4th

After my mom died, I read every journal and planner she left behind. There weren’t many. The entries were sporadic, sometimes leaping a year—or even five—with little information and a lot of space devoted to her weight and what she was going to do about it. Haha. We weren’t so different, me and this woman who shared half my DNA.

In one of the planners, I found an incomplete Fourth Step. My mom had been sober my entire life—she got sober before I was born—and by the time I was twelve or thirteen when she had started this Fourth Step, she had already been sober for fifteen or sixteen years. The Fourth Step is the part of Alcoholics Anonymous where you make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of yourself: your wrongs, fears, resentments, and the damage you’ve done. A lot of people get stuck there. They write down what they can and then stop.

My mom had stopped, too.

That was where I learned she had slept with her younger sister’s college boyfriend—the sister who didn’t like my mom and thought she was much prettier because she was blonde. Which is funny, because I had also heard my aunt’s version: that my mom only claimed she’d slept with him to hurt her. After all, he only liked blondes like my aunt. He couldn’t have done it. He just wouldn't have slept with a brunette like my mom.

I never learned which version was true. But I believe my mom.

I also learned that, in her early twenties, my mom had worked in a nursing-home kitchen. One of the residents died after choking on a piece of hot dog. Almost two decades later, my mom still believed it was her fault because she hadn’t cut the hot dog into small enough pieces, even though she knew the resident was at risk of choking.

There was other stuff too, but the inventory felt awfully incomplete. She didn’t get into half the things I had seen.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe no one can make a complete inventory of a life—not even a person trying to account for all the ways she had failed.

Still, it was through the worst choices of my mother’s life that I grew to respect her. I learned to cheer for her—not because she had been innocent, and not because sobriety erased what came before, but because she kept going while carrying everything she believed she had done.

And somewhere in all that unfinished writing, I began to understand her: not as the mother I had needed her to be, but as the woman she had been trying, imperfectly, to become.

I forgot how nice it was to get lost in the crevices of my own mind.

not so b.a.m.f.

I cannot care ...to this level ...for another day.

Like, genuinely, I need to care at least 20% less by tomorrow.

You know that general sentiment that we’re all here to learn a lesson?

That each lifetime, we’re put on Earth to “learn a lesson”?

Well, I’m pretty certain mine is that old adage: “You made your bed. Now it’s time to lie in it.” Maybe that’s why my bed was never made until I was in my thirties. I was avoiding the consequences of my actions.

And maybe I’m a little too bratty, too defiant, too obstinate, too… I don’t know—too authority-figure-hating—to really buy into all that life-lesson bullshit. Most of my lessons were learned at the will of another, and now the sound of my name gives me the same dread as being called into the principal’s office.

But I guess some people love their names. Some even get off on them—literally. “Oh, baby, say my name!” That’s a thing, right?

And I guess there’s some world where lying in bed—bed-rotting—is so nice, so lovely. But for me, it’s just time-out and shame: the things I never felt I deserved when I was doing my best with the information available at the time.

Summer of Fortune

Something, something, Wheel of Fortune year,
followed by something, something spinning,
but the summer was when the hummingbirds
came late, in flocks, and the males dove
at each other. I heard their chirp
for the first time in my life, and it sounded
just like it did in Disney’s Pocahontas,

and we went on our second out-of-state trip this summer
just to buy weed—marijuana, not vacation,
an errand, an extended errand—
but returned early and sobbed

the day after because Ruby
couldn’t go on anymore, and you needed the vet
to say it was the right choice
on the phone, five times. We drank shitty
McDonald’s milkshakes and ate fries
until we went to bed early with stomach aches
that were gone by morning. Then we found ourselves
at the shelter, clueless, stupid, drunk with wanting—
God, the wanting,

the wanting for everything to turn out all right—
and we couldn’t take that puppy home that day;
her spay wasn’t for another two days, thank God,

and then she was in our home, eight hours in, 
at 3 a.m., we were awake,
dreading that we had made the biggest fucking mistake,
but at twenty-four hours we were playing fetch;
at forty-eight, she knew her name.
And the fear in me still eats a hole,
some cavity made of fast-food chemicals and sugar,
something that remains, because

I cleaned out the fridge and wonder
if this leftover is still good.
I made this before Ruby died—
how many days? How many days?—
and now our lives look totally different,
and I don’t know what else one summer can take,
if anything,
or whether everything will turn out all right.