Hey, Mama.

Look, I know you raised three toddlers before me, and I’m sorry it’s come to this – truly, what is wrong with you – but I’ve noticed you really suck at meeting my needs in the morning. I’m a giver, though, so I’m going to tell you how to stop being awful.

I’ve broken this down by topic so your questionable brain can comprehend it better, and you can use it as a sort of reference sheet when you grow confused, which, as far as I can tell, is often.

Waking up:

Thanks for letting me crawl into your bed at 2am to use daddy as a pillow and you as a footrest. I like that. Please don’t wake me up, though. I don’t like that. If you wake me up, I will either be so fucking adorable you could cry, or I’ll behave like a weeping squirrel on methamphetamine.

I like to wake up when I wake up, which is usually 6am, unless you have to be somewhere, in which case I like to sleep longer than I’ve ever slept in the entirety of my life.

Getting dressed:

I like pants with “soft stuff” inside. Nobody knows what that means but me. I hate some clothes, a lot. Which clothes I hate changes daily, but you’ll know if I hate it because when you try to put it on me, I will throw myself onto the ground with my face on the carpet and bottom in the air. This is because your sartorial choices are so awful they cause me physical pain.

Like bowel cramps. That’s why I’m writhing.

Also, the person I want to get me dressed is whoever isn’t available. Daddy is at work, you say? Well, he’s who I want to dress me. Since he’s not around, I will refuse to get dressed.

If not him, I want the teenager who already left for school.

Third-tier choice: The 7-year-old, because at least with her I get to laugh a lot and everything takes nine times longer than it should.

Lot of motion, no progress. That’s the way I like it.

Basically I want anyone in the world other than you to dress me because I hate you and you’re always rushing on account of your shitty planning skills, which aren’t my problem. I hate rushing. I AM THREE.

Brushing my hair:

I will never know who’s fucking idea it was to grow my hair out. What are you? Hippies? Hipsters? You’re almost 40. Pull it together. I hate my hair. I hate that you think you need to brush it. I only like daddy’s beard brush. I can’t believe my father has a beard brush.

The reason I like it is because it’s boar bristle and therefore does absolutely nothing against the wads of dried whatever the fuck is in my hair.

The best thing for you to do would be to NOT TOUCH MY HEAD EVER but look, I’m reasonable, so I’ll settle for an iPad in front of me and unbridled wailing while you attack my head with small, ineffective bristles.

Breakfast:

I hate breakfast, unless you don’t feed me breakfast, in which case I feel starving, downtrodden, and abandoned, even though daycare feeds me breakfast. Once you feed me breakfast, though, I remember I hate it.

So what’s best is that you make me food then let it sit at the table so I can reject it.

Shoes:

I prefer shoes that do not fit the season. In the winter, I like sandals. In the summer, I like rain boots. I’ve observed you’ve gotten on board with the summer rain boots but really hold fast to this “your feet are going to get cold, honey” nonsense.

Fine, I’ll wear closed-toed shoes, but only the pair that has one missing. Oh, you can’t find it? Look harder. I NEED THE ONES THAT ONLY HAVE ONE, Mother. And I need to put them on myself, which I don’t know how to do.

Jackets:

Fuck jackets.

Carseats:

Fuck those too.

Lunches:

I need a lunch like the other kids even though a wonderful woman named Amanda makes me home-cooked lunches every single day and you pay for it. And I need three items in that lunch. If I spot sweets, I need three sweets. You never let me do this. This enrages me. If you would just give me the three sugary items in my lunch, I wouldn’t have to remove the shoes that just took me ninety minutes to put on the wrong feet.

Walking:

Sometimes I will walk to the car or up to the door at daycare. Sometimes I will tell you, “My legs deflated,” and collapse in a pile on the sidewalk.

I ain’t mad. My legs just deflated.

The car ride:

I like to listen to The Greatest Showman soundtrack with my lunch in my lap, or I like to scream about how you fucked up my morning again. There are just so many details you forget. Stick to this reference sheet, JANELLE, and I’ll just sing, okay? I’ll sing show tunes and be the cutest little ratty-headed toddler in the world.

Like God intended.

You’re welcome.

Love,
Arlo

what sort of bullshit you gonna serve up today?

***

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February is a strange month for me. In the later years of my drinking, February was such a “strange” month that I would hit a spectacular bottom by the end of it.

I went to rehab in March 2007.

I went again in March 2008.

And then, in March 2009, I got sober, after the bottom that ended all bottoms, though it was an internal collapse that time.

A few years after that, I noticed that every year (even sober), around February, I am hit with a persistent, vague malaise.

Nothing in particular is wrong. Everything in particular is wrong.

A therapist once floated the idea of “seasonal depression.” That sounded plausible, but I’ve always been able to manage this state with exercise and eating a little better and forcing myself outside or staying inside and the steadfast knowledge that it will end, and I go through this every year.

So I don’t think it’s depression. I think it’s a yearly shithole I enter for some reason, or many reasons, which remain not entirely clear.

“Manage” it. What does that mean, exactly? Endure it to get through, I suppose.

Not die. Not drink again. Not obliterate my life some other way.

On February 8, I attended the hearing of the mentally ill cousin who killed my grandmother. I heard testimony of what happened that night. I sat in a room with him, the kid I knew as a kid, with whom I played and even lived for a while. He did not look the same. A couple times he looked back at me. I could not smile, or even nod.

On the way home, I fell asleep in the passenger seat and stayed half-asleep for two days.

And then I got some sort of ten day illness which I am not entirely sure was not a sickness caused by my shaking in that courtroom and a re-entering of the images I thought had faded in the past 14 months.

But I took antibiotics and it improved, so probably not.

“Manage.”

The Parkland shooting happened shortly after, as you know. Seventeen more babies dead. AR-15s. The NRA. The President suggesting we turn our schools into dystopian wastelands of gun-wielding ex-marines and teachers. I wonder if we should stay. I wonder if I belong here. I wonder where we’ll go.

I want to be funny. I want to write you a funny post.

It will come.

Is that how I manage? Because I know it will come again?

I know that after the greatest pain of my life, the relief has come. The freedom. The facing, and the letting go. This isn’t the greatest pain of my life. Not even close.

I think of the parents in Florida living theirs. I think of the kids who survived, the ones telling the NRA-whore politicians to get the fuck out of their way.

“Manage.”

The other day I looked over at Arlo, my three-year-old, as he was kneeling on the living room rug, carefully trying to push a little figure into a car that wasn’t meant for it, and I watched his little fingers move. Have you ever noticed the way toddler fingers move? Just these tiny hands working so damn hard, these chubby, sweet things working, working.

A task that doesn’t matter. The only task that matters.

I thought maybe it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Because in February’s defense, this is the month when I cry looking at the faces of my children, when tears come so quickly I’m ashamed of myself. Then I’m ashamed for being ashamed of myself.

I am on the edge of what my body can contain, right on the rim of my person, where every insult, every joy, every sting hits me faster, and harder, than when I’m on the inside, protected, drawn deeper into myself where the days are safer and the world kinder.

This is the month of raw nerve.

I have learned to “manage” until I fall back where life is more comfortable. And I suppose, in some strange way, I’ve learned to appreciate what this feeling is, and what it does, because like it or not the pain casts the joy in more vivid light, and the ears of my dog feel softer, and the arm of my husband feels denser, and the curl of my baby seems perfectly fallen over his eye like a weird piece of art.

And I notice it.

In thirty minutes, I’m going to leave my house to hear one of my favorite singers. I’m going to dance. I’m going to feel my body move.

I’m going to notice the cracked love and sin of his voice, and manage.

In case you’re managing too.

Here we are.

the curl in question, and the rocks he asked to “borrow from the earth.”

****

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In college, I drove a white 1986 BMW 325, a gift from my stepmother when I was 17. I loved that car. It was hers for ten years, then mine, and it was small and fast and just fancy enough to make me feel like I was somebody, or would be someday.

Perhaps that little car is why I drove alone so often, to no place in particular: toward the beach after high school, or San Francisco, or the river in the summertime. Sometimes I made it somewhere. Sometimes I drove around in circles.

My college town, Davis, frustrated me because there was no beach within thirty miles, no particularly lovely river to visit. It was hot and miserable in the summer and smelled vaguely of cow shit.

But nowhere else could I find the feeling I had driving my little car and listening to my favorite tunes, alone with my thoughts, so I drove wherever or nowhere for that feeling.

One evening when I was nineteen, I bought a pack of Camel Lights and headed west on interstate 80, toward San Francisco.

I wasn’t going to San Francisco. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was listening to old live Grateful Dead tapes and feeling lost and a bit sorry for myself while the rest of the world held hands. I had broken up with my boyfriend, again. When I met him at seventeen, I was sure he was “the one.”

But he kept on being not the one, and my roommates and their boyfriends were irritating me.

Somewhere near Vallejo, just before a big hill that always made me feel like I was going too fast, like I would lose control of my car somewhere near the bottom, I saw a rest stop on my right, up at the top of the hill, and for some reason, I took the exit and parked my car. Perhaps I thought there might be a view. The sun was setting. I must have wanted to watch the sunset.

I sat on the hood of my car and looked out over the land beneath the hill – the spotted lights of a shitty valley town. I watched the sun go down, though it was nothing like the orange pink over Bodega Bay.

I smoked a cigarette, and smoked again. And maybe again, when I noticed a van parked two spots away from me with a man in the driver’s seat. He got out, walked over to me, and casually began a conversation.

What I remember about him is that he was a white dude, at least forty years old, short, small in stature, thin, with short dark hair and dark eyes. He wore jeans and a black sweater. He appeared unassuming and friendly. I do not remember what he said to me, or why I engaged with him, or how or when or with what segue he shifted the discussion to my appearance. My face.

At that age, I had straight blonde hair that fell down past my waist. I was thin and strong from riding my bike every day to my class, and swimming laps when I could. I felt attractive. I felt wanted. I liked that. Maybe that’s why I kept breaking up with the one who was supposed to be the one. Maybe I wanted to see who else would like me.

I don’t remember what the man said or how long he said it, and I don’t recall the tone in his voice or the look in his eye, so I do not and will not ever understand how he managed to work the word “modeling” into our chat, or why, more importantly, I believed him or cared.

And even more significantly, I do not recall and I will never understand why I found him to be legitimate, or forgot we were at a rest stop on the side of the freeway. I did not ask myself what he was doing there. I did not ask myself what I was doing there.

And I will not ever understand how I, an intelligent, strong young woman who fancied herself critical, with an impenetrable wall of self-defense, having grown up with a father and mother and brother who warned me about the evils of predatory men, how I, how I, grew confused.

I will never understand how he, a stranger, wrapped all of me, all I was and had ever been, into a tiny ball grasped in the palm of his sweaty little hand – a hand I could have broken. A face I could have smashed, or simply walked away from.

“You can do it,” he said. “You can model for me and I’d like to hire you.”

Did I tilt my head in doubt? Did I chuckle? Did I curl my lip in amused skepticism? He handed me a card with a phone number. Did I think that made him real?

“But what I need is to see your body.”

There. There.

There is the moment I should have left. There is the moment I should have looked for other cars to make sure I was not alone. There is the moment I should have known.

But I did not.

“Will you show me now?” He asked.

As if I were floating, I got in the driver’s seat of my fancy little car and he in the passenger’s seat and we drove to a darker place of the rest stop and I lifted my shirt, the flesh of my size 34B breasts exposed, my nipples still hidden.

“Now take your bra off,” he said.

His voice now was thick and heavy, fast and impenetrable. I was his now, it seemed. I was in some world I knew before, though it had been many years. Or perhaps it was a world I had never left, only convincing myself I wasn’t a little girl anymore, and I could fight now, and I would know when I had to fight, and I wouldn’t fall silent and complacent and participatory in my own abuse.

He was demanding, not cajoling. There was no doubt in his voice. I was his. I felt it, a snake whispering from the passenger seat, nudging me to look around.

I looked at him, and when I did, I noticed movement in his lap, a shadow in the corner of my eye, and when I focused on it, I saw, like a knife shredding the veil of my trance, his hand in his pocket, stroking his erect dick through his pants.

There. There.

I knew.

I pulled my shirt down and scanned the parking lot, aware now of the danger I was in. A car drove by the other side of the parking lot, and I loved the driver. His existence gave me power.

“Get out.” I said.

I don’t remember my tone. I don’t remember if I tried to sound big or loud or convincing.

“Get out.”

He did, without a word.

I drove away. East, this time, back home.

My heart pounded the beat of those just startled awake. When you’re in a deep sleep and a bookshelf falls or a window slams. Crash.

My skin crawled. I wanted a shower. I wanted to understand what had just happened. I wanted to erase his face, his hand creeping across his groin.

But more than all of that, I wanted to erase me. I wanted no soul to ever know. I wanted no soul to know I was that weak, pathetic, illogical – and, dare we say it? – stupid.

My daddy didn’t raise a fool. My mother showed me better. And I, I was more than this.

But I wasn’t.

So I threw the card of that man out the window and never told a soul about this moment until right now.

Because everyone right now is talking about the girls who don’t walk away. We wonder why they don’t leave. We wonder why they don’t scream fuck you and run, because some do, you know? Some of them waltz out with the fire of a thousand suns. They make sense. They are strong.

But what I want to say is that some of us were messed with as little girls. Some of us already know what it means to shut down and fold up to get through. Some of us have never tried the alternative, because we didn’t know we could, or didn’t find the power.

Maybe it’s that. Or maybe it’s that girls are taught from the moment the world starts patting our heads and putting us in skirts that we are “pretty” or we better be “pretty” and we are “pretty” for the boys, who want to have us, and we are taught that when they want us, we owe them, because we were pretty and they couldn’t help themselves, you know – it’s just the way they are.

So by the time we are in their apartment, having allowed them to buy us dinner – by the time we kissed them once – or spoke to them too long at a party or bar or rest stop, well, we led them on, didn’t we?

And now we are theirs.

We are pretty. And they want to have us, and if we don’t deliver, we are out of line, breaking the pact, fucking with the natural order of things. Blue balls, et cetera. You know. Perhaps we are used to enduring, to not liking it, to giving in. Perhaps we’ve done it countless times.

Or maybe it was just that the stars aligned in a way that night that removed my brain and voice and power. Maybe I was fucking sad and that’s it. Maybe he hypnotized me. Maybe he saw me from afar and sniffed my weakness, or maybe, I was just plain stupid.

I will never understand what happened that night. I will never understand where I went, and how he won, but I understand why girls don’t always run.

Isn’t it strange, though, that I spent twenty years wondering why I didn’t run, and no time at all wondering why a piece of shit man stroked his dick in my car, after spending an hour convincing me of his virtue?

Isn’t it strange that in my weakness, I did wrong, but in his abuse, he owes no explanation?

That, I understand, though, because I am a woman. I believe women. I believe women who don’t run. And though I wish every one of us that power, to fight and kick and fuck these bastards up, I know why we don’t, I know why we hide, and I’m telling this story to come into the light.

I didn’t ask to be harmed. He sought to harm. I failed to defend, and yet everyone – including me – is concerned with me.

And that is why we cannot run, sometimes.

***

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My friend is 38 weeks pregnant and I sense she feels a little guilty about not enjoying these final weeks of pregnancy at all.  

And so, for her and all the other mothers out there in their last few weeks of pregnancy wondering if it actually sucks as bad as you think it does, I offer this compilation of the 14 biggest bullshit moments of my four pregnancies, all of which occurred in the last few weeks of said gestational periods.

Now, before I continue, I need to warn you: This is for sure beyond “too-much-information” and possibly falls into the Do-You-Have-No-Dignity-Left-At-All category, but I’m posting it anyway because, you know what? The last month of pregnancy is TMI.

The whole fucking thing is too much information.

Women go through some shit – often literally – to have these babies. We endure a physical discomfort and bodily weirdness that defies all reason and decency, and yet we continue. We go on. We go on to birth these babies and mother them through it all, because we are badasses. Period. So I’m going to talk about the real things because they are the, um, real things.

Plus, I love you all more than I love my dignity.

So, here we go:

1. The time with my first kid when my entire family showed up a week before my due date waiting for the baby and every day I got to waddle downstairs – having gained 70 pounds due to donuts and preeclampsia, resulting in ankles my husband used to indent two inches with his finger and roar in laughter, and though I wanted to tell the family gathered round to FUCK OFF AND DIE BECAUSE NO THERE AREN’T CONTRACTIONS,” I couldn’t say that because I was still trying to be “nice.” (I was only 22. Cut me some slack.)
2. The day before that same first kid was born and I stomped downstairs like an irate penguin and my husband Mac looked at me and said, “Well, good morning, gentle feather.” And I couldn’t stab him.
3. That time I was vacuuming and slightly lost control of my bowels, which nobody tells you is even a thing or could be a thing, but, apparently, IS, and then later that day had to stand on a scale while a male OBGYN looked at me and said, “We should probably talk about your weight gain.” And I couldn’t stab him either.
4. Or perhaps it was the endless attempts at using sex to “induce labor” which really just meant my husband got to enjoy life even more while I prayed to baby Jesus mine would end if I couldn’t have this baby today.
5. Or how about that time I had my first homebirth and had some bullshit bacteria in my vagina, so the midwives told me to take a clove of garlic, needle a string through it, and insert into my vag as a special device they lovingly called a “garlic tampon.”
6. Followed by an injection of yogurt into the vagina. You haven’t known “low point” until you’ve inserted yogurt into an orifice you can’t even see.
7. Waitwaitwait no. Fuck that. None of us have known “low-point” until you have hemorrhoids so bad you can barely walk and no medicine works so your midwife suggests “a potato suppository” and you find yourself at 2am cutting a potato into a thin strip to shove up your ass because life is no longer worth living.
8. And then both dumbass hippie remedies work, meaning everything you knew about the world is wrong, and you’re still pregnant, so feel no joy. Because I want my baby. All I want is my baby, who is never coming. This is a fact. Never coming.
9. Speaking of baby, my favorite is when the baby “drops” and everyone says “any day now” and “Aren’t you more comfortable now?” and you’re like NO MOTHERFUCKER NOW THE BABY IS ON MY BLADDER AND HALF OUT MY VAGINA INSTEAD OF WEDGED IN MY RIBS. How the hell do you define ‘comfort?’”
10. With my last pregnancy, I taught college until five days before my due date and the only car we had for me was this tiny maroon Toyota scion with a stick shift and every single time I got in it, I was sure I could never get out, and I’d have to basically throw my upper body out the car and hope for the best, all in front of a bunch of perky ass teenagers with incredible optimism and zest for life while I attempted to launch myself out of a small, rusty vehicle. Who am I and how did I get here. I woke up every day for three weeks thinking, I cannot do this. I would give anything to not get dressed.
11. My other favorite is the two weeks with Arlo when every time I laid down, contractions would begin – every night for two weeks – and when I got up, they’d stop. They would stop. So I couldn’t sleep, ever. They just kept me awake. That’s all they did. They didn’t dilate shit. THEY JUST KEPT ME AWAKE FOR TWO WEEKS.
12. I peed 345,000 times a night, and every time I did, I’d gaze at the toilet paper hoping for a spot of blood, or the famed “mucus plug” which literally nobody has ever seen, only to go back to bed and have fake contractions for funsies.
13. How about that time I decided, in a fit of unbridled desperation, to drink castor oil to induce labor and all I did was shit for nine hours? That was cool.
14. There is no dignity left. I walk like a penguin. Nothing fits me and I don’t even care any more. If one more person texts me to ask if I’m still pregnant, I will in fact kill you. And then, the woman due two weeks after me, has her baby before me, and I am in a heap on the ground telling my husband we need to “try sex again.”

So yeah. Check it out. The last month of pregnancy is complete and total BULLSHIT and you get to be pissed about it no matter how grateful you are to be pregnant and nobody gets to tell you to be grateful because your entire body is hijacked and surely god or nature or whatever the hell made the last portion of pregnancy a total nightmare so we’re willing to go through labor, which is rad, because baby, newborn breath, and a vague remembrance of what it’s like to not be MISERABLE PRETTY MUCH ALL THE TIME.

Take it easy. Take it real easy. One moment at a time. Eat what you want, wear what you want, tell the world to fuck off and just be, however you can. And next time you’re thinking you’re the only one this miserable, think about potato suppositories.

I’m with you, sister.

You know what’s awful? When I see this, I MISS IT. Somebody help me.

***

You know what REALLY helps authors? When you preorder their book.

Also, real talk: I do not put anything in my ass in this whole book. 

We can all take comfort in that little factoid.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think I like my dog better than everyone on the planet except my kids but even that is questionable. Did I say that out loud?

We have a blue heeler named August West. We call him Auggie. When we  got him, our Labrador had just passed away and because my husband and I are ruthlessly devoted to questionable decisions, we got another dog right away and consequently I looked at Auggie as a rude interloper and pathetic substitute for what I really wanted.

Trying to understand my feelings, I googled “Getting a new dog after your dog dies” and read about 900 articles suggesting that one shouldn’t get a dog immediately after a dog dies because the new dog will seem like a pathetic substitute and rude interloper.

Weird.

So then I was grieving both my dog and the addition of a new dog who I low-key hated, which added guilt and shame to my already mountainous guilt and shame surrounding the sudden death of my Labrador.

In short, I believed Auggie was an astronomical mistake, and yet, one I could not, or would not, ignore.

He was this round black and white spotted little thing with soft, floppy ears and keen, engaged eyes. We said he looked like a fat seal. George noticed one of the markings on his side was in the shape of a heart.

And he is a fucking working dog. I knew if I didn’t train him thoroughly, giving him all kinds of jobs, he would find himself a job, and it would probably be Eat The House.

So, against a large portion of my desire, I devoted myself to training our August West, who, in case you aren’t familiar, is the alcoholic in the Grateful Dead song “Wharf Rat.”

What.

So there I was forcing myself outside with this dog multiple times a day, taking him to puppy training where he would leap for the sky in pursuit of other puppies while I stood on the leash (as directed by the teacher), thereby causing him to occasionally do these gravity-defying acrobatic flips in the air.

I was convinced Auggie was the worst pup in the class with the worst parents.

But I kept going on account of the house-eating situation.

And one day, I noticed something. I noticed the fat seal learned commands by about the tenth time we did it. I noticed he looked at me and cocked his head to one side, waiting for the next command. I noticed he followed me around the house like a duckling behind its mama.

He appeared, in a word, to exist just for me, and I noticed.

I taught him to sit, stand, go down, and wait. I taught him fetch and “leave it” and “catch it.” I taught him to shake hands, sit on my right and my left. I taught him to go around behind me and come to the front of me. I taught him to walk on a leash, stop when I stop, go when I go, sit when I pause.

And as we worked together, I noticed that when I was with him, I was free of the pain in my brain. He came a few days after my dog died, six weeks after my grandmother was murdered, and 12 weeks after my grandfather died. He came in the middle of me writing my memoir on alcoholism and motherhood.

He came when I was enduring a pain I had never known, and reliving through my writing a pain I believed would never be surpassed.

I noticed that when I was with him, I was in my body, on the ground – outside of the swirling mess in my brain — communicating with an animal intuitively connected with me. It was so simple, so loving, so tangible:

Sit. Correction. Sit. Correction. Sit. Success. Treat.

It wasn’t vague or complex or twisted up in emotion. It felt clean, direct, and pure.

It was a dog watching me, observing me, learning me, and me, learning him, committed to teaching him, and what I noticed is that one day I looked at that fucking dog and realized he was healing me.

After I’d write a section of my book that tore my heart into shreds, I’d head outside with Auggie and sometimes I’d give him whole strings of commands with signals only. No words. No sounds. Just a couple of friends working together.

The way he watches me. The way he sits in front of me, waiting, observing, at the ready. The way he jumps on my bed when I’m resting, puts his paw on my chest as if he’s patting me. The way he wags his tail when I say his name, and sleeps on the kitchen rug while I cook.

I have never loved a dog like this. (Don’t tell my last dog, who I loved, too. But this is like WEIRD.) I didn’t even know this was possible, and I wonder if it’s because he came when I was pissed off and broken and full of terrified rage, and I was committed to protecting myself from humans, from the violence and agony they cause, and here comes Auggie as if to say, “Okay but you never said anything about fat seal pups. Can you let me in?”

There’s that Dead song that says “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

For me, I guess it was a dog I wasn’t ready for.

Also, HE WAS TOTALLY NOT ALLOWED ON THE BED. I AM IN COMPLETE CONTROL.

*****

“Fiercely talented word-warrior Janelle Hanchett grabs your guts with her frank, brutally funny, and moving memoir of modern motherhood and addiction. You won’t want to let go of this book.”

―Ann Imig, editor of Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now