We have one car that’s a champion in the snow but mice have crawled up inside the dashboard and nested in the airbag system. My warning light has been illuminated as reminder that when I fishtail and throw a 360 on slick, icy roads, I’m SOL save for a rodent family that might shoot out the steering wheel to cushion the impact. Considering the size, weight and non-absorbent make-up of the average mouse, I’ve decided to mostly stay home even though the lack of cleaning apparatus and chill of strained relations makes me want to crawl out of my itchy, winter-dry skin and flee to Florida where I hear it’s 80 and humid and there’s no such thing as chapped lips.

I suppose in this confinement, I should continue the job search I began a few days before the X-mas break wherein I write and re-write cover letters and resumes in order to send on-line responses to job listings in which I am only vaguely interested, those that appear on Monster and Craig’s List, knowing all the while that my ten years as a Landscape Designer don’t translate into value as a paralegal or administrative assistant or pharmaceutical representative but there’s always hope that some firm will see that the individual who ran her own company, wrote for a newspaper and also did time in the accounts department in an advertising firm, can and will learn this office stuff quickly and, in the interim, can probably manage the phones and tend to the ailing tropical plants suffering for light beneath the fluorescents.

I make it sound sort of optional, this employment thing but really it’s dire. In the last days of ‘08 we learned that MBH’s company would no longer be covering health insurance for dependents. So we have the expense of three on our plate in the New Year which makes for leaner times in our already skinny lives. And then there’s the latest confession – that neither of us can take one more day in the house together as a couple; working, sleeping, eating, pretending. And so we’re trying to find a way to swing rent. Some way to give ourselves some breathing room. It may, in the end, save us. Or it just may allow us to sever things in a civil manner. Either way, we see the expense as non-optional.

In order to clear the way for this added financial hit, I cancel newspaper subscriptions, I dial back the minutes on the cell phone, I cancel cable and stare meaningfully at the high-speed internet access bill wondering if we can survive on a dial-up. Wondering if the dial-up option still exists? We are wearing long underwear and turning down the thermostats. The dog shivers in her dog bed. The kids play hours of Wii and we let them, because school’s out and the wind blows negative temperatures and it’s free and we ignore their computer game dependence because their bug eyed attention to Madden ‘09 somehow assuages our guilt.

We have yet to break the news to the kids, this separation, which will confuse and disturb them even more than it does us (if that’s possible). And then there is the news to share that we are taking a leave of absence from the Country Club which really doesn’t affect their Winter lives but will completely rock their summer-time existence. I keep reminding myself that there are worse things to suffer than no swim team or tennis or golf but I feel really, really badly about this one. Possibly because we gaveth and now we taketh away. It’s one thing not to know what your missing, it’s another to miss something you once really, really enjoyed. They have friends there. They have known the sweet laze of sultry afternoons spent licking watermelon drips from their sticky arms and jumping in the chill pool to rinse their skin clean. They have known the smell of fresh mown grass on the fairway. They have known the distinct sound of tennis balls bouncing on a clay court. They have learned how to drag the brush and groom the court after play without filling their tennis shoes with clay granules. They have dressed in a sun dress and sandals and little boy khakis with a starched button-down to attend the awards ceremony at summer’s end where they receive recognition for sportsmanship and effort and achievement. They have known what it feels like to belong to this safe place, a place of well-to-do families and blue skies and a snack bar. I feel sad about a lot of things, but mostly I feel sad that I can’t continue to give them the things they have come to know as normal.

So here’s hoping that somehow, some of the next 364 days will find a way to be truly better than this one. Less uncertain and bleak and fearful and nostalgic. And here’s hoping your ‘09 is a good one, better than the last, even if your last wasn’t all that bad, because who doesn’t deserve even better?

The hushed quiet of the private therapy room, free of the canned sounds of reception, is breathless and cool. Though it is dark, it is not dreary and there is some comfort in the fact that there is a Kleenex box and asian art work and a bowl of hard candies, butterscotch or peppermint, sickly sweet confections in a bowl, an oral diversion meant to ease the complexity of discussions about “relationship hygene” and the purpose of sexual encounters “to engage feelings of vulnerability and aggression which we have come to think of as taboo emotions and regularly suppress such frailties in most non-sexual human interactions.”

One can tell that much thought has been given to the arrangement of furniture in these therapy spaces. My personal therapist likes to sit in a straight backed chair pulled up to her desk while inviting me to take the seat that is directly adjacent to that desk. She can swivel to face me and put her feet up on the file cabinet. There is a window behind her and the filtered light illuminates the wisps of her short hair, glowing gold in the darkness of the room. Her visage is cast in shadow, completing the effect of deliberate anonymity. She is faceless, haloed even, playing the angel of benevolence whose expression I cannot read for the corona that surrounds her.

And our marriage therapist has his own contrived arrangement. He prefers a deep arm chair that faces a wide leather couch. There are two other arm chairs beside this couch. To sit one of these chairs would be to face the wall rather than the professionally dressed man who has greeted us gently, quiet but stern, paternally ushering us through the door. So we both sink into opposite corners of the long couch. We prefer to meet his gaze than that of one another, having shared a chilly car ride, a week of reserved hostility and patient withholding.

I get the feeling that he is making note of our seat selection. That our choice to sit together on the couch, however far apart, my habit of holding the throw pillow in my lap, hugging it to my chest as if for protection, tells him something about us as a couple, about the state of the connubial union. I only wish I could see the note he’s made next to “seat selection” – hopeless, helpless, hopeful, fucked. He must play a little game with himself. Upon first meeting a troubled couple, he must try to predict the outcome ahead of time, tagging the duo with some sort of premature prediction. He is, perhaps, keeping score of his ability to predetermine a couple’s destiny based solely on the place they choose to sit when first entering the inner sanctum.

But I have to believe we are learning things beyond where to place our fannies. Conversely, I fear that the learning, the progress, is supposed to be more efficient in its development, neatly packaged within the 50 minute therapy window, reaching its weekly conclusion by the end of each billable hour, when, in fact, we’ve both just managed to open a vein and are in the midst of a full soulful bleed on the oriental carpet when our fifty minutes have elapsed.

Almost as if there is an audible chime, a programmed alarm bell, we are ejected into the harsh glare of day, into the parking lot of our lives without the benefit of soft sounds and cushioned chairs and hard candies. We bleed and ooze a collective flow of unhappiness upon the pavement. And all the way home we wish for the mediator, the third party to help us frame and present our individual view points in a more palatable and digestible manner. I have thought to ask him how much it would cost to take him home with us for the week where he might spend some real time dissecting our likenesses, our differences, where he might really get a feel for the state of the union and can say, after seven short days, hopeless, helpless, hopeful, fucked with some measure of authority. That would be easier somehow than this slow burn that is perhaps progress and perhaps not and only time and countless seating arrangements will tell.

And the responses, the comments, the e-mails and the willingness of those who I’ve known in this space for a few years now to offer me their personal time, to offer a phone call, an objective ear and the symbolic shoulder of quiet support, has been an overwhelming boost to me. I know that like minded people gravitate toward one another, like kindred souls who end up in the same book stores, who frequent the same restaurants because they both adore the french onion soup, the blogosphere acts as a much more infectious and effective facilitator. We end up at each others’ blogs nodding our heads in sympathetic recognition, laughing, sharing, weeping through the complexities of this collective life.

It’s a humbling experience to be able to emote in this forum and to have that emotional outlay met with infinite understanding and little bits of wisdom. It’s as if a dear friend hears your call, your plea, even your quiet little whimpers and comes rushing over with a pint of ice cream and The English Patient on DVD and you sit side by side watching one of the greatest love stories of all time while eating Chunky Monkey from carton and wiping your noses on your shirt sleeves – that’s what this blogging thing is for me – comfort and acceptance and the knowledge that others, others with wisdom and intellect and darn good stories to tell, have also endured all manner of shit and lived to tell about it (unless of course your the husband in the English Patient who decided to fly his plane into a sand dune instead of doing the hard work which is required to achieve “lived to tell about it” status).

And while no one can say a damn thing that makes it all better, there is something very powerful in your verbal acuity, your willingness to recognize and acknowledge my situation as familiar or acceptable and to even share your personal anecdotes about your own marital difficulties. I am forever grateful for your cyber-companionship. I see people on a daily basis who do not know me anywhere near as well as you all know me because they do not know my mind.

This blogging thing makes for odd and unorthodox friendships but they are real and important connections that deserve to be acknowledged.

And so I leave you with some wise words I found in my in-box earlier this week as an example of the very thing that gets me through the day,

CCE, Your situation has been brewing for some time and has had a million tiny moments and choices to get you here. It is going to take time to deconstruct the myriad rudders to find which one, or which combination, will turn things again. I still maintain that you’ll inevitably find yourself doing the slow work of constructing a narrative for your life that’s going to put everything else in perspective. I don’t know what that is but I know it’s bigger than you and more than now. And I still say that faith that things will work out may well be the thing that, in the end, makes things work out.

Tiny moments, choices, slow construction, perspective, faith, bigger than you, more than now…all good things to ponder at this juncture. Thank you.

And, as an aside, I told you the peonies were primed to bloom. The picture included here is just a sample of what’s exploding in my garden this week. For that and for all of you, I am thankful.

So there is the state of things…one big hassled frenzy, a breath taking whirlwind before the pause and linger of summer which should be spent poolside, sipping lemonade and reading mindless fiction but somehow, these next few months don’t seem to hold the promise of that quiet languor.

First there is the fact that, with nowhere left to go but up, My Better Half and I are attempting to make some changes. I wish I could call this team work but it feels more like each of us embarking on an individual and private effort to find some stable ground. It’s been shifting and tilting away from us for awhile and this is the moment, the crucial point at which we find ourselves searching for a way back to center.

While I’d like to think that people change, people who really, really want to change can find it in themselves to fight complacency, can recognize the tiny but significant ways they have failed each other and make the minute adjustments necessary for recovery and the sustained health of the marriage, I can’t quite shake the emphatic claim that MBH has made throughout the eleven years of our marriage. Until very, very recently he has been determined and resolute in his opinion that people don’t change, can’t change, won’t change. It was take it or leave it for so long and now, somehow, when leave it became a distinct possibility, he is no longer quite so certain that change is an impossibility.

And while no one sets out to find themselves here, staring at one another over a cup of coffee at a the Heartbreak Cafe, deciding whether or not to split the bill, share the tip and take separate ways at the fork in the road, I think it’s sadly common, almost banal. We aren’t the first people sipping at this bitter brew and we won’t be the last.

There is one jaded but clever waitress here, with her netted hair and her faded work uniform, who tells tales of the few who have decided to endure, who held hands awkwardly while on the way out to the parking lot, who climbed back into the very same beat-up, work horse of a marriage they arrived in and rode off together in some inexplicable state of stubborn devotion.

She says she never hears from these folks again. She tells it like it’s a good thing, this silence. She claims that only the lonely and the sorry send her postcards. The others, the few, that made it out together have each other. And that makes her glad.

While this shift from mean spirited withholding to lightness and love is, at first, subtle, by mid-May it’s firecrackers and a full symphony. First there is the Forsythia and daffodils, all that yellow hopefulness just sticking up, bare naked from the dark, raw earth, the portent of something more spectacular to come. Then there are the tulips and hyacinths, cheerful beginnings, the miniature companions to the viburnum and the lilacs.

While the lilacs flush late May, their perfume fills the backyard spaces with the scent of Paris. Mother Nature is wordly that way, dropping a little bit of France right down in suburban Massachusetts. And just as the lavender and white of the lilacs begin to brown, she turns it up a notch, like an apology for lilac endings. There is the sudden promise of peonies, their globular blooms standing high and hopeful against the barely open drifts of purple cat mint. The Lily of the Valley put on their tiny white, intensely fragrant bells while the irises open to reveal the complicated folds of yellow, garnet and purple flowers. Paper thin, flouncy and loud, the iris is the garden’s equivalent to Great Aunt Emma in her garish hat and ruffled party dress.

The Therese Bugnet rose bush is, all at once, covered in buds. She offers up a handful of open flowers each morning, the deep, sweet fragrance of a rugosa rose on the air at dawn. The foxglove behind her has decided to play along, a spire of dappled blooms drooping from its one stalk, a botanical oddity, a high school student without a prom date, alone and awkwardly fancy in her polka dots.

And there are yellow, familiar day lilies sprinkled about and bouncing on the breeze. Their cheerful faces like ordinary folk, casual and comfortable and somehow reassuring in their dungarees and lightly stained t-shirts. They are all of us, the lady at the check out, the reliable mail man, taken for granted because they are decent and accessible.

And of course there is the 30 foot shrub outside the dining room window that Mother Nature has decorated with a million light violet bursts of early June. Her rhododendron, the true harbinger of summer, has been dolled up, trotted out, her majesty’s most magnificent display of affection, the three tiered cake at the end of the gala. You are drunk and sated, made slightly vulnerable by all these offerings and so you say, “I accept. I forgive. Now bring on the delicate white shower of the Bridal Wreath and all that February hopelessness will be forgotten.”

Fairy art courtesy of Fairy Art Postcards

I’m also behind on almost everything else. There are outstanding bills left to pay, the bedrooms haven’t been dusted and vacuumed in over a week and the downstairs, while clean just last Sunday, is already sullied with the clutter of school papers and muddy rubber boots and pet hair and the grime of three meals a day at the bottom of the kitchen sink.

Our dear friends who moved to California last summer are back to town for a brief visit. They will come for dinner tomorrow. I have a meal to plan and prepare. This weekend we are off to Cape Cod and I’ve agreed to handle Saturday’s cook out, steak and Italian chopped salad and a birthday cake in celebration of our hostesses’ 35th birthday. And MBH and I will have been married eleven years on Friday and, of all our eleven years, this month just happens to have been our hardest yet, leaving us both unsure about whether to celebrate this one or just ignore it. And I’m in charge of planning third grade field day which falls on Friday of next week. And, did I mention that I drank way, way too much wine last night and have all this to tackle while trying to keep my head from wobbling off my fragile neck.

Forgive me the lame post. You know what I’ll be doing today. Wish me great efficiency. I know I’ll feel better when the fire-breathing to-do list has been slayed.

Apparently Mark and his wife have found some sort of connubial equilibrium by,

“each keeping a notebook in which we record all the things the other does that are wrong. They plan to compare notebooks on their deathbeds to determine who was the better person.

But in the meantime, they’ve realized that they haven’t had an effective way of handing out both praise and criticism. That is, until now. From here on out, they’ve decided to issue annual spousal performance reviews.”

Hopefully Mark won’t mind that I’ve put the Madmarriage through the same corporate stress test and come up with the following performance review for myself and My Better Half:

CCE’s 2008 Spousal Performance Review

DOMESTIC SKILLS
Rating: Over Achiever.
Comments: CCE has been known to spend whole evenings organizing shoes in the mudroom and vacuuming the dog. There is no question that she sets exacting and impossible standards, unafraid to work overtime in the pursuit of cleanliness and the perfect pie crust. She must, however, continue to try and manage her own frustration that other team members often fail to reach projected cleanliness goals and will continue to incite her wrath over black finger print smudges on the door jambs and dirty socks on the bedroom floors. CCE needs to work on delegation skills, leaving at least a few household chores for Her Better Half seeing as there are only twenty four hours in a day, eight of which should be spent sleeping. She needs to trust that he can, indeed, manage to do a load of laundry without causing second floor flooding or an incremental bleed of red towels on white t-shirts.

BEDROOM ACUMEN
Rating: Meets standards.
Comments: CCE is a fit and attractive 30-ish female who strives to meet deadlines, milestones and objectives in the bedroom when she’s not too exhausted, drunk or impossibly irritated with her BH. She has recognizable trouble switching between housekeeper, mother and sex goddess roles and often fails to apply her imagination in thinking outside the 11-years-of-monogamy-box. This being said, we think that CCE’s bedroom acumen could be improved by her BH’s attentive fawning to include fresh cut flowers and the simple purchase of a some edible chocolate body paint, a swing and a healthy dose of Xanax. CCE has great potential in this department. We hate to see her fall short of her obvious ability to reign supreme and excellent in all things bedroom.

PARENTING
Rating: Achieves standards.
Comments: CCE successfully straddles the line between knowing when to be supportive and encouraging (when youngest child is streaking towards the goal in last week’s soccer game) or downright neglectful (when American Idol or tournament tennis is on television). She is not afraid to administer punishments for failure to replace the cap on the toothpaste and is not above eliciting peak performance from her children by withholding dessert for minor offenses. While subordinates complain that she can be a real “ball-buster”, we think CCE epitomizes perfection in the parental management department and has even been known to show her soft side every now and again by planning impromptu trips to the playground or the bowling alley.

PUNCTUALITY
Rating: Over Achiever.
Comments: While CCE is never ever late for anything, there is such a thing as pathologically punctual. We appreciate the inner and exacting clock by which CCE operates but would caution her that it is really not necessary to proceed scheduled play date times by twenty minutes. And we reiterate our belief that no matter how anxious she is to make a good impression, no dinner party hostess really wants her invited guests to arrive “right on time”. A fifteen minute lag is expected and appreciated and often means the difference between said hostess finishing her shower and blow drying her hair. Because the attention to detail in the punctuality department borders on excessive perhaps CCE could go and hang out for a week with her mother-in-law who has never been on-time for anything and the two could sort of rub up against each other and moderate the other’s tendencies into something more decent and acceptable.

OVERALL RATING/GOALS
Rating: Achieves or exceeds standards.
Comments: CCE continues to lead by example in all household matters (even making beds while occupants are still dozing and frequently considering driving the cats to the nearest quarry for possible abandonment if that’s what is necessary to cut down on excessive pet hair on the couch). In the coming year, she should consider cloning herself in order to save her sanity. Overall, CCE is a good wife when not being a complete “ball buster”.

CCE’s Better Half 2008 Spousal Performance Review

DOMESTIC SKILLS
Rating: Needs improvement.
Comments: CCE’s Better Half, here on in referred to as BH is still learning how to be an asset rather than a detriment to the household management program. While his instincts in this arena are good, (who doesn’t love a guy who likes to play video games and board games and allow children to play in the mud on the way to the bus stop), BH needs to commit more time to the more banal aspects of the job (i.e., dog walking, cat litter changing, planning for business trips rather than panicking the night before heading out to Cincinnati when he realizes that all his dress shirts are still in a wad at the bottom of the suitcase in the spare bedroom since his last trip to Grand Rapids0. BH could also use a week’s worth of continuing education classes on topics such as preparing healthy family meals outside of his current comfort zone which includes fried pizza and the drive-thru at BK, how to romance one’s business partner with simple gestures like spontaneous phone calls, appreciative notes and the ability to discuss financial matters without exploding into a rage.

BEDROOM ACUMEN
Rating: Satisfactory.
Comments: While BH claims to consistently meets his own deadlines, milestones and objectives, he isn’t always a team player and consistently misses obvious ways to establish bedroom business relationships such as actually entering the bedroom when CCE is still awake, sometime before 1 a.m., which would require deliberately skipping a three-hour web surfing session which seems to occupy his evening hours on most occasions.

PARENTING
Rating: Achieves standards on occasion.
Comments: BH often meets his six year old’s expectations playing court jester to her queen. She favorably and affectionately refers to her father as “a big child” and therefore expects little but laughter and unconditional love. BH’s eight year old son is a little more demanding and suffers the internet obsession acutely, often commenting on BH’s inability to peel himself away from he lure of the computer during non-business hours. BH is often unavailable for discipline, hygiene, safety, scheduling, education and appropriate outerwear selection routines and prefers to delegate these responsibilities to partners and sub-ordinates. “BH is an exceedingly loving parent, when he remembers he is one.”

PUNCTUALITY
Rating: Questionable.
Comments: Yes, BH is always on time but only because CCE is a worthy task-master.

OVERALL RATING/GOALS
Rating: Achieves standards.
Comments: BH is part of the marriage. In the coming year, he should strive to replace rotting wood on the exterior of the house, remember to call his mother and father who live in Florida on occasion, like on their birthdays, and put away the growing stack of clean clothes CCE has efficiently washed and folded and placed smack in front of his bureau. If household budget allows, he also should take a course in how to endure television programming that he may find insanely boring, (i.e., Hell’s Kitchen and pre-recorded French Open matches) in order to better spend time with his wife and appreciate just being close to her and holding her hand.

Somehow Spring and baseball and my inquisitive six year old who has recently begun peppering me with questions like, What’s your favorite adjective and What’s your favorite feeling remind me of a dear college friend with whom I’ve sadly lost touch but who wrote me a remarkable letter just before the birth of my son. This friend was a really gifted baseball player and is still, I’m guessing, a darn good athlete and a terrific pal to those he hangs with in Santa Monica. I’ll share his sentiments of my impending parenthood that he sent me way back in 1999 because he seemed to know a little more than I did about what I was getting into.

“Congratulations, CCE. You’re going to be a great Mom. I think you remember when my little sister, Phoebe, was born our freshman year in college. Well, Phoebe is growing up. She’s six now. She takes piano lessons and attends the same Kindergarten I went to. She plays softball and soccer on the same fields on which I played. But the coolest thing about Phoebe is, well, how cool she is. Now I can sit down with Phoebe and have a conversation with her. I crack jokes and she laughs hysterically. I show her pictures from around the world and teach her about different places and she’s able to listen. She’s interested and interesting. And at the coffee house where my family gathers every morning, after she applies way too much cream cheese to her bagel, she sits back and watches people and makes small talk with strangers.

I’ve gotten carried away talking about my sister Phoebe but my point is that to create a little person that will someday, not too far off, sit across the table from you at a coffeehouse and ask you repeatedly about your favorite color and your favorite song is just awesome. Until that day, good luck with all the diapers. I mean, if it wasn’t for diapers, I’d be having kids tomorrow.”

And while I couldn’t quite imagine what he was talking about at the time, (as predicted, the two infants that I produced shortly after receiving his letter in no way resembled this Phoebe-character he described, no small talk with strangers, no soccer or softball or Kindergarten or bagels, but there were an awful lot of diapers), suddenly, right on schedule, I find myself spending the chill spring evenings kicking a soccer ball around with a team of six year old girls. I rush two children through homework assignments and piano practice and try mightily to set realistic limitations for television and video game consumption. I make breakfast, lunch and dinner to the constant banter of two developing little people who are exploring the reasons for everything in the universe, things as profound as poverty and as banal as public swimming pools and belly buttons.

And while I’m not too sure that I’m all that good at tackling these important topics, my answers to their queries are mostly inadequate, I’m still amazed by the little thinkers that have recently sprouted from toddlers of the chubby cheeks and the downy hair and the flat, flat Flintstone feet. And while each afternoon is a challenge akin to a final exam, a defended thesis, I can honestly say that they are now interested and interesting little people, even if they do exhaust me with their almost academic pursuit of knowledge.

So I do my best. Here is a typical fifteen minute conversation with my G who, now six, has officially become the Phoebe-character of my friend’s letter,

G: “What’s you’re favorite adjective?”
Me: “Well that’s like having to pick your favorite font. It’s just impossible to say with any absolute conviction. It’s so mood dependent. Today, my favorite adjective is ‘winsome’.”

G: “What’s your favorite feeling?”
Me: “Unequivocally – happiness.”

G: “Why do we have belly buttons?”
Me: “Because that is how you and I were attached when you were floating around in my belly waiting to be born. There was a long cord that connected us via your belly button.”
G: “So that’s how you kept track of me, with a leash?”
Me: “Well, not exactly, it had more to do with nutritional exchanges and blood flow and all that good stuff.”
G: “Well, how did I get in your belly anyway? How are babies put in bellies?”
Me: “That’s a conversation for another day. Okay, sweet pea?”

G: “When was the last time you ate whip cream?”
Me: “Oh, I don’t know. A month ago. At Starbucks when I forgot to order my Frappuccino without it.”
G: “When do you think I last had whipped cream?”
Me: “Last month at Fuddruckers, on your milk shake?”
G: “Wrong. Today. I had whipped cream today on my jello at school.”

G: “How was the first person ever born? The first person couldn’t have had a mother, right?”
Me: “Right, people evolved from apes. Kind of changed over time and became human.”
G: “So the first person was a monkey?”
Me: “Yup.”
G: “So where did monkeys come from?”
Me: “Well, all creatures probably evolved from one basic organism that inhabited the earth a long time ago and differentiated over time into things like frogs and rabbits and monkeys and eventually humans.”
G: “You mean I was once a zebra?”
Me: “Not exactly.”
G: “I didn’t think so because I don’t have hooves or stripes or a tail.”
Me: “All sure signs that you were never a zebra. Correct. Bedtime. Thank God. Bedtime.
G: “Okay. Bedtime. Can I read a little?”
Me: “You can do whatever you want as long as it’s silent and doesn’t involve another question.”

Today, after school, I think I should bring her to the local coffee house and let her exhaust perfect strangers with her ceaseless curiosity because I am clean out of answers.

G sat close, absorbing the warmth of the popping fire. She crouched, rocking back on her rubber garden-boot heels and asked questions about the invention of fire and the purpose of stars and the reason for the strange colors she sees on the back of her eyelids even when her eyes are shut tight against the flames. She barely took a breath between queries, a stymieing slough of innocent wonderments for which I had no absolute answers. I just stood quietly off to the side feeding the hungry fire, one limb after another. I added a large severed branch from the old beech tree that lines the drive. The gnarled tree-arm was still holding on to all its paper thin leaves. Like delicate black butterflies, they quickly darkened and broke free of the fire. Floating on warm drafts of rising air, they spiraled and danced, filling the sky with their funereal confetti, the burn of one dead tree rising like hope and then falling about our shoulders like the end of something beautiful.

After all, what mother hasn’t cooed with pride over their infant’s first mecomium stool, that greenish black slick that is all the evidence an anxious new parent needs that their darling new baby possesses the very same digestive track as all other healthy babies the world over. There is comfort in this sameness. Expectations fulfilled. One off-colored elimination and the entire family is exhaling a collective sigh of relief.

And then there is the issue of the new mother’s own ability to defecate. Without a proper bowel movement, she is a prisoner in the maternity ward. More stool softeners are administered. Nurses talk in hushed whispers about her inability to poop as if it is a sign of this mother’s mental weakness. They have forgotten just how startlingly and scarring it is to pass a watermelon size creature from the vagina. They are focused on forcing this poor woman with the stitches to produce yet another expulsion that will surely tear her insides out, will lead to internal bleeding and the end of a perfectly good birthing experience. There is a stand-off. Armed guards stand at the bathroom door and order her performance. She will weep softly and pretend she has shat. They will rush in and insist on seeing the evidence and the new mother is forced to admit she has lied. Back to toilet for another attempt. Hours drag on before she achieves the successful void which is celebrated and admired and practically wrapped up along with the flowers and the teddy bears and the swaddled infant as souvenir of this important life changing event.

Now safely home with baby in arms, the true shit talking begins. There are long battles waged about whose turn it is to drag themselves from bed to change yet another diaper, change the whole outfit, the entire crib, in fact, because another runny infant stool has crept beyond the gathered leg pleats of even the most absorbent nappy and has stained the sheets and spoiled the cute footy-pajamas with the moons and stars.

This ritual grows tiresome, like Ground Hog day with diaper genies and Huggies’ wipes and changing table pads.

And somehow, in all its shit-filled sameness, life just sort of flies by until a person finds themselves suddenly parenting a child capable of crapping their pants at a zoo-themed birthday party even though they’ve been ‘potty trained’ for months. Just as quickly, they are Mom to an eight year old little boy who is crying as he clutches the porcelain, ‘It hurts Mommy, it hurts. Make it stop.” And without reaching up there to extract the compacted stool herself, she is powerless to help the child experiencing the distinct pain of his first anal fissure. Apricots are administered. A Sids bath is drawn. There is hand holding and supportive cheers while the boulder of poop is finally excreted. It is a monumental turd that refuses to be flushed away. It threatens to remain their as evidence of the ill effects of too many chicken finger/french fry combos for time eternal until someone gags their way through the process of breaking it up into flushable sized portions.

Because this defecation thing is something we all must do on a regular basis and because we parents have become sort of inured to the relative disgustingness of such discussions, 225,000 copies of What’s Your Poo Telling You? have been sold and the Poo Quality Index has become a popular topic at dinner parties, on episodes of Oprah and at play groups alike.

(I am happy to report that I have yet to discuss the PQI with anyone over tapas and dirty martinis or while standing attentively just to the right of the monkey bars. I’m not sure the suburban town in which I reside is ready for discussions about feces. But have no fear, I will probably make this social blunder very soon as I have a compulsive need to bring up shocking matters at regular intervals just to ensure that I am not too well liked in this town of 30,000 judgmental mom-types.)

Perhaps I am so comfortable with discussions of colon performance because I endured months and months of undignified testing in order for doctor’s to determine that my intestines are truly unique and mysterious and that no matter how many colonoscopies are conducted or stool samples collected and placed into small vials and stirred with little plastic spoons in preparation for lab analysis, no one is going to be able to determine the exact reason for my inner turmoil. The ability to sit in a room with a male doctor and exchange colorful commentary about one’s recent performance on the seat-of-ease is definitely an acquired skill. No matter how professional and gravely serious this doctor is about the topic, initially, there is that awkward silence that is you trying to determine just how much is too much information. I mean he’s asking but does he really, really want to know?

There is a distinct feeling that anything you say or do in regard to your bowel movements can and will be used against you in a future episode of Candid Camera. Such is the nature of the topic. But the success of the book and my ability to discuss poop for an entire and lengthy blog posting is evidence that we’re all in this together. To void or not to void has never been at question.