10:35 a.m.  They will be here at 11:30 and it feels like a bomb is going off inside my soul.  This is supposed to be a happy time of year.  I try to feel joy; and failing that, I carve a cheerful smile on my face for my children and for the friends and acquaintances who view me in public.  It takes so much effort to bear fake cheer that the smile feels frozen, like a clay pot that has set and will break if it isn’t handled gently.  Oh God please let the light in.

10:40.  Thoughts race through my mind and I run from the racing thoughts but I know not where to hide.  I have nowhere to go because the pain resides inside me and the soul wreckers will arrive, bearing their own phony goodwill, on my doorstep in 50 minutes.  I betray the “Happy” in Hanukkah and the “Merry” in Christmas with the dolorous mien I fight so hard to hide.  Would that I could feel peace and love and understanding.  Oh God, please let the light in.

10:45.  If I come clean to the world about how much pain I’m in, who will turn from me?  The stalwart stand by me but the aching, brooding artistic persona scares off so many others.  Disaffection and depression taste bitter and I am hard to be around.  I force goodwill and good cheer and feel fraudulent, so I hunker down and write little.  I don’t need anyone.  That’s a lie.  I need what I never will have and never did have and yet I cannot mourn it while they remain near.

10:53.  I do not cry.  I will not cry.  I will not reach out; nor, will I lash out when I see them.  The children ask, “Why can’t we spend the night at our grandparents’ house,” and they are disappointed and the injustice of it all infuriates me.  Is it mendacious for me not to speak the whole truth to them?  They can’t handle the truth.  My parents can’t handle the truth.  They attend Catholic services and receive the body of blood of Christ but refuse the Sacrament of Confession.

It’s okay, really, because I fell on my knees in front of a priest last year and confessed their sins for them.  He listened.  I cried.  The priest forgave me for their sins and advised me that I owe my parents nothing.  “Pray for them to find their way back to the Lord.  And keep your family safe from them,” Father McKittrick told me.  And he placed his hands on my head and called for God to let the light into my soul.  Oh God please let the light in.

11:03.  Christmas cheer betrays me.  It makes me feel lonelier.  My children need me.  I summon what little crumbs of faith I can gather at this last minute and wrap presents for them.  For my parents.  My son glides past me and his smile shatters me.  I hug him.  And I try.  I try to let the light in.

   I read a beautiful blog this morning written by Deb Bryan named the “the lightness of remembering well” about the marathon her sister and brother-in-law ran in honor of her mother, who passed away more than a year ago.  I have run several marathons and during a few of them, cried my eyes out for reasons simple and complex, so I understood the following words as recounted by Deb’s sister, Rachael:

Every time I thought about quitting and just walking the rest of the way, I thought about Mom. I wanted to be able to put my jersey on her headstone and to let her know, wherever she was, that I did this for her. At mile 16,when a small group of guitarists were playing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” I burst into tears while running. I felt like she was there the whole way.

As I sipped a mug of steaming coffee and felt my eyes welling up with tears, I reflected back on the nature of the marathon.  As immense and painful and impossible as running 26.2 miles seems before, during and even after you traverse those miles, overcoming the challenge of running 26.2 miles has always made me feel great, rather than small.

   In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, one of her characters asked the other if looking at the ocean made him feel small.  And the hero laughed and replied,

Never. Nor looking at the planets. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space.

When I fight through the miles stacked on miles, I don’t sob and hide my head in fear and shame and insecurity.  There are moments, of course, when I ask myself what the hell I’m doing and a few of the marathons I’ve completed have seemed like veritable bloodbaths.  I ran one marathon while still ill from bronchitis and unable to breathe, and you can call me stupid and reckless, but I am more than that, and every marathon I have completed has brought home to me just how much more than stupid or reckless I am.

   Ayn Rand had it right, you see.  When we set out to achieve the impossible, we rise to meet it and in so rising, we hold hands with all that we ever were or could be.  And in holding hands with all that we ever could be, we are able to shed and bid farewell to all the specters of failure that once shackled us.  Warriors carry swords and guns and other means of unleashing destruction on their opponents and there is a place for the avenging light of armies clashing on a battlefield.  The marathoner, however, brandishes in her heart an even stronger force: love.  It takes love to fuel the courage to grind out mile after mile despite the ache and agony of an exhausted body.

    Deb’s sister Rachael ran those miles with the light of a beloved lost mother guiding her way.  When I ran my first marathon, I ran for the lost and beaten little El, who felt small until her soul broke free of the darkness that once blinded it.  Rachael laid the bib from her race on her mother’s gravestone.  And I laid the pain and anguish of little El gently down on the running grounds unfurling behind me, for that troubled little soul to run and eventually rest in peace.  Surveying the miles ahead and behind us should remind us how great and beautiful we really are.  And if you’re in doubt whether you will make it, please let the light be your guide.

Ben’s kindergarten teacher sent me a note.  It said, “Ben made an inappropriate comment: ‘Bomb a head off.’”  I pulled my little boy aside immediately and asked him, “What did you say to upset your teacher?” He giggled, looking innocent (read: no dimple showed) and explained: “We were making these Hanukkah books, with pictures where the girls walk around with a candles on their heads, and this is like a bomb, the candle is, so I told the girls at the table that I hope the bomb doesn’t blow off their heads.”

To summarize, my kindergartener got over excited and he and some other boy traded stories about exploding Hanukkah candle-bombs exploding in their heads.  I received another note later this afternoon alerting me that Ben’s file will include a permanent note marking him as a behavior threat because he used the word “bomb” in a scary way.  I am confused by what life is sending me.  Indubitably, threats should be taken seriously.

And yet, my son was not making a threat of any kind.  The County Guidelines define a threat as “an expression of intent to harm someone that may be spoken, written, or gestured.”  My son did not intend to harm anyone.  In all cases, including the one at hand, there must be some discretion. What happens when a child is reading from a textbook about a war or an assassination of a President and uses the words “gun,” “bomb” or “killed?”  What if a child uses such a word and is overheard and misunderstood by a teacher?  Why is my child being singled out when other children were laughing?  How could my 40 pound 5-year old constitute a threat to his classmates?  Does it not matter that he did not intend to hurt anyone but was in fact concerned that the candles would explode and injure someone else?  What if my son now has a permanent stain on his file because he got over excited and giggling over the candle-bombs?  How is this his fault?  Application of rules without context can result in an unjust legality, as it were.

Kindergarten boys use words.  Not all of these words are nice.  It’s how they learn. Words matter but they do not bear a magical connotation.  The words “bomb” or “gun” or “kill” all require context in order to assume their intended function; moreover, the only way we teach morality to little people is to allow them to use many of these words and to provide the proper context for the words.  When a 5-year-old screams, “I hate you,” or “I want to kill you,” this gives a conscientious parent the opportunity to discuss the nature of life and death and love and hate.  When a child screams, “I will kill you,” perhaps this is the time (for those of us who believe in the Word), to mention the Ten Commandments and the punishment God exacts upon murderers.  And if you’re wondering, I have had all of these conversations with my children and they’re better people for it.

A reader said to me, “It all starts and ends with the parenting.  It is not the schools’ responsibility to raise our kids or teach them right from wrong.  It is their job to teach them and keep them safe while doing it.  If that means they over react and back pedal after proper investigation, then so be it.”  I hear what she’s saying but I think when we create policies and procedures for almost-adult students and apply them to 5-year olds, we create more harm than good.  Sure, the school covers its ass, and maybe in the long run, that’s all we really care about.  We live in a society governed by a legal system that does little to protect the innocent.  There is a reason lawyers call it a “legal system” rather than a justice system, and the same sort of blind injustice governs the school systems.  Ben’s school is applying rules minus discernment or judgment or that word I used earlier: context.  This yields an easier result for the Bureaucrats and teachers but it ignores the needs of the individual child.  My child.  And this both disturbs and frightens me.

I woke up to a barrage of threats and abuse and I’m swimming in a sea of hurt this morning.  Strangers called me a bitch (I am) and a cunt (well, I have that) and an idiot (need I post my IQ bona-fides?) and a fraud (yes, I have a law degree from William and Mary and passed the bar in three states), with asshole (also have one of those) and free speech violator tossed in (I am a Libertarian-need I say more?).  A man threatened to rape me (already have been).   Another man insinuated (not that he would ever use that word) that I was a cruddy mother (maybe—how the hell do I know?).  It’s been years since I’ve been bullied.  I don’t feel so much like the 12-year-old blob girl we all know and adore, as much as I feel like the 16-year old teenager who carried around a Joe vs. the Volcano luggage-sized well of abuse and unresolved pain on her sturdy shoulders.

How did I end up here again?  Why am I spending one more day in Hell?  I brought it on myself honestly.  A friend of mine told me and a few mutual friends a few days ago that a FB Page named, aptly enough, Did I Piss You Off was posting violent images of rape and domestic abuse.  In these photos, readers were urged to go out and rape and beat more women.  Next to graphic images of rape victims bore such messages as, “Wanna stop rape?  Then just say yes, Cunt.”  Most chilling of all was a photo of a dead baby, with the words, “Rape this baby until its bones break.”

I know, I know: if you don’t like someone’s message, don’t visit their house, or on Facebook, don’t visit their page.  I have never reported anyone before, and as far as free speech, if you don’t understand that there are limits on it, please head to a law library and study it a bit before screaming at me that you are free to say whatever the hell you please, because that simply is not true.  There are clear constitutional limits on hate speech, for example, not to mention words that incite violence.  I did not leave nasty comments on DIPYO’s page, but along with several administrators, I reported DIPYO for violating Facebook’s polices.

What is Facebook policy?  It provides:

We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your help to do that, which includes the following commitments:

You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.

You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.

DIPYO has violated a number of provisions recently.   By collecting a sister page’s personal contact information and distributing it to its users with instructions to attack the administrator, DIPYO has “collected information from users without their consent.”  By posting images that urge its readers to make today “Rape-Day,” DIPYO has “posted content that incites violence.”  In a number of posts that belittle rape victims, DIPYO “has posted content that is hateful.”  In photographs depicting rape, DIPYO “has posted content that is pornographic.”  DIPYO has violating the ban on posting “content that contains nudity, graphic and gratuitous violence” by urging readers to rape and break the bones of babies.  And now, in directing its 51,000 “minions” to attack several FB pages, including my own, DIPYO has “engaged in a policy to intimidate, harass and bully another user.”

Facebook, unfortunately, will do nothing to protect the innocent.  I urged readers not to follow DIPYO; on the other hand, DIPYO ordered his fans to visit my page and harass me and to file spurious and mendacious reports about me.  These reports may shut my site down.  One side of me wants to leap and hide and just fade away into the ether.  This is a difficult time of year anyway.  The other side of me, the healthy one I guess, will not back down.  And yet this burden, like so much of what I carry inside of me, the rape, the incest, the abuse . . . the past that haunts me . . . gets all tied up and connected inside my head.  When the cascading voices of what I was and who did what to me and what that makes me gets too loud inside, I search, oh so desperately, for a way to quiet the cacophony raging in my soul.

Bullies are attacking me.  It hurts.  I am trying not to stand still.  I don’t want feel afraid.  It hurts.  I won’t back down.  There is too much evil in this world.  I should ignore it.  I should fight it.  I hurt.  It’s too loud inside my hide.  I am not a failure.  I am more than a victim.  I am not a bitch or a cunt or a fraud or a failure or an idiot.  Please stop the voices.  Please stop the hurt.  I will not back down.  I will stand and fight and hurt . . . and hurt and not back down . . . no matter how much it hurts.

What if Santa is a woman?  What if the idiotic Elf on the Shelf is a girl named Julie instead of a boy named Jack?  What if Mary Magdalene was the 13^th Apostle?  Sigh, I apologize for this last question, I really do, but I can’t help it: what if God is a Goddess?  Did I start asking these questions this morning?  No, of course not.  I raised my hand in Honors Comparative Religion and asked a few questions along these lines as a freshman English major and the professor told me I was in the wrong class, asking the wrong questions.  The philosophy and history professors all told me to take my sarcasm elsewhere, and so I did: I left school and tried to write the great American novel and fumbled around for a couple of years before I stumbled back to college and argued my way to a degree, Magna Cum Laude.  I didn’t stop asking questions but I long ago stopped expecting that someone would provide answers.

Do I believe in God?  Yes, I try to, but I doubt his existence and I question almost everything I have read about him in the Bible.  I don’t know if God is male; I don’t know if he brought the locusts and the plagues upon the evil nations; I don’t know if he built Eve out of Adam’s rib (damn, that movie, Adam’s Rib makes me angry even though I love Hepburn and Tracy).  I don’t understand why the Old Testament is so hateful; the New Testament; so full of love.  I don’t think that everything inscribed in its pages really occurred because even if God exists and is infallible, he did not write the books and chapters in the Bible.  Men wrote it and I keep coming back to two things: humans are highly imperfect and often are incapable of perceiving and speaking what is real and true; and, only men, and never women, wrote the words in its pages.

As the mother of three children, I try not to question my belief in God in front of them.  When I married my Methodist husband, I agreed (since I was terminally confused about my faith) to follow his lead in all things religious, and this has worked out well enough since he suffers from indolence on Sunday mornings.  Sometimes we make it; sometimes we don’t.  I teach the children the fundamentals of both my shaky Christian faith and my reason-based philosophy and hope that they will have the critical thinking ability, as they age, to figure things out for themselves.  In some ways, I want them to find an unshakeable faith.  To be honest, as I have waded through major depressive episodes again and again, I often have fallen to my knees and begged God to pass me a lifeline.  Faith in God gives me hope.  And yet I hope that God understands why I have so many doubts.

How does this relate to Santa Claus and the elf on the shelf?  I hate the Santa Claus myth.  It truly offends me that we are expected to lie to our children.  My daughter wanted nothing to do with Santa or his minions, and so I was able to tell her that Santa was a happy myth, a game, like a Disney movie, that parents told their children.  My boys, on the other hand, didn’t listen to me when I tried to dispute Santa’s existence, so I have played along reluctantly and yet detested the mendacity I have acquiesced in espousing.

It does not, unfortunately, stop here.  It isn’t enough that we lie about Santa.  Now we are expected to lie about the Elf on the Shelf, and this has created an unexpected problem.  My daughter, who is 8-going-on-28, felt the sting of discrimination when my husband put “Jack” on the shelf this morning, and I in turn realized that I have become an instrument in injuring her sense of self as a girl.

As the children ate breakfast, the boys chattered about Jack.. “C,mon, Mom,” my daughter said grumpily, “We need to rename the Elf on the shelf.”

“That’s not possible. His name is Jack,” I replied as the kids fought among themselves.

“Yeah, but we can rename him every year,” she persisted.

“But he’s already named. That’s preposterous.”

Maddie shouted over her brothers. “No, what’s preposterous is that the elves always have boys’ names!”

I sighed. She had a good point, and of course the in-laws gave us that stupid thing already named.  “Maybe,” I mused, “I should rename the elf Julie.”  Madeline snickered.  Jim burst into tears and I glared at him and exclaimed, “Aw, stop crying about the elf!”

If I do not discard Jack, I will buy a dress for him and give him a girl’s name.  It seems unseemly to rename God a Goddess.  Who am I to know or to question God’s sex or gender?  I stop at declaring Mary Magdalene the 13^th disciple (a notion based on serious and scholarly arguments).  And the freakin’ Santa myth is difficult to combat when the entire culture pressures both parents and children into believing it.  I will not, however, inculcate the myth of the Elf on the Shelf; which is to say, if he remains in our household, she will, from now on, wear a dress.

“Hey,” I said quietly.

She glanced at me and sat down.

“I will listen to you, I promise.”

“Yeah.”  She shrugged.  “It doesn’t matter.”

I nodded and waited.  I didn’t have the energy to take care of her, to search for the right words to fix her.  How can I fix her?  I don’t have much to give. 

“Are you going to ask me if I’m sure it happened?”

“No.”

“If you ask me that–don’t ask me that.  Don’t put that on me.”

“I won’t.”

“Why do you care?”

“I need to know.”

“That’s all?”

“Talk to me.”

“I see it in a flash and then it fades but I feel it like yesterday, like when your guy hurts you accidentally when he makes love to you.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you see in that flash?”

“A man walks past me on a dark path in the woods and nods at me.  I nod back.  I taste fear as if it were salt left by summer sweat, with a tinge of bug spray overlaying it.  For the rest of the walk I replay the assault that did not happen.  Yes it happened.  Not tonight.  Not that man, not tonight.”

“Okay.  Go ahead.”

“I saw it and it felt real in my body.  I have trouble describing it don’t want to feel it again.  For a flash of an instant I saw something and felt it.”

She stood up and walked over to the window.  You could see the lights from where she stood.

“What are you thinking?”

“I used to like to look at the city lights from Nana’s house.  It was the only time I felt safe there.  Otherwise I waited for someone to hurt me.  Lights meant that someone was still awake and maybe somewhere things were okay.  The lights looked happy.  Now I look outside and I think how long it would take to hit the ground and how much it would hurt and I remember the time I almost jumped and this is all so much to handle.”

“Why did you feel scared at Nana’s?”

“Are you serious?”  She crossed her arms and sat on the ledge, legs dangling above the ground. He strangled me. Papa strangled me.  Aunt Mary saved me.

“How does your body feel when you see the word rape?”

“My genitals ache and burn.  It feels like someone is pushing into them.  I don’t like seeing the word or speaking it out loud.  It’s a bad word.”  She shook helplessly and tried to talk through it.  “I don’t know how to face this.”

“You’re thinking about hurting yourself aren’t you?”

She looked over at the window and when she turned back to me I saw tears in her eyes.  “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.  Please stay here with me.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Do you remember when you were 17 and your parents thought you were gay and you got so upset that you just drove, hoping to meet a median at 70 miles an hour, and you drove for hours, until you ended up somewhere in Pennsylvania?”

She smiled.  “Yeah.  A big storm blew in and I was in white-out conditions.  The rain came down so fast that the only lights I could follow were the big trucks’ lights.  I couldn’t even smoke a Camel Light.  I slowed down and almost stopped and I was afraid.  That was my chance to die.  I didn’t really want to die.  I wanted to bleed from the pain and find someone who cared enough to fix me.  I ended up alone with a choice to make and I fought to hold on.  When I made it home I told my parents how much they’d hurt me, how wrong they were to think that my friendship with my best friend was anything more than that.”

“How many long drives like that did you take?”

“A lot.  Those were my death-wish drives in the middle of the night.  By the halfway point all I could think about was a warm bed and a few hours of sleep.”

“Remember the time you OD’d on marijuana laced with PCP?”

“Yeah.  Fun.  Crazy drug.”

“Doesn’t matter.  Your heart stopped beating, you saw the light, the tunnel that atheists attribute to something that it’s not.  I think it is.  And then what?”

“I turned around and fought like hell to breathe.  To get away from that bright light.”  She shivered.  So did I.

“What else happened—remember?”

“I held on to the sides of my chair and the demons told me to leap out of the window.”  We smirked cynically.

“Doesn’t matter if the demons were real.  Did you jump?”

She shook her head.

“So you’ve been here before.  You know this pain, this hunger for human comfort.  And if no one reaches out to you, you’ve been here before.”

“What if no one believes me?  Wait, what if someone doesn’t believe me?”

I smiled sadly.  “People have done worse things to you than not believe you were sexually assaulted and repressed the memory.”

“When I try to remember it the pain—I want to fall, it’s all I can do to stand up and talk.”  She bent over and put her hands on her knees.

“Breathe.”

“Can’t,” she choked.

“What do you see?”

“Dark.  No!”

“What do you feel?”

“Pinned down can’t breathe gotta go get out of there where is everyone what is happening to me bad don’t make noise not here not here no no no don’t look.”

“Who?”

“My eyes are closed.”

“Open them.”

“I feel it I feel it so hard that I squeeze my legs together and it still cuts through me, storms through me like a late night train from nowhere.”

“Is it was it someone you know?”

“Yeah, I think.  I don’t want to kill them.  I want them dead, away, gone from here.”

“Where do you want to be?”

“So often I don’t want to stay.  I feel it here inside me and I want to disappear, to not be.”

“Don’t.  Stay.  Stay with me. I will hold you here.”

She tried to stand but she glanced at me helplessly and started to fall.  Her head hit the sofa cushions and she looked like she was still falling, unaware of time or place.  I knelt next to her and held her hand.

“Little El—I’m here.”

She rolled on her side and curled her feet under her knees.  Her stomach rose and fell, with breaths, or sobs I did not know.  I waited.  “What do you feel?”

It took so long for her to open her eyes and turn them on me.  Her eyes were haunted and it made her look older.  “Hold me.  Please.  Hold me.”

A jolt of pain hit me in my stomach.  I started to shake and my hands trembled.  Hold her?  How?  It did not matter.

In one motion, I leaned over, grabbed her cigarettes, and gently shifted her head so that I could fit on one side of her.  She sighed slightly and I could feel her body tense and start to shake.  I lit two cigarettes, handed her one, and with the same hand, I supported her head and hugged her.  We sat and smoked, her head on my shoulder, and we said nothing.

“I’m ready little El.  I will hold you tight and watch over you while you cry and keep you safe.  I promise I won’t leave your side.  You’ve held it in all this time but we need to let it out now, examine it together, figure out how it hurt you and you know what?”

She looked at me quietly.  “What?”

“I need you so much.  I need you like you need me because I can’t fix us without your help.”

She shrugged and started to get that wild-eyed look she gets.  “I don’t understand.”

“I need you to trust in me and have faith that I will watch over you.  Do you know why I need you to feel your pain?  I need to feel my pain too.  It’s the only way I can fix us, if we can sit together and I can go back through this with all the shit I’ve learned as an adult—there’s something to getting older.”

She leaned on one arm.   “I don’t know how to cry.  Can you teach me that?”

I put an arm around her and laughed. “I don’t know either.  Maybe we can figure it out.  Let’s go eat some ice cream and talk about it.”

She nodded.  “I can have ice cream?”

“Yes.  Mint chocolate chip—your favorite.  Mixed with coffee. C’mon, let’s run to the store and grab some.”

She took my hand and we drove together and neither one of us imagined what would happen if we slammed into the median.  We were okay, as long as we were together, me and little El.

Madeline slammed the bedroom door against the door wall and dramatically glided into my room.  For much of the afternoon, I had been lost in contemplation.  The day before, a friend had threatened suicide.  She lives thousands of miles away from me, and the only thing I could do to help her was to call the police in her city.  Now she is furious, and keeps finding new and creative ways to tell me just how furious.  As she burst into my room, my eldest child managed to grab my attention with a most unusual pronouncement: “Mom!!  Come quick!  Jim and Ben are sinking the Titanic in the downstairs bathroom and there is water everywhere!”

     Hastily I threw the papers I’d been editing in the general direction of my desk and ran downstairs.  I heard Jim and Ben laughing uproariously and planning their next stunt.  “Hey Jim,” Ben cried, “Watch this!”  I ducked my head in around the corner and my jaw dropped not so much at the water dripping from sink to linoleum, but more so from the strange gurgling sounds coming from Jim’s mouth.

Something hung out of Ben’s mouth and I realized he was sucking or blowing on something.  Oh please God don’t let it be the toilet bowl brush.  One time I caught Ben chewing on the toilet bowl brush when he was a baby and I was sure he was going to die of some infectious disease.  I sighed in relief when my eyes scanned around the bathroom and settled on the still-intact toilet bowl brush.  Whew.  No need to got to the hospital.  Innocuously enough I suppose, my sons had removed the toilet paper roll from the dispenser and filled the sink with water. Then they pretended they were scuba diving around the capsized Titanic by blowing bubbles through the toilet paper cylinder into the sink.  It was weird and disgusting and ingenious and I snapped a few pictures.

Why take pictures of my children behaving crazily? I leave the analysis up to a friend, C.N.:

For the billionth time, I experience a flicker of abject gratitude that my childhood preceded the social media revolution. And for the billionth time, I’m grateful that my (alleged) adulthood coincided with the social media revolution, allowing me to enjoy things like the spectacle of online friends’ kids blowing bubbles in the sink with toilet paper rolls.

This time it was my kids blowing the bubbles, but who knows?  Maybe next time it will be someone else’s kids creating the happy madness.

A few minutes later, I too was laughing loudly at my winsome children playing with everyday bathroom supplies.  My husband walked in from work carrying his briefcase and looking all grownup in his grey overcoat and grey suit, and he tried not to smile at the puddle of water in the powder room.  I stood on top of the toilet pretending I was the captain of the Titanic. The children blew bubbles with the toilet paper rolls and floated tissue paper in the sink. “It’s land,” Ben cried. Jim giggled hysterically. Madeline exclaimed, “Tidal wave!!!”  I caught her on film yelling, and as tired and dispirited as I had felt earlier, I felt restored by our shared mirth.  And many bath towels later, the Titanic was dried off, and so were all of its crew members.

Please Note: Name and Locations have been Altered to Protect the Confidentiality of People Mentioned Below

My day started well enough, or at least it started like any other Monday.  I woke up, glared at the clock, winced at the first few steps I took toward the bathroom, brushed my teeth, braced and prayed for patience before waking my sons and my daughter, and tapped the computer to wake it up.  I like to check e-mail and Running from Hell with El before I start my coffee pot.  The Facebook page may exist only in the virtual world but it sure feels pretty real to me.  And the friends I have made through Facebook aren’t fake, not to me, so when I spotted a notification from a woman named Cary from Texas, I perked up and quickly scanned it. Cary has become a good friend of mine and I love hearing from her.

Lately, Cary’s been going through a rough divorce and like half the damn world, she lost her job when the entire mortgage industry collapsed.  Our conversations have gotten darker but she never fails to crack a joke and tell sweet stories about her children.  In today’s e-mail, Cary told me she was “going to end it all,” and as rushed as I was, I dashed off a quick note asking for more particulars and details.  More than anything, I needed to assess the imminence of her suicidal intentions.  As I typed, my sunny child, Jim, walked around the corner and I smiled (or grimaced) and asked him to please brush his teeth and get ready for school.

The remaining minutes leading up catching out the bus consisted of a battle among barely speaking and very angry children and a grouchy mama, and I lurched between pouring milk and contemplating my friend’s problems.  I can’t get into it here, but I understood why she felt desperate.  If I were in her shoes, I might be contemplating the pill bottles in my medicine cabinet.  God knows I’ve thought about it before, and when things got bad, really bad, I handed the bottles over to my best friend.  That morning I gratefully had tried to smile and my best friend, she had tried not to cry when she took the pills from me.  I say that here neither for pity nor for shock value but merely to explain why I took Cary’s cry for help seriously.

I sighed and glanced longingly at the piles of half-written chapters on my desk and got busy on Cary.  I wrote more to her, and her responses alarmed me.  I contacted a friend who runs a suicide prevention site and ran the situation past her and she immediately gave me advice and tried to help me figure out what to say and what not to say.  I private messaged (“PMd”) Paula, one of my dearest friends who lives in Dallas, and asked if she lived close enough to Cary to drive by Cary’s house.  “Shoot,” Paula responded, “Cary lives closer to Houston.”  Then I PMd another one of my closest friends, Alicia, who is also good friends with Cary.  “Alicia,” I wrote, “Cary is suicidal.  She needs help.”  Alicia immediately got in contact with Cary and about an hour later, she wrote me back.  “Yeah,” Alicia said, “I talked to her.  She’s ready to end it. I don’t have her location, so I can’t call it in.”  Alicia lives in the Pacific Northwest, so she could not get to Cary either.

We got in contact with another one of our close friends, Hannah, and if you’re thinking, “Crap, y’all are like a freakin’ female mafia,” why, yes, we are.  We laugh with one another and sometimes we cry.  And if we ever went to war, I’d want these women in my bunker with me.

Hannah is a brilliant, highly educated hard ass from some scary part of New York City, and as crazy as her Queens accent sounds, she graduated from NYU, so she is sneaky-smart, if that makes sense.  I didn’t screw around with Hannah when I PM’d her: “Cary is desperate, which is code for suicidal, and we’re running out of options.  None of us can get out there.”  Hannah started making suggestions and as she usually does, took charge, which sort of relieved me because I dither and get lost in my own contemplations and story lines and shades and hues of gray.  “Is there anyone out there we can talk to?”  Hannah demanded.  Alicia responded, “Yes, her parents.”  In the back of my mind, I worried about Cary’s parents, who I recalled were ill, but I kept that to myself.  And I chirped in that it might be good to call them as a last resort.

Hannah typed, “Not last resort.  Now.  Does anyone have Cary’s phone number?” Alicia and I had her cell phone number but not her home number, and Cary had stopped answering Alicia’s texts.  “What about her parents’ phone number?”  Hannah and I both spent the better part of an hour trying to track the parents down.  I even called in a favor from a government investigator, who was able to get me the name and number of the owner of the parents’ rental home, but we could not find the parents’ number.

By now it was 2 p.m.  The three of us had spent most of the day trying to talk to Cary and then to find her parents, and my kids were running around the house punching each other and I wanted to mull it over and suss it out and do nothing of use but I knew that wasn’t going to be good enough.  Alicia wrote, “Someone needs to call this in and I’m hiking in the Everglades and am losing my signal.”  I thought of how calling the police might result in lost custody and Hannah wrote back, “Guys, you really need to alert the police.”  Alicia agreed.  “Gals, I can’t find a number.  It could be unlisted or I’m looking in the wrong place.  If she’s serious and we believe she’s going to do this, we have to contact the police.  I’d rather she hate me than have her death on my hands.”

I thought of Cary’s daughter, who is Madeline’s age, and at that exact moment, Madeline breezed into my room, wiping her wavy locks out of her eyes.  “Mom?”  I waved her off and then felt like a jerk, so I put my arms out and held her in a tight hug.  “I’m really sorry hun, but a friend needs me.  It’s very important I concentrate right now.”  Madeline nodded at me and asked, “Which friend?”  I smiled and shook my head.  “I can’t say, but can you please take Ben outside with you?”  She stood up straight.  “Sure.  Can we play in the water?”  I thought of how cold it was outside and how much they love splashing in the creek and calculated the low risk of Ben somehow managing to drown in the ankle-high water.  “Okay, but don’t go farther than I can see you through this window.”

Cary’s daughter needs her mother just as much as my daughter needs me.  Back on the computer, Hannah had typed, “El, call them please.  The non-emergency number is 555-555-5555 or give me the information and I will call them.”  I asked yet again, “Alicia, is the threat imminent?”  And Alicia responded, “It’s the only thing we can do.  It’s the right thing.”  As I dialed Houston, Texas, Hannah PM’d me and asked if I were calling.  “Yes, on the phone with dispatch now.”  I tried to understand the thick Texas drawl and read Hannah’s messages.  “Good girl,” Hannah added.  “I am shaking like a leaf.”  I thought about this and realized that my hands were steady and my emotions, almost nonexistent.  I would have time to feel later.

I don’t know how the story ends.  The police brought Cary in and she may never speak to us again.  She’s angry at us.  She’s scared of losing her daughter.  We’re scared of losing her.