Author: Jeannine Ouellette

My dear friend Julie wants to marry Louis, our nearly house-trained Yorkie-Poo puppy. A lot of people might think it’s offbeat and even disturbing that Julie imagines matrimony with a small, furry dog, who, charming though he may be, has certain disgusting habits, like snacking on my nephew’s dirty diapers.

Mostly, I’m used to the oddity of Julie’s passion, and I trust that when she says “marry,” she’s exaggerating. Still, I cringed a little when she got super-friendly with Louis in front of the nice, normal neighbor couple. Their laughter at the spectacle of “girl loves dog” bordered on nervous hysteria. But the guy who gets most uptight about Julie’s puppy love is her boyfriend, Tony. Julie says Tony is jealous of Louis. More likely, he’s simply embarrassed about being edged out by a poofy fella with bad breath and an excessively hairy back.

Either way, I’m not about to tell Tony—or Julie, for that matter—that, according to a 2002 study conducted at the State University of New York at Buffalo, an animal friend often provides more comfort than a spouse. Researchers measured signs of stress, such as spikes in blood pressure, while study participants performed mental math or held their hands in ice water. People completed the tasks alone, with a spouse, with a friend, or with a pet, and those with pets fared best. Meanwhile, numerous studies have shown that the mere presence of domesticated animals can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, raise survival chances after a heart attack, and mitigate loneliness and depression.

Spouses, on the other hand, offer no such proven benefits. Sure, married people are consistently healthier and happier than their single counterparts, and are less likely to be smokers, heavy drinkers, or be plagued with headaches or psychological problems. But that, say researchers, is probably because married people started out happier, healthier, and more content than others who don’t marry. A Michigan State University psychologist synthesized fifteen years of interviews conducted with twenty-four thousand Germans and concluded that marriage itself doesn’t make people the slightest bit happier. Well, at least not in the long haul. Their self-reported happiness scores, on a scale of one to ten, rose slightly from 7.28 to 7.56 immediately after the vows, but by the second anniversary, they were right back down to their starting points.

I read all about this research on pets and marriage and the science of happiness in the recent “Mind and Body” special issue of Time. (That’s one of many magazines Jon inexplicably signed up for the last time someone came to the door, which was right after the sixty-pound box of grapefruit arrived, sold by a previous door-knocker. Grapefruit smoothies leave a lot to be desired). I was reading all this about how Julie would probably be better off adopting a dog than marrying a man a mere forty-eight hours after Jon and I finalized reservations on a place for our wedding this summer. Wouldn’t you know. I’m always a beat behind.

Oh, well. I’m marrying him anyway, even if he continues to order grapefruit. Because I’m not sure that marriage is, in the end, supposed to have a whole lot to do with happiness. It’s about the profound comfort of trusting someone to put up with you despite the fact that you are not a dog, that you are unfortunately much more complicated and ornery than a dog, and frequently less adorable. This open-eyed love is in contrast to that of Louis, who quite plainly loves us because he doesn’t know any better.

So we’ll have a homemade ceremony in Duluth, at Brighton Beach on Lake Superior. We went there years ago, when both of us were gasping through the first year of marital break-up. Jon had never been to the North Shore, and I brought him there because it has always been a healing place for me. But that particular early winter day was wickedly cold and windy. Sharp rain pelted our faces, and the lake was dark and roiling. The whole scene matched the landscape of our lives exactly, yet the moody darkness held a strange peace. We ventured out on the rocks together, but the freezing wind and rain drove me back to the shelter of the car. Jon stayed out there on the jagged shore for a long while. I thought maybe he was soaking in the desolation, merging his personal rawness with the brutality of the elements. But I was wrong. Later, much later, Jon told me that what he’d experienced out there in the howling wind and crashing waves was an unbidden moment of grace. He’d looked out at that dark horizon and seen, to his surprise, an open space for possibility. The space filled up with a picture, mottled through the rain, of us spending our lives together, of our enduring. And now we’re returning, not with hopes of unbridled happiness, but of enduring grace, just grace.

Back in the seventies, when I was tender and impressionable, my mom used to chat with her houseplants. “It helps them grow,” she’d explain to me as I followed her around from one beaded macramé hanger to the next. “They don’t understand the words, but they can tell you’re talking to them. They like the attention.” To her credit, Mom did have a magnificent Boston fern and a sprawling jade plant as living testaments to her efforts.

It just so happens that her ideas date far back past the bad-fad seventies. I don’t think my mom was reading nineteenth-century German philosophy in between her plant waterings, but professor Gustav Theodor Fechner was promoting the idea of talking to plants back in the mid-1800s. In his book Nanna (translated as Soul Life of Plants), Fechner reasoned that plants share our human capacity for emotion, and that lavishing them with good conversation and heartfelt attention promotes healthy growth.

Science can’t deny that talking to plants could help them grow, but for reasons other than those my mom or Fechner offered. You see, there’s the simple scientific matter of plants needing carbon dioxide to grow. When you talk to a plant, you give it a direct dose as you exhale. Of course, you’d have to speak intimately with your green friends for several hours a day (which could be thought odd) in order for your breath to provide a therapeutically significant amount of CO2. Personally, I think this sounds like an incredibly relaxing activity, but it lacks decent income potential.

Or does it? Luther Burbank, a renowned botanist, is best remembered for introducing the Burbank potato, precursor to the Russett potato. But Burbank’s passion was much broader than the spud. He claimed that plants are capable of understanding the meaning of speech, telepathically. Burbank recorded his ideas in his book, Training of the Human Plant. In 1926, Burbank died and was buried in front of his Santa Rosa cottage under a Cedar of Lebanon tree that he planted in 1893.

But his ideas stayed in circulation, and in 1970, George Milstein, a New York dentist, released his classic album, Music to Grow Plants By, which I am almost certain my mother kept in her collection alongside the Anne Murray and Johnny Cash titles that her daughters grew up on.

This all serves to explain why I am naturally predisposed to entrancement by things from which most others maintain a skeptical distance. Like, for instance, Masura Emoto and his water crystal photography. The Rake’s article about Emoto’s appearance in Wayzata last summer inspired letters from readers (and drew some reprint requests as well). Clearly, Emoto hits, and perhaps grates, a nerve with his claims that talking to water affects its “health.” Just when you thought bell bottoms were finally going back out, talking to your water comes in.

Can water in a jar really—as Emoto insists—be affected by words on a piece of paper, taped onto the glass so that they face the water? Is Emoto even a scientist? He’s said to be a graduate of the Yokohama Municipal University’s department of humanities and sciences with a focus on international relations, with a subsequent certification from the Open International University as a doctor of alternative medicine.

I know what you’re thinking. But on the other hand, what harm can come of a world with more love and appreciation? And anyway, if I already talk to my plants, how far a stretch is it to say a little thanks to my water?

Or is this the sort of thinking that will soon have me stepping over cracks in the sidewalk and flipping the light switch three times before I enter or exit a room? Not really. I think it’s more like a direct challenge to the old saw that you’re not doing any harm when you picture your enemy under a bus. In essence, what Emoto and Burbank and Fechner profess is the existence of profound and lawful connections between life forms. They seem convinced that our intentions are powerful and create consequences beyond our current comprehension. They’re also three good examples of the fact that you can’t set out to understand, observe, or prove these ideas without many people poking fun at you.

Milstein, on the other hand, is a tougher nut to crack. With his dentistry practice and his recording dreams, he may serve only to prove that the seventies were every bit as weird as we remember.

When you get to a certain age, you realize it’s time to prioritize your to-do list. Not to discount her enthusiasm, but I think Ms. Routson exaggerated in my fifth-grade yearbook when she wrote, “Teacher, writer, astronaut, president—you can do it all!”

The truth is, the moon and the White House are not the only items to delete from my plans for this lifetime. I’m beginning to think the only degrees I’ll earn are the kind you order online, and I’m no longer waiting to metamorphose into a social butterfly, a ballerina, a talented cook, or a person who can utilize more than two organizational skills at the same time. These days, I see the wisdom in playing to my strengths and cutting my losses elsewhere.

For the most part, I’m at peace with the gradual recognition of the many things I may never do. My throat closes more stubbornly against the rush of things I will never do again.

Mainly, we’re talking about babies.

If you said that six kids in one blended family were enough, you’d probably be right. My oldest daughter started high school this year, while Jon’s oldest graduated and headed for the East Coast. Only one of the bunch is still too young for deodorant. I can see—even through today’s cyclonic activity level—an eerie quiet waiting to settle over our house in a few short years.

The thing is, I’ve spent so much time being buffeted by children’s urgency, so many years spinning in their familiar cacophony, that I don’t trust the impending quiet. It’s foreshadowed already during the times when our kids are with their other parents. The silence then is demanding, it wants something back. But what? Productivity? Leisure? Gratitude? Sex? I’m incredibly grateful that Jon and I have predictable times when we can enjoy each other in that intensely indulgent way that childless couples do, since we never experienced that phase of life together. Besides, being both divorced once already, we have a depressingly realistic sense of how dangerous it can be to let your marriage become like running a child care center with someone you used to date. Couple time is good! It’s just that a totally empty nest sounds so excessive.

Take New Year’s Eve, 2002. Jon and I had a party that started with all of our kids and a few friends at the Nicollet Island ice rink, and continued with festivities at our house. Our friend Julie brought her Best of Abba CD, while our friend Sean was the karaoke singer. In a fit of abandon, I put on my silver dress and black boots and became the dancing queen. Jon’s oldest daughter was a junior then, and she had invited about fifteen high school friends over. The other kids had guests, as well. At around ten o’clock, the adults made martinis. When midnight arrived, we paraded the block with pots and pans while the college kids on the corner backed us up with trombones from their balcony. It was a crazy good time.

Boy, did we pay for it the next day. Worse by far than the hangover was the weirdness of a confetti strewn floor and a kitchen counter stacked with dirty cups, coagulated hot chocolate clinging to their insides. Amid these sticky reminders of our kids, who were freshly departed to their other homes, Jon and I sat sullen, our ears ringing in the hush.

Not that I would seriously consider having a baby. Of course not! Yet to admit that, even to myself, feels like a hard pinch. Because living a life this full is a lot like giving birth over and over again. Each time you get better at it, and you realize how much you didn’t understand before. Even pain feels partly good because you’re so damned alive. By the time of Lillie’s birth—my last—I was only beginning to understand this. She came so fast we barely made it to the hospital. The intensity and speed of the effort left me shaking so hard I could barely hold her. She was wakeful and calm, and she smelled of bread. Sophie and Max were there to meet their sister, awed as much by the blood as by the strange new creature in my arms. My own sister was placating them with vending-machine treats and trying—while she waited for us to come home with Lillie—to fend off chaos.

And that’s the thing that’s so clear to me now: Everything alive is in some sort of chaos. I mean, what could be more chaotic than emerging life, or more deathly than complete stasis? I’m sure I can manage over the next several years to envision a rich middle path, but still, I’m a little sad to know that the fullness of the moment is but a sign of the gradual waning of these most chaotic years.

When I was in the throes of young motherhood, raising three little kids and editing a parenting magazine from home, I signed up for a bunch of email groups for moms. I wanted to tune into what parents were talking about and arguing about. I wanted to know which issues packed the most punch among mothers like me. The flood of email that began arriving helped a lot in terms of story ideas and even finding contributors for the magazine, but it also got me wondering about where some of these women found the time to contribute so voluminously to so many email groups while also pulling babies away from outlets and wringing out the cloth diapers we were all so dutifully committed to. Some of those moms, I came to think, were actually addicted to email and the escape it must have offered from the isolation of being home all day with babies. I thought someday I might write a feature story on this topic, but it never materialized.

Since then, my work and family life have changed. The kids are busy with school and sports and music lessons, and I’m busy teaching most of the day. Although I’m still writing, I use email less than I used to. But I still like it quite a bit, and probably depend on it more than I should. It’s a habit born of many years of being self-employed and working from home. I check my messages first thing in the morning and last thing before bed, and multiple times in between. I’m always hoping for some piece of good fortune to arrive in my inbox. It could be an acceptance letter on a query I’ve sent out, or a kind word from a reader, or a letter from my sister or a friend. It could even, these days, be a note from one of my kids. Even though it’s usually just a lot of work-related documents crossing the transom along with offers to enlarge my penis, I still check with a sense of inexplicable anticipation…which usually ends in disappointment.

So now, it’s Google I turn to most for the possibility of enlightenment and surprise. I love Google. Oftentimes, when I should be working, I find myself Googling instead. I can’t be bothered with advanced search techniques involving signs and symbols. I prefer a more esoteric approach, based on a belief in serendipity and fate. I have Googled everything from “good ideas” to “meaning mystery life.” I particularly enjoy Googling for obscure beauty secrets and the diagnoses for any ailments that might arise in the family. With Google’s help, I have accurately identified everything from ingrown toenails to more complicated problems, such as hair dye gone wrong. I know that my stepdaughter Lily was especially grateful when I Googled her green hair and determined that professional intervention was advised. My son Max was less impressed when I misdiagnosed his poison ivy as ringworm, but the mistake was quickly remedied by our corner pharmacist. No lasting damage was done, except to my credibility.

All this Googling is decadent, I’ll admit, and usually an extravagant waste of time, but sometimes it pays off. About a year ago, in the midst of Googling the day away, I stumbled upon a potential client for my grant-writing business. I fired off a letter of interest and within twenty-four hours had secured the largest single deal I’d ever made, plus a stream of ongoing work that continues to this day. Sometimes, since then, I Google words like “jackpot” or “lots money little work,” just in case. I can’t deny that a couple of times I have Googled myself, but, as often seems to be the case, results on my big sister are more impressive.

Something tells me there is a limit to the usefulness of Google, and I might be approaching it. But it’s not easy to quit. Real life is full of complicated situations with no apparent answers. Families are hotbeds of emotion and need. The political world is highly complex, to the point where I often feel powerless in my efforts to get true clarity and effect meaningful change. Work is a reliable source of anxiety, as are questions about whether or not I’m doing enough well enough to hold my own in a competitive economy. For God’s sake, the male fish in Britain are turning into females and the microbe responsible for mad cow disease is proliferating in our food supply as we speak. In a world that seems increasingly out of control, Google is an escape of sorts. It’s a place where answers are free, easy, and instant—if only I can stumble on the right question.

Labor Day weekend marked the end of Wack the Iraq, a boardwalk game in the seaside town of Wildwood, New Jersey. (Its inventors must have assumed that customers untroubled by the game’s objective would also be unlikely to bristle at the gross grammatical insult of its name.) The game involved players shooting paintballs at live human targets posing as Iraqis—that is, people in ridiculous dark plastic suits, trudging half-heartedly around a pen while getting splattered with paint. My family watched this spectacle with our own eyes this summer and found ourselves recoiling as a five-year-old girl took aim at a pretend Saddam. We weren’t the only ones disturbed; an outcry from antidiscrimination activists led to the game’s early closing (the rest of the boardwalk arcade remains open until mid-October).

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year and a half since combat began. I remember vividly the evening of those first Baghdad bombings. I was feeling sad and frantic about the news, and I walked into the living room to be near my kids—who, it turned out, were setting up a friendly game of Risk. I stopped cold. They stared back with a collective “What?”

“Please,” I said, “put that away.”

“Oh, right,” they said in a flurry, as if they’d momentarily forgotten all about the impending bloodshed on the other side of the globe. They argued mildly among themselves until they settled on Pictionary as a more suitable game to play.

Now, more than one thousand American soldiers have died in the “campaign.” All but one hundred and forty of the U.S. deaths have come since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations under a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

One thousand American deaths are terrible indeed, but I can’t fully process an isolated American statistic when it is estimated unofficially that between ten thousand and thirty thousand Iraqis have been killed since the United States invaded their country. There are no official figures for the number of Iraqi civilians killed, but Iraq Body Count, a group organized by British and U.S. researchers, believes the number exceeds 11,000.

An organization called Project on Defense Alternatives maintains a website with more detailed accounts of the losses, including press excerpts, such as this April 2003 account by Peter Beaumont in the London-based Observer: “Hanaan no longer has much of a face to speak of. This slim 17-year-old girl has burns that cover her whole body….Ali, his parents say, had been a curious boy and was playing with unexploded ordnance when he was injured….Surgeons give him a 50 per cent chance of survival—not because of his injuries…but because of the risk of infection in a ward terribly short of antibiotics….One of the US Marine guards outside the Medical City Complex…recalls a boy brought in with all of his face except his lower jaw shot away. The child had been traveling in a car with his parents that had approached a US checkpoint too fast for the soldiers’ taste. So they drilled it with heavy machine-gun fire. Radaad Latif Jassan al Obeidi stands by the bed of his son Saadeq, 22. He says he was injured in his stomach by the same bomb that landed near their home….Saadeq’s leg has been amputated at the thigh.”

War is hell. But this war is worse, because its justification was based on falsehoods. As the election approaches, I want John Kerry to take a stronger stand. With Minnesota as a toss-up state, there is no way can I risk helping Bush by voting for Ralph Nader. Why won’t Kerry heed the advice doled out recently by feisty columnist Helen Thomas, who said that the Democratic candidate could stand to “learn something from two previous wartime Republican presidential candidates who had a better take on the public pulse and won the White House.”

Thomas recalled that in 1952, during the Korean War, Dwight D. Eisenhower promised that he would “go to Korea” and end the bloodshed. Once in office, he kept his promise and went to Korea. The war ended with a ceasefire standoff months after his inauguration. Then in 1968, Richard Nixon assured voters that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. Forced in part by Congress, Nixon did reduce the troop commitment to Vietnam. U.S. forces were still there in 1974 when Nixon was forced to resign, but the war ended the following year. “These were not triumphal solutions,” wrote Thomas, “but they did give Americans some hope of eventual escape from the two quagmires.”

Somebody, please, get us out of this quagmire. Kerry, where are you?

It won’t be long now. September’s weight presses in on my teacher bones, and there’s only one way to stave it off and prepare for the shock of going back to school: Take a road trip of several thousand miles with five kids. So here we are in Mackinaw City, Michigan, where sturdy-looking Midwestern families gather to enjoy the azure waters and soft sand beaches of Lake Michigan.

The sky above the straits of Mackinac spans clear and stunning, the same as it’s been since I first started traversing the Upper Peninsula with my sister and our Nana eighteen years ago. Back then, after we’d dropped off Nana at our aunt’s house in Detroit, we’d turn around and head back north on I-75 for a long car party of Doritos and cigs and Tab and music so loud that one state trooper had to use the bullhorn to catch our attention. Finally we noticed him and pulled over. A cloud of air-conditioned smoke emerged as my sister rolled down the car window. “Ladies,” the trooper said through tight but upturned lips, “I’ve been following you with the lights and siren for the last three miles. It’s time to fasten your seatbelts.”

This morning, a rainbow kite with six tails flies impossibly high, and another exactly like it lags at least a hundred feet below, trying hopelessly to catch up. On the ground, the thick smell of fudge coats my nostrils. I’m sitting alone in a coffee shop in the bustling town square—which is actually an outdoor mall — and I’m pretending to be a serious novelist at work on a great manuscript instead of a harried columnist trying to work on vacation. Tomorrow, we head for a friend’s private island in the Georgian Bay, a place so remote that there is neither phone service nor electricity nor flushing toilets. At the nearby arcade, Jon and the kids entertain themselves watching the teen locals show off on the Dance Dance Revolution Extreme machine. It’s so entrancing that I blurt out a promise to get the home version for our basement.

Later, I find myself wondering if promises made in the heat of vacation are binding. After all, do we really know what we’re saying or doing or even who we actually are when we’re on the road?

Think how many couples tie the knot while vacationing, only to come to their senses with a sickening shock once the trip is over. Of course, for Jon and me, such a jolly and spontaneous act would be different. Since we’ve been living together for so long, we are already balancing all of the responsibilities of marriage and family life, just without the paperwork. Plus, we’ve been planning to marry for quite a while. By now, the most frustrating aspect of being unwed is the inability to use the simple terms “husband” and “wife.” Can a “boyfriend” have a touch of gray? Does anyone especially care to be a fiancée more than once? Can a heterosexual have a “partner”? And no offense, but I’d rather lock myself in the bathroom than have a “significant other.”

Traveling as a blended family brings all this up, since we’re meeting people and introducing ourselves over and over again. We get a little loopy. This morning at the cabin, while Jon and I were still in bed, I heard my daughter Sophie say something to her stepbrother about “when my dad and your mom get up.” Silence. Laughter. Who’s who around here, anyway? Isn’t that part of why we travel — to get enough perspective on ourselves and our lives to figure it out?

These questions must have been nagging me the other day, when I surprised the Mackinac ferry driver (who looked about fifteen) by asking him if he was licensed to perform weddings “at sea.” Alas, he wasn’t. But no matter, because after the Georgian Bay we’re headed south, to Manhattan, where we will dodge terrorists before heading to the Jersey shore near Cape May, which is awfully close to Atlantic City, if you get my drift.

At the table next to me a grandmother is sharing a sandwich and orange juice with a little girl about eight. The child is wearing a red T-shirt with a white cat on it. She reminds me of my younger daughter, and of the wistfulness of teenage girls before they grow up, and of myself years ago.

All these young families walking by the window, and the childless couples, bronzed and urgent, they remind me of time passing. Revisiting these places I’ve been so many times before, it’s oddly disorienting and comforting at the same time. I see my past and my future, but it’s my world right now that comes into focus. These kids we adore, the chaos and the effort and the comedy, honestly, it aches in that way I love to feel, because I know it will never be like this again.

In a sweet little house several miles south of mine, a girl named Esmé keeps a box on her dresser. In the box is a collection of necklaces—a painted chime ball, Thor’s hammer, a polished unity stone, and her favorite, a sterling angel. These are all trinkets I’ve given her over the years that I’ve been her primary class teacher. Next year, she’ll be going to a new school, which made us both cry as we said our good-byes and exchanged gifts and letters, celebrating the school year’s end. It was through Esmé’s parting letter to me, four pages carefully handwritten in dull pencil, that I learned how closely she guards those gifts. I’m moved by the way she keeps them enshrined in a special box, and even more so, I’m humbled that she does so, as she explained, to “protect your family.”

To protect my family. Surely I’ll never put one of my children on an airplane, or send my daughters to baby-sit, or watch one of them fall uncontrollably in love, or walk out my own front door into a world of lost keys and slippery roads and dread diseases and real-estate bubbles without thinking of Esmé’s box.

You bump into a lot of people in your life. Some of them are extraordinary in their goodness. There’s no way around it. I tend to think of these individuals—and I’m not among them—as old souls who’ve been by this way before. Many times before. They’ve acquired a certain wise patience for those of us who are still bumbling along in our selfishness and our spite. “You’ll grow out of it,” they seem to say, “sooner or later. And if you don’t, there’s always your next lifetime or the one after that.” It’s this very acceptance that makes the extra-good people stand out. They’re not like me, always in a hurry to improve themselves and everyone around them—a trait that’s a dead giveaway of the many remaining practice lives to come.

My sister just had a baby, her first. A perfect little boy named Henry. He’s a few weeks old now, recovering nicely with his parents, who are frequently worried about his well-being. At first he did not poop, and so they called the doctor, who suggested putting a thermometer in his rectum to “dislodge” any remaining meconium. I think Henry overheard, because he immediately let loose, and has been doing so with gusto ever since. But it’s not always so easy.

Two days after Henry was born, he and his mom and dad were hanging around nursing and napping in their “family-style” hospital room in the East Village when a nurse stepped in to announce that it was time for Henry’s bath. “Be back in a bit,” she said as she took Henry a few doors down the hall to the nursery. But she never came back. Instead, a different nurse rushed into the room to announce that there’d been an incident, and my sister and her husband needed to come right away. Henry, the first nurse said, had stopped breathing and turned blue during his bath. He needed to be admitted to ICU immediately. “He looked fine,” my sister told me later on the phone, defeat hanging heavy on the line, “but it turned out I didn’t have a choice.” So Henry was taken off to the ICU, three flights up, and my sister spent the next twenty-four hours going back and forth to nurse him, camping out in the ICU as much as they’d let her. In the small plastic bassinets around her she saw babies in pain, impossibly small babies, like featherless birds, bodies taut with the effort of screaming.

My sister is thirty-eight. I’m thirty-six. When I’m thirty-eight, my oldest stepchild will be twenty. When I was twenty-two, I was married with a house and a baby and another soon to be on the way. Neither my sister nor I knew what we were getting into when we had the audacity to produce innocent, perfect new beings. Nobody knows, no matter how many times they do this foolhardy and brazen thing. If we knew we would simply have to change our minds, not because it’s so much work, and you never sleep again, and oh, the pain and the misery—not because of any of that, but because not a single one of us is big enough or strong enough to shield somebody else from the ravages of the world. No other inadequacy could ever be more painful than this one. And that, I believe, is why Esmé keeps my gifts in her box to protect my family, and why it will always make me cry to think of it: Because she is loving and wise enough to know that I could never be powerful enough to do all the protecting myself.

Finally, I’ve discovered Shannon Olson, local author of the novel/memoirs Welcome to My Planet and Children of God Go Bowling, and I’m in love. I am in love because she’s hilarious, because meeting her and hearing her read her work inspired me to write about ugly, touchy subjects in my last column (which always scares me, but a lot of you said you liked it), and finally, because she said I have nice hair, which made me happy at the end of a long, arduous day. And I’m in love with Shannon for the same reason I love a memoir in general, and for the same reason others hate them: It’s personal.

What I’m still reveling in after reading Shannon’s books—which I did over a weekend—is the delicious, guilty pleasure of eating up so many private details about another real woman my own age. I love that she picks at her toes and that her ex-boyfriend would catch her in the act, surprising her with the greeting, “Hey, little picker!” I love her for sharing this unflattering detail. This stuff is rare in everyday life, where we take care to guard the fragility of the truths and lies within ourselves, and with those we love.

I recently had a frightening beauty emergency that Shannon could relate to. The only person who knew (until now) is my sister, because she’s the one who got so excited about waxing products. I’ve only ever waxed my legs, and then only infrequently, so I’m not sure what (other than big sister’s voice in my head) possessed me to slap leg wax on my face to see how smooth it would make my skin. To make matters worse, I attempted to treat the stunningly immediate and painful breakout with the same brand of zit-zapper I used at thirteen. Apparently my adult skin had grown a little more sensitive, judging by the intense chemical burn I inflicted on myself.

I could go on, but the extent of my vanity is already embarrassing enough. People I know looked at me oddly but apparently didn’t know what to say, so I let them wonder. By the time I called my sister, we both laughed until we cried, which is what somebody like Shannon does for me in the dark of night. It’s comforting to know that other people have outrageous experiences, however inane they may be.

Do you remember Harriet the Spy, the eponymous girl detective who spied on her neighbors not to solve crimes, but out of sheer curiosity? She had a roster of homes whose windows she peered into, taking notes on the inhabitants’ activities; at one home she even hid in a household dumbwaiter on a regular basis. Harriet was my girlhood hero. I tried to emulate her for a while, creating a “route” of my own and talking my friend into being my partner, until her father warned us that we could get arrested for being peeping Toms. I retired my route, but never really stopped watching other people.

Years ago, a friend told me about being pregnant and waking up ravenous in the predawn hours one night. The cupboards were bare and she woke her husband to ask him to run out and get her an egg sandwich. He refused, and she hit him with a lint brush. She was ashamed, of course, but still she laughed in delayed rage and hysteria as she told the story. Another acquaintance announced once at a New Year’s party that her husband’s midnight kiss had been accompanied with the plea that they have sex more than twelve times in the coming year. I collect these small confessions like unusual bits of sea debris and store them away to examine, sometimes decades later, in the search for what is normal. These oddities are the great treasures of human connection, and it’s storytellers like Olson who bring them to light.

Books give us a singular brand of unobstructed access to the inner dialogue of one or more characters. They offer carte blanche entrée to somebody else’s inner life. Films can’t offer this, at least not nearly to the same degree. Cheesy devices such as voice-overs can’t plumb the depths of the human psyche the way countless pages of well-crafted rumination and narration can (and if a movie tried, we probably wouldn’t put up with it very long).

But writers like Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and our own Shannon Olson, not to mention serious, breathtaking talents like Dorothy Allison, and tons of others I don’t have time to read—these writers attack topics as diverse as elastic-waisted pants, colic, and childhood sexual abuse, opening the doors wide to anyone who dares to walk in and pull up a chair. They’re the next best thing to Harriet’s route, and perfectly legal. You’ve gotta love ’em.

I’m getting married this fall, I hope, if we can manage—between three jobs and six kids—to plan a wedding celebration. We wanted to wait until the dust from our previous marriages and divorces had settled. Then one day I woke up and realized that the “dust” might never “settle.” What’s more, the fallout from divorce is not annoying yet relatively harmless, as dust is—it’s more like a fine mist of napalm. It is, as everyone says, hell.

When I was twelve, my sister and I moved in with our dad, his wife, their dog, and two cute, perfect preschool kids. Our dad’s wife didn’t really want to inherit two adolescent daughters, and all the black eyeliner that came with them. So, after a couple of miserable years as a distinctly unblended family (frequent notes in the fridge stuck to premium food items warned, “If you can read this, do not eat, do not touch”), my stepmother insisted that my dad and my sister and I go see a counselor.

The three of us traipsed off to the counselor’s beige, low-rent office in the local strip mall. We sat on a scratchy couch, and he listened to the saga of our unhappiness, especially that of our stepmom, who, of course, was not there. Then this counselor (whom we never saw again) said the most shocking thing to my dad: “If your wife can’t get along with your daughters, why don’t you get a divorce?” Wow, I thought. Would my dad actually do that? “Never,” said my dad. Why not, I wanted to know. “Why not?” asked the counselor. “Because I am never, ever going through that hell again,” said my dad.

A few weeks ago, a Japanese book arrived in my mailbox. Turns out that a local magazine publisher is now marketing an anthology in Japan, and one of my articles was included. This means I’ve finally been translated (and believe me, I’m boasting about it whenever casual conversation veers anywhere near Japan). But it also means I’ve been telling people in a faraway land that divorce is not really a bummer for girls after all, and that in some cases girls even benefit from observing their mothers change their lives for the better after a marital breakup.

Yeah, right. The problem is that despite the impeccable research and interviewing I did for that piece, it was total hogwash. On a very basic level, divorce sucks. At minimum, your kids have to slog back and forth between two houses and deal with parents in constant combat. What I probably should have told those unsuspecting Japanese folks is that they ought to hunker down and enjoy their miserable marriages as best they can.

Not that they—or you, for that matter—can’t perhaps find a partner with whom you’re more compatible now that you’re over the legal drinking age and have sanded down your most jagged character flaws through the sobering and selfless activity of parenthood. But is it worth the torment, the stigma, and the godawful endless warfare of divorce? It is true that for some, staying together is an even hotter hell, and I would never urge someone in a genuinely abusive relationship to stick it out. In many cases, divorce is the lesser of two evils.

It is also, ultimately, a selfish act—never mind that it’s also about as much fun as exploratory surgery, and lasts far longer. In my case, I’m not sure I had ever done anything truly selfish before getting a divorce. After all, I was raised not to ask for things (and I’m also the middle child). You get the picture: “Where should we go for dinner?” “I don’t know… where do you want to go for dinner?” Or, “Which movie should we rent?” “Either is fine with me, which one do you think we should rent?” Or, “When would you like your lobotomy?” “I’m not sure, when would you like me to have my lobotomy?”

Marriage changed me; motherhood changed me more. But divorce and its aftermath changed me the most. I no longer have the energy to be desperately deferential. I’m turning into everything I never was before. I merge fearlessly in traffic. I park in tight spots (and sometime miss). I say no. I talk about my problems. I sometimes hang up on telemarketers (though I still cringe to admit it). And now I love someone again, someone who seems to love me more than I can explain, and I’m getting married again—even though it’s hardly perfect, given our kids and our pasts and our complicated present. Now, however, I don’t give a damn about perfect. I have what I need, and mostly what I want. I’ve paid for it all, and with that I can do well enough by everybody else, most of the time. So listen up, after all, Japan, and good luck to you all, every last one.