That was the river. This is the sea.

I was listening to this song by The Waterboys the other day and it brought back a sharp memory of the night I left my marriage. It was a Monday evening, and I had walked out of my house with my daughter and a bag of clothes. After dropping her at her best friend’s, which was where she wanted to be, I drove east with the idea of staying in a hotel somewhere. There were numerous doorsteps I knew I could show up on, but I wanted anonymity.

I pulled over on the Miracle Mile in San Rafael and used my phone to book myself a room in the Embassy Suites, a suitably huge and faceless place where I knew I would meet only strangers. Then I drove out to China Camp state park. It was a warm September night, the moon and the stars were out, and this song came on as I pulled off by the side of the road overlooking the marshland and the East Bay’s lights. Now I can see you wavering as you try to decide, you’ve got a war in your head and it’s tearing you up inside...but that was the river, this is the sea...

I got out of the car and I stood looking up at the night sky - Hamlet’s brave o’erhanging firmament, fretted with golden fire. The phrase howling at the moon comes to mind. But instead of howling, I remember that I shouted something out loud to the stars. It would be impossible to describe how I felt at that moment, because it was not one emotion but a whole mess of them. Then I got back in the car and drove to Embassy Suites, where I walked across the giant empty atrium with my single bag, and the smiling receptionist said cheerily, hi there, how has your day been?

My room was enormous, a suite really. A suite for one. I put my bag in the corner of the bedroom, and my toothbrush in the glass in the bathroom and I looked out my third storey window to the parking lot below. I called two close friends, and then I lay down on the bed and wondered when I would ever feel normal again, and what that new normal would be like.

That was the river, and this is the sea...

The metaphor is an apt one. Marriage feels to me a little like a river, with its tug and flow and the familiar banks keeping the water in check. Sure, there are dangers lurking: the odd rapid, sometimes a series of them; periodic threat of river eels or snakes or something uneasily unpleasant just below the surface. But you move along with a river, in the one direction, with a general purpose and the sense of a beginning a middle and an end.

When you leave, you cast yourself into the ocean. It’s vast and uncharted, unfamiliar, fraught with the fear of going under. Everything you knew is back there on the shore. There are waves and storms and frightening creatures of the deep and you have no sense of direction as you flounder around. In the beginning, you are consumed with the effort not to drown.

Leaving a long marriage is a kind of death. You lose so much, and you go through the same phases of grief as when someone dies: shock, pain, guilt, and on and on. And yet, in my experience, there is a prevalent sense in our society that if you chose to leave your marriage, and especially if you are clearly happier since you left, you must be doing just fine. 

When a death happens, people come around. They bring food. There’s a memorial, a way to come together and grieve and remember. There are no markers in our culture for divorce. One day you serve papers. One day you sign the marriage settlement agreement. One day the court-stamped paperwork shows up in your mailbox and your marriage is officially over. I picked mine up on the way to work one day, thirteen months after I left. I drove around seeing patients all day with that manila envelope on my passenger seat.

The night I walked out of my house, I lost my life partner and all our plans and hopes and dreams for the future. I lost my intact family, my house, my pets, most of my possessions, and my neighborhood community. I lost any sense of security. Over time, I also lost some friends. Couples, mostly. People I thought were close friends. The best I can understand it is that for some couples, hanging around with a newly single person is uncomfortable. And all that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what my daughter lost.

Did I choose to lose all those things? Nobody chooses the pain of divorce. They just choose the lesser of two kinds of pain.

Over time, a new Waterboys song became more relevant to me: I shed some light, I change my address, I haven’t felt this great since I first went West. I’ve got brilliant intentions, unthinkable plans, I’ve got sparks and electric shocks just exploding from my hands.

It’s a song called Learning to Fly, and it’s about a guy who is falling in love all over again. Okay, so I’m not a guy, and I’m not falling anywhere. But it was a new metaphor. I’ve always fancied flying and I thought maybe I had spent enough time in the water. And when Mike Scott would sing I’m gonna love you as hard as I can, and I’m never gonna stop, I would think how that might be true for me again some day, and in the meantime, why not lay a little love on myself?

Blogger error: Repost from August

Once again, Blogger spuriously reposted an old blog post of mine, this time from August. Please ignore this morning’s post on buying deerproof plants. Time to move to Wordpress!

Being Quiet

Here in the Bay Area, we are thirteen days into fire air. The Camp Fire, four hours north, has been burning since sunrise on November 8th. It has burned more than 150,000 acres and they don’t think it will be fully contained until November 30th. Now instead of getting out of bed every morning to push the button on my Mr. Coffee, the first thing I do when I wake is check purpleair.com to see how dangerous the air is in my town. Today, November 20th, the PM2.5 count is 176. Still red. Still dangerous to breathe.

PM2.5 are the fine particle air pollutants that our lungs are not built to filter. Fine particulates that are less than 2.5 microns in size travel deeply into the lungs and can cause long-term health problems. We Californians all know more about these particles now than we ever wanted to. San Francisco continues to be the most polluted city on earth, and it probably will be until that longed-for rain, forecast for tomorrow. Meanwhile, we don’t really know what we are breathing. Words like asbestos, lead, toxic waste hover on the periphery of my thinking. I don’t want to let them in. 

Writing about the fire is difficult, because whatever contaminants I am breathing in down here, and however my life has been impacted by having to stay indoors, wear a mask, and limit patient visits, it’s all so minimal compared to the suffering of those up north. The death toll rises daily, though the list of the missing is now getting shorter, after rocketing up to 1200 last weekend. I don’t even know how many people have been displaced. Fire refugees. A new tribe of humans.

So I want to write instead about the curious quiet that has settled over the Bay Area during these smoke-filled days. I drove into San Francisco last Saturday to meet a friend in from Ireland. The weekend before Thanksgiving, the Golden Gate Bridge should have been thronged with tourists. It was like a ghost bridge. Usually towering up proud and gorgeous out of the fog or the sunshine, it loomed out of the smoke like a grieving shadow of itself. 

People are staying indoors. When they go out, many are wearing masks. Many, but not enough. I see folks out with their toddlers and no masks. It breaks my heart because kids breathe so much faster than adults, and metabolize pollutants differently. Their developing brains...asbestos...lead...solvents...yeah. You get the gist.

So it’s one of the biggest holiday weeks in the US and the streets are weirdly empty. It has been a hot, dry, sunny November. A single day of rain so far. But the air is hazy, the sun shines dark gold, even red sometimes through the smoke. And the trees stand still in the breathless murk, hanging on grimly to their rustling dry leaves, waiting for rain.

But it’s the internal quiet that I have noticed. Usually restless and a little over-invested in being ‘productive,’ I find I have slowed down, physically and emotionally. Staying indoors has narrowed the focus. The mood is somber to begin with. We’re all waiting. We are all in mourning, in a kind of prolonged shock: and grief and disbelief make you slow. 

We are also in fear. I repacked my Fire Bag - a backpack full of passports, cash, essential papers. We’ve been over our fire evacuation plan, trying to imagine the scenarios. If you can’t get through to me, call Uncle Steve, let him know you’re ok and I’ll do the same. But the truth of it is, people got burned alive in their cars trying to get out of Paradise. It doesn’t take an overactive imagination like mine to see my daughter’s Jeep burned out on our road.

I want to honor the fire victims, the displaced, the firemen, and all the people whose lives are forever changed. The news cycles move on to the next disaster. Paradise may rebuild, but it’s a graveyard right now. Humans are resilient and the wonderful stories of heroism and generosity coming out of disaster have not surprised me. It’s hard to know how to adequately honor them though. After donating, volunteering, and sending messages of support, it seems like being quiet is the appropriate response.

Single Mom of Teen Finds New Ways to be Annoying

Sometimes my daughter looks up at me from her phone when I have been speaking to her for a while. Her look clearly says oh, right, you’re here! And yet what you have been saying is outside of my sphere of interest, so you will have to repeat it.

For my part, I consider it part of my mom duties to find new ways to annoy her. This is especially true since I am a single mom, so when she can’t stand me, she has no backup slightly less annoying parent to turn to. Plus it’s ridiculously easy to exasperate her. I can sometimes do it just by existing.

The other day, for example, we were taking a road trip together. We love to drive and we love to drive together. I mentioned that I was feeling a sense of deja vu. I pronounced it, as the French do, deja vyew. Jessie looked at me witheringly. It’s deja voo, she corrected. Actually, I said, aware that I was about to be very annoying, I’m the person in the car who speaks French and I can thus verify that the correct pronunciation is vyew. She looked straight ahead. That’s not how anyone here says it, she answered firmly. And there it was: cemented in fact. I was wrong. But I was fine with that, because now I had a new way to annoy her. I said deja vyew a couple more times during our trip.

Sometimes my questions annoy her. Asking how her math test went, for example, is annoying because it reminds her she had a math test that she didn’t study that much for. Asking how she is: that’s bad. I can’t remember why. 

And I am apparently very frustrating in my preference for sad songs. We share a lot of our taste in music, which is a happy thing as we both play music incessantly. But my tolerance for sad sack music is way higher than hers. And apparently it’s weird to have a Spotify playlist for driving called ‘Upbeat’ and then populate it with a bunch of slow, miserable songs. Who knew?

Possibly the thing that annoys my daughter most about me is my inability to provide her with food. I know that might sound like a sort of basic mom task, but it’s a particularly difficult one for me to perform correctly. She doesn’t live with me all the time, but her schedule is random and decided on the fly. It’s hard for me to keep in my head what nights she will be here, principally because she only texts me her plans late in the day sometimes. I do go grocery shopping. Feels like I go several times a week, and each time the bill has three digits. But no matter how often I carry out this chore, the food just seems to run out. She doesn’t eat that much, so I wonder whether she has teen hordes over when I’m not home and they pick my fridge clean? Or random strangers come by while I’m at work and eat all our groceries? This could be. Her interpretation, however, is that I never have food in the house.

I’ll be honest: keeping the fridge full of tasty, nutritious, fresh food is not my strong suit. That said, she can open a full fridge, stare in for a moment and then say despairingly Mom, there’s nothing in our house to eat!

One sure-fire way to get a reaction is to answer her honestly when she asks how work was today. I’m a hospice nurse. She knows my work frequently involves bodily fluids. What she really wants to hear is my day was great, thanks sweetie! But sometimes I decide that our relationship will be deepened if I tell her how my day really was and not just what she wants to hear. So I might recount some details from a manual disimpaction that afternoon, or throw in the wound care I did for some gangrenous toes. She really loves that. She wanted to be a nurse herself, for about ten minutes in junior year. Then she heard what a manual disimpaction was and opted for journalism instead.

On balance, I have to say that life with Jessie is very harmonious. We see eye to eye on most things. We have the same sense of humor, so we frequently crack each other up. And I think she can forgive me most of my more egregious flaws, like how I don’t moisturize enough. I do try to avoid the more obvious parental missteps, like showing her new boyfriend unflattering pictures of her when she was a baby (it’s hard to find those, but there are a couple). I try not to nag her about college applications or cleaning her room. But given the stressors of the job, I think every parent needs a couple of deja vyews up their sleeve.

An Off-Grid Sort of Town

In a couple of previous blog posts, my dog has advised me on love. He has even shown a reasonable amount of aptitude for the role. With the caveat that he is still a dog and dead skunks in the road are viable objects for him to show a keen interest in.

Lately, I have been kind of discouraged. A love interest of mine proved to be regrettably one-sided, and the side was mine. The other side, well, not so much interest. In fact, I’ll just be honest here: none at all. 

But once again, small fluffy off-white mutt Buddy to the rescue. I didn’t even have to tell him what was going on. Like all dogs, he just looked at me, and he knew. I encountered him at my old house where I was dropping off my daughter, and after he had done the insane body-wagging greeting thing, he stopped and looked carefully at me. You need to get out of town, he said. My thoughts exactly! I replied. But how did you know? He placed one of his grubby teddy paws into my outstretched hand, a trick we taught him so he could get little pieces of reward cheese. I’m your dog, he said. Book yourself into the Mendocino Hotel for a night or two. 

I will, I said. But I’m sorry, I don’t have any cheese.

The Mendocino Hotel was built in 1878 and every single inch of it feels that way. It has the kind of old world charm that you can’t create, it has to have been laid down gradually over 140 years. It’s the only place in town where you can find a double room for $109. Sure, it’s a room the size of a postage stamp, and you share a bathroom, but you also have access to the wraparound balcony that skirts the entire hotel, including its oceanfront, not to mention the hundred cool nooks and crannies around the hotel where you can just sit and soak it all up. Cosy armchairs in front of the blazing fire. Plush barstools in the Garden Room bar, where the sun slants in across the lacquered wood and threadbare velvet upholstery. Quaint wrought iron chairs and round tables on the patio. This place is magical.

Taking Buddy’s advice, I booked myself a single night on a whim. It was indeed time to get out of town. Hospice work had been unusually draining, my daughter was heading to Oregon to see a friend for the weekend, and I just couldn’t countenance two days home alone reflecting on how very disinterested my love interest was.

Friday morning I headed out on my solo roadtrip early. The Bay Area was shrouded in smoke from the Camp fire near Chico. The sun shone weakly orange through the haze and the whole scene looked apocalyptic. I drove north on Highway One and hit Freestone at the perfect time for breakfast. A mid-morning cup of coffee and one of their excellent scones. Meyer lemon, mango, and white chocolate. I’m not making this up! They made this up!  

I was just savoring the white chocolate aspect of my scone and wondering how life could get any better, when a text came in from Jessie. Oregon trip fell through. Can I come to Mendocino with you? I was an hour and a half drive from home. Would I go back and pick her up? 

Two minutes later I was on the road back home. It was a little odd to be retracing my steps, but as my dad would say, all part of life’s rich pattern. And heading to the Mendocino Hotel with Jessie instead of alone? SWEET!

It was an eerily beautiful drive north along California’s most stunning stretch of coastline. The air quality was awful. We could not open the car windows. But the sun shone through the haze with a surreally gorgeous light and we played favorite music and savored the set of random circumstances that had led to us spending two days together on a road trip.

Mendocino, always an understated town, was even more muted than usual. We arrived at dusk, but it was hard to tell, the air was so heavy with smoke. We checked into the hotel and sat together on the high wrought-iron framed bed in our tiny room. I checked the fire news. 70k acres, still only 5% contained. The whole of Paradise town was gone, most of Magalia, burned to the ground. 27k people displaced, having lost everything. We tried to imagine what it would be like to lose everything. People had been found burned in their cars, trying to escape. We tried to absorb this. It was very quiet in our room.

The air quality was too bad to safely go outside, so we ate dinner in the hotel. I went down and secured us a table while Jessie stayed in the room talking to her boyfriend. I sat alone at the table, thinking about how I would have been sitting here alone all weekend, and that would have been okay. But waiting for Jessie to come down from our room and join me? That was much better.

Over dinner, we had fun pegging all of our fellow diners. There was the table of three women, one of whom completely monopolized the conversation. We eavesdropped shamelessly for a minute on her description of a cruise she had been on. I notified my daughter that she should feel free to smother me with a pillow if I ever went on a cruise and then tried to tell her about it. Don’t worry, mom. She instructed me then on the art of scanning a room and immediately identifying the people who were happy. It’s not about smiling or looking upbeat. It’s about who looks genuinely interested in their companion. As usual, she was bang on the money.

Saturday morning, we woke before dawn. I was sure that Mendocino, despite its sleepiness, would have a cafe where I could procure some coffee before 7am. This proved optimistic. It was also 38 degrees and after the weird heat of November in Fairfax, our faces instantly froze when we went outside. However, turned out the hotel provided free coffee and tea in the bar, so we availed and sat by the fire reading and writing until the first cafe opened and we could reasonably expect eggs and more coffee.

My favorite cafe in Mendo is the Goodlife. They have a stunning array of excellent beverages, including one I had never heard of which I will cover in a minute, and an even better array of pastries and healthy type foods, plus all manner of quirky patrons proving that this is the coolest place in town to breakfast because it’s where all the locals go. 

I was standing waiting for our hot beverages when it struck me that the conversation I was having with a bearded stranger in a straw hat was actually a flirtation. Out of practice! His beard was braided and his hair was long and curly and he opened the conversation by asking if my hair color was natural. I laughed and told him that I was touched by his politeness, but that the strange hue of my hair was not intentional. I recounted the circumstances that had led to my hair becoming so unintentionally and, some might say, violently purple. (This was the subject of a previous blog post, so I won’t go into it here.) He laughed at my ineptitude in self-hair-coloring and mentioned that his own hair had a small amount of grey in it but that he was fine with that showing. I didn’t point out that he was at this time covering up said grey hair with a very tatty sort of straw hat. 

We got our drinks and he explained to me that the weird concoction he was purchasing in a jelly jar was known by some Italian name (I have forgotten it now) and it was a shot of espresso covered with quantities of whipped cream. We mused on how this might help him begin his day, and went off to our respective tables. It was nice to flirt. It felt like maybe something had opened up in me. The freedom from longing for something that was never meant to be, perhaps. 

As I sat with Jessie and she ate her breakfast and I drank my coffee, I noticed that straw hat guy kept glancing my way. When I was sure he was deep in conversation with his mates, I glanced his way. As we left the cafe, he caught my eye and waved and wished me a beautiful day. I wished him the same. So it goes. 

Later in the morning, after our tradition of trying to sit in every nook of the Mendocino Hotel that we could, we wandered around town. I didn’t expect us to find anything we could afford, but we were sure to have fun looking. In the basement of a building on Lansing Street, there was a new clothing store called Treasures. As soon as I walked in, I was transported back to Florence, to clothing stores I so unexpectedly found there brimming with lace and silk, all at crazily affordable prices. The owner was a cheery individual called Drea who laughed when I complimented her on her excellent taste and said disbelievingly I get to go around shopping for this stuff...for my work! I picked out about twenty items and had fun trying them all on. 

From the changing room, I could hear Drea giggling softly to herself outside. Turned out she was trying on her own wares: a new pair of pants with lace and flounces at the three-quarter length hems. Too theatrical? She asked me, as she modeled them. I told her they were indeed theatrical but I thought she could more than carry them off. She laughed her infectious laugh. It’s fun to be me! She said, as she rang me up for a madly floppy pale pink fur coat that was only $39. You’ll get lots of hugs in this, she said. I told her how good that sounded to me.

As I left her store, I thought about how, if I lived in Mendocino, Drea and I could be friends. And I could also be friends with straw hat guy! Maybe more than friends! Maybe I should move to Mendocino? Of course, it was four hours from an airport. But I could have coffee every morning in the Hotel. I could live in one of the wooden water towers. An off-grid sort of town, I had heard a resident call it earlier that morning. After a week of mass shootings and midterms, off-grid had a nice sort of ring to it. I could nurse dying folk up there, by the sea, in the maritime mists and fogs.

But by early afternoon, Jessie and I were restless to be back on the road home. We packed the car, and set off for the four-hour drive that, for us, is a large part of the fun. I drove, my co-pilot was on music detail and started creating a suitably awesome queue for the freakishly twilit smoky world outside. Off-grid still had a lovely ring to it, but I put moving to Mendocino in my bag of dreams. Lots to accomplish in Fairfax first.

Single Mom Acquires Relationship Manager

I have been post-divorce and single for two years. It has been Important. And I’m really ready to meet someone. Please notice the capitalization of Important. It’s not just poor editing. It covers a whole two years of solo evenings on the couch and waking up alone. But also what is known in divorce circles as doing the work. I don’t really know what a divorce circle is, but I’m intimately knowledgable about the work of emerging from a long marriage.

Last Monday night, I went to bed at 8:30pm. This was because daylight savings had ended, so I was now waking up at 4:30am instead of 5:30am, and because I’m a chronic insomniac, and I lie awake for hours every night planning my next novel. So by 8:30 that night, I was preternaturally tired and I just fell onto my bed and sank into an inhumanly deep sleep. Sort of like the sleep that hibernating bears sink into in caves in the arctic. Only I was in Fairfax, shortly after dinner on a Monday evening.

I was woken at approximately 12:13am by the ping of text coming in. Please don’t judge me. Yes, I leave my cellphone on by my bed at night, thus opening myself up to harmful rays and probably brain cancer and maybe even hydrocephalus, though the science isn’t quite in on that one yet. But I’m a single mom of a teen who sleeps elsewhere several times a week. Thus my phone is sometimes on by my bed. She could have a teen crisis at 2am. It has happened.

The text said that there was a fraud alert from my credit card company. It asked me whether I had recently made a purchase from Walmart. This is like asking a Republican whether they want to go on Ellen and do contact improv with Barack and Michelle. I immediately called my credit card company.

The nice chap who answered (after midnight PST, what time could it possibly have been where he was?!) introduced himself as Russell, my Relationship Manager. I felt a momentary surge of excitement. Relationship Manager? Could he be about to...But no, I quickly woke up enough to realize that he was not talking about finding me a loving life partner who cared about how my day was, wanted to bring me lilies and hoped to take me out for lobster dinners. Clearly, relationship manager in terms of my credit card meant managing the relationship between me and...what did it mean exactly??

While I was puzzling over this, Russell deftly exacted from me the last four of my social, my date of birth, my mother’s O-Level math result, and the details of my last credit card purchase. I had no idea of the latter, it was after midnight and I couldn’t even remember my name too well, but I hazarded some kind of guess that seemed to satisfy him. Plus I mentioned, probably with more heat than necessary, that there was no way I nor anyone I knew had made a purchase at Walmart in the last hundred years.

Russell very kindly reassured me that my card had been compromised and there would be no charge to me. We chuckled together in a moment of weird connection about how the scumbag who had stolen my credit card information may have got away with some lousy purchase at Walmart but would be stalled at their next attempted crime. I hoped it was the intent to purchase a gun somewhere. Maybe even at a Walmart. But I didn’t mention this to Russell, because some part of my very sleep-addled brain was still sort of hoping that he was Managing my Relationship. And it wouldn’t do to come across as emotionally brittle.

After we wished each other a very good night, and he assured me my new credit card would be arriving within seven to ten business days, I reflected on how very many phonecalls I was going to have to make to change all my autopays to the new card number. Then I drifted off into a sort of doze again. It was now 12:38am, and my defunct credit card information was sort of floating round the universe waiting to stick in vain to some criminal malcontent. 

Meanwhile, I was cosy in my bed, feeling thankful that the crazy amped-up tech industry made it possible for my card company to text me about possible fraud just minutes after someone used my stolen information to make a purchase at Walmart. But most of all, I was feeling sleepily grateful that in some call center somewhere, Russell was busy being my Relationship Manager. Surely, given his laudable efficiency, by the time I woke he would have found me the perfect man?!

But you will have to wait for the next blog post to find out

Spoiler Alert: Her Cat Dies at Minute 90

Last night, I had tickets to see a favorite singer/songwriter at a favorite club in San Francisco. But my daughter, who was supposed to be coming with me, was doing an excellent impression of a chipmunk (see previous post) and not up for it. 

I thought about going alone. I also tried to cajole various single friends into coming with me. Come on, it’s Blanco White! He’s 27 and sexy and a fabulous singer! At Cafe du Nord! But nobody was available, and although I think of myself as resilient and strong enough to drive into the city alone on a Saturday night to go to a gig, it turns out I’m not.

So I went to the movies. I tried to get the same friends to come to the movies with me, but they had all the same excuses about why they couldn’t go to Blanco White. Lame. So I decided I was definitely strong and resilient enough to go to a movie on my own. I’ve done it tons of times and usually I love it. Sitting in the dark, feeling mysterious, trying to block out the stench of popcorn and not check my phone too frequently to see if anyone is texting me.

I had a hard time deciding between Bohemian Rhapsody and Can You Ever Forgive Me, but decided that the former should really be seen with someone so I would have good company singing along, and someone to share my favorite Queen memories with afterwards. So Melissa McCarthy it was. CYEFM had the added bonus of Richard E. Grant. And it was in the fabulous art deco Rafael Theater, really the only venue suitable for viewing a Richard E. Grant movie.

I’d seen the trailer, so I knew this movie had the potential to be really quite depressing, but I’m talented at ignoring red flags, and it was about a writer who lived in New York City and did I mention it had Richard E. Grant, so I committed myself to it with touching optimism. Even when I drove by the theater looking for parking and saw the length of the ticket line and nearly just turned around and drove home.

It started out great. Melissa spends the first scene quaffing whisky on the job and getting fired for telling her boss (inadvertently, it must be said) to F off.

But no more spoilers.

Except the cat thing. Sorry about that. Slipped out.

But as the movie progressed, Melissa proved to be a failed writer (not many of those about, huh) who couldn’t pay her rent or get help for her sick cat (this is all in the trailer). Plus in one scene she actually mentions that she is 51. MY AGE! This rankled with me for two reasons. 1) Melissa doesn’t look nearly 51. Her skin. Way too smooth. She even sort of choked on saying 51, as though her acting talents temporarily deserted her cos hey, she’s only 48 (I googled it just now). And 2) I’m 51, and I actually look my age, especially in the mornings. There’s a third reason, involving my stalled writing career, but I don’t have time to go into that now.

The important thing to know about Melissa McCarthy in this movie is that although she develops a completely wonderful and very funny relationship with Richard E., which really could have saved the movie if she had appeared to enjoy it more, she sort of spirals downward throughout the entire thing. I’ve seen too many spiralling down movies lately. I need some spiralling up movies. 

In fairness, she may well have spiralled up at the end of Can You Ever Forgive Me. I don’t know, because I left. At minute 90. It was a tough decision, having invested two hours of my life in getting to this movie and sitting through it. But her cat died (did I mention that?) and it was all just too much for me. I stood up in that crouchy way you stand up when you are leaving a movie in the middle, and hyperaware that it was just me standing up, and not me and my date, or me and a friend, giggling together about how we were leaving a Melissa McCarthy movie because it was just too depressing.

I walked to my car in the nearby parking garage, and I reflected on the fact that the best thing about my evening was that parking is for some unknown reason free in San Rafael on Saturday nights. Maybe the reason for this is to give some glimmer of joy to 51-year-old single women whose writing careers are spiralling in a direction we won’t examine too closely and who have just left depressing movies that they went to on their own on a Saturday night. I don’t know. But I’m thinking of calling someone on the San Rafael town council to find out.

I have a feeling that I just ended this post on a sort of down note, and that’s really not my style. I like to give a little uplift at the last second, so people don’t come away from reading my blog thinking jeez, if this woman writes another post about dying people I’m unsubscribing. So I’ve been trying to come up with the so-called Uplift Ending. And here it is: when I got home I texted some of those same friends who had turned down a night on the town with me, and I let them know what a good thing it was they had said No to the downward-spiral experience. And in the process, I cracked myself up, because I like to laugh at my own jokes. And I got some very funny responses in return, which also cracked me up. So on balance, I got more laughs than tears from the experience. And that, to me, is a good Saturday night

Why You Should Never Give Your Daughter A Norco and then Start Coloring Your Hair

So I may have given away a little of the plot there. And maybe you don’t have a daughter. Or hair. Or if you had a daughter, you would never give her Norco. Nor, if you had hair, would you ever color it. But you shouldn’t stop reading. Because you never know.

Yesterday my daughter had impacted wisdom teeth removed. Never a good candidate for the dentist’s chair, and very squirrely around general anesthesia, this was not a happy event for her. She came home and her face swelled up like a balloon. Despite tons of ice and ibuprofen, there was quickly bruising, sinus pain, jaw pain, and pain in her throat and straight up to her temples. I dosed her and iced her and got her smoothies and soups and special drinks. I finished my work day charting on the couch, and getting up every five minutes to fetch her something from the fridge. Things were jogging along okay and I felt like a reasonably good mom. A mom who is also happily a nurse. A nurse who is a mom. It was all fairly good.

This morning, the swelling was worse. She iced and dosed and iced, and we lay around with me making fun of her for looking like a chipmunk. We watched the videos she had inadvertently made of herself while emerging from anesthesia. She didn’t remember taking them. They were really funny. And we laughed about how she had called a store during the same time, with her mouth stuffed full of cotton, and tried to speak with the saleslady, who just kept saying honey, I can’t understand a single thing you are saying.

But around 10am the pain spiked. She was miserable, and I decided she should take the Norco that was prescribed to her, as the ibuprofen just wasn’t cutting it. She’d had a Norco right after the surgery and had been okay. She took the Norco and got in the shower. Then I took my shower, and I began to apply the strange-smelling burgundy goop that is my do-it-yourself hair color. You wear plastic gloves and old clothes and it’s messy as hell. You’re supposed to carry out this complicated ritual with cotton balls and face cream to prevent your forehead and ears from being colored the same color as your hair. Because apparently that looks sort of weird.

I had just applied some, not even all, of the goop and had not yet started with the cotton balls and face cream when my daughter called out that she was feeling dizzy and nauseous and “really weird.” I immediately did nothing. She often feels really weird. But shortly thereafter, she called out that she was feeling really really weird. I quickly realized that to be coloring my hair at this moment was in fact a bad idea. I slapped on the rest of the goop and a plastic shower cap and a towel and went in to minister to her.

This was the start of an hour of seriously bad reaction to narcotics. I did everything I could, but nothing made her feel better. Her dad called in a prescription for Zofran and dashed to CVS to pick it up. I gave her ginger fizz and tried to talk her through the nausea. I googled natural nausea remedies in case we happened by some fluke to have them growing in our garden. 

Meanwhile, under the towel and the shower cap, my hair was turning purple.

A friend arrived and comforted her. Her dad delivered the Zofran, and she got quick relief. It all started to resolve. I stopped feeling like the worst of moms for giving her the Norco. How could I have known?

Meanwhile, my hair, my forehead, and my ears were all purple. The goop was supposed to color my hair a chic reddish brown, but it had been in my hair for a lot longer than such goop is supposed to be and there had been no face-cream-lathered cotton balls to prevent my skin from being purpled also. 

The good news was I knew my daughter was feeling better because she started to laugh at me. Our friend laughed at me too. I went into the bathroom to shower the goop off and see the extent of the damage.

My skin reverted to a normal color after lots of showering, but my hair, it’s pretty purple. And not just uniformally either. I slapped the color on so rapidly that it’s sort of uneven. So some of my hair is really purple, and some of it just a bit, and some is sort of its own natural color shining cheerily through. With a bit of grey, just for good measure.

This all points to the fact that if you have a daughter, and she gets her wisdom teeth out, and she’s in a lot of pain, and you decide to give her one of her prescribed Norco, do not attempt to start coloring your hair. And if you do, don’t come crying to me.