I think 2012 decided that life had been too good for just a little too long. It trained its End-of-the-World-promising eye on me and saw a gal with a great partner (who also happens to be my baby daddy), a weird and funny smarty-pants kid (who also happens to be the cutest kid in the world and no, I’m not saying that just because I’m his mom, it’s Science Fact), a gal who makes a little bit of money here and there doing what she’s supposed to be doing (no, not playing slots, writing).  Nice house. Cute dog. Things looked like they couldn’t get any better when, on Valentine’s Day of all days, we found out we were pregnant. This seemed meaningful and romantic until, at around 9 weeks pregnant, we lost the baby. So, yeah, Valentine’s Day is kind of screwed up now too. Now all the red hearts and roses seem even creepier than before.

Surreal. That is the most appropriate word for March 12, 2012. For one thing, this sort of stuff doesn’t happen to me. The only reason I even knew where the hospital was located was due to the fact that we had just been there two days earlier for an ultrasound, listening to the baby’s heart beat for the first time. We even got the little picture, resembling a tiny pixelly white lima bean, which I promptly hung on the fridge.  Other elements that made it surreal: The fact that it happened at a shooting range (before I knew I was pregnant I’d gotten my honey  a Living Social Adventure called “Shootin’ and Drinkin’” – a trip to a shooting range and a brewery. I figured I could neither shoot nor drink, but the party bus would still be fun, and it was, well, would have been). The lavender Converse my inappropriately handsome gynecologist was wearing. The fact that my gynecologist was inappropriately handsome.  The fact that we’d named the baby already (Justine) and the night it happened we got MELANCHOLIA on Netflix. Perfect miscarriage film. The opening scene? A black screen with one word across it: Justine.

These are the things I remember, the things that are safe to remember. A lot of the horror of it is gone. Or is it gone? I think I carried a lot of it secretly around with me in the form of the twenty pounds I gained last summer, the first ten from all the Nutella I couldn’t stop eating when I was pregnant (I’ll never touch the stuff again) and the second ten from not being able to walk for ten weeks. Oh, did I mention that I broke my foot  in three places two months after the miscarriage? Gone was the hope of being able to lose the Nutella weight by getting back to running. Few things are more humbling than having to wear your maternity clothes for months after your miscarriage. Although, I couldn’t bring myself to wear my “I’m not fat, I’m pregnant!” tee-shirt. It seemed less funny once I was, actually, just fat.

One of the reasons I suspect that I carried dark memories and unrealized emotions in that twenty pounds is that, as I’ve now lost the twenty, plus another ten (the remaining baby weight from Ellis – and it only took me six years!), I am finally starting to feel the loss of the baby. Could it be the fact that tomorrow it will have been one year? Or could it really be that all of that extra weight was like armor? Something for me to focus on instead? Something for me to keep from letting go?

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to learn how to meditate. If there’s one thing the miscarriage taught me is how woefully out of touch I am with my emotions. I treated the miscarriage, from the first drop of blood to the realization that I didn’t need those maternity jeans I’d gotten off the sale rack at Target, to finally taking the pixelly picture of that little speck of life off of the fridge, much like I would treat a situation in which my car needed to be fixed, or the gutters needed to be cleared out. Methodically, logically. At one point I remember asking my husband if it was really bad that I didn’t feel all that terrible about it. Months later I would see Luke Wilson holding a sobbing Laura Dern on Enlightened, crying over the loss of their (characters’) baby—I remember thinking to myself, oh, shoot. We never did that. Were we supposed to do that?  They always show that on TV when people lose babies. How did I forget to do that? I have, to date, cried twice about the loss, I mean big cries, sobbing alone in the house kind of cries. Shouldn’t there be more?

It seems I operate exceedingly well on auto-pilot, pushing less desirable feelings deep down inside in a place only Deepak Chopra can touch. And he did. Thanks to a dear friend of mine, I was introduced to his 21-day meditation challenge hosted by the somehow simultaneously ethereal and down-to-earth Chopra.

Now, here comes the woo-woo part.

I had been meditating for 8 days, and during each one I’d experienced, on a good day, visions of light and a spinning sensation, on a less intense day, just an extreme calm. But, on day 9, I felt someone hug me. I can’t put it any more clearly than that. It was a true physical sensation of someone hugging me from behind. Of course, I knew it was my daughter. Then I heard a voice say:

“I can help you better from up here, Mom.”

Now. It’s hard to tell, especially if you are, like me, as I mentioned, chronically out of touch with your subconscious and your emotions, how much of what happens during meditation is imagination and how much is ‘reality.’ It’s hard for me to trust a touchy-feely moment like that.

The answer came for me the very next day, arriving via Facebook as do most important life-changing answers in my life. A faraway friend of mine in whom I had confided about the loss of the baby, messaged me, out of the blue, to check in and see how I was doing. Remembering the loss, she wrote (again, out of the blue):

You WILL meet the child you lost last year. And that child will embrace you and say “Mommy! I have waited SO long to hug you!” That child watches over you, Jenni.

That was the second time I cried about Justine.

The first time:

About six months after the loss, a friend of mine posted the following poem on Facebook (I told you! All answers come from Facebook), and reading it I was shocked to find myself sobbing. I realized I hadn’t thought about the baby for months. I felt remiss. And I felt the intense relevance of Rumi’s words.

(Note: I can’t remember who posted it, so I don’t know who to thank–I saved it to my computer and then promptly lost it. Today I Googled it and found it, but had to copy and paste it into Word and change it to Arial because I could not in good conscience link to a site that would present this deep and provocative piece, as they had, in Comic Sans font. Comic Sans? Come on, people! For shame.)

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Rumi ~

One thing that happens after you lose a baby, is you realize how many of your friends and family have had the same experience. On an emotional level it’s baffling. Why?  Why all that hope and promise only to have it dashed to the ground? Only to have it literally flushed down the toilet?

On a biological level it, simply put, falls into the category of shit happens. I’m beyond regretful that so many I love have had to go through it, but am intensely aware that I’ve joined, albeit involuntarily, a weirdly strong *fellowship, one that has the capacity for hope and promise and one that, unbelievably, manages, time and again, to allow the cautious return of that same hope and promise.

*(Sorry, I just can’t use the word sisterhood.)

Chris describes ‘Evil Tender’ as the peripherally ‘art’-generated money we artists make in order to…keep…making…art. Example: I’ve read that Gary Oldman did LOST IN SPACE in order to fund his masterpiece NIL BY MOUTH.  That was truly Evil Tender. In reference to the old saying “The world needs its ditch diggers” Chris refers to himself as a ditch digger. If Chris is a ditch digger, he’s finding all sorts of treasures along the way, just dig around his site for these gems, or go straight to his Greatest Hits! page.

To hear me gush about Austin, the importance of peers, the genius of Max Landis and the life breath of dreams, see here for Chris’s interview.

As my granddaddy used to say, I’m so proud I could spit.

That evening, I met a dedicated group of actors/teachers who would submit to soul-baring exercises over the next three evenings, the results of which would become integral parts of the resulting piece. Director Mollie Mook-Fiddler designed improvisational exercises that would speak to the theme of the piece, guiding the actors in using their own experiences and emotions to help build the play.

In fact, all I brought with me to Silverton, CO, was an idea I wanted to explore, the loosest of outlines, and the title: Wishbone. The title was based on a wishbone I’ve kept with me since I won it in my family’s yearly Thanksgiving contest for the first time when I was around 11-years-old. I  panicked when I realized I’d left the thing on my desk at home in Tacoma–I’d meant to bring it along with me for inspiration. No matter, Mollie had the actors think back to artifacts from their own childhoods, asked them to write a brief story about each artifact and what it meant to them, then hand the story to another actor to read aloud, so that it became a universal story, as opposed to their own story. That was inspiration enough. All of the stories laid the foundation for the play. One of these stories became a major factor of the piece, revisited throughout each movement.  The piece was finished at 2pm on Saturday, July 28th, and the performance took place that night at 7pm. The dedication of everyone involved was humbling.

Admittedly, this is the briefest of updates as I’m still processing what took place and how it felt to write non-stop for four days. To put it in the simplest of terms, it was a writer’s fantasy camp. I had my own (self-designated) special booth at the Teller House Restaurant (I still miss their Huevos Rancheros) where I wrote 80% of the piece. The other 20% was written in bed in my 110-year-old hotel room complete with breath-taking mountain views. The town itself was magical, the people were welcoming to the point where they seemed familiar in a Deja Vu sort of way, and the air was clean and fragrant and full of energy.

I used the song “Lazy River,” a song Chad often sings to Ellis, throughout the play to symbolize the way “life should be” – and I revisited it several times as I wrote the play to keep myself in that mind-set, to not get down-trodden in the actual emotional weight of the subject matter to the point where I might forget the glimmer of hope I was endeavoring to illustrate through the darkness. This song and the blue skies of Silverton will always bring back a feeling of the possibility of peace.

Silverton has a piece of my heart now. As terrified as I am of the bumpy tiny-planed flight and the subsequent treacherously winding drive it takes to get there, I can’t wait to go back.

It seems like most things worth arriving at require traversing plenty of bumps and turns.

Around 4pm yesterday, two hours before our first rehearsal was to take place, I got a call from Mollie that rehearsal that evening was cancelled. There was trouble in paradise – no, wait, trouble in the house that all the interns were sharing for the summer, all the interns who would be participating in the improvisational exercises that would help shape my piece. Someone wouldn’t take out the trash, someone else felt like someone was telling him or her ‘what to do.’ Understandable, it’s already a challenge to share a house with so many people, especially if you also work together all day long. Mollie gathered the interns last night, instead, for a chance to regroup and remember that Theatre is about connection and depth and humanity. And sharing chores. So, instead of diving into the rehearsal/devised piece process, I had the evening and this morning/early afternoon to actually start writing some pages.

I think this was (at least, for me) a blessing in disguise. It was nice to have a framework, a rhythm established. I wrote a very short first ‘Act.’ I’m actually leaning more toward calling them movements, as in a piece of music. I am planning for four. So, with 7 pages in hand, and a sheet that described emotional revelations I want each of the three characters to make throughout the piece (and a brilliantly clinical, yet poetic, wikipedia definition of a ‘wishbone’ that Mollie found) I arrived at my actual first rehearsal tonight and met those who would be helping me. What an incredible group.

It was much more emotional than I thought it would be, though the tears shouldn’t have surprised me. The subject matter we’re working with is not exactly musical comedy. The piece speaks to how human beings survive crisis, and how sometimes the person living the crisis can over-identify with it, and become the crisis. In my piece, there is a mother who loses one of her twin daughters to abduction. She becomes the ‘mother who lost her daughter’ and forgets to be a ‘mother with one daughter.’  The group of actors who digested and processed this material and these themes this first night were so willing to jump right in. They worked through some very personal exercises, and allowed themselves to be really vulnerable.  It was very moving, especially considering the fact that, one day earlier, they were feuding housemates.

And inspiring. I’ll get back to work tomorrow morning and have two more ‘acts’ or ‘movements’ for them to work with. On my way to breakfast this morning I walked by the theater and saw it: POSTERS!

Yes, posters. This shit just got real.

A Theatre Group hooked me up with a sweet room at the historic Teller House hotel. Everything I need is within 300-feet of the Teller House front door, including the beautiful Montanya, an award-winning rum distillery where Mollie and I promptly toasted the beginning of an exciting week.

Silverton is a tiny and magical town. It has one paved road, several Victorian-era buildings that boast their roots of having originally been bordellos, and scattered A-frame houses on its outskirts. This is the kind of place that, were you to drive through it, you might wonder: do people actually live here? It seems like an impossibly charmed life. Dogs lazily wander the streets. Everyone knows everyone. Parking is free. It’s located in what is basically a bowl in a valley completed surrounded by mountains. And I’m currently blogging at 9305 feet.

Next door to Montanya is the current home of A Theatre Group – located in a storefront along the main road. I’ll head there Tuesday at 6:30pm for my first rehearsal with the actors who will help me shape my play over the next 4 days.

Until then, here is the view from my bedroom window, rain and shine (I’ve had a taste of both already!):

As I was saying, I’m at SeaTac. I’m privileged enough to be heading to Silverton, Colorado, to be an ‘artist in residence’ at the New Artist Series sponsored by Silverton’s A Theatre Group. If you would like to see my photo and bio, of which I am so proud, click here.

This is the first step in my journey.  I know, ‘journey’ can be such a loaded word that is often overused and dramatized…but I don’t know how else to describe this. It’s a journey that will take me away from my son for longer than I’ve ever been away from him. A journey that will challenge me to treat my dreams of being a writer as though they are a reality. It’s also a journey that will reunite me with a woman who was part of the process of my becoming the artist, and the person, that I am.

Mollie Mook Fiddler. I met her as a seventh grader.  I remember the first time I saw her, at age 12, standing at her locker, across the hall.  She was definitely too pretty and too cool to be friends with. Still, by some miracle, we became friends. In fact, somehow, eventually, we became the closest of friends, laughing together, crying together, camping together, being too cool together, dieting together, and eventually, as ‘adults,’ she took me into her home, giving me a place to stay when I was in a time of need, need of escape…that’s how I ended up in Iowa (where she was in the graduate acting program at University of Iowa), a place that became more important to me than I would ever know.  A place that, in all honesty, I had to look up on a map to discover its whereabouts before I flew there to accept her kind offer.  Iowa is where I met my husband, and where I found myself (not necessarily in that order).  And it all started with the tiny guest bedroom at 228 Lee Street, Iowa City, IA, 52246, that Mollie offered me when I really needed her.

While Mollie is still far too pretty and too cool to be friends with, I took her up on yet another kind offer to spend a week with her creating and developing a piece for the stage. She will not only be directing the piece, she will, if my begging did its job, be starring in it as well, at its performance at the end of the week.  The idea of Mollie Mook (as I knew her so many years ago) enacting MY written words is like an excerpt from a dream I’ve had many times, from which I’ve awoken smiling.

Here starts the journey.  I hope to update this process day by day, because my bags were too full to pack an actual diary.  So, welcome to my diary.  I’m calling it Wishbone, because for some reason I sense that will be the title of the piece that comes out of the outline I’ve put together.

The process is this: I bring an outline to rehearsal at A Theatre Group in Silverton, and three talented and open-minded actors (of which Mollie will be one) will help me craft this piece. I’m hoping to piece together something about survival, something about the acceptance of the price of admission for living. Something about how to move forward, with bravery or without.

That’s what I’m doing right now.  As I said, I hate flying.  But I’m moving forward, getting onto the plane in less than an hour’s time…with bravery or without.

A fellow flyer and diner at the Africa Lounge snapped this picture of me: Me with my armor, a beer, my computer, my cell phone, my blogging.  This is how I get on the plane.  Until tomorrow…

For the last year or so, since I painted the New Mexico House under construction, I’ve been obsessed with painting objects that are more architectural than my usual portraits of human beings. I followed that up with the Ferry House on Whidbey Island, the interior of which is also under construction. I like the lines of things half-finished. I’ve also recently become obsessed with pictures I found of a house in Joplin, MO, that was nearly destroyed by that horrendous tornado that swept through last year. I was struck that the lines of something falling down are similar to the lines of something being built.

For my submission to 27 Feet of Art (and More!), I knew I wanted to do something architectural, and I wanted it to be related to Olympia. I had taken some pictures of a crane at the lumberyard on Olympia’s waterfront a few months ago when the boys were busy throwing rocks across the water. They had an unspoken game going with some other beachgoer/rock throwers — trying to hit a large metal…thingee…that looked like it had fallen off a boat and rested about 60 feet (?) or so from the shoreline. Every once in a while you’d hear a CLANG, followed by cheers.

But, as I said, I was distracted by this lumberyard. I was struck by the immense and neatly stacked pile of fallen trees. They had been processed and so were that bright orange/gold color. Ready to be made into houses?  Paper? The promise was exciting to me, but it saddened me as well, imagining the forest they used to be. Similarly, I was amazed by the huge crane that stood right at the edge of the water, so close to all this peace and beauty and playing families was this massive, almost science fiction inspired, machine. Symbolizing the end of the trees, but re-purpose for the wood. Symbolizing: Man making things. The torn emotion I felt reminded me of the torn emotion on the face of many of the women I’ve painted. And some of the men.

In short, I came up with a triptych (in this case, of equal-sized panels — a requirement of submission is that all art be 12″ x 12″) of details of the crane. Up close, the angles and the light shining through them are beautiful, and create patterns that might be mistaken for cliffs, rocky crags, or even branches.

Another privilege of my life is that I can hop on Facebook whenever I need a break from work and check in with friends near and far, friends who, without the internet, I would probably have never seen or heard from again.  Tonight I saw a post informing me that a friend I knew in high school had passed away.  His obituary did not hint at how it happened, and I have not seen this guy for 20 years. Still, seeing his face in The Denver Post obituary section was a giant wake up call.  Here’s what it woke me up to:

A) TWENTY years!?  I guess the fact that I just received an invite to my 20th high school reunion should have clued me in to the fact that it’s been TWENTY years since I graduated high school.  Moral of the story: time is weird and memories are slave less to actual history than they are to the way our mind, guided by our emotions, interprets them. For instance, one of the reasons I am not planning on going to my 20th high school reunion (in addition to the prohibitively outlandish cost of tickets — $138 to be exact…that wasn’t a typo) is that, when faced with the names of kids with whom I actually attended school, I usually have to look them up to see who they are.  The group of friends I had outside of school, such as the one who passed away, I can still picture as though I just yesterday had coffee and played chess with them at Paris on the Platte.  Judging from the pictures on the Paris on the Platte website, our little place under the viaduct looks a lot fancier than it did back in the day (more power to them!).  The viaduct which, by the way, I’m pretty sure is no longer there.  I don’t think Denver looks very much the same now as it did in 1992. Are the alleyways my friend and I used to hold hands and run down in the middle of the night to scare ourselves as we left Rock Island still scary? Wait, is Rock Island still there? I know they tore my high school down last year. I figure if I want to pay $138 to get depressed I could just stay here in Tacoma and go see the Blue Oyster Cult at the Emerald Queen Casino next month.

B) Memories are a gift. The guy who posted the passing of our mutual friend credited him with introducing him to The Stone Roses, a staple of my high school years.  I immediately went on a mind-trip tour of 1990-1992 via YouTube (the equivalent to a time machine) and listened to several tracks of the Roses’ self-named album which I played on repeat, interrupted intermittently only by Kate Bush, Jellyfish and Jane’s Addiction,  in my 1984 Dodge Colt during my entire Junior and Senior years.  During trips to the DAV thrift store on Colfax, trips to Perkins on Wadsworth to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and do homework all night, drives to the hogbacks in the foothills west of Denver, a fateful trip to the Sand Dunes during which my boyfriend crashed my car into a deer (one of the rare times I “got in trouble” with my dad), trips to Winchell’s when we didn’t want to attend the spirit assemblies, trips between my house and my mom’s new house when my parents got divorced, trips to my piano lessons, where my piano teacher was half teacher/half counselor.  She was the only one who noticed that I, at the the age of 17, considered coffee, cigarettes and Grape Nuts a balanced diet. Listening to that Stone Roses album, after twenty years, gave me the same feeling of indignant invincibility that I had back then. I’ve heard (but don’t quote me on this) that memory is in the frontal lobe of the brain, right next to sound and smell…I’m pretty sure if I had smelled a clove cigarette and Pert Plus (the shampoo my boyfriend’s mom bought him) I would probably actually, literally, have been transported back in time to 1991.

C) What matters most is now. I feel blessed to have such powerful memories.  Not just powerful, but empowering.  They made me who I am, for better or for worse. But what matters most is that those memories were stepping stones to get me here. The best part of this process is looking back and keeping in mind that, when things looked like complete and utter chaos, there was always a way out, and that way out brought me to where I am now…to the aforementioned husband whom I love. To the son who surprises me every day with his crazy brain (and who I realize, every day, will soon be creating his own memories, in his own version of ‘for better or worse,’ of high school). I’m older now and have finally gotten to the point where I can have faith in that thing my dad has always said to me “It’ll all work out, honey.” I need to give my mom credit for that one too, as she’s taxed with telling me that everyday in my adult life. Divorced or not, and whether they knew it or not, they were a pretty good team in making me feel, at best, that I could do anything, at worst, what’s the worst that can happen?

Time machines, still, are pretty fun, so I leave you with a few images of my high school years, and a soundtrack to boot.  I don’t know how many people “loved” high school. If I were to make a list on paper of what was going on in my life at that time, you’d probably look at it and think I should have been on suicide watch. Instead, I felt invincible. If I ever forget that feeling, I listen to Kate Bush, and now that my friend of so long ago has passed away and I was reminded, The Stone Roses. Not to speak for the dead, but I assume he is feeling pretty invincible now, too.

The Stone Roses – I Wanna Be Adored

                    Kate Bush – Army Dreamers

Jellyfish – The King is Half Undressed

Jane’s Addiction – Mountain Song

Kate Bush – This Woman’s Work

The Stone Roses - I am the Resurrection

Jesus Jones - Right Here, Right Now (our class song, actually, surprisingly)

Tonight, date night consisted solely of my husband and I sharing a bottle of wine four times the price of the wine we usually enjoy. I’m talking about Root: 1 Sauvignon Blanc.

Broken foot still ailing me, I’m beginning to master that embarrassing scooter at Trader Joe’s. I have honed my skills on the thing to the point where I can enter the wine section without my previous nail-biting certainty of knocking over those balancing acts of wine bottles they call displays.

I was buzzing along, heading toward my usual stomping grounds, the three-buck-Chuck section, when I heard the wine guy use the word ‘grapefruit-ey’ when describing the Root:1 Sauv Blanc to another shopper. The scooter doesn’t have brakes, but I cut off the power so fast I think the tires screeched. Then he used the words ‘tart’ and ‘zesty.’  I couldn’t take it anymore.  I was sold.

At $9.99, this bottle was a rare treat. Like I said, four times the cost of our usual bottle as, recently, three-buck-Chuck was reduced in price to $2.49/bottle (in California, it’s even cheaper and is known as TWO-buck-Chuck!). I could hardly dare to let myself hope that this splurge would be everything I hoped for.  In fact it was all that, and more.

Magically, as we opened the bottle, the sun came out.  So we headed to the porch and date night consisted of this summery bottle of wine, a bowl of Wasabi Almonds (which went fabulously with the wine — a highly recommended pairing!), a few games of ladder ball (the one ‘sport’ I can really manage on crutches) and my husband and I talking about practically nothing at all for about two hours.

One might think that after ten years together there would be no new stories to tell between two people, but getting so much pleasure out of enjoying this special bottle of wine on the patio reminded me of one my husband hadn’t heard: the time my mom treated my brothers and me to dinner at a ‘fancy’ restaurant in Denver.

Wuthering Heights was sort of ‘old person’ fancy – the kind of place your boyfriend might take you on prom night because of all the white tablecloths and the fireplace. My mom had received a $50 gift certificate from a doctor for whom she worked, and was determined, though she was on a strict budget, to take her kids out for a fancy meal. When we arrived, we noticed the least expensive item on the menu was $15. We’re going back twenty plus years, remember.

So, we all agreed to order the least expensive item.  But wait, how would we do it and still maintain our aura of fanciness?  We devised a plan that one of us would order the item (it was cod) and then the others would ‘change their mind’ and order it too…”Oh, wait, I was going to order steak, but now the cod sounds good, yes, I’ll take the cod.” The last person was supposed to chuckle and say “I’ll make it easy, I’ll have the cod too.”  We practiced this charade when the waiter wasn’t looking, and we had it down pat.

The waiter approached.  We were ready. This was going to be good. He hardly finished saying “Have you decided what you would like –” when my oldest brother blurted out “We’ll take four of the cheapest.”

That night, feeling fancy proved to be short-lived. If only we’d known then that, one day, Root:1 would bottle that faux-fancy feeling! Root:1 Sauvignon Blanc tastes like summers spent vacationing in the Chilean countryside, and it costs even less than the cod.

I guess even fruit flies like feeling fancy because, with the sun, they came out in droves to share our date night. We had only one defense: