how am i? funny you should ask

Yesterday I ate like 14 cookies at Meehan and Sally’s housewarming and contemplated how drinking would be a more literary way to wallow (although AK pointed out that a booze hangover is rougher than a carbohydrate hangover, which I definitely have). Did I mention that I chased it with pizza? It was a flashback to my younger years, when every day was the last day before the first day of some diet that would mark the beginning of my new life.

Today I’m holding onto the healthy living wagon with one hand, basically being dragged through the dirt. I went to the gym this morning, where any sense of empowerment was tempered by every stiff ligament reminding me why I’d been away for two months and why I was back now.

Then I stopped at Starbucks where some stupid compilation of Mother’s Day songs* next to the mint display reminded me that this Mother’s Day will pack twice the crappiness punch as the past seven. I kind of lost it, and some guy asked if I’d like to pray with him. I said a firm thanks but no thanks, but the thing is, I have so much excess emotion right now that I’m looking for any audience that will take it. Anyone who asks “How are you?” is in danger of finding out.

So I had this little fantasy of telling him exactly what was up, at which point he would say, “You know that God hates the babies of lesbians, right?” Which would give me an excuse to scratch his eyeballs out, which is what I desperately want to do to someone. It’s an impulse that would be inappropriate to direct toward the 15 high school classmates that Facebook tells me are pregnant right now. (And these are the girls who put off having babies so they could get PhDs. I miss the days when getting knocked up was a mark of underachieving.)

But the prayer dude seemed nice and not even that crazy, and I realized that any notions of punishment probably stemmed from the bowels of my subconscious. Back when I was imagining that I might have to go live in the hospital for a month and a half, I thought, with some trepidation, Well, I guess I’m writing a nonfiction book about this experience. Now that my experience is much more mundane than the one in which I have high-risk preemie twins, I feel released from that mental book contract. If I do write a book, it can be fiction, which is the only place I’d let myself create a character who really believed that God hated her. Because my conscious, therapized, self-editing self—the one who’d have to narrate a nonfiction book—is much more enlightened.


*Okay, I just Googled that compilation. It benefits prenatal care organizations and accompanies a documentary about the life-threatening complications faced by pregnant women in developing countries. How evil is the girl who just did IVF and was like, “Put it on my tab, awesome insurance company”? I have to buy the CD now, don’t I?