Godammit, I’m Mad!

I knew immediately that Jean-Paul Gaultier’s spring 2012 couture collection was a tribute to Amy because I did the math. Behive + eyeliner+”Marilyn” stud = Amy Winehouse.

What a wonderful feast of crazy hives and mish-mash of retro vampy girly excess!

It makes me happy to know that Amy’s influence will live on. Her swagger and her vulnerability, her beautiful voice, her tiny little body supporting all that hair…she will haunt me forever. This collection is an homage that’s right on point, as Amy liked to say of her beehive.

Lindsey Wixson is especially adorable in her purple hive and I can’t get enough of her.

Check out the beauty details here.

Also, did everyone see the new Karl Lagerfeld stuff at net-a porter this morning?  Horrible, right? What is he thinking?!  Please let me know if any other runway shows are worth looking at. Right now, I only have eyes for Amy.

Last night I discovered a girl named Chrissy who killed herself after several years of paralysis caused by a swimming pool accident.

I learned about her in a forum on the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation website. I came upon the website a few months ago, and struggled with the mystery of why some people want to go on living and some do not.

Chrissy was a beautiful girl who had recently fallen in love and was looking forward to everything. The story of her accident and its aftermath is horrifying but it happened and I had to read it. Horrible things happen but few things can be this horrible. Still, Chrissy endured for several years. In the end, she simply didn’t want to continue a life under the circumstances dictated by her condition.

On her blog, she explained:

A big part of me died back on June 5, 2005 and my life was never the same. Everything has felt empty, and bittersweet. Every memory tainted with sadness, over everything that I’ve lost, everything I miss doing, and everything I had planned to do, and hoped to be.

I understand. Max left me a message saying something similar, even though his disabilities weren’t as extreme as Chrissy’s. For him, they were intolerable.  Going back to her blog just now, I couldn’t help but cry. What a brave girl she was. I salute her honesty and her incredible, heroic struggle.

~

Tonight, I learned about a photographer and writer, Édouard Levé, who shot himself a few days after completing a novel called Suicide. The novel is fiction but obviously reflects Levé’s preoccupation with suicide. Perhaps he he planned his death as an artistic statement. Or perhaps he lingered too long on the subject of death, turning it over in his mind until it seemed like the only rational conclusion to his obsessive and inward-looking existence. He was only 42 but seemed to have focused closely on life’s absurdity.  Here is what the narrator of Suicide says:

“You didn’t like the selfishness of your suicide. But, on balance, death’s reprieve won out over the painful agitation of life.”

It bothers me that Levé threw his life away even though he wasn’t paralyzed. It bothers me that I can’t understand why some people are resilient and some aren’t. It bothers me that you can’t leave this world without smashing everyone around you. It bothers me that no one has the power to decide which suicide is justified. It bothers me that I don’t know where Chrissy is, meaning I don’t know where Max is. It bothers me that I can’t forgive Levé for hanging himself because I can’t find the compassion for his obscure suffering.

It bothers me that I have to keep pondering death like a difficult math problem that might yield an answer if I stick with it. It beckons to me and repels me and it continues to break my broken heart.

Goodbye to Dad

Two walkers, December 2009

High School graduation, June 2011

Max and Pico

Playing guitars

and finally this photo by Antanas Sutkus. I can’t describe how much I love it. It is so exquisitely tender! It sums up everything for me. I want to kiss the little child and to reassure her. But I know she is me.

My dad died last night, at home in bed. He would have been 90 in November and we thought he would live forever. His health has been failing for the last year and a half but suddenly in the last week he turn a bad turn.

My brother and my nephew have given their all to keep him alive but metastatic cancer is a vicious force of nature that won’t be tamed.  All the kids gathered at my dad’s house to be with him. When he could still talk, he managed to tell me “Your….hair….looks…. dry.” I laughed and agreed.

Last night I sat by his bed and sang to him. He was unconscious but I imagined a slight reaction. I tried to offer comfort and peace. I wanted him to feel my loving presence, and I told him that everything was good, everything was perfect, in case he was feeling any fear.

I joined the other siblings in the living room. There are seven of us, from 18 years old to 60.

My dad didn’t really care about me, but I was the Genius. He loved the other ones, though: The Artist, the Ladies Man, the Homemaker, the Weightlifter, the Looker and the Tennis Star.  He had asked us what we would like to have after he died. I asked for his old wedding band, mostly because everything  else was taken – his piano, his Rolex watch, his cars, his paintings, etc. The ring was in an envelope in a locked box with his will.

Sure enough, my sister noticed the envelope last night, torn open and empty. One of the siblings explained that our dad had decided to sell the ring, with the help of his caretaker. The story changed a few times and I left the house sobbing after screaming at the Tennis Star.

It couldn’t have ended any other way.

I’m reading a book about addiction that Max read last year. He told me I might like it. I also remember him writing to his girlfriend that the book caused him to review his childhood, which he always thought was “pretty normal.”

The book, by Gabor Maté, a physician and psychiatrist, is extremely compassionate toward the addict. In fact, he explains at great length why the addict never really had a chance: Improper bonding during infancy harms the infant’s brain and sets him up for addiction.

Maté recounts study after study to underscore his thesis. When rats are removed from their mother for only one hour a day, their brains show damage. In human babies, this faulty bonding fucks everything up. The child is forever doomed to suffering and attempts to extinguish the suffering.

I can’t read too much of this book. Someone needs to do a study on my brain, to show how much harm the book has done.

Maté ends the long chapter about the origins of the addict’s malformed brain by assuring us that he’s not saying it’s hopeless! People can be healed, he says, through the indomitable Spirit that lives within all of us.

Meanwhile, I am compelled to look back in time and question everything. I remember loving my baby at first sight. I remember adoring his every expression, every gesture, every hair on his head. I remember nursing him for 14 months. I remember friends coming over  just to  admire him. I remember dressing him in his little outfits, reading to him, cuddling him, singing to him.

But I was a depressed mother. Depressed mothers ruin the brain as well. I forgot to say that. The baby picks up on the mother’s depression and is irreparably fucked.

I wish I could talk to Max about this. I want to know if he blames me. Or rather, if he forgives me.

His addiction must have been a nightmare for him. So much worse then the nightmare it was for us. It was such a long struggle. I never really felt it was my fault, until now.

My own mother hated me and told me so, but I didn’t want to become a drug addict. There was no comfort anywhere, from anyone, when I was a child. I have my problems but I never wanted to stick a needle in my arm. If everyone with an imperfect or depressed mother needs to escape their pain through opiates, who’s left?

I’m caught in this argument.  Depressed people don’t all become addicts. But my son did, and it’s my fault.

I wish it was nobody’s fault. I wish it was a wrong turn that led to more wrong turns. I wish he had been able to overcome his addiction and the pain that caused it. I wish I could comfort him and convince him that he was loved and he was perfect, addicted or not.

Mothers and children, what are your thoughts?

No matter how awful everything is, Toby Keith has given us a priceless gift in the line about his “daddy’s right eye.”  I laughed at it then and I still laugh when I think about it. Please enjoy his idiotic take on September 11.

~

“Knowing what our core values are and cleaving to them, even in times of testing, must be a lesson when we see the results of situational ethics and temporary, expedient treatment of basic  rights. America should not again panic and overreact to terrorist attacks against this country…….the cost of 9/11 has been billions of dollars spent, an unneeded war, and thousands of lives lost.” -  Richard A. Clark (Former US National Security Chief)

~

For me, September 11 is inextricably linked with Max, who worked at the financial Trade Center, next to the Twin Towers. It took hours before I could make contact and learn that he was okay. He ran for his life and later learned that his office was sheared off by fire.  I was so relieved, and so grateful, and so sorry he had to experience such trauma.

But life is trauma. And that’s why we need Toby Keith to lighten our burden.

Yesterday, I made the stupid decision to google “Sister Wolf.”

It’s weird to see yourself as others see you. I’m used to interacting with strangers on my own territory but finding yourself being discussed elsewhere is the equivalent of hearing what people say behind your back. And naturally, they want to talk shit about you.

I was so pleased to find several people who loved my blog! But the pleasure gave way to annoyance when I came across a website devoted to criticizing bloggers. There was even a forum for the critics to chat among themselves, but I didn’t read it. It was enough to find some people dismissing me as crazy, with one commenter even noting disgustedly that I should be getting grief therapy instead of blogging.

It has never even occurred to me that people might disapprove of my grief.  And I never think of myself as crazy, or even weird. I think the critics were upset that I outed a troll, and that’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Upon reflection, I’d do it again, because that’s the only way to effect a consequence for cowards who want to hide behind anonymity.

Well, you can’t please everyone, right?  It’s better to not google yourself. It’s the one instance where ignorance actually is bliss.

But then, I was buying my kid a wallet at Ross Dress for Less, when a sales assistant asked me if I was aware of their Every Tuesday Discount for seniors. Sure enough, my reflexes are so slow that I didn’t slap her in the face for suggesting that I am a senior. She went on to explain that it’s for people “55 and older.”

I glared at her and said something like, Okay, I’ll take the discount but you’re not supposed to think I’m 55 or older. She smiled back, sweetly and blankly. What a fucking cunt!™

God, it’s so awful how you can’t control people. I’ll never get used to it. But I can write to Ross Dress for Less and complain about this assault on my self-esteem. It might be fun to try to get them to apologize. I could even call it grief therapy!

Good idea or not?

In response to my last post about rock bands, I received the following comment by someone using the name Gene Simmons:

i hate that old dried up cunt, the one who´s son died

~

Here are my thoughts. It’s wrong to attack someone like this, online or otherwise. Why the hell would a total stranger try to hurt me in this way?? Just because they could get away with it?  It is beyond my understanding.

So I wrote back to this person, and said:

What a horrible thing to write to me!   May I ask what moves you to write such a hateful comment to someone you have never met?  I hope you never experience the loss of a child.   Meanwhile, I’d like to know why you would invoke the loss of mine in response to an innocuous blog post about rock bands?   Sister Wolf

The next day, she replied:

you know what you are right
I´m deeply sorry
your loss is way too big for me to understand, and i was outta line
this is what made me write that:
“that girl whose boyfriend punched her in the face”
when a person suffers through abuse, besides the beatings and insults and humiliation
what hurts the most is the scorn of those around her,
things like
“that would never happen to me”
“that happens only to stupid bitches”
and it pissed me off that while you demand compassion about your situation,
you show none towards someone who was fucking publicly punched in the face and then mocked endlessly for it
sometimes the only person who doesn´t shit on you for being in that situation
(that looks so simple but it´s not)
is your abuser
so you go back because in that moment he is being sweet, when deep down you know that it won´t last
and it was a mistake I´m sorry
I know things don´t get better by insulting someone else in pain
and there i was trying to put you down to make myself feel better
when we are all fighting something
that random comment just struck a cord, felt personal you know?
óbviously I´m not without fault myself
I hope this makes you feel less insulted

yours truly
Gene Simmons

~

Having read and reread this explanation, I don’t feel Gene Simmons knows the difference between a pop star and a blogger who lost a child.  I don’t “demand compassion” as Gene Simmons states. I have no demands. I merely expect human decency from those who wish to leave comments.

Gene Simmons is actually a 31 year old aspiring artist named Gabriela who lives in Mexico. There she is, above. She needs to take responsibility for the things she writes.  She’s not 12 years old, after all.

I don’t want to hear ONE MORE WORD about my vag, which in fact does not suffer from dryness. And I don’t want to be taunted with the death of my child.

Please explain to Gabriela why her apology is worthless, since I don’t feel adequate to the task. Explain to her that the cause of abused women isn’t furthered by grotesque insults lobbed at other women, under cover of a pseudonym.

And if you want more of Gabriela in your life, you can visit her here.

Saturday is Max’s birthday. I can’t Let Go, and I can’t Say Goodbye. He was my gift to the world and my partner in arms and my higher power. I miss him so much.

Omelette

I don’t know where I’d be without it.  I found this here.

And you can still find me here.