All of Me, Why Not Take All of Me?

Or at least help me figure out where some of me belongs...

I’ve been procrastinating writing.

That’s not like me. I feel most myself when I write, edit, revise, share. I want to say what’s stopping me is that two distinct columns a week is a challenge. That I no longer want to be compartmentalized. That I don’t want the JJ of DirtyGirl Diaries in one space, the Jodi of Dementia Caregiving in another. That I’ve worked for too long, too many years of therapy, recovery, yoga, tai chi, est, EMDR and every other modality in an effort toward integrating all the fractured fairy tales of my personality. Learning the things about myself I didn’t know, or finding the source of the stories I’ve told myself. And you.

An old friend asked me if I remembered taking her for an abortion when she was 15 years old, then bringing her back to my apartment, making chicken soup (from scratch) and calling her mom to assure her that everything was okay. I was in my 20s, working in the topless bars, well-ensconced in regular heroin and cocaine use, along with the booze and I didn’t remember that at all. Which, given all that ensconcement, isn’t surprising. But I didn’t even remember being that kind of person, the kind who would take care of a runaway kid who was only a few years younger than me and may have been running the streets of Times Square as long as I’d been. I didn’t remember being nice.

Where does a story like that belong? The good girl (The Long Goodbye) or the bad girl (Dirtygirl Diaries)?

I abandoned that same friend not long ago, choosing not to believe that she has stage 4 cancer, knowing she’s smoking crack again and cancer feeling like just another scam. Cancer is often a go-to scam when you’re getting really high on the downlow. It explains away weight loss and dissipation. It elicits sympathy.

Shouldn’t I be more sympathetic, either way?

If she’s getting high, she’s trapped. I’ve been there. Getting clean isn’t easy, it’s way more than just putting down the drug or the drink. WAY more.

If she has cancer, and her family has abandoned her because of the prior lies and crack use, am I a monster for not helping financially when I can? Not at least being available by phone, being a sympathetic ear?

So, same friend, different reactions and where do those musings and stories belong?

That’s the thing. I worked a lot to integrate the disparate parts of Jodi, JJ, Sharon (I haven’t even begun to tell you about the Sharon part).

It’s been suggested that I broaden my scope—let’s be honest, at some point Mom’ll die and the Long Goodbye will have to end. It’ll be about a different kind of saying goodbye, the grieving when the person is actually gone. Very different from the current grieving when Mom is here and not here, like a magic trick, a single space taken up by matter & anti-matter.

When I’ll pack her cremains into the silver cocktail shaker that sits on the shelf, empty, and tote her around with me here and there, hither and yon. Or is it hither and thither? Either way, I’ve never been any of those places, so Mom will come with me hither, thither and yon, until I’m finally ready to let her go. And even then I’ll hang on to a little bit of the ashes.

I could write about our travels, the new Travels with Charley, me in the role of Steinbeck, Mom’s ashes and the silver cocktail shaker playing the role of a French poodle.

That’s not why I’m procrastinating. It’s not why I find myself purging my home, yet again. Two huges bookcases, two granny carts full of books. Clothes, bedframes (really, how many does one need), things I thought would eventually be art (armloads of defaced Barbies, a section of an urban brass apartment house mailbox), my father’s four foot face that had originally been his logo, atop the outside of his photography studio (which I’d envisioned leaning against my barn one day, when I had a barn and a farm, much like the heavy vintage bicycle with no brakes I’d bought and hung on to for the same reason even though I lived in a fourth floor walk up at the time).

Fred’s face.
When Mom sold the house, it was in the garage. Drag it out to the curb for garbage pick up, she’d said. My Daddy’s giant head. On the curb. For rain to hit, dogs to piss on, garbage men to toss into the crusher truck.

It was a complicated relationship. He’d been dead for a bit, the business had been closed for more than a decade. I dragged his head out to my car.

What was the first apartment I hid it in? The East Village? Brooklyn? The other Brooklyn apartment? It’s been in my Queens closet for seventeen plus years. Facing the wall, behind the coats.

I haven’t been able to toss it. Or display it.

It’s leaning against a doorway now, appropriately, neither here nor there. Halfway in the front room, halfway into the living room. Neither on its way out, nor committed to staying here.

Yeah. That’s the thing. That’s the procrastination. Daddy.

I imagined putting him up on the wall, opposite an equally huge luchador¹ head. I’d begun thinking of that display as my religious room. I have a Virgin Mary painted by Mom’s late boyfriend, a copy of what he’d seen on the bottom of a skateboard. I have a few other religious pieces of art. Different religions. And Daddy. Who holds some kind of larger-than-life god-like place in my brain.

His head is cracked. Peeling. His camera, the paint flaking off. I’m afraid to clean it, that more paint will flake off, and I have no interest in restoring it. Bringing him back to life.

It’s complicated. Like we were. Like they were.

Dead Dad Fred’s Head

This is where I want to go, what I want to write about.
What I don’t want to write about.
He had a secret.
We all have secrets. His impacted all three of us.
Anyone I can talk to about it, any place I can gather more information, those places are gone, those people are dead. Or demented.

Secrets are keys.
Sometimes you want to see what’s behind the locked door.
Sometimes it was locked for a good reason.

Yeah. That’s the thing. That’s the procrastination.
Integrating me. Dirty me. Nice me. Secret me. Daddy me. Caregiver Me. Armadillo me. All of me.

A friend said that getting sober was about going from having a thin skin and a hard heart to having a thicker skin and a softer heart. Sometimes I feel like I’m somewhere between those two extremes, stuck in the hallway of thin skin & soft heart.

Thicker skin/ Softer Heart—Not a bad goal. Not a bad title, either.

1. Why Luchadors are My Dashboard Jesus