Upon finishing another gut-gripping essay in Anne Lamott’s Grace book, I reel. Thoughts and inspirations of essays come flying at me, like in a mountain snowstorm, driving late at night while tennis ball-sized glaring white snowflakes fling wildly against the windshield, as if in a tunnel of white madness. And here in my head, madness roars.

I think about the raw thingys in my life I can be writing about: the pathetically torn black panties that I continue to wear because I dream and fantasize about the guy who will rip them off me—the fact that I don’t currently have a lover doesn’t even phase me, because I know he will come. (Arrive. Knock on my door. Appear.)

Although I was never an alcoholic (with the exception of the time I swiftly downed a whole glass or two of Oozo, because of a guy, of course and becoming comatose after praying into the toilet, I saw angels, dancing in a circle, in the place where my third eye is) Annie and I both acted as if we relied on “drugs” for many years.  Raw thingy number two and my personal drug of choice: struggling with obsessive compulsiveness in my childish childhood habit of putting my middle finger in my mouth and sucking (of course I’d much prefer a body part related to the love of my life yet since I didn’t have a lover, my finger substituted in my increasing orally fixated wants/needs). It’s a habit I’d spent endless time wrestling with, until I met this powerful teacher.

I'm a professional Caregiver. It’s a most rewarding career, as I learn from every client that I spend time with. This woman, who I’ll call Sonia, was telling me about her drug of choice and how she quit. For many years, Sonia was a cigarette smoker. Then one evening, while absentmindedly reaching for a cigarette and finding that she was out, she panicked. That’s when the epiphany came to her: “I didn’t own me, the cigarette owned me.” I balked, I felt as if I was hit over by an out-of-control tennis racket. (That says a lot about my own will power that is about as firm as a stretched-out rubber band.) I asked her how she handled it; when she wanted another one and the desire and drug were too much—did she cave in, I wanted to know? “I had freedom when I quit. I realized that I was completely free, when I stopped smoking.” I loved her story. She is my new hero. Me, I believe in caving in—regularly—no matter what it is.

On the note of heroes, I keep thinking that Anne and I should be best friends—after all, we are both single parents and have been, for years, our teenagers the same age, both are an only child and Anne and I seemingly wild artistic souls whose love for our babies teeter on insanity. One minute we are madly in love and the next—passionately wanting to strangle.

In fact, when I first birthed my daughter, Hayley and I was reading Operating Instructions, I thought, why the hell isn’t Lamott being charged for abuse—if not physical, then mental? How can she get away with this stuff? Now, I look back with envy. How come I wasn’t writing my true thoughts about the painful side of breastfeeding, when Hayley’s innocent mouth felt like daggers digging into my yeast-infected nipples and we passed the yeast around, from her mouth to my nipples and back. You could have peeled me off the ceiling, back then.

I breastfed Hayley until she was over five years old. The yeast infection was resolved and Hayley and I were both addicted to the closeness, the nurturing and the healing affects of my milk when she wasn’t feeling well. Plus, it beats the heck out of listening to a crying, whining child when all we had to do was attach her mouth to my nipple, bringing sweet silence and a surge of hormones, like I had just smoked the best pot. What could beat those natural highs?  

Anne also wrote on Salon (and I write on Opensalon—not quite the same rah rah, since anyone and everyone can begin a blog on Opensalon, yet still, it’s in the family). See how much we have in common, Anne?

In her simplicity, Anne and I also have in common our circling of stories—how we begin at one point, stray all over the world as we go, then come full-circle to our original point. And it doesn’t need to be earth shattering. Like Buddhist beliefs, it just is. Shot guns don’t go off, horns don’t announce endings—or beginnings, for that matter—the epiphany lies in the gentle shift of the breeze, as the in and out of the breathing of the ocean. Life isn’t really about sudden and terrific evolutions—these take time, especially if change is something that makes you break out in a rash in conspicuous places, like me. The subtler the change, the easier my monkey-brain can deal with it and the more evolved and long term it turns out to be.

While after reading some authors’ writings, I feel inspired in a positive way, Lamott motivates the ugly, the unthinkable and the raw out of the deepest part of me.

I never understand how some writers come up with unexpected endings and twists—real life isn’t like that; how do they make that stuff up? I don’t know if I could come up with that stuff if my life depended on it and that’s why I could never seem to write anything capable of being published in either Chicken Soup books or Reader’s Digest. My stories are always too subtle for those readers, too seemingly benign when really they are earth shattering because the shift has already began; it’s not just guns and roses for a New York minute then life back on the range. My changes actually happen. Not to say that these other writers’ don’t; I’m just more realistic about mine...if not teetering on the edge of boring.

Life isn’t about suddenly shouting boo! to someone appearing from around the corner—it’s not about popping kernels of popcorn, after the oil is burning hot. It’s about journeys, consistent paths, seasons of emerging, growing, then dying, to re-seed into earth’s luscious breeding ground where new births always follow.

Coming home from a hike in the mountains, my date d’jour and I see billowing smoke and he decides it’s from crashed plane wreckage because it’s so black. Arriving home, the smoke is several blocks away and I later learn some kids lit matches and set fire to a field, nearby. Hiking around the area the next few days, you could still smell the smoke and the grass was charcoal black.

Just a couple of months later, the grass has grown back, greener than the rest of the field, more vibrant and alive than ever.  

In the not too distant past, my writing was forlorn; I was married to a man who acted like a child; most of the time together we were like preschoolers at Montesorri, doing our own thing in the same room, only not peacefully—we were always at one another’s throats. We’d need a “teacher” full-time—therapist, third party, surrogate parent, etc.—to pull us off one another (when we weren’t fighting we were fucking—both thingys that guys are known to be doing at any available moment). Sure, I could see some of my trials and tribulations as humorous; yet it has been more recently that I am able to take myself less seriously and admire not only my good qualities, my failings, as well. Laughing at myself is pretty much a daily thingy. Someone has to do it.

As I step my legs through my torn black panties, I realize this epiphany: it’s time to drive to Target and buy new, untorn ones. I mean--do my panties own me? As my mother’s generation used to say, you don’t want to be caught with torn panties if for some reason the paramedics arrive to get you and need to pull off all your clothes.