided with ramped-up misogyny in the halls of power, the #MeToo campaign, and a global lockdown. Night sweats, madness, and dizzy spells with a backdrop of Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the Great Orange Mistake. Midlife panic with a side of protests and pandemic. It’s been a wild ride, rage and sadness mingling with hormones to create a new me. Or, rather, to reveal a distilled version of me with all the old shit swept away. I truly have no fucks left to give. Or, perhaps, I have a whole new crop of fresh fucks to give, and I’m passing them out like Santa with candy on a fire truck.

The older I get, the mouthier I get. It’s a delicious development (for me). I’m not just comfortable with my new foul mouth, I’m positively transformed by the therapeutic properties of language. There is real release in telling it like it is with all the color and bite. The world has been particularly ugly this last decade, and I’ve walked through a midlife hell with nothing but a hand fan and a seltzer. A few well-placed fuck-you’s can be balm for the burn. I’m sorry — or, rather, I’m not a bit fucking sorry anymore because that’s what this is all about — but the world is burning, and at my age, the patience and the politesse are gone. I’m fresh out of any performed tolerance.

Here in the rough middle, I care much less what anyone thinks. I suffer fools less gladly, if at all. I am getting in touch with my rage at a particularly ragey moment for women, and a lot of it is coming out of my mouth. I keep it all pretty close to home — I haven’t, for instance, told my leering neighbor exactly what I think of him — and the family is entertained. My profane husband is happy for the company, though at times he seems more than a little worried about where this new trend might lead, wincing as my anger rises and the obscenities fly. I’ve spent a lot of time assisting my aging and ailing father, who is astonished at my colorful blue streaks. We commiserate regularly about politics and difficult family members, and I feel finally liberated by my ability to speak candidly about these things that make me so angry. “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth!” he said of my young, demure self. “What’s happened to my daughter?”

I imagine that my years of measured, profanity-free communication were an exercise in restraint. An attempt at control. An example of polite, respectful behavior that I was setting for my kids. When they were young, my husband and I argued about his fondness for expletives; me taking the side of language and power, him the side of “just words.” I maintained — and still believe — that there is great power in language and that we must use it carefully. But I’m surprised and delighted to find myself a convert. The power in cursing may be in its therapy, its catharsis. Get it all up and out. When my quarantined-at-home college-student daughter let fly a “fuck” over a dropped spoon, it became clear I’d lost the battles. When in Rome.

I’m blessed to have come to my salty mouth in these angry times. Bad words seem to be having a moment, and I’m in great company. Emma Byrne’s Swearing Is Good for You and Benjamin K. Bergen’s What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves both support the sport of swearing. Scientists and linguists seem to agree that there is therapy and humor, history and humanity in the art of profanity. Sarah Knight has built a thriving career on the sturdy back of the four-letter word with her No F*cks Given Guides. Saying the unsayable, breaking down a few tiny barriers of “polite” society, gives one a sense of agency. Plus, it’s fun.

🖕🖕

I was eight years old in 1972 when George Carlin performed his infamous seven dirty words bit. It probably took a few years, given my age and the lack of internet, to become part of my consciousness, but it did.

Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.

These were the dirty words, the dirtiest according to Carlin, and it was clear to my child self that I must never say them. My father said a few of them, sometimes, and I idolized him. I heard some of them in the music I loved. But my mother never, ever uttered any of them, and it was an unspoken expectation that this was my future. She was my example of womanhood, and we did not speak filth. It wasn’t “ladylike.”

The times, as they do, have changed.

I now use almost all of those words and am comfortably conversant in most filth in my middle age. It has broadened my vocabulary and my ability to express myself with appropriate emotion. The first three come up almost daily now, but I trip on the fourth. It’s why I’m referring to it as “the fourth” and why I will not write it again here. The “c” word. My best friend charged her college roommates a quarter for every time it was used, and we still call it the “25-cent word.” I can’t make friends with this word; there’s something violent and gendered about it that seems loaded with menace. It’s a word that wants to be spat out, a weapon thrown at another. My British friends assure me that it’s not nearly as loaded in the U.K., but it causes an internal wince when I hear it. I know it’s just a word, but its power is like poison in the mouth.

I find “dick” to be a much more effective word, and it didn’t even make Carlin’s list. I’ve known a few guys named Dick, and they seemed fine, but I felt badly for them. Using the word “dick” to describe someone is clear and incisive. No one likes a dick, and everyone knows to avoid them, but I’m sure plenty of people love guys named Dick.

“Motherfucker” is also a word that causes me some discomfort, because of the mother part. I’m a mother, I love my mother — why must name-calling implicate the mother? I’m all for naming the fuckers, but let’s leave the mother out of it. “Fucker” does the job nicely, and I don’t hesitate to use it when appropriate. For instance, my meddlesome neighbor is a stupid fucker. I prefer “fucking asshole” for him, though. It captures his essence more effectively.

I am finally discovering the joy in bad words. I love words like “fuckall” and “fuckery.” “What the actual fuck,” is an odd thing I find myself saying. The fuck sandwich is satisfying, as in “absofuckinglutely” or “fanfuckingtastic.” And, of course, “fuck” and “dick” can be combined with many words to put a finer point on your message: “fuckface,” “dickhead,” “clusterfuck,” etc. I’m a babe in the woods of creative cursing but am taking to it with gusto. The possibilities are endless and delightful, and I have new ways of saying almost everything. “There’s a panfuckingdemic!,” I crowed in the high Covid years, in response to a question about socializing. In the midst of a recent political rant, I said, “They’re just kissing the asses of the assholes.” It needs work. I’m sure I sound ridiculous, like a tween posturing at summer camp, but I don’t care. Caution has been thrown, and I’m a new, mouthy woman. The bad words are so very good.

It must be noted that I don’t generally hurl filth at others. I’m not a name-caller and have maintained a modicum of my learned social graces. My neighbor may be a fucking asshole, but I’ve never told him that and am not likely to. I smile and wave or thank him for whatever weaponized kindness he’s peddling. But standing on my porch watching him toss another wild animal corpse into my woods, I will tell anyone exactly what I think with color and verve. It’s not pretty, but neither is he.

🖕🖕🖕

Somehow, those social graces fell by the wayside when my fingers flew up over my head at the reckless driver. I can’t imagine actually saying “fuck you” to that boy’s face, but that’s just what I did with my fingers. “Fuck you.” He deserved it. It felt great in the moment; it felt like the correct and righteous thing. I hope I’d do it again if in the same terrorized position. I have new, albeit small, weapons in my arsenal. It’s like imaginary armor. Obviously, a word won’t protect me from anything, but my ability to wield it with conviction may give pause to the bullies. And, at the very least, it’s cathartic.

We must rage at a raging world sometimes, or we feel powerless. The brutes don’t always get the last word, I hope. Perhaps if the quiet among us rise up and say, “Enough,” with uncharacteristic vulgarity, the reckless will pay attention. After my triumphant gesture, I half expected to find my mailbox smashed or some dog shit on my front porch. So far, there’s been no trouble. That stupid fucking truck still roars up and down my road, an obnoxious local, but nothing seems worse for my display. And I’m decidedly better.

Don’t tell my mother.

🌻 Lisa

I have to go to LA.

Yeah, I know, I GET to go to LA.

But I’d like to land in some sort of functional shape.

My daughter has lived on the far shores of North America for about three years now and I still haven’t visited. The trip was looming, but now the wedding of a dear friend is happening in the City of Angels and it’s time. I want to go, but also — I have to go.

This has the potential to be a fabulous vacation. Los Angeles would never be near the top of my list, but loved ones are there, along with great food, an ocean, sunshine, art, and untold mysteries just waiting to be discovered. (The only mystery will probably be discovered by the pool, in a caftan, between the covers of a book.)

We’ve rented a big, ridiculous house in Laurel Canyon for the whole lot of us — four adult kids, partners, the grandbaby — ten of us, plus all the old friends in a separate beach house for the wedding. A positive mind — what could go right? — can imagine meaningful chats, walks along the beach, raucous meals, cool bars, family bonding, time with old friends, lots of laughter.

I haven’t been able to find the switch, though, to that positive mind state. I’m trying. Reading the Stoics, collecting quotes, platitudes, and aphorisms. Andrea the therapist is coaching me in the positive direction, but when my default mind takes hold, it’s what could go wrong. Aphorisms can kiss my ass.

Flight anxiety is not uncommon. It’s not even interesting. Everyone I’ve asked relates to the panic. I’m afraid of the usual stuff — unhinged passengers, soul-crushing delays, an incompetent system, and, of course, death. Mostly, though, I’m afraid of myself. The panic attack is not unknown to me and I’m preemptively panicking about it.

In “Captain Ron’s Guide to Fearless Flying,” Elaine Godfrey writes of being “so overcome with anxiety that I passed out at the gate, my body folding over my suitcase like a wilted flower.” I have passed out many times, the “poster child for vasovagal syncope,” an ER doc once called me, and let me assure you it has never been like a wilted flower. If only! No, “down like a tree,” in my mother’s witness account. Whiplash, a concussion, and once, down a flight of stairs. Fainting at the gate for me would be a painful, piss-soaked crisis, a voyage effectively ruined for all involved.

Friends take Gabapentin, Xanax, Valium, homeopathic remedies. Noise canceling headphones, immersive podcasts, white-knuckling, wine.

My doctor gave me Ativan, says her husband can’t fly without it. I’m almost more afraid of the drug than the flying, though, which gives you a window into my very specific madness.

My smart friend Henry, who is a travel writer, wrote this years ago: “For me, the question has never been why some people are scared of flying, but rather how anyone in their right mind manages not to be.”

To reiterate, he is a TRAVEL writer. He’s been everywhere, many times, and he’s still afraid. More recently, he said:

“Constantly remind yourself that there are upwards of 250,000 planes in the air on any given day, and you would have to upset some particularly malicious gods to find yourself on one that goes awry. And stay focused on the reward at the other end — in this case seeing your daughter — and how that more than justifies a few hours of discomfort and anxiety!”

Does it, though? My daughter will be in my house a week before my flight, I speak with her nearly every day. Will she make it worth the sacrifice? Do our children understand the mammoth sacrifices we make for them?

Henry also says to drink wine before the flight, which I absolutely will not do. I’ve read all the terrifying things about alcohol and flying, I know all about embolisms and heart issues. Maybe Lily will give me a fun California cocktail when I’m safely on the ground. That could be a reward. (We’re just like dogs — do the thing, get a treat.)

I’m having lots of scattered conversations with myself, especially around 3 a.m., post-sleep, pre-dawn. The most delicious time for high anxiety. I remind myself what future me will think of this adventure if a headline-grabbing crisis occurs. I ask, “If not now, when?” I imagine a winning outcome, a reinvention of my homebody self.

“Think of the possibilities!”

Yeah, that’s the problem. Too much thinking. I spoke to Andrea about my overthinking and she said, “I have a book for you.” Oh good. I’m going to read a book about overthinking. Isn’t that sort of overthinking overthinking?

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

Okay. I must do it, we’ll see if I can. Sometimes the overthinking suggests that I cannot.

So far, I will be snorting Rescue Remedy, journaling my panic, listening to binaural beats, performing death-grip maneuvers on Steven, and running an endless tape of platitudes and aphorisms. Yes, they can kiss my ass, but also any port in a storm.

Please feel free to share your best flight tips in the comments! The countdown has begun, I leave in 21 days. I have a new bag, a tin of pastilles, drugs if I want, and the great desire to write a new chapter and have the trip of a lifetime. I will also settle for safe, sane, and relatively healthy.

Also, what books to read? On a plane, by a California pool, in a panic? 📚

✈️ 😬 Lisa

Kathe and I are Olympic swimmers, passing the summer days in her tiny blue pool. We score each other (9.7!, 8.9!, 10!!) after magnificent flips and dives and she almost always wins because she’s older and a little bit mean. We are absolutely convinced of our superior skills. We are quite possibly the best at everything.

Kathe is my neighbor — when you’re a child, the most important quality in a summer friend is proximity. She’s a little older, she has a pool, and her father takes us to the 7–Eleven for Coke Slurpees when the afternoon gets so hot that we begin to melt and complain. On Tuesday evenings, her parents drive us to Rustler Steak House where I get a rib-eye, well-done because of the crusty black char that we now know causes death. Carole King telling us it’s too late on the car radio, Kathe’s mom in the front seat holding up her Jiffy Pop hairdo, dad driving in retirement leisure.

She’s my very best friend, until school swallows and separates us in the fall.

We spend the summer almost exclusively at her house because she’s sort of an only child and I’m the oldest of four. Her house is bigger, quieter, and cooler, in both temperature and amenities. She has access to endless soda, the best of ‘70s junk food, and a servile mother. She also has a basement where her much older brother’s record collection awaits with bean bag chairs and a vaguely dangerous, psychedelic vibe. I learn about the Beatles and Ringo is my crush, to my enduring quiet shame. We listen to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on a near endless loop and I still wonder what that did to me.

Upstairs, we playact Cher — Half-Breed Cher, not Sonny and Cher Cher — and I always have to be Cher’s little sister because I’m younger. I ask every time if I can be Cher and the answer is always no. Kathe tries to convince me that this little sister is cool, maybe even cooler than Half-Breed Cher, but I never buy it. We dress in a child’s found version of the befeathered diva and parade down the stairs and out the front door to stand on two tree stumps and sing made-up songs in our best full-throated approximation of the half-breed amazon.

We walk into town carrying a small bag of dog shit for the veterinarian (“stool samples,” my mother says, and she has somehow convinced me this is normal). After dropping off the parcel, we head to the drug store where we pool our change and purchase one package of fake nails. Later, we lie in the lush grass, each of us admiring one elegant long-nailed hand. I feel very beautiful and womanly as I brush the nails on my cheeks and drag them gently through my hair.

We sit on fence rails under the mulberry trees and pick the ripe fruit, stuffing our mouths, staining every exposed bit of ourselves and all of our clothing. My mother will scold me later for my purple feet and ruined shorts. We sit on the fat pony in the field and chatter about nothing and everything. The pony is so warm and alive and I love the way it smells. Sometimes it kicks, shrugging both of us off in one swift gesture, one of us flying over the pony’s head, the other over the tail. We bruise, but laugh in our shock and surprise, infused with the power that comes with cheating death.

We cross the lilac-choked gardens, where we half-heartedly pretend to be brides, to visit Kathe’s ancient grandmother. She has great bowls of hard lemon candies in her living room and leans imperiously in her chair to fart. Our mad glee is barely contained. We sit in the barn loft and wonder when we’ll die.

We play Monopoly for hours when it rains. One game lasts for days in an effort to break the Guinness World Record. Eventually, we tire of the challenge and spend hours scouring last year’s thick Sears catalogue, building our Christmas lists, fantasizing about all the things that will make us happy and beautiful and popular.

We make butter, mustard and sugar sandwiches and marvel at our culinary genius. We eat baloney and neon cheese, bags of snacks that are vaguely like packing material. We drink gallons of soda.

In the upstairs bathroom, her father keeps a stack of Playboy magazines by the toilet, right there in the open. I make excuses to go to the bathroom sometimes because it’s the most incredible, scandalous thing I’ve ever seen. I feel fevered and weird about it, a thing like thrilling shame, and I snap the magazines shut and force my confused self back downstairs for the next game, afraid that my absence is suspicious.

I cut my finger on a corn stalk in the back field and, while cleaning it in Kathe’s bathroom, I see the white cream mixing with red blood and faint at the vision of pink, smashing my head on the washing machine. Later, in our profound boredom, we sprawl on the kitchen floor with knitting needles, scraping the dirt out of the swirling designs in the linoleum. This is a mesmerizing and oddly satisfying endeavor.

All summer, I run the yard back and forth between her house and mine, my mood dependent on the hour and the direction. Off to Kathe’s in the morning, eager for a summer day of purple feet and ponies, swimming and Slurpees, dreamy Ringo and furtive glances at impossible naked ladies. Silver medals, chasing records, catalog shopping and forbidden food. Home in the evening, anxious antennae alert to snakes in the yard, a tangle of little people, and the tepid drama of my own house with its buried thread of menace. The long bright days of summer.

☀️ Lisa

Note: An early version of this essay was published by The Hairpin in 2017. Silvia Killingsworth published a few of my essays there and working with her made it feel that the sun was briefly shining on me.

Things to share:

• City of Gold is a fascinating documentary about Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, Jonathan Gold. It’s also a love letter to the food and culture of Los Angeles. Made in 2015, but particularly — and sadly — relevant today.

• Excited for The [B]old Women Book Club with and . I LOVED Still Life at Eighty as I’ve loved everything Abigail writes. July 29!

• I followed ’s recent advice and gave CBS some feedback. The message is, essentially: “Colbert is beloved and comedy is necessary — shame on you.” I hope the gloves are off for these next 10 months.

• The world continues its frog-march to hell. What’s to say?

I slipped the elder care leash for a minute and went to the beach, unknowingly bringing the plague and sharing it with the family. “It’s just allergies,” I chirped while feeling increasingly hot and unwell, trudging from cute beach house to crowded beach and back in a heatwave, like a sick and stupid 21st century American lemming in a big hat.

Covid, of course. My first time. They say you’ll lose taste and smell, but they don’t tell you about the eyes that feel artificially dilated, the ears that ring with rebuke, the lethargic unreality of a bad drug. They don’t mention the miasma of weakness and regret. I’m sick of my own company.

There’s a great picture from the ill-fated trip, me grinning and clutching my perfect, joy-filled grandson on the deck of a beach eatery. “This is when Nana gave you the plague,” we’ll tell him when he’s older. He’s fine, but I’m still a bit rearranged many days later.

Was it too much to ask for two fine days at the ocean?

My life has been full. I’ve done a lot but also not much, somehow. I’ve lived, largely, in service to others (my choice!) and have done a good enough job. Now I’m old, peeking out of the cozy confines of my hole and wondering what the rest of you are doing. I’m boring and a little bored. The nature of a very good life, I think, we’ve just been sold a big fat American lie about how AMAZING™ it’s supposed to be. It’s amazing. It’s also boring. These are both good things.

There’s always a story behind the headline. I was once in awe of a woman acquaintance, a writer and professor, with a big, gorgeous glossy-magazine life who turned out to be shallow and ridiculous. And one of the best women I’ve known does not seem particularly “together.” She’s honestly kind of a hot mess, but is brilliant, kind, creative, and generous. The lasting, important stuff. The covers don’t tell us about the book, as we are told but forget.

I see you, all these beautiful, accomplished women in the rough middle of your lives, getting on with the business of being quietly fabulous. I’d love to do big shiny things, but the little things are so enticing — and much easier. Except for the nagging comparison bullshit, I’m happy here in my skin and my life. I’m a frumpy-ish introvert, cruising along in my little domestic bubble, pecking away at chatty essays that a handful of kind, attentive people read, until: “MOM! I just met the most interesting woman — she’s published and favorably reviewed by Very Important Papers/has won awards/travels the world/speaks this many languages/wears the hell out of a Hepburn suit.” And I wilt a little in my Big Box sweatpants and know in the deepest recesses of knowing that I will never do any of those things. I don’t really want to! (Except maybe the writing bit. And a little travel, and maybe the suit). But I want to have done things. Does this make any sense?

Can we just aspire to contentment?

I raised four kids — smart, good, lovely people. In the words of Kelly Corrigan: “The way I see it, if you have four kids, you don’t really have to do anything else, ever.”

A dear departed friend also raised four brilliant kids, but was bitter about her own lack of achievement. “I will not be defined by my kids!” She was a fierce, funny, wild artist who threw the best parties and her character is etched in our memories. I fear when they remember me it will be, “she made a good cheesecake, did the dishes at every party, and was sort of nervous.” It’s not a terrible legacy — someone needs to do the dishes and cheesecake is always welcome, but it’s pretty tepid.

I’m so proud of my kids and don’t even mind being sort of defined by my part in their lives. But I fear turning into one of those dismissible old ladies whose only tales are about the kids. Their achievements are not mine — are they my only achievement? I mean, if so, that’s great but it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Don’t tell me to join a club or run for anything or get a job — I’m happy here in my rural “retirement”, lucky in every possible way. I’d like to rest on my laurels, I just can’t find them.

I thought this might be an essay but then realized it’s just a rant. A fine Covid whine. Yes, Covid is still a thing along with all the terror and the fascism and the heat. It’s getting harder to imagine Hepburn suits, harder to care about ambition, here at the ugly end of the world.  

Comparison is messing with my pursuit of joy. I’m proud of my quiet, simple life, but when confronted with people who are Very Cool™, it scrambles my brain a bit. Maybe I want that? Maybe I don’t have the map, the energy, or the ambition, though, and it would be much nicer to lie down a bit before the next elder care shift. Long ago, before I was trimming dad’s toenails and counting out his meds, he taught me the Taoist concept of Wu Wei: Be the water flowing around the rocks. I just didn’t count on so many rocks.

☯️ Lisa

Things to share:

• Finally ripped through The Guest by Emma Cline. I can’t remember the last time I read a book so voraciously. A fast, compelling tale that was perfect tense company to my drugged dis-ease. I’m still a little upset and would love a denouement. Might there be a film?

• Slowly picking my way through Knausgaard’s Summer, in love with the hypnotic way he enshrines the quotidian. Our little lives are ennobled in his hands.

• Indelicacy is a sly little slip of a novel by Amina Cain. A cleaning woman at a museum sets her social sights high and then chafes at the chains of privilege. Intense, lovely, and provocative. (Thanks to for the rec!)

• Call your representatives, even though they probably don’t represent you. It feels futile in these insane times, but I have to believe it’s worth something. Even in my pathetic plague state, I’m calling and writing my terrible rep. Drops in the ocean, but the ocean is made of drops.💧

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“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” Oscar Wilde

It’s been a drinking month. I target the breaks, the red dot days, but May has turned into a drinking month. And, honestly, I’m fine with it. A glass of wine each evening during the fall of civilization — what’s the harm? Where’s the trespass? I’m old-ish, the world is burning, I’m having a drink. Not much, just a glass — the scolds with their health panic and worry beads can just fuck right off (that’s me, I’m the scold). I’m not sorry.

Quatari plane? Glass of wine. Library of congress? Spritzy cocktail. Rule of law? French rosé. Memecoin? Genocide? Habeas corpus? Measles? Signal chats? Tariffs? Maga face? Elder care? Arthritis? Drink, drink, drink.

The acupuncturist suggested a casual cleanse to help with my sleep issues, joint pain, and general malaise — cutting out sugar, processed foods, and alcohol for one week. Also, not much dairy (don’t touch the cream in my coffee) and probably no gluten (which is my usual status these days).

I did it. I cleaned up my act for more than a week. Nothing is different. I’m still me.

So May is a wine month this year, I give up. I sat in a good chair gazing at a big, gorgeous lake on a chill May day. Wrapped in blankets, we appreciated the lovely local Reisling and the view, and damn it was a lovely distraction. I’m entering my unapologetic era. The unapologetic, orthopedic shoe era of my life. It has potential.

We went protesting again yesterday, stood on a roadside in the rain under a vault of gray sky, wondering if any of it matters. Some people honk and wave, some shout and flip us off. I really just want to be alone, but here we are. Driving an hour to interface with angry white men (all the mean, mad ones are white men, it’s just true). We finally made signs. (Mine says, I’M SO ANGRY I MADE A SIGN.) The end times are surprisingly crafty.

When it was over, we ate good food with better wine in a charming enough bistro. Wet from the rain, wounded from the mean men, but pretty sure we’ve done the right thing. For whatever it’s worth.

Leave me with my Portuguese bubbles and hopefully something will be sorted by June. Perhaps June is a month of relative sobriety. Perhaps there will be a sliver of good news. Perhaps, too, pigs will fly and sweet putti will appear in my backyard to sing me into the next season. One can dream.

Cheers! 🥂🐷🪽

Things to share:

• Master of Claude de France’s Book of Flower Studies is a gorgeous distraction. Each specimen from the manuscript has been planted in the Cloisters’ gardens and I’m hoping to actually see it this year.

• Teju Cole on Vermeer. A brilliant profile that has changed the way I view these masterpieces.

• Let’s just have a little drink. “… looking out, sober, at a culture that is now coming to associate alcohol exclusively with pain, I feel as if we are at risk of forgetting what a truly lovely thing a bit of booze can be.”

• Really enjoyed the heady escape of Crush, Ada Calhoun’s novel about relationships and connection.

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That’s Velma in the big chair. Arms crossed, stoic caution written on her tired face. She was always old, to me. Old lady hair, soft body shrouded in old lady shifts. Voice of a tentative crone, she would speak when spoken to, when delegating, or calling us to meals. Always tending something, someone. She was somehow joyless, but always kind.

Nana, my mother’s mother’s mother. Matriarch.

She buried three babies and raised six children in the shadow of the wandering dandy she called a husband. The big old house on the dirt lane named for the family is as alive in my memory as she is. The house was her realm, all doilies and polish, cooking and scrubbing. The lilacs and the rabbit hutch, the pony next door and the scary relatives down the lane. I’ll only ever know it — know her — through a child’s eyes. And stories.

That’s Rosemary, daughter of Nana, sitting in the peach sweater, her serene face a lie. Genteel hellraiser, she abandoned her husband and two small children to run off with a Mexican playboy. She left her kids with Nana, who raised them, ran around wild and free in 1940's America when such a thing was an unspeakable scandal. She finally brought the playboy back home to live a cloistered life for two, formal visits and holidays with her children an attempted retribution for her crime.

Grandma, my mother’s mother. Black sheep, hellion.

She was haughty and tempestuous, a self-styled princess with a peasant’s pedigree. She breathed fire and left ashes in her wake. In a memorable fit, she broke a full set of fancy china, dropping one at a time into the bathtub with dramatic flair. A man once dared to spit at her feet and she beat him with her umbrella. I adored her because she adored me, showered me with everything a child wants, and questioned none of my whims. I was the light in her life, the child of the child she abandoned, the chance to make up for her transgressions. The crime ghosted in my mother’s eyes.

That’s Rosemarie — daughter of Rosemary, granddaughter of Velma —standing in peach. Looking haunted. Or stricken. Angry? Posing? I’m never sure. The hands tell a tale — one on the woman who raised her, the other on the one who should have. I watched her walk that divide and wrestle with loyalty, learn how to mother with only part of the manual.

Mom, with the mother-sized hole in her heart.

She’s beautiful, leaning tragic but always resisting, exhausted by the demands of mothering and the burden of motherlessness. Balancing the solid, silent lessons from her strong grandmother (the woman she called Mama) with the wild, selfish, genetic inheritance of her mother. She steered herself through a world that defines her by the men and the children in her life. I know her as mother and I know her mother’s story. But can I ever really know her?

That’s me, the child. The girl, pulled from a headlong rush at childhood to stand still for a four-generations photograph. Clearly impatient with the ritual, probably dressed for a holiday. Distracted by things offstage — cousins and small animals, tables loaded with sweets. Uninterested in the meaning of the moment. My mother looks filled with the moment, my grandmother looks filled with herself, and Nana just looks resigned. Mothers and daughters, stories and sins. The fraying matrilineal thread running through the generations.

Me. Daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter. Mother.

I now have a mother’s appreciation for the mess of the thing. I’ll not make those mistakes, we say. And yet. Are they mistakes? Or just small navigational errors in a long and difficult journey? Is life just a series of course corrections? My grandmother, Rosemary, used to say after any blunder, “You just pick yourself up and get on down the road.” A convenient mantra for one who left so much wreckage behind.

I love all of the women in that image and I have felt loved by them. But I know each of them only through the prism of their mothering and wonder what’s missing from the picture. What have those women not shared with one another, what are their secrets? Does a measure of blood connect me to their stories? Do the tales we tell about them capture the truth? Do our stories define us?

Will my daughter ever really know me?

Does it matter?

Happy Mother’s Day! 🌸
Lisa

I wrote this years ago, prompted by the photo. It was originally published in The Hairpin (RIP), so I kept the hairpins. 🎀

When I was 44 years old, I woke up on the floor in the arms of my bewildered mother. Betrayed by my body. If I had been paying attention, I would have seen that the supposed betrayal began years before. And, if I’m being frank, I will admit that the idea of feeling betrayed by my body is a tired cliché and an oversimplification of the truth.

It’s not betrayal, after all — it’s destiny, written in our origin code and mapped in blood and bone. I am woman, destined to ride the waves of gendered storms until I fall back into the earth, just ash and memory.

The truth is that a body evolves in the way it’s meant to, guided by broad, boring things like history, gender, genetics, and lifestyle. The truth is that I had busied my body with a big life and ignored these tiny dawning realities. Until I couldn’t anymore.

Until my body knocked me down in the middle and demanded my fealty.

//

Our Western understanding of menopause stands on the pedestal of patriarchy. This quintessential feminine experience has always been viewed, medically, through a masculine lens. “In patriarchal societies — including our own — post-reproductive women have often been scapegoated as threats and burdens,” writes Lynn Stuart Parramore. The so-called witches of 17th-century Salem were merely menopausal. In the 1850s, Victorian physician Edward Tilt determined that the uterus was the “keystone of mental pathology,” after which toxic douches and horror-movie surgeries, often performed without anesthesia and consent, became common treatment. Victorian obstetrician Lawson Tait advocated institutionalization for unruly midlife women. It was Tait’s belief that Jack the Ripper was actually a woman — and a midwife. He also noted that menopausal women liked their drink. The temptation cannot be overstated.

//

More than a decade ago, I passed out at the foot of my mother’s bed. It was actually my daughter’s bed, but my mother was sleeping in it. She was visiting, and she called to me in the night. She was feeling unwell, she said, and then I fell — like a tree, in her telling. A perfect tableau for the narrative that I’ve affixed to the event: My midlife body, limp in the arms of my aged mother, young daughter sleeping on a couch downstairs. Three generations of female bodies in various states of being and becoming. A story.

This was, in my distilled and fantastic narrative, the beginning.

Years ago, I passed out, and when I woke up I was different. A raw and fragile woman; one woman becoming another. The new, ever-evolving me was unfamiliar and terrifying for a while, an awkward deconstruction of the before. But also a nebulous future-me that is still (always) under construction. A body slipped of its husk, loosed from its chains. If this body can weather the storm, it may improve on the body before.

//

“Perimenopause” is the name given to the tumultuous phase in a woman’s life, a vaguely defined and muzzily understood chapter right before menopause. Menopause marks the cessation of menstruation and becomes official when a woman has gone one full year without bleeding. Peri can be a nonstop parade of what seems like a thousand symptoms (or maybe 34) and can last 10 years (give or take), according to typically vague and unhelpful statistics. These symptoms are often so amorphous as to be easily mistaken for the vagaries of life: Mood swings! Anxiety! Allergies! Weight gain! Fatigue! By this measure, we are all (at least some of the time) perimenopausal. I suffered at least a decade of most symptoms.

Will there be a prize?

A woman can begin to suffer as early as her thirties or (as some unfathomably claim) she can never suffer at all. She may be told, as I was, that she just needs a Xanax. That she should take a vacation or try to sleep more. Maybe yoga or meditation. Therapy. There may be tut-tutting about her chocolate habit or her wine consumption, as there are any number of diets that promise to fix any number of female troubles.

The truth, however — the messy, ungovernable truth — is that hormones rule the day. Each day they are dancing incessantly to their own changeable and often riotous soundtrack. Sleep and diets and vacations and pills may help for a bit, they may mask and assuage the nightmare briefly, but the next moment is a new nightmare, one that requires a new fix. There’s no math or science involved, no easy navigation. It’s a weary waiting, a trudge through the fields of discontent, never knowing where next to put one’s foot.

//

My body was so unreliable for so long, I suppose one could say it was reliably unreliable. I expected to bleed with wild irregularity. To never count on sleep. I greeted each strange development as if it was perfectly normal. Tingling extremities? Hormones. Irregular heartbeat? Okay. Burning tongue? Must be peri. In the early days, the symptoms convinced me of my dramatic, impending death, but it became a chapter of expected, nonchalant loss. I’m losing my balance, my vision, my way. I’ve lost my knees, my shape, my stamina, and my stability. At times it seems I’m losing my mind, but, interestingly, the same unhinged mind is whispering secrets. Secrets that just may save me.

//

Hormone replacement therapy is the much-touted modern medical answer to this natural disaster, an attempt to even out the seesaw levels of estrogen and progesterone in a changing woman’s body. Many women find relief with HRT — I had my own briefly successful affair with progesterone cream. However, much is unknown about how it affects the body, because we just can’t find the dollars or the will to research women’s health. Add to this the fact that the wildly fluctuating hormones of the perimenopausal woman make dosage a daily shot in the dark. I chose the route of kale and wine, coffee and supplements, acupuncture, yoga and weepy walks. The results are mixed.

//

I woke from that terrifying time-out and was force-marched into a surreal new world. Understanding the new terrain was like reading a fantasy land map, someone’s loopy stab at world-building. A dizzy world of weeping; a world filled with fear, panic, and anxiety. A world with wildly fluctuating temperatures and unreasonable demands. I lurched around in an unfamiliar body — missing me, what happened to me — waiting for the after, hoping for the euphemistic change. Between the dizzy spells and the malfunctioning thermostat, I felt unfit for the world; the world not fit for me. In the middle of a headline cold snap, I considered peeling off the layers and bolting out the door into the ice-dry air. The thought of snow on my hot skin was delicious, like a pool in the swelter of August. I’ve come a long way from the girl with cold feet, the girl in wool mittens. I’m a woman on fire now, plump and soft, sore and dizzy. Many years later, I’m edging into the after. The fires are finally quieting.

//

Professionals said all the wrong things and sent me on wild goose chases until, finally, a gynecologist told me the truth: Hormones are doing this to you and it will stop. You are not crazy, she said. This is perimenopause and it is normal.

Normal! A highly respected gynecologist told me that my experience was normal. She also said that many, many women come to her with much more dramatic troubles. Capable, successful women who — on a seemingly ordinary day, somewhere in the middle — go mad. Up all night mad. Screaming naked in the streets mad. Threatening their families mad. Suicide mad.

The body in the middle is not playing and it will not wait. It will respond swiftly to each choice, every slight, and all abuse. Garlic equals indigestion, tennis equals pain, one more glass of wine equals all kinds of hell to pay. Too much noise leads to mania, and meddlesome family members can lead to injury. My body is not my body — or, rather, is becoming my new body — and it will brook no nonsense. It will lash out. Or just fall down.

//

Conventional medicine does not take women’s bodies seriously; this is a truism that we bang our heads against year after year. American culture eats female bodies and spits them out in the middle — we are scrutinized, criticized, and dismissed. This wild midlife ride turns us upside down, and all we can do is hope that it drops us back on our feet. Quietly and well-dressed. In “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” Diane Hoffman and Anita Tarzian found that women are “more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they ‘prove that they are as sick as male patients.’” The Guardian reports a study where only 39 percent of women who have a cardiac arrest in a public place are given CPR, versus 45 percent of men — pointing toward stereotypes in which “men are silent stoics” and women are “hysterical hypochondriacs.”

Just a few years ago, I woke up on the floor at the foot of the stairs. “Who is the president?” an EMT asked. I had passed out again. It fits a writer’s narrative, a poet’s fancy, that my middle decade was roughly bookended by two falls. I was suspended in a middle place, occasionally going to ground. My gynecologist shrugged — fluctuating hormones make fainting more likely, especially in a body like mine. One with high vagal tone, she said, which sounds like a good thing but has me living on the edge. Estrogen, however, is a fickle mistress. My body is her pawn. I waited a long time, suspended somewhere between the before and the after, the rising and the falling. Somewhere in the middle.

🌿 Lisa

Things to share:

• To Tell You The Truth, a fabulous essay by in It drew me in because of my own experience with an aging father, but the writing is just so good it could have been about anything.

• Knausgaard’s Spring is so good, his writing is like hypnosis. Not for everyone, maybe, but I can’t get enough. “Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for. Could you try to remember that?”

• Still protesting and calling, feeling a bit fatigued! is helping me through, with info and action. is a shot in the arm. 💪

• Science says drink champagne. Cheers! 🥂

I’m not a believer. I’ve had a long and complicated relationship with faith, one that sees me flirting and fleeing by turns. Faith is a thing I’ve tried and failed to write about, but it’s coming. My big fat faith essay will be born, come hell or high water. This is not that.

Without church and all that faith business, we were left to indulge our children in time-worn American holiday rituals. For Easter, we took a sort-of-pagan, sort-of-Madison Avenue approach and embraced it whole hog (often with the hog on the table).

Four kids and decades worth of baskets, dyed eggs, jelly beans and pastel sweets, we started the festivities each year with a hunt, whipping everyone into a froth of spun sugar madness. The Bubbie Hunt, a holdover from my husband’s childhood when someone couldn’t say “bunny,” and “bubbie” was born.

The Bubbie Hunt was the first thing the kids would do upon rising on Easter Sunday. They had to locate the initial clue, which was fiendishly hidden (this was never a hunt for amateurs and the oldest and/or smartest was always the strongest hunter — it’s Darwinian around here). The clues led them around, sometimes ranging over acres and acres, depending on the weather and how much we (the parents) wanted to endure. All over our big, old house, often into the creepiest, dustiest, most forgotten corners. They had to work for the payoff and there was no small measure of whining and flagging. At the end of the rainbow, they would find their baskets and the next phase would begin. The phase where my children rapidly stuffed chocolate and chews and all manner of inappropriate morning “food” into their heads and I yelled about getting some real food first. Such fun.

This was a tradition with legs. We did it every year and the kids came to expect it. As they got older, some of them continued to demand it. My daughter (the baby), deep into her teens, was still putting the pressure on. “We’re going to have baskets, right? And the hunt — we have to do the hunt. I want (insert name of current boyfriend) to do the hunt with us!” We were weary and wondering crankily for a bit when we’d be off the hook.

It was a chore. The husband and I would wake on Easter Sunday and immediately start cursing and complaining. “Shit! It’s late — baskets! Clues!” We’d leap up, as on all those stress-filled Christmas mornings, and start making magic for our little diabetics-in-training. I would arrange the appalling plastic grass in the baskets, portion out all the sugar and trinkets, and press Steven for the landing spot. “Just tell me where the hunt ends.” I’d drop the baskets in the creepy back stairs or the garage or somewhere and he’d write all the clues.

It was tricky. The clues were clever and numbered — each had to be hidden in the correct spot in order for the hunt to make sense. If the Bubbie hadn’t had his coffee yet, things could go south quickly. He somehow managed, however, to build successful hunts, year after year. It was impressive. The kids had to use their minds and their bodies and they had to work together. He would send them traipsing into every room, leafing through books, searching the pantry, and racing through the yard. Once, a clue was on the dog. It’s amazing what you can make them do when candy is at the other end.

I think it’s over, though. I think the Bubbie has died. My kids are old, my daughter (the baby, keeper of the flame) is in a distant city brunching with other young adults. What the hell happened?

We woke up this morning, kind of late, and mused first about the deliciousness of no expectation. Then, of course, the rush of minor sadness. I don’t want to do all that work, but remember?

The Bubbie is dead. Long live the Bubbie.

Happy Easter!
Lisa 🐣

The first time, in 2016, I attempted to assuage the pain, mitigate the fear, and ease the disgust of our epic national mistake by furiously reading, writing, raving and pacing. I researched organizations to help, subscribed to news outlets under fire, and shared whatever helpful information I could find. I raged at the gods and clutched my tired little head in bereft confusion.

This time, the focus is inward.

I’ve taken little walks and hot showers, cut my hair, canceled subscriptions. Good books and drinks with friends. And, oddly, the thing that has reliably given me peace is cleaning. I don’t mean the daily grind cleaning — dishes, laundry, sweeping, toilets — that’s still there, no more satisfying than ever. No, I mean the underbelly cleaning. Organizing forgotten closets, purging aggressively, finding the hidden scum and scouring it away — a top to bottom reassessment of my space. I have been least unhappy, in these recent dark days, when furiously ferreting out the baggage, rounding up the filth and removing it. Seeking the light.

America is in dire need of such a deep clean.

Every bag of trash jettisoned feels like a tiny triumph. Every shower is an exercise in grout scrubbing, every item in the long-ignored linen closet is assessed, folded and filed in a maniacal search for order. Nothing is safe in my house now. Cumbersome pieces of furniture are scrutinized with new eyes, fraying rugs seen for the filthy doormats they are. I am seized with a newfound zeal for the clean sweep, yearning for a calm, organized environment with no unnecessary thing, no excess, no bloat. I am desperately seeking control. The clutter-clearing gurus make much of the creation of space, making room for better things. We need so much room.

We need to make order out of chaos.

This is, of course, ripe with metaphor. It’s a classic response to trauma — circle the wagons, gather the valuables, throw the superfluous overboard. I feel like we can’t be lean, mean, and clean enough in the midst of all this ugliness. “Drain the swamp!,” they said, and the swamp grows while the worst of the swamp dwellers revel in the filth.

Way back in the days of relative certainty, the innocent days pre-’16, there was a moment that really irked me (okay, there were thousands of irksome moments, this one just sticks out). Our ruler-in-waiting referred to Venezuelan beauty queen, Alicia Machado, as “Miss Housekeeping.” The first ugly takeaway is his racist slur, the cultural stereotype that turns the stomach. The second is disgust with his constant loathsome misogyny. The third, though, is the denigrating use of the term ‘housekeeping’ and all that it implies.

This isn’t new. It’s a time-honored trope among the moneyed classes, hinting at an oppressive gender divide. Housekeeping happens to be the very first, most important, step in the construction of a life. Every single day. Keeping house — house being the very engine at the heart of society — has been bled of meaning, an undervalued, unpaid or underpaid job for women and the underclasses. This witless, artless, puppet of evil would be sitting in his own mess if people weren’t doing the real work in the shadows. Someone has to press those suits and polish those gold faucets. Someone has to clean up the ketchup.

And so, my elbow grease is fueled with pride and honor in the noble task of homekeeping, but also with anger and disgust at those who benefit and denigrate. I wish I could scrub and scour this national blunder away. Many millions voted for sanity, and yet we are left with this mess. Someone took a dump in our collective house and now we are left to purge and sanitize.

If only cleaning my windows was the answer.

🧹 Lisa

Things to share:

• I’ve written about cleaning before, it’s a fascinating subject. We’re all doing it, or thinking about doing it, all the time.

• has given us this great post, We Need Some Heroes. So tired of being told to DO SOMETHING, “We want leaders.” We poured into the streets, we’re cleaning our houses and yelling at our absent reps, we voted for fuck’s sake — where are the leaders?!

• Snow yesterday, here in the Northeast, but Tom Waits sings You Can Never Hold Back Spring every year for me and it helps. “Winter dreams the same dream every time.” Sigh.

• Any good ideas for one good line, every single day for FIVE YEARS?! The paralysis is real.

“A still, lovely summer’s evening; the grapes ripening, the oxen ploughing. Only man is mad.” Iris Origo

There’s a haunting passage in Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, juxtaposing the horrors of war with the banality of a lovely spring day. Something about a cat in a lane and yellow flowers — I can’t find it, but it’s clear as a bell in my memory since reading it years ago. The sun comes up, the cat bathes, the flowers bloom. Only man is mad.

I want to write. I long to fill pages with the tangle in my head — food and memories, my body and my grandmother. I’d like to write about light, fire, worry, and wine. But the world burns and the worst of us spoil the everyday.

I want the unspoiled everyday back.

These years have been a nonstop circus, a festival of madness and bad reports. The noise outside the kitchen window has been so great and terrible, it’s impossible to ignore. It curdles the custard and sours the sweets. We can’t seem to look away from this increasingly rotten national moment, and it’s contributing to a sickness in the soul of the nation.

The staggering offenses pile up so fast that we reel from each shock, unprepared for the next. Anyone paying attention knows that the American experiment has always been driven by greed, built on racism and misogyny, rife with corruption. That is not new. In the past, however, it seemed more cloak-and-dagger, more backroom cigars and handshakes. The public face of previous marauders was a little more hail-fellow-well-met, the better to fool the beleaguered sheep. And, usually, a few heroes and heroines rose up to check the madness. Today’s public faces, for better or worse, openly lie and spin and spit — they sneer and wag their fingers at us while their machine plunders away. We await our heroes and heroines.

Maybe it’s better to know our enemies.

In an effort at distraction, I read two engaging journals: A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 by Iris Origo; and May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, from 1973. Each, in its way, suggests that our current panic is not unusual. Each is instructive in ways of looking, and making sense of outside madness. Though seated in very different time and place, these women distill the reality of managing the personal in the harsh light of the political.

It’s unnerving to identify with Origo’s journal of the Italian run-up to WWII, with its spectator’s analysis of Fascist sentiment, media complicity, and misplaced trust. In the summer of 1939, she writes: “It is curious — the unanimity with which everyone here refuses to believe in the possibility of war.” It can’t happen here. It can, of course, and it did. Some saw it coming, many didn’t. Origo reports the mood, she gleans partisan motives in the press, and she guesses at the concerns of the classes. She speaks with students, farmers, and officials. She watches, every day, with interest and rising alarm.

Just as we do.

Sarton’s journal is a more interior affair, focused largely on her small corner of the world and her internal struggles. When she ventures out of her bubble, however, she writes, “The big question, I jotted down during the long wait at the airport, is how to hope and what to hope for. We are citizens of a corrupt country, of a corrupt vision.” This was her mood in the last grinding years of the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American War), with Watergate as background.

Sarton returns to her writing, to her flowers and her friends, and tends the flimsy scaffolding of her sanity. She carries on, in spite of the noise beyond. Origo, too, does her best to write, read, and visit with other hand-wringers amid the high panic of approaching war.

It’s instructive to read women at different moments in history, as they strive to balance the mundane with the madness du jour. I’m increasingly fascinated with the stories, in letters and diaries, of women fighting the tides of history as they keep the lights on and pick up the dropped stitches. Storms gather, but we still need to eat.

So we will watch, and we will write and talk. We will lament today this abhorrent administration’s rejection of all reason and morality. The bile will rise as we watch the whole mad tale unfold. But we will also putter in the warm kitchen. We will make dumplings for the chicken stew, and watch the snow squall, and tend the woodstove. The fires outside will continue to burn, but the drafts in the windows need stopping. The compost needs to go out. Appointments must be kept.

I need to clear a path through the shrill panic and write it all down.

Pay attention. Read the news, write letters, march and yell and protest. But also: What’s for dinner? Should I change the flannels? Have you noticed how the dusk light hits the stairs? Are you planting bulbs? Would you like a drink? Snow is coming, along with the news.

The sun will rise in the morning, no matter the madness of men.

So should we.

“And now is the time that I laid aside, at least for a few hours a day, the world that pours in here from the outside …” May Sarton

📚 Lisa

Two short books:

• Maira Kalman’s Still Life with Remorse is the perfect short read, with gorgeous art and profound bits of autobiography. I got it at the library, but will probably need to have it on my shelf to revisit.

• Somehow by Anne Lamott is a collection of lovely, funny meditations on love, but also much more. I’m not religious, but Anne shines with the best of the church. Kind, smart, open, thoughtful, introspective, and often very funny. And helpful! “This is the launch code when under attack: gratitude, chores, chocolate, service, breath, nature.” A mantra for a mad age.

  Thanks for reading The Long Middle! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The gummy cubes are tiny, about half the size of a standard sugar cube, and pleasingly packaged in an adorable tin. The accompanying literature suggests I drop them in tea, coffee, or cocktails. Just like sugar cubes. They’re flavored, “like those hot cinnamon candies,” say the people who claim to love me. They taste like stinky boy.

Thank God someone said, “Mom, you should start with half and wait a while.”

My experiment was based on hope and research. Using cannabis to ease menopause is nothing new. Many of my friends and family use it, either recreationally or medicinally; evidence suggests that weed can greatly relieve some of the worst bits of midlife. After suffering most of the storied meno misery for years, I’ve been tempted by positive reports from friends and promising research blooming in the press. I default to the glass of Pinot, but as Dana Goodyear writes in The New Yorker, “everyone knows that alcohol is bad for you (kills your stem cells, gives you cancer, makes you grouchy, paunchy, gray), whereas, increasingly, the industry is equating conscious marijuana use with sublime good health.”

I’m all in.

I’ve considered vaping, à la Helen in The Affair, and have imagined myself in the bath, languidly smoking a joint and singing, like Diane Keaton in Shoot the Moon. I’ve seen the targeted marketing — happy white ladies (always white ladies) enjoying their edibles as some sort of goddess-given right, a path to healing and enlightenment. After decades of relative weed sobriety, I decided it was my turn. Perhaps a midlife high is just the thing to untie knots and calm demons.

What could go wrong?

I have a glancing history with pot, an old acquaintance forgotten on the high seas of adulthood. I smoked socially and sporadically through my teens and early twenties and had one or two unsavory experiences with brownies. The last time, decades ago, turned into an ordeal. I was my own eyeballs, if that makes any sense, and it went downhill from there. Then I spent years birthing and nursing babies and more years trying to keep them all alive. That glass of Pinot became my medicine of choice, while everyone around me lit up.

Now I’m old. The kids are getting old, and navigating their tendencies toward self-medication. My joints hurt, my emotions are wonky, and sleep doesn’t always come easy. The ugly racial disparity in the law’s approach to marijuana is not lost on me, a white lady. I believe that marijuana should be legal everywhere, for everyone, and I also believe that the legal tools we use to tame the wild beasts (alcohol, nicotine, opioids, and other prescription drugs) are worse for us. But I have much to learn.

Cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) are the two most prominent cannabinoids found in Cannabis, the plant genus that includes both hemp and marijuana. CBD provides what Goodyear calls “a ‘body high’ that doesn’t affect cognition,” while THC is “the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis.” Think pain-free productivity versus pink elephants. The people who claim to love me have suggested I try CBD oil or edibles in an effort to calm the fires of midlife, but these same people gave me stinky-boy THC cubes.

And we were off — pink elephants on parade.

It helps here to know something about me and my sensitive ways. My husband calls me the canary in the coal mine, after the poor birds that miners carried, confident that the delicate creatures would fall quickly if conditions were dangerous. We are early indicators of potential danger, the birds and I. On the night in question — the half-cube night — my husband said, “I can’t believe you feel anything at all. You ate so little.” He said this, as I — a canary with pinwheel eyes, hyena laugh, and a creeping, not-entirely-unpleasant-but-marginally-troubling unhinging — watched incredulously from the bed.

I felt drunk but not sloppy, wildly happy but anxious, totally myself and completely misunderstood. I had an unquenchable thirst and a mouth like a desert. It seemed a sort of fug had wrapped itself around me and filled my bedroom. (Yes, a fug, not a fog — it’s sort of a fucked fog.) I somehow sustained a long online conversation with a friend and sent a professional email to a stranger. I put stuff in online carts. I yelled inappropriate things and grinned conspiratorially to myself. I drank what seemed like gallons of water. I wobbled to the bathroom, afraid to be seen, wondering if I even could be seen with my blurry edges. I burst into manic gales of laughter whenever I was seen. Uncontrollable, inexplicable laughter. I felt sort of mad — not angry, just deranged.

My husband took one look at me.

“Oh boy. She’s down!”

This went on. For hours. The pinwheel, the laughter, the bliss/panic cycle. I couldn’t sleep. I felt a little crazy. My joints may have felt better, but I don’t remember. I was busy worrying about death. And madness. Teeth. I was entirely too aware of my tongue. Somewhere in the wee hours, I decided that my house was on track to become the next Grey Gardens, and I was Edie-bound. I shudder to think what a full cube would do to me.

911, what’s the nature of your emergency?

The upshot: I didn’t like it and I couldn’t wait for it to go away.

I am, it seems, not a candidate for THC. The next day, I felt muted and tired, like I was laboring under a blanket. Not altogether bad, but weird — like a canary near a bad mine. I felt as though I had been through something. I look at the people in my life who use cannabis for all manner of things and can’t imagine how they ever get anything done.

They tell me I’m sensitive, and I am. They say it’s different for others, and I’m sure it is. But it doesn’t seem fair. I’d like to pull a vape pen out of my purse and tame the dragon occasionally. I’d like to drop a gummy after dinner and slide into that sweet evening. Why must I be a fucking canary?

I’m not done. CBD is next. In a tantalizing passage in Bon Appetit, Aliza Abarbanel writes, “Dozens of studies have found evidence that CBD can treat epilepsy, act as a therapy for schizophrenia, and alleviate joint pain, among other illnesses.” That “other illnesses” bit is intriguing. The people who claim to love me also claim to have access to CBD oils and treats, though now that it’s mostly legal in my state I don’t need the shady sources. There’s something of value in there, I’m convinced — even for a canary like me. And I want it now.

👵🏻 Lisa

Stuff!

• Deluge the White House with postcards for the Ides of March! (Better late than never.)

• Jamie Raskin’s DOGE Privacy Act requests.

• Make your 5 Calls!

• is a great place for action and awareness. I highly recommend it for daily shots of whatever we need.

• Take care of yourself. Smoke ‘em if you can, drink less, get some sleep, look away from the news, have a little treat. The fight will be here tomorrow, and every day after that, little fires everywhere, as it has been from the beginning.🔥

How does one behave in a coup? How does one dress?

Today, it’s cheap black sweatpants, a stinky black turtleneck, and a threadbare cardigan of indeterminate color. Socks with holes, leaking boots, a sad (comfortable) picture.

Maybe we should all start smoking and drinking more. I stopped at the adorable little liquor store for a vinho verde because fuck it all. January was not dry, February sucked. A South African billionaire Nazi has my social security number and measles is on the march again. As wrote, “Everyone can fuck off.”

The bean tree is full of turkeys, I see them through the kitchen window. A huge flock lives in my woods and I’m increasingly fond of them. When they sit up in the tree, it’s like a strange and sinister cartoon playing out in my backyard. Dinosaur birds in the big bare bean tree, silhouetted against the concrete winter sky.

Baba Vanga was a blind Bulgarian mystic and, while I have a healthy skepticism about such things, YIKES. If you don’t want to read the screaming internet articles with eye-watering pop-up ads, I did it for you.

You’re welcome.

Baba Vanga is known for predicting Princess Di’s death, 9/11, Chernobyl, Obama’s election, and the date of her own demise. There’s more, but that’s not a bad start to a resumé. Among her terrifying prophecies, she had stuff to say about 2025:

"In the spring, a war in the East will begin and there will be a third World War. A war in the East that will destroy the West," and she further warned of Europe transforming into a "wasteland". More specifically, she revealed Putin would ascend to become "lord of the world" and prophesied not only Russia's survival but its rise to global supremacy, stating: "Russia will not only survive, it will dominate the world".

Oh, also lots of destructive earthquakes and other natural calamities will wreak havoc across the globe in 2025. She specifically mentions an earthquake along the west coast of the US. My LA daughter just ran from the fires — will she listen to me about the Bulgarian mystic?

So, cool cool, I don’t believe in mystics but she got some big stuff right, yes? Putin is angling and has puppets in the White House, yeah? Things are a bit uNsTabLE at the moment, right? It’s been a wild decade, with the Russian asset’s first turn in the WH and an actual plague, but it seems to be escalating quickly. Is it just me?

I drove an hour to a small town to stand on a busy road with other alarmed humans. We’re out here. We’re almost all old, and we’re tired. We’re chanting (the horror) and waving signs (Are we great yet? ‘Cause I just feel embarrassed.). We’re gathering and commiserating, calling and writing. It’s heartening, but … can 700 concerned citizens in a tiny town do anything about this runaway train? Is it too late? The hopeful among us chant, “The people united will never be defeated!” I actually feel pretty defeated, though, even in the face of my micro-activism. Even in the midst of the crowd.

This is what they want, though. They want us defeated and despairing.

I am afraid of Baba Vanga. Afraid of her possible ability to see disaster barreling straight for us, as we make our little signs and sing our little songs. I don’t believe in mystics or prophecies, but maybe I should believe in something.

This is what democracy looks like? I’m going to need more wine.

🧙‍♀️ Lisa

While I was writing this, my phone started screaming TEST TEST TEST, This is a test of the emergency broadcast system … and you couldn’t make this shit up. I wonder what the turkeys think?

One thing to share:

• Reading American Breakdown by and it feels like an important book. The subtitle attempts to capture the scope: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. Woven throughout her own fascinating story is so much compelling history — science and politics, feminism and capitalism, health and wealth. Thanks to ’s author questionnaire for putting this book on my radar!

Midnight. A tiny naked boy. Red cape looped around his scrawny neck, one wee, defiant fist thrust into the air, the other on his hip. Standing on your bed, bellowing, “Never!” Into your bedroom, into the wild night. You have dared to ask that he get into his bed — back into his bed — for the third time. The fourth. You sit, bleary-eyed and weak-kneed, beaten to a weary emotional pulp by small, unhinged people.

Your academic training is useless in the face of children. You will explain why we do not put blueberries in orifices other than our mouths. You will field impossible requests from tiny dictators and weave magic for tyrants with attention deficit. You will say NO in an increasingly callous way and you will hear, a thousand times, WHY. It will buzz in your dreams like a whiny mosquito. You will be dazed by toddlerian twists of logic and tripped up by twisty teen nihilism.

One of them will say, “Geography is a waste of time. We only name things so that we can control them.”

You’ll reply, “It didn’t work with you, did it?”

Your athletic prowess will not help you. They are fast and slippery, with the stamina of wild, migrating birds. They are waxing as you wane. The sheer will and hunger with which they attack the day — your day, each day — breaks you, makes you fall, laugh, cry, feel all of it. Makes you remember.

Kids give new life to your fears and illuminate all previously unconsidered danger. Suddenly, the world is a rusty trap. Cars. Water. Pesticides. Bagels. The bigger and faster they are, the more alarming the stakes. Asphalt. Alcohol. Balconies. Trees. Genuine relaxation is scarce in the new hyper-vigilant atmosphere. The air is thin up here.

Many of their books will slowly erode your capacity for intellectual thought. A and B and fucking C. Again and again. The mind-numbing singsong of so much children’s literature is crack to a child. You’ll be forced to say the words so many times, you’ll chant them in the rare silent moments and the drug will wash over your softening brain. “Vera Violet Vinn is very very very awful on her violin.” Don’t read Babar. A pining for French colonialism, an undercurrent of xenophobia, those poor anthropomorphized pachyderms — it will just piss you off. And, speaking of loathsome characters, you’ll choke on Curious George’s racist captivity narrative. Garfield is an asshole. Don’t get me started with the Berenstain Bears.

Eloise is good, though. Eloise is poetry.

Nanny is my nurse
She wears tissue paper in her dress
and you can hear it.
She is English and has 8 hairpins
made out of bones.
She says that’s all she needs in
this life for Lord’s sake.*

They will say things like, “Coke is baby’s wine,” and, “Listen to this appetizer of a song,” and “My green eyes are hungry,” and you will be sure that they are minor blossoming geniuses and then they will ask if west is left or right at an age when they should know. And you will know that they are like you.

Scabies, lice, pinworms, and ticks. Croup, whooping, pox, and fever. Lost testicles, colorful rashes, bite marks, and bloody noses. Years awash in body fluids. Sour milk smell and baby shit dreams. Gross tolerance quotient rises exponentially. You can smell the parents in the grocery, if you don’t spot the embattled eyes first. They stand still and silent in the first aid aisle, hoping a breeze doesn’t lift. Just seeking one moment alone in the store. A nice smelling emollient, maybe. Or a cookie, not for sharing.

The big one will put the little one through a window. The little one will get his revenge a few years later with another window. So much broken glass. They will weep and scrum and make peace in minutes, no big thing, while you quake on the sidelines and wonder where these wild things came from and how to tame them. They will draw lines and cross for spite, tattle and sell each other out like miniature politicians. You will be the territory they fight over, your very body the spoils. Your lap, your hand, your breast, your bed. The cuddling becomes grasping becomes smothering. You will love them so much it hurts and you will also suffer a slow, lush and delicious suffocation. Don’t. Stop. Don’t stop. The mad pendulum of mother’s love.

They will eat everything in your house. Or nothing, and you will embark on the mad search for the one thing that suits. You will find food in your pockets and your cushions, your purse and your car. Loose, crushed, old, mushed, often rotting edibles, mingling with your hair and your essentials.

They will weaponize speech.
“You have a really big butt.” (At the beach.)
“This is the most boring house in the most boring town in the world.” (To your visiting friend.)
“Now you’ve ruined everyone’s Thanksgiving.” (Because you’ve asked him to turn Eagles of Death Metal down.)
“You’re just like Nana.” (That’s the one that really hurts. It’s not true.)

You will say regrettable things, as well. You will bite your tongue and wait ten seconds and rehearse the good, kind, responsible thing but the regrettable thing will fall out, instead. It will sit there, ugly, and shame you.

They will throw horse chestnuts, wet towels, false accusations. Quick to generate filth, they will never embrace the doctrine of tidy. Born hoarders, they will dig literal garbage from the dirt and squirrel it away in a giant plastic bin, push it into the back corner of a closet. Can’t get them in the bath; can’t get them out. They will paint things that should not be painted and they will tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You will feel small and misunderstood.

Your heart will break and maybe some of your fingers. Their fingers will find a way into your eyeballs and your cheesecake. Their hearts will break and then yours will break again. They will tell strangers embarrassing lies and some equally embarrassing truths. You will compare your team to others, calculating kindnesses and wits, stamina and grace. The voice inside that used to read real books and converse with large, thoughtful humans will tell you that, “comparison is the thief of joy,” but that language is forgotten. The one you speak now is guttural, monosyllabic, and not friendly with aphorisms. The one you speak now is all business and would say something like, “aphorisms can kiss my ass.”

There will be mean girls and stupid boys. Dim-witted girls and brutal boys. Yours will say, “Not me.” You will believe them or want to believe them, but you will see the grafitti and know. You will have bully talks and drug talks and sex talks and long talks about things like “respect” and “responsibility” where it becomes quickly apparent that you are the only engaged participant. There will be bullies and drugs and sex. You will walk the finest of lines with regard to your own history. “When I was your age, I discovered psychedelics.” Lying is sometimes the best choice.

The only thing worse than imagining your parents having sex is imagining your kids having sex.

They will sneak out and cry wolf and make you whiny and worried, a floor-pacing hand-wringer. A stop sign — a real, honest-to-god stop sign — will show up in your son’s car. Another son will walk home one day carrying a big reflective sign with the name of your road on it. These signs are much larger than you would think and their presence in your house is possibly a legal problem. Judgement is terrifyingly slow to build. You wave and smile at the road crew as they replace the sign, picturing the original in the back of your closet.

They will cease to exist if you do not listen and watch. Their trials will be yours, times ten. Your heart will now forever be pinned on the outside of your body and you will only ever be as happy as your least happy child.

One day, they will show you a brilliance that you, yourself, have aspired to but not achieved. This will blow you up with pride but will also confuse you with its vague, unintended challenge. The child in you will call it insolence. The adult will tell you to grow up.

One night, your grown baby will creep into your bed in the dark and whisper the tale of the boy that fell from the balcony and was carried away in a helicopter. In the morning, someone else’s child will be gone and yours will be warm and weeping on your shoulder. There can be no god.

They’ll leave and soar and fall and run back and leave again and your hair will gray and you will begin to rub your knuckles the way your grandmother did. You’ll wake thinking of them and they will populate your dreams. You’ll ask, “Could I have done better?” They’ll smile and wave and pixelate away.

If they don’t kill you, they may actually save you.

*Kay Thompson, Eloise.

💗

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’m posting old things about penpals, bread, and children. Studiously avoiding the horrors of the world. This is because my brain is on fire and I’m not writing, just regurgitating old things that make me happy. I am also yelling daily at my rep, in writing and through the phone lines. She’s a MAGA show pony in high heels, so it’s a bit like screaming at a concrete wall with bleach and bright make-up painted all over it — frustrating in the extreme. While it all burns down, though (along with my brain), I offer these old essays about letters and food and family. We can pretend, for a minute, as a little treat.

It’s February. The raw and wretched month that eats your dearest wishes for breakfast and spits them out like black ice just before bed. My birthday is in February, as is Saint Valentine’s Day, but none of that helps. Birthdays are always a disappointment and Valentine’s Day just makes me think of massacres and Al Capone. There’s something in my chest. It’s sadness, maybe, or bronchitis. I’m not sure, but there it sits, day after day, like some cranky crouched creature, a burr on the inside. It demands my attention and slows me down.

We won’t even talk about what’s happening *out there*.

Much has been made of the therapeutic benefits of bread making. I’ve used the kitchen to quiet the demons — sweet tarts and custards, aromatic things roasting in the oven, bubbling pots on the stove. Once, I made a grand chocolate layered cake with a silky ganache late at night because it quite simply felt like the only way I might make it to sunrise. I survived and the cake was delicious, so I support kitchen therapy.

Bread, however, is largely uncharted territory for me. I know my way around the easy stuff — corn bread, lemon loaves and cranberry breads, blueberry-studded muffins and currant-flecked scones. It’s that magic equation of yeast, time, temperature, and muscle that intimidates me. Aside from the odd pizza crust, I am a babe in the real bread woods.

February, with its attendant disturbance in the breast, seems like the perfect time to embark on this new therapy. With the ill wind howling white out the window, I rolled up my sleeves to see if I could solve that magic equation. See if it settles the madness.

The Pullman Loaf and Sally Lunn Bread

Brioche is my holy grail, but those who know say it’s tricky and requires much work (best accomplished with the big snazzy mixer, which I don’t have and am not buying). For a minute, I thought the whole bread adventure was over before it started and I flailed around unhappily, like a toddler. Then I found a solution.

The Pullman Loaf.

Essentially a plain white sandwich loaf, this was appealing because I had all the ingredients and it seemed easy. I used Chris Kimball’s recipe from The Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook, because I like this sentence:

Of course, you can simply bake this bread in any old bread pan if you don’t care much about the shape of the loaf, which is what I do.

Key elements here — simply, any old, don’t care much, and, from the expert, which is what I do. Chris knows his audience.

This was a great place to start because — it worked! I felt moderately proud of myself because it required yeast and specific temps and time and kneading. I got messy and a little frustrated, but it was basically a stress-free experience. After a little work and a modicum of patience, I was rewarded with pretty, warm loaves perfect for slicing and slathering with butter all afternoon.

Emboldened, I next chose the Sally Lunn Bread, largely because Deb from Smitten Kitchen did such a marvelous job marketing to me. She speaks my language (“lazy,” “weep gently with joy”) and there’s a story. I’ll let Deb tell you:

Like any food story worth tucking into, the story of Sally Lunn Bread comes with drama over its origins — Was it originally made by Protestant refugees, who called them “soleil et lune” or sun and moon cakes? Was it named for Solange Luyon, a pastry cook in Bath, England who for decades sold these buns on the street? Was knowing how to bake it truly essential to being a successful housekeeper, as this 1884 book, suggests?

I love stories, I am lazy, and I suspect that gentle, joyful weeping could be part of a successful therapeutic regimen. I’m all in.

This bread was so easy, it felt like a cheat. There was yeast, temperature, and time; but no kneading, no mess, no fuss. It wasn’t much more trouble than a quick bread, but yielded something like a poor-man’s brioche — a hint of egg, a hint of sweet, still warm and slathered with butter.

There are too many people in my house and each has his or her own chest-sitter, provoking theatre and delusions of high-flown personal crisis in the midst of what is surely just run-of-the-mill February. There are too many chafing souls in this space.

To have a thing, a focus, a place for my hands, a reason to watch the clock and, in the end, a product to show the wild-eyed group — see, I’ve been busy — this is the gift of bread making. It feels important, contributory, ancient and real. It’s creative and meditative, a ministration of sorts, leaving the kitchen warm and the air perfumed with civility.

The Rustic White Bread

This feels like a setback.

I was hopeful. I’ve probably been called rustic behind my back. It seemed basic and foolproof, but also like “real” bread. It made two loaves, required more time and effort, and the pictures looked like a real baker was involved. Flour on the crust, slashes on the body, important-looking crumb.

The making was a pleasure and I felt briefly competent. The kneading was sensuous and hypnotic and felt surprisingly good to my aching thumbs and wrists. The rising was triumphant and the uncooked loaves, with their professional looking slashes across the top, held much promise.

The finished bread, however, was mediocre — dry and heavy, not nearly as pretty as the pictures. (Is anything ever as pretty as the pictures?) I substituted bread flour for all-purpose, so it’s probably my own fault (which feeds perfectly into my negative winter narrative). French toast, anyone?

I needed a victory. Something lush and gorgeous, something to massage that small crisis from the ribs and rearrange February into a string of worthy days. A decadent, crowning-glory bread.

The thing about bread-making that elevates it above all else in the kitchen is that it’s alive. Literally bursting and popping with life. You can watch it as it rises, hear it if you bend near. You are, with your life-worn hands, shaping life into artful sustenance, as the earliest hands once did. Massaging tiny beasties into a sustaining thing. We need this, a cycle of creation and consumption to build something sane and reliable.

Challah

I do worry that my motives aren’t noble. I’m all product over process. I love challah, I want challah, I want to have made challah. Do I actually want to make challah? I worry about the burden of expectation and the expectation of disappointment. But then, I worry.

Worry is where I begin with the challah, fresh on the heels of the rustic flop. I’m back to Deb at Smitten, as she was so kind to me with that lovely Sally Lunn. Her challah looks gorgeous (when will I learn) and she doesn’t seem daunted, so I tentatively dive.

The making of this bread was surprisingly manageable and satisfying. Though I came to it with mild panic, the process settled into a fairly simple, rhythmic activity that wove itself into the business of my day, seamlessly.

It rose three times, just the way it should, and smelled of real challah, even before baking. I clumsily braided it, and it forgave me. Once in the oven, if filled the house with such an aroma of good and happy Sunday mornings, that I felt all was well — or, at least, that all could be well. Maybe even would be.

Once out of the oven, I had my victory. My crowning glory bread. The one bread to save me. Aside from a bit too much darkening of the crust, it was luscious. One of my proudest moments in the kitchen. Two plump, gorgeous loaves — a bread that made me one of those insufferable food posters on social media, a bread that caused me to exclaim, “This tastes like real challah!” (My standards are decidedy low.)

Someone told me that, according to Chinese medicine, trouble in the chest is related to grief. Any and all grief, all the way back to childhood. And, unfortunately, the daily bread grief that comes with the paper each morning. Global crisis grief. In theory, if we identify and process each incident of grieving, the chest will clear. Easy as bread.

I need to make one more. It’s tempting to stop, to end on the high challah note and find a new therapy. But I’ve got days left in this wretched month and no better idea. I don’t expect to recreate the thrill of victory, I just hope to avoid failure. The burr is back and with it comes that familiar expectation of disappointment.

Seeking the last bread, I find myself standing in the bathroom at first light, gazing slack-jawed at a miracle sky. February gray shot through with forgotten color. Dawn in the crowded house, in the brief moment of silence, before the appearance of agitated winter souls.

It’s memory that I’m chasing, a desire to hold it in my hands, warm it in the oven, and eat it. I’m 13, that terrible turning age. It’s a sweltering summer day and, somehow, I am alone with my mother. Just us two, all day — a rare thing in a big family. She is painting the outside windows and we struggle together with a comically massive ladder, heaving it around the corner of the house, laughing so hard the tears overtake us and the task threatens to slide into calamity. She is also making bread. Portuguese Sweet Bread, it was called, and it was my favorite.

In this memory, when the painting is done and the bread is ready, I eat too much of it and lay baking in the sun on a blanket in the backyard with my mother and a stack of magazines, and I can almost feel the bread rising a little more in my overfull stomach. It is a delicious memory, a memory stuffed with sunshine and warmth, laughter and industry, my mother’s undivided attention and sweet warm bread.

My memory may be flawed. Why would a middle-aged woman be painting the house and making bread, all on the same stifling hot day? It seems crazy, but perhaps it happened this way. Perhaps she was wrestling the thing in her own chest. Truth and memory have an uneasy relationship. The bread was real, I can still smell it.

Portuguese Sweet Bread

Early in this bread project, I off-handedly mentioned this childhood bread to my husband. I told him that the memory reminded me of that Hawaiian grocery store bread and, lo and behold, that’s what it is — Wiki says so. I haven’t had it since I was a kid, but I’m hoping for a therapeutic stroll down memory lane.

Using Emeril’s recipe, the process seems familiar and comforting. Just five loaves in, I realize this bread-making business could become an easy habit. Do most of the work in the morning, with my coffee — no more than a half hour of focus — and let the beasties do the rest throughout the day. It’s become a thing I do now, or a thing I can do, instead of a distant aspirational thing. I make bread.

The process is almost ritual — measure, mix, knead, rise, punch, rise again, bake. The dough feels vaguely warm and alive in my hands and the rising is reliable. The result is, likewise, reliable — like a memory. Substantial, satisfying, a comfort. It’s, surprisingly, not that hard. It requires attention. It is rewarding. You will fail. You will thrill. The burr will not be eradicated. It can, however, be placated. Distraction is good.

I realize that my bread project neglected the thornier corners of baking — the sourdoughs and whole grains, the boules and batards. I’m not ready for a starter, though that sounds like where you should begin. I’m aware that I skew sweet, but it is February. These were my starter breads and, though I still want to own a brioche, I’m pretty proud of myself. That, combined with all the warm bread in my belly, has lightened the darkest month and calmed the crisis in the chest. I recommend it.

Go make some bread. I’m going to the library.

🥖 Lisa

Author’s note: This essay is years old, from a distant February. I don’t eat much gluten these days, but maybe I should. I mean, why the fuck not, at this point?