Bread and Bread

1. embracing your wiggly kid (even if he wiggles right out of your arms) Dash is super wiggly these days. Whereas once the edge of the changing table was a place to put diaper cream and hand sanitizer and something called “bottom spray” that is just a made-up product invented for baby registries, Dash now sees those things as clay pigeons for him to knock over with one sweep of his magnificent grabbing arm. This guy will steal the glasses right off your face. I imagined his near future as a wiggly bigger baby and then a wiggly, curious, running-everywhere toddler. I thought of Matea, Jamie’s year-old daughter, who is gentle and cuddly, though plenty curious as well. I thought about how it wouldn’t be hard, if you were so inclined, to mourn the not-having of a certain kind of baby. Bouncy if you wanted cuddly, cuddly if you wanted bouncy. But just as quickly I dismissed the thought. It would be so much work wishing for another kind of kid! You’d waste so much time! You’d be anxi...

In my ongoing, desperate attempt to find writing time in the midst of work and family time, I joined a parent-writers group online. This week one of the members, Hannah Shanks , offered this prompt: Tell us about one of your “little things”—a personal talisman, your daisy-print office supplies, your worry beads, your prayer shawl, your favorite mug, whatever grounds you to yourself and the wider world. Tell us about one of your touchstone items. How did it get to you? Why do you love it? How does it help you get through the day? Who gave it to you? What stories would it tell, if it could talk? One year my friend Meehan set a resolution to wear her favorite clothes more. She had a habit I recognized all too well, of wearing her meh clothes and “saving” her special stuff for special occasions. Inevitably, by the time a worthy occasion rolled around, the clothes she’d once loved too much to wear would be out of style. I love reading the Nostalgia column in Vogue because the w...

There is a Big Lots! around the corner from Dash’s daycare. I’d been meaning to check it out since he started daycare last week; you’d think it was a museum or something, and in a way I approached it as such (hey, you take your thrills were you can). I hadn’t actually been to a Big Lots! before, but I grew up going to Pic ‘N’ Save, its eighties counterpart (Wikipedia tells me that Big Lots! actually bought Pic ‘N’ Save in 2002, although by then it was called MacFrugals). Pic ‘N’ Save occupied most of a down-and-out strip mall in Hermosa Beach. This was back when there were still down-and-out parts of the beach cities. My mom always speculated that the other businesses in the strip mall—an Indian restaurant and a couple of stores that kept heavy curtains drawn at all times—were fronts for something. The price was right. Pic ‘N’ Save was full of cheap crap that regular stores hadn’t been able to sell, but we were a family of bargain hunters. If a brand of kids’ shoes had br...

1. self-care in red boots Last weekend was busy. The week that followed it was busy. It included a book club meeting at which we discussed the NPR story we’d all heard about how only white-collar people say they’re busy. People who work three minimum-wage jobs just say they’re tired. By the time I left work yesterday, I was both. Which means I was in a weakened state, and it didn’t take long for me to turn my writing evening at Philippe’s into an is-it-scar-tissue-or-cancer Googling session. It’s the absolute worst thing I can do for my mental health, but it’s like I have an addiction that’s long past the point of making me feel good— and pretty much never did. Leave it to a Klein to find an addiction that was never fun in the first place. I need 'em like a hole in my head. I need 'em to heal the hole in my head. It bugs me that my mental health is so precarious, but at least I got my Googling bender out of my system, and I decided to devote the rest of my week...

AK and I miss the days when Plum Sykes had a regular column in Vogue. She was always writing about hanging out with Gwyneth Paltrow, or what she was going to wear to some sort of semi-royal gala, or her bold decision to bob her hair, or her new discovery of the color olive. She presented everything as a charming dilemma, and I always imagined a princess standing in front of an immense closet, hands clasped perplexedly as servants scurry about. What? Oh, just having a few friends including my bestie Gwynnie over. Once she wrote about her chronic back pain and I was like, Oh my god, Plum Sykes has a real problem! I think she solved it with a spa treatment and an intense workout routine that enabled her to wear a fabulous backless gown to the semi-royal gala of the month. Vogue has since replaced Plum Sykes with Elisabeth Von Thurn und Taxis, who I think is an actual princess from some Swiss-ish country. I don’t adore her as much as Plum, but her piece in the December issue, abou...

1. nudity of abundance Sunday afternoon, AK and I went to a potluck for all the participants in Bodies Mapping Time , the photo project I’d posed for a few months back. J Michael Walker , the artist/photographer, had snagged a room at the Flintridge Foundation, a tree-flanked compound in Pasadena. The room was institutional, with desks arranged in a square donut and a projection screen. I plopped my couscous down among the lentils and zucchini and scones that other people had brought. J Michael had roasted tomatillos from his garden and made a hot, smoky, delicious salsa. As far as I could tell, he was a Latina woman trapped in a white man’s body. But moving through the world in a white man’s body shapes you. That’s the nature of the body, and the people who witness it. It wasn’t my nature to trust men who were too quick to idealize women as goddesses. But the shoot had been fun, cozy, intimate but simple. So I trusted J Michael’s sincerity.  Flashback to the ba...

Our plan had been to camp for a couple of days in Idyllwild, where we’d once celebrated AK’s birthday in a luxury cabin and where, longer ago, I’d gotten a cheer-camp sock tan that made the remnants of my radiation burn look like nothing much. Then Idyllwild caught fire. It seemed tacky to complain about the dissolution of our vacation as people and animals’ homes were getting charred. Selfie with radiation tan. Meehan offered her dad’s house in Carmel as an alternative, so on Friday night we drove north instead of east. A couple of weeks before, Meehan’s wife Sally had told me, “Meehan and I were talking about how great you’ve handled these past months. So many people would have shut down, but you opened up and weren’t afraid to ask for help.” I’d almost cried right there in the middle of C.C.’s graduation luau. Lots of people had expressed admiration for my stamina during cancer treatment, but most had viewed my vulnerability as a sort of understandable evil. Well, of ...

At Thursday’s chemo session I grabbed a copy of TLC, a catalog of women’s cancer accessories published by the American Cancer Society. It includes lots of hats like this: Everything's coming up roses...um, I mean, generic flowers. And turbans like this: In this case, "royal" means "Come into my moldering mansion and watch silent films starring meeeee." And wigs like this: The "Amanda" wig. Don't hurt yourself on its pointy ends. Okay, so the American Cancer Society is a nonprofit that does a lot of good work, and I would rather they put their resources into finding a cure for cancer than finding a cure for the humiliation-on-top-of-humiliation that is cancer fashion. But the latter is at least highly treatable, and I’m here to do my part. Tip 1: Own it. In previous posts , I’ve discussed the cringe-y nature of anything that looks like it’s trying to pass. That’s why these models have got to go. I hate it when plus-s...