Author: Jeannine Ouellette

I got it from my dad, this strange and incongruent entrepreneurial drive, this thirst to sell. It makes no sense for a quiet introvert like me, whose hands shake in front of groups and who cancels more social engagements than is appropriate in polite society, but it’s true nonetheless: I have a knack for sales. I debuted in fifth grade with a poetry machine made of an appliance box. The machine (with me cramped inside it with a flashlight and a pencil) spit out five-, ten-, and fifteen-line poems for a penny a line. I coasted rapidly downhill from that lofty debut, and have since sold everything from French fries to advertising to magazine subscriptions to vitamins and laundry soap to affordable health care and clean water. Most recently, I’ve sold multimillion-dollar improvement plans to state and federal review panels in order to score grants for public schools. I’ve sold over the counter, in the office, on the phone, and with a knock at the front door.

Speaking of knocks at the front door, we get a lot of them in the academic hotbed of liberal generosity that is Prospect Park. So yesterday when I was upstairs in my attic sanctuary, lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon because I’d been sucker-punched by my annual back-to-school cold, my stepdaughter Lily pounded up the stairs to tell me there was someone at the door who insisted he had to speak to someone eighteen years or older. “Tell him to go away,” I rasped. She said, “That’s the problem. He won’t. I think you’d better come down.”

Uh-oh. This guy got persistent with the wrong sick lady. I climbed slowly down two flights of stairs, walked to the front door, and glared at the widely smiling man who awaited me there. “I do not appreciate being dragged out of bed,” I whispered dramatically, since my voice had gone out the day before. The salesman blew past my complaint and started his spiel, saying that he hadn’t meant to get me out of bed, but that he just needed to talk to someone eighteen years old. “My stepdaughter told you I was sick in bed,” I croaked, “and you should have respected that.” A cloud passed over his eyes. I saw it just as if it had happened to the sun in the sky. Then he apologized and left.

And I immediately felt guilty. Poor guy. He probably thought Lily was just making excuses, like people always do when you go door to door. Would my scolding throw him off for the evening, make him miss his quota? Did he have a family to support? I should have heard him out.

Maybe only a former door-to-door canvasser can fully appreciate the rugged, desolate terrain of one front step after another; I, for one, will never forget it. The strap of the leather satchel across my shoulder, the weight of the clipboard in my hand, summer sun waning as the evening careened toward nine, kids voices ringing out from backyards, and the trembling tension of suspense between the push of the doorbell and the opening of the door. And finally, the rush of success with every check collected. I never once missed quota.

That’s a salesman’s daughter for you. My dad has been around a few blocks himself, dabbling in everything from mopeds (yeah, you probably remember his old shop on Central Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis, don’t you?) to soap (until the EPA got interested, but I never really understood that story) to real estate (which somehow fell through because of a licensing hitch) to used cars (but the neighborhood was bad and wore him down) to boats, which aren’t exactly flying off the lot in this economy. Just recently, though, he told me he’s gotten into buying timeshares, which just might be the ticket.

For all the years I’ve known him, my dad has never worked a traditional nine-to-five job for somebody else, and I can see how that rebellious streak rubbed off on me. The act of showing up for work at the same place at the same time five days out of the week for my teaching job still takes me by surprise. Me? Keep a schedule? How amusing.

In a weird way, my dad made a schemer out of me, by example or genetics or some stirring of the two. Why not fly risk up the flagpole and see if it salutes? I like the thrill of the chase, even though I don’t like skinning my knees. Yet the scabs give me empathy for all the rest of us out there. Go ahead. Give me your spiel and I’ll do what I can. Just don’t drag me out of bed next time.

Todd Strand is in a world of hurt. It’s called Hennepin County Family Court, where he’s spent the last three chilly midsummer days in divorce trial proceedings, after almost three years of legal warfare. His personal tab—not including his wife’s legal fees—has already pushed past the $100,000 mark. Seven thousand dollars of that went to cover his half of the cost of a private custody evaluation that spanned from last summer to this one. His trial didn’t conclude, so he’ll be headed back to court in two or three weeks. If things get backlogged, it could be as late as October. After hearing this deflating news, he’s not sure he’s got it in him to keep his commitment to this interview with a writer who wants him to discuss—yet again—the complicated details of his personal life. Plus, this story will be in readers’ hands long before his case is decided, which could be as far off as January 2004, depending on how long the trial drags on. It makes Todd edgy. “I don’t want to make this any worse,” he sighs into his cell phone, saying that even if we change his name, which we have, certain details might be specific enough to stick out and identify him. “Look,” he concedes, “I’m standing in line waiting to buy a burrito. I’m starved. Give me two minutes, and I’ll talk to you.”

So despite his reservations, despite his understanding that this story is not going to be strictly the one he’d like to tell about how “men are discriminated against” in family court, despite his exhaustion and stress, despite all of it, this forty-three-year-old father of two school-aged children still wants to talk. In fact, he can’t stop talking—the words just spew out involuntarily. “I’m exhausted, but I don’t mind telling about this, because when it comes down to it, this whole system is just a tragedy, and if there is anything I can do to help anybody else, it’s worth it. There has got to be a better way.”

No matter how you look at it, modern American divorce is a costly spectacle. With about a million new marital dissolutions each year, divorce is a twenty-billion-dollar-a-year industry, and the average admission price these days is fifteen to thirty thousand dollars per spouse (a figure that’s even higher in many urban areas or for complex and highly conflicted cases, such as Todd’s). Attorneys take the biggest piece of the pie, with meters running at $150 to $450 an hour to handle the legal documents. And then there is the best interest of the children to consider—a process that’s become unfathomably expensive, financially and emotionally, in a growing number of divorce cases.

For Todd, the custody dispute has gone poorly. “They want you to say every horrible thing you can come up with about the other person, and I haven’t done that. I’ve stayed on the high road the whole time, and as a result I’m losing big.” Todd wants joint legal and physical custody; his wife wants sole legal and physical custody. In Minnesota, almost all divorcing couples have joint legal custody, which means major decisions will be shared regarding the children’s education, religion, and health care. Minnesota law presumes joint legal custody except in extreme cases, such as documented abuse. Physical custody, though, pertains specifically to the everyday care and residence of the child, and while joint physical custody has gained popularity in recent decades, the majority of divorcing Minnesota mothers still retain sole physical custody (usually by agreement of the divorcing couple).

Despite these legal presumptions and precedents, Todd’s evaluator, a private professional whose work was paid for by Todd and his ex-wife, recommended sole legal and physical custody for the mother. Todd told me he didn’t feel comfortable with the evaluator from the start. “It’s crazy. What I keep coming back to is that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Not that I committed any crimes,” he insisted. “I haven’t. But the bottom line is they want full legal, and they want to prove I’m such a crappy dad, but it’s not true. You can just see that the custody evaluator is very biased.”

About one million American children experience their parents’ divorce each year, and nearly half of all children born today will go through some sort of custody dispute in their lifetime, because today’s divorcing parents don’t readily agree on the care and custody of their kids. Neither do the laws that govern our family courts, nor the people who practice there. Getting the issue of custody decided in court via the prevailing “best interest” standard has become a quagmire. Family court judges and referees frequently order a child custody evaluation to be conducted, and they base their decisions on the report submitted by the evaluator after the assessment has been completed, which usually takes several months. Custody evaluators can be employed by the county or by the divorcees themselves, in the former case being almost free to parents in Minnesota, and in the latter costing anywhere from two thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars.

Custody evaluations involve a full workup of “research,” including home visits, parenting observations, parent interviews, child interviews, questionnaires, psychological testing, intelligence testing, chemical dependency assessments, and interviews with friends, neighbors, teachers, doctors, dentists, babysitters, and so on. One cottage industry begets another: On the web, there are dozens of sites that describe the ins and outs of winning custody by impressing evaluators, passing psychological tests, and showcasing your ex-spouse’s parenting deficiencies without staining your own hands. There’s a tidy profit to be made from the panic and helplessness that strike when parents are being scrutinized and graded by a random stranger.

These issues and the systems governing them are so complex and variable across states and counties that to ponder them makes your head spin. Yet Sarah Ramsey does it every day. Ramsey is a law professor at Syracuse University, where she specializes in family law. She coauthored the popular casebook Children and the Law: Doctrine, Policy, and Practice. “Children aren’t so harmed by divorce, per se, but by a high level of conflict, whether it accompanies divorce or is part of the ongoing marriage,” she told me. “It would seem logical that conflict over custody would be even worse for children than conflict over something else. It is very important for parents to put their kids first and keep them out of their conflicts.”

To determine the total number of cases in which custody is disputed is to count grains of sand on a windy day, because, contrary to Todd’s experience, the overwhelming majority of disputed cases do not go to trial, even when they involve expert custody evaluators. Instead, roughly ninety-five percent of divorce cases—even the most vicious—are settled out of court without a trial. But the term “settled” is misleading in its civility, because most of these settlements occur on the courthouse steps, after a year or more of damaging accusations, affidavits, court hearings, evaluations, tests, home studies, motions, countermotions, and endless other machinations of the adversarial family-court system, including the paralyzing stress and financial strain of it all.

Still, the number of contested custody cases has increased over the last three decades. According to Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen, “This area of practice is a tremendous source of income for psychology ‘experts.’ In the mid-1970s it was estimated that in the U.S. the yearly price tag for all the custody evaluations done was $24 million.” Today, courtroom psychology is a billion-dollar industry, and custody evaluations account for a substantial slice of that revenue, probably at least $100 million.

I like luck. I don’t understand it and can’t predict or explain it, but I enjoy courting it and can’t help believing in it. Philosopher Nicholas Rescher—author of Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life—contends that without luck, life as we know it would be unsustainable, that the randomness of good and bad luck gives life the spice that makes it palatable. As I see it, luck encompasses a lot of other ideas with jazzier labels: divine intervention, extrasensory perception, mindfulness, and the will of the universe, to name a few.

You could argue with me that these are all distinctly different principles and that to mash them together is to misunderstand them all, and you’d be right enough. But I’m going to do it anyway, because at the end of the day, when the bedside light goes out and you stare at the soft orange glow of the streetlamp on the ceiling, hashing it over, you’re bound to say to yourself how lucky this or that thing was—whether you’re a church-going type, a fatalist, or a sage-burning, meditating, Buddha-loving, place-the-auspicious-green-plant-in-the-southeast-corner-of-the-house-for-wealth sampler type, like me.

Reviewers say that Rescher’s book “offers a realistic view of the nature and operation of luck to help us come to sensible terms with life in a chaotic world.” He interweaves historical examples, from the use of lots in the Bible to Thomas Gataker’s treatise of 1619 on the great English lottery of 1612, from gambling in casinos to playing the stock market. Rescher maintains that “because we are creatures of limited knowledge who do and must make decisions in the light of incomplete information, we are inevitably at the mercy of luck.”

I have a little theory of my own to offer, which is that the more you notice luck, the more of it you find coming toward you. It’s exactly the same as when I was fifteen and my boyfriend drove a brown Cutlass and I suddenly started seeing tenfold more brown Cutlasses driving on the city streets than I ever had before. (This same principle did not, however, apply when my boyfriend two years later drove a black Cadillac hearse as the bandmobile for his pals, but that’s an understandable exception).

I had a very lucky moment a few weeks ago when my childless sister was in town being the good auntie, and my house was crawling with kids and commotion. We were getting ready to rush off to the next activity when I heard our niece Charisma, four years old, hollering at my sister upstairs. I thought it was because she’d been having too much fun with the gang and didn’t want to go back home. But in the same instant, I knew I was wrong. I swung around stupidly looking for her, and heard her holler again. I ran to the window and saw two small bare legs sticking out of the pond and a cascade of long blond hair splayed across the surface of the water.

I screamed something I can’t remember and ran out the front door. Jon bolted for the back door. He got there first, and grabbed her soft white legs with his big brown hands and pulled her out. I carried her in, her wet head pressed against my face. “I want my mama!” she sobbed.

But her mama wasn’t there, she was home with Charisma’s brand-new baby sister, and so it was my daughter Sophie and I who helped peel off the sodden clothes and run the shower and wash the pond scum out of those long curls. Later, Charisma drew a picture of herself, a stick figure with a large head, reaching over the rock ledge of the pond for a “pretty thing,” a floating glass bauble. She then drew the next frame, in which her mouth was open to signify her call for help when she found herself too far over the edge to pull herself up again.

The weird thing about all this is that to call the bit of water in our yard a pond is a stretch, to say the least. It’s not quite three feet deep and it’s about the circumference of a standard umbrella. Benches and gardens encircle it, and no one has ever fallen into it except Charisma, who has done so twice now, and she’s only four. But what I saw out the window was scary enough for me to still be reliving it. I really don’t know if she could have gotten her head stuck under the water. I can’t rule it out, no matter how I’ve tried, and I’ve had to sit many times since and feel the magnitude of my thankfulness for this piece of luck—the baffling phenomenon that touches and humbles us all with the random power of its grand surprise.

I’m sorry to be morbid, but I’ve been thinking a lot about death again lately. This time, it’s the simple fact of mortality that’s got me flustered. It’s as if it never dawned on me that I won’t live forever, and neither will my family and friends. I keep overhearing people at stores and in restaurants talking about hospitals and radiation and surgery, and the loved ones of neighbors and friends are dropping like flies. How unfair! There’s so much to do! To distract myself, I jumped into a frenetic burst of hot-weather productivity.

So far this summer, I’ve painted or helped paint about 32 walls, five doors, many yards of woodwork, a staircase, and two ceilings—one a mural of a summer sky with a veiling of translucent white clouds floating lazily along. This latter was a labor of love for my youngest daughter that took about six hours (thank God her room is the size of a closet), and my neck has almost straightened itself out now, six weeks later.

This morning, I sit at rest in the study, birds chirping away furiously outside the window, clear sun and sky dappling brightly through a thick canopy of oak. I’m taking a moment to revel in the soothing cheer of the fresh rose chintz walls—which still need another edging from this view—and I’m taking stock of all this new color and its deeper meaning. Because there was more to the obsessive painting than just tidying up the place. I had a mission, based on some wise words from my hero, Anne Lamott, who says that “perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

I wasn’t looking at my feet when I painted the living room brick red. I was terrified to do it, having been a white and off-white kind of gal all these years. Yeah, white is safe and tasteful and all, but it’s also as enticing as pabulum. Ever since painting one small wall in the foyer a dusky red last summer, I’ve been desperate to go for more. So, while Jon was busy on a ladder scraping the walls upstairs, I whipped out the color swatch I’d nabbed at Home Depot, waved it in his general direction, and called as I backed casually into the hall, “The foyer walls are drying and I’m going out for more sponges . . . and I’m going to grab some paint for the living room, as long as you don’t object to this color, bye!” I ran down the stairs and out the door before he could talk me out of it.

The results? Shocking and then pleasing, especially after we ran out in a panic and bought four new lamps to brighten it up. According to belatedly consulted color experts (a cheesy page on the web), red paint suggests vitality and aggressiveness. It conveys amorous vibes, and deep subtle shades are perfect for living rooms, creating an intimate, cozy feel. What do you know! At worst, say the experts, red is too dramatic.

With this small success buoying our confidence, Jon and I really got bold, and we blissfully and fearlessly imagined a burnt orange for the dining room. We spent an hour poring over the samples and finally settled on three cans of Flaming Glow, I think it was called. But we probably should have brought that little cardboard patch of Flaming Glow home before we paid for the paint, because when we taped it up to the dining room wall and stood back, it was unequivocal: If we painted our walls that color, the onset of violent insanity would be swift and merciless. I should have checked into the expert view of orange, a dominant color that combines the energy of red with the intellectual associations of yellow and is, at its worst, non-relaxing.

So we veered for a soft, creamy yellow, and continued sanity (more or less). That’s life for you. You win some and you lose some, you get stuck with a few cans of crazy orange paint, and then you die. But at least nobody can say your walls were boring.

In a few weeks I’m boarding a van in the middle of the night with the man I love and five of the six children we share to drive for fifteen days from Minneapolis to Lake Ontario and back again. We’re going to take the S.S. Badger car ferry across Lake Michigan, ride a dune buggy on the gorgeous sands of Silver Lake, don raincoats and hats to feel the drenching raw power of Niagara Falls on the Maid of the Mist, spend a few nights in a rustic cabin on a remote privately owned island in Lake Ontario, parasail on Lake Huron, eat fudge on Mackinac Island, and pay homage to the greatest lake of all as we wend back home via Highway 2 along Superior, hitting Bayfield and Duluth on the way.

I hope I get some good stories out of the deal, because I can tell you that despite the thrills and overconsumption of fun and fuel, none of us are going to “find what we’re looking for” as we paddle toward the sea any more than we find it sitting in traffic on University Avenue. This truth goes back to the disillusionment of cactus and dust and angry bees on a summer day in childhood.

I was nine, living on the outskirts of Casper, Wyoming, with nothing but a six-foot cedar fence standing between my backyard and the wild open expanse of sagebrush, tumbleweeds, and prairie dogs leading up to the foothills of Casper Mountain, which loomed purple in the distance. Mostly this arid landscape was flat and uninspiring to a girl who’d not so long ago left the rocky majesty of Lake Superior.

I started riding my bike out behind the fence, as far as I could go in one direction and then another, learning to notice the humble beauty of various cacti and flora. And one day, I stumbled on the impossible, the wondrous: a gorge in the land, with two steep walls and a bottom, along which a pitiful but real trickle of water inched sluggishly along.

A hill, a stream—it clutched my heart with buried memories of home. I wanted to claim it, stick a flag in the ground, make it mine forever. It would be my secret place, my personal canyon, where I’d commune with the big sky and beyond. I’d return the next day to spend the whole afternoon, alone with myself and the world, snug in the safe crevice of earth that had found me at last.

I did return, my bike basket laden with the picnic I’d packed for a day in paradise. My heart thumped with anticipation and the happy exertion of the ride. Hot noon sun pounded down on me as I unloaded my goods and hauled them halfway down the dirt slope, scoping out a little bare spot to sit. I chewed a few dry bites of a peanut butter and honey sandwich, swallowing hard. I wasn’t really hungry, so I wrapped it back up and sipped orange juice from a plastic thermos. Sweat ran from my hairline into the corners of my mouth. The hard dirt was uncomfortable, the sun punishing, the cacti pokey. I didn’t feel magical. I felt sticky and itchy and awkward and dense and I had no idea what to do next. But to leave so soon would be to fail, to admit I’d been duped, that fairylands were make-believe and our cardboard house with its tin shell and flooded basement and scabs and boils was real as bone. And then, on cue, the bees arrived, swarming in for the honey and juice, and I grabbed my stuff, kicked up the dusty slope and pedaled home, heavy with a disappointment I could never have named.

The mindful among us would say, “Wherever you go, there you are.” But could I have understood then what I want so dearly for my own kids to hear now? That as summer’s limitless possibilities start popping like soap bubbles in the air around them, and the panic sets in, and they scramble to fend off the loss with more of something—anything—that wherever they go, and whatever they buy—there they will be, that to feed a monster only makes it hungrier? That those who can’t find satisfaction from others must turn to things—goods and services, toys and travel—to fill the emptiness within? That as Jack Kornfield writes in After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, “Socrates, who lived a simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, ‘I love to go and see all the things I am happy without’”?

That I grew up dirt poor and money is better, that the tin house is thousands of miles past, but I’m still here, that life is tough but they can love it anyway, and that they are never going to find what they are looking for in the mall or even behind the cedar fence because The Wizard of Oz is absolutely a true story and they should listen up as fast and often as they can.

Up till now, I thought I had absolutely nothing in common with G.W. Bush. Then, I was taking my daughter to the what-not shop in Dinkytown to find a birthday gift for a friend, and we saw a slew of magnets with ridiculous quotes from the prez. For example, “I know how hard it is to put food on your family,” and “More and more of our foreign imports come from overseas.” I’m a sucker for this stuff, even if I understand that anybody, after all, can become tongue-tied and say embarrassing things. It happens to me all the time. Still, I wouldn’t consider this common ground with George. Especially considering his attitude toward the French. Just last week a pal of mine who is himself married to a Frenchie asked if I’ve been getting any flak for my heritage. If I have, I haven’t noticed.

For example, immediately after leaving the gift shop, I took my kids to sip some lemonade at an outdoor table at the Loring Pasta Bar, and since the sun was so radiant in the sky, and since my name is French, I encouraged us all to speak with French accents and pretend we were dining at a Parisian café in springtime. I was instantly reminded of my brother-in-law’s recent experience in Paris, because somehow Harry, like G.W., has a way of getting into scuffles. It began with the hotel not offering any coffee in the morning, thus forcing Harry to go in search of it. As you may already know, Paris is not yet dotted with strip malls with Starbucks and Caribous on every corner, so Harry had to get his coffee at the only place that offered it: McDonalds. As it happened, the French McD’s coffees were petite by U.S. super-size standards, so Harry needed a few. Six to be exact, except he had his numbers in fractured Spanish. “Seis?” asked the cashier. “Oui, seis,” said Harry. “Seis?” “Oui, seis.” “Seis?” And so on. God, I love being French.

But still, it wasn’t until much later, back at home, doing research of another sort, that I happened upon this little jewel that G.W. uttered back in April a year ago, while ruminating on the challenges of educating children: “Sometimes when I sleep at night I think of Hop on Pop.” Really? He does? So do I! There is this mournful passage that goes something like, “Dad is sad, dad had a bad day, what a day dad had.” That one lingers every time I read it, and if you haven’t read it yourself recently, pick it up, you’ll see what I mean.

Of course, I’m a teacher, and that’s how it is working with kids. You never leave it behind. It follows you home, joins you for dinner, and crawls into bed with you at night. You never get it out of your head and for the most part, you don’t even try. Of course, you’re not also running the nation with a head all full of Hop on Pop. If you were, you would not have the time and clarity for urgent matters such as international relations. Which helps to explain why Bush admitted, only a few weeks after hopping on Pop, “This foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating.” Yes, apparently. Finally, an explanation, albeit certainly not an excuse.

You see, what I’d like to explain to George is that it’s frustrating for me, too, this foreign policy stuff of his. War and its aftermath gets me all distracted from putting food on my family, let alone concentrating on my work. It makes me feel helpless and out of control, because I believe I ought to be doing something, and don’t know how or what. I keep wondering about those Iraqi kids and what really happens next, what’s really going on over there. It sends me into immediate overload. I have so many kids on my mind already. For better or worse, the most I can do is what’s in front of me.

Which happened this morning to be two robins, behaving very oddly. They appeared to be sparring, and though you might surmise it was mating and I just didn’t recognize it, I don’t think so. My son and I agreed that they were fighting, perhaps over a mate. “But they won’t kill each other, Mom,” he assured me, sweet golden-haired ten-year-old that he is. “Because humans are the only species that kill their own kind.” He’s thought a lot about violence in these last months, so much so that he’s actually considering retiring his squirt “guns” for less overtly violent “water shooters.” I’ve been around the “ban all replicas of guns” block already, and for the moment I’m leaving it all up to him. Even to the extent of not questioning his assertion about which species kill. Finally, I’ve learned to shut up and let my kids do some figuring out on their own, right, wrong, or somewhere in between. After all, just like G.W., most things eventually speak for themselves.

My 12-year-old daughter has come down with something. I think it’s called puberty. It’s certainly called annoying. This brilliant, gorgeous child who only weeks ago was full of hugs and kisses and admiration for me has suddenly been replaced by an alien beast.

“Mom?” she says with that tone. “Are you wearing eyeliner? Because you don’t usually wear eyeliner. It’s interesting.” Or yesterday, her eyes hardened with anger, a dark scowl across her forehead, one hand jauntily on her hip and the other brandishing a metal dustpan: “Just so you know, I’m relegated to using this as an implement for cleaning the guinea pig’s cage, since you have utterly neglected to provide me with a litter scoop.” I glance at my son and he glances back, both of us clearly wondering how we are so thick as to not see the urgency of her problem. And as for the mustache my daughter thinks I’m growing—in a certain light of course—well, I’d just as soon not discuss it. To think I used to consider her broad vocabulary an asset.

Now, before we go further, don’t worry that I’ll embarrass her by telling you all of this—I always get her permission before I put her into print. The thing is, I’m never likely to say anything she hasn’t already heard, even if she happens to insist with smug nonchalance on humming Chopsticks to drown me out.

But she can’t fool me, no matter how hard she tries. Because at the end of the day, the alien departs and my daughter, under cloak of darkness, returns. “Mom,” she calls, “come put me to bed.” And so I trudge up the stairs and crawl under her pretty embroidered comforter, settling in for the stories that are about to come. Stories about friends, boys, and teachers, but even moreso stories about her: what she is thinking, what she believes, what she loves and hates most in the whole wide world. If I listen closely enough, I get to hear a great deal about who my daughter thinks she is and who she plans to become. It’s fascinating and deeply reassuring.

By the time I was her age I didn’t tell anybody anything anymore. My stories imploded and collapsed on themselves until I no longer recognized them as having once been a part of me. I can clearly see seventh grade as the year when I lost all sense of myself, when I wandered deep into the cold dark woods—wild animals all around, red eyes glowing and mouths frothing—and the bread crumbs I left to mark my trail just scattered like dust. I had no idea how to find my way back to myself and it scared me damn near to death.

In my twin bed in the basement of my dad’s suburban split level, I’d lie awake nights staring into the pitch black, afraid to go to sleep because in the quagmire of unconsciousness I’d find myself in the white cinderblock tunnel that led to the girls’ locker room at school, fluorescent lights glaring overhead, my legs leaden and paralyzed as the throngs of kids pushed past me.

I’m so thankful my daughter has a clearing in the woods into which bright sunlight streams (or moonlight, as the case may be), a place where tame songbirds congregate, and wildflowers nod in the breeze. This is a place where she can throw off the accoutrement of adolescence and be something truer—at least for a moment or two in the hush of bedtime. “Don’t go,” she pleads when I try to slip away. “Stay, Mama, you can’t go.” “But it’s late,” I tell her.

I have so much to do is what I’m really thinking. Lessons to plan, stories to write, schedules to iron out before the new day pummels me. How many phone calls did I blow off today? How many chores have gone undone? And what in God’s name am I going to wear to work tomorrow? I’m so tired, the weight of the comforter lulls me into sleepiness. My daughter is warm beside me, chattering on, and I can feel myself drifting off as her guinea pig chirps softly in the background. But I can’t lie in her bed all night. I snap myself awake and sit up. “I have to get up, I have to.”

“No,” she says firmly. “All you have to do is stay with me forever.”

Here’s my favorite line from First Comes Love—Marion Winik’s horrific yet touching memoir of marriage to an openly gay man who, between being diagnosed with AIDS and his eventual death several years later, stops working and starts skimming cash from Marion in order to support his drug habit: “There was a letter from the bank saying I should come in immediately and deposit $999,744.26 to cover my recent withdrawals. I reread this astonishing sentence several times . . . [and] arrived at the bank shortly afterward sans the requested million.”

I read Winik’s book when my own life was teetering, and I laughed so hard at parts I lost my breath and tears rolled into my gaping mouth. When you’re down and out and a little bit ragged, somebody else’s unthinkable misfortunes can seem hysterical from a safe distance.

The distance is what’s key. The rutted, weedy stretch of dirt road between my life and somebody else’s is often the geography I find most interesting, most inspiring. The company of others whose realities are starkly different than mine is revelatory and oddly motivating. That’s part of what I love about Julie and Sean, two of my closest friends. Both are single, childless, never been married, and also smart, attractive, educated, employed, and hilarious. Julie’s about my age, and Sean, since he is a man and can have his exact age revealed, is a crisp 39. I’ve tried all sorts of voodoo to get them to fall in love—since both of them really ought to, and besides, Julie longs for children—but so far, no dice. Fortunately, though, they enjoy each other’s company enough to hang out with Jon and me and the several thousand children who populate our blended family most Saturday nights.

Coming over here is for Julie and Sean something like riding a unicycle on a congested street in India. There are big kids with filthy socks wheeling back and forth on the Total Tiger abdomenizer on the living room floor and pounding up and down the stairs and listening to music, and there are small kids with filthy socks toting rodents in pockets and begging the grown-ups to play Twister and have a disco party, and there is chaos and noise in wild excess. But it’s the contrast we revel in on Saturday nights as the kids drop off to bed and we sit around the dining table, talking over wine, laughing at ourselves and each other, swapping genuine secrets, and huddling in a weird helpless way against the menace of this awful war slithering under the locked door, unstopped by our protest signs and pink buttons and marches.

The balm of shared history is powerful at these times, especially since Jon and I face the awkward and often funny task of sewing together biographies that were well into adulthood before they merged. Julie and Sean are a bit like basting tape, criss-crossing the widest seams and filling in historical gaps with fresh perspectives. Jon’s known Sean since junior high, they went to college together and remained friends through all of the years since, while Julie and I go back a decade and a half. We’ve watched each other’s lives unfurl in opposite ways, nonetheless beset with the same essential challenges of ambition, loneliness, stagnation, and change. You can’t hide yourself from someone who’s studied you for so long.

I met Julie 14 years ago, when I was practically another person, a classified advertising sales manager at a weekly paper. Two or three months after returning from my maternity leave, baby Sophie in tow, I hired Julie to sell ads in my department. She was highly caffeinated and articulate and awfully pretty.

On her first day, I was showing her around the office, when suddenly her face squished up into this horrible expression. She was staring straight at my breasts. What could I do but carry on? But when Julie’s face didn’t unsquish and her eyes kept returning to my chest, it struck me that something terrible was happening, because I was thinking of Sophie, asleep in the vinyl port-a-crib in my office across the hall. I looked down, and there was a dark wet spot the size of a half dollar slowly expanding around my nipple, as leaking breastmilk turned the crimson fabric of my dress a dark burgundy. What could two women do but blush, laugh, and become friends?

Since then, several million other things have happened to each of us. And on Saturday nights, in a house warm with kids and candlelight, we open the wine and spill the events of the past week and year and lifetime onto the table and pick through the curious contents, laughing and commiserating over the serious hilarity of it all.

Louise Erdrich is fighting sleep. This explains a lot.

It’s said that the threshold between sleeping and waking—the lucid yet lawless terrain of twilight—is a cracked door to enlightenment, a conduit to the divine. How apropos that, here in the grainy borderlands of consciousness, the Minneapolis novelist puts pen to paper and struggles (yes, struggles) to write. Writing becomes a talisman against sleep, as she strings one word after the next simply to stay awake.

Erdrich’s exhaustion is the well-earned reward of a life equally matched to the richness and complexity of her writing, and that’s the way she likes it. The demands of a writing life combined with motherhood—demands unveiled with rich clarity in her 1995 memoir, The Blue Jay’s Dance—are still fresh and concrete for Erdrich, who has a two-year-old and two adolescent daughters at home. As if to defy the constraints of traditional female domesticity, Erdrich writes prolifically, with 15 published books to date, including her latest novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club, in which she turns her attention to her German-American ancestry and in particular, her paternal grandfather’s experience of fighting in World War I on the German side, before immigrating to the United States and plying his trade as a butcher.

Erdrich, whose previous novels have rummaged the lore of her French-Ojibwa maternal heritage, primarily writes fiction. But she draws heavily from genealogical research, family legends, personal tragedy (she suffered the deaths of her son, and her husband, Michael Dorris), and the mythical landscape of her North Dakota childhood. She has published eight novels plus assorted poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books. She is a permanent fixture on bestseller lists and a favorite of critics and scholars, and her voice is celebrated as one of the most important in the annals of Native literature.

All of this is just not enough. Three years ago, Erdrich opened an independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, near her home in Kenwood. It is a gathering place for the Native American arts community and a repository for a hand-picked crop of books reflecting the convictions and idiosyncrasies of the owner: Native writers, local authors, small runs from independent presses, literary novels, and obscure volumes alongside classics in fiction, parenting, gardening, and spirituality. The entire southwest corner of the store is dedicated to what Erdrich describes as high-quality children’s books, the sorts of books you really want to read to your kids. Beside the parakeet cage is a tiny reading nook—The Hobbit Hole—tucked under the stairs and looking out at pretty red shelves topped with Native American Barbies and hand-crafted birdhouses.

This eclectic montage is scattered thoughtfully amongst other offerings. Displays of Native handcrafts—quilts, pottery, baskets, and paintings—punctuate tables and shelves, along with books and little glass cases of herbs, jewelry, and music. Erdrich refers to the bookstore as an extension of her home, and the warmly scuffed maple floorboards, birch-bark reading loft, and brightly upholstered chairs and rockers do create a comfy ambience. But for Erdrich’s true fans, the bookstore’s physical manifestation of her tangy sense of humor promises further delight. For example, a large, ornately carved wooden confessional towers against the eastern wall. Patrons are invited to sit and read, or just think, inside the confessional, where cleanliness is literally next to godliness. (Shelves on one side of the unit display Wash Away Your Sins body care products and handmade cedar soaps; shelves on the other side hold an array of lush hardcovers on spirituality.)

While Erdrich fends off sleep for the sake of another novel (her current work-in-progress begins in New Hampshire, where she lived for many years, and wends its way back to her homelands of Minnesota and North Dakota) and tours the nation to promote The Master Butchers Singing Club, new manager Brian Baxter (formerly of Baxter’s Books) runs shop at Birchbark and does his damnedest to manage Erdrich’s schedule as well. His first task may be to bring the shop into the black, since the hand-written FAQ propped near Birchbark’s cash register says the store currently operates at a deficit of three to five thousand dollars each month. But “We’re passionate about this place and what it stands for and we’ll hang in there until… either we make it or go broke,” the humble sheet of cardboard assures loyal customers. Profits, if and when they materialize, will go back to the Native community. Meanwhile, the bookstore is committed to providing a “grassroots outlet for Native gardeners, artists, a place for books—provoking, intelligent Native and non-Native literary books, noncorporate, out of the box, and cheerfully eccentric in a world dominated by monolithic interests.”

Not a simple mandate, but Erdrich enjoys life most when it’s “really complicated.” She thrives in the deepest and sometimes darkest interstices of human experience, personal and political borderlands where cultures collide, and where humor and tragedy, love and hate, success and failure, and life and death spill over the thresholds and become inextricably linked.

The Rake spoke with the overbooked Louise Erdrich about success, kids, writing, bookselling, and on a quiet Friday evening when her two-year-old daughter was too tired (or rather, too soundly asleep) to participate in the pow-wow Erdrich was otherwise committed to attend.

Life is weirder than I thought. Take, for example, my new polyfiber leopard-skin car seat covers—a gift from my teenage almost-step-daughter, Britta, and her boyfriend, Ben. They thought themselves pretty clever with this bit of cheer (although they did very considerately leave behind the gift receipt “just in case,” ha, ha). But I’m not one to return a gift.

I admit that at first I didn’t think the leopard skin was me. But then I thought, Hey, what the heck, just because I’m a prim elementary school teacher with three kids and three unofficial step kids and a hamster and a guinea pig who pees on me every time I hold him—does this mean I can’t drive around on fur seats? The truth is, I sort of relish the quizzical looks I get from friends and colleagues. A fellow shopper at the co-op recently glanced in my car window, gestured at the upholstery, and guffawed out loud—and she didn’t even know me. Who foresaw what adventure a little leopard skin could inspire?

I’m even wondering if my bolder, wilder new image was behind a snap decision to book a trip to Florida to see my dad over the upcoming school break. You see, if you’re flexible and a little crazy, you can buy dirt-cheap flights online to Orlando. Mickey’s hometown is only an hour and a half from Apollo Beach, where my dad lives, and rental cars go for less than $30 a day in mouseland. All of which adds up to a low-budget chance to do what my dad has been asking me to do for the last two years: bring the kids to see him. But of course, the whole transaction required a little courage, a dose of optimism, and a Zen-like acceptance of the unknown.

First of all, the web site informed me that the name of the airline and flight times would remain a mystery until, if, and when I made a final purchase. So what the heck, I said, as I typed in a credit card number and hit “send.” My kids haven’t seen their grandpa for four years—our last visit with him was amid the flurry of a cousin’s Detroit wedding. And while I’ve carried the burden of personal responsibility for this hole in my kids’ lives, it wasn’t until recently, when my son wept over “missing” the grandpa he doesn’t really know, that I decided maybe there are three better reasons to visit my dad than my own guilt: Sophie, Max, and Lillie.

Well, my own guilt is pretty potent too, considering I haven’t made the trek to Florida for eight years, despite my dad’s frightening quadruple by-pass two years ago in December. I felt sick over being absent then, being the only child not standing by for his surgery, but it’s more complicated than it seems. At the time, my hair was on fire from the hell of my divorce, and I was careening around like a madwoman trying to put it out. Meanwhile my car didn’t have heat or an engine that started predictably, and drives to work were half-blind endeavors with frost growing on the inside of the windshield as fast as Sophie could scrape it off. I didn’t have the nickels and dimes to fix my car, let alone fly my flaming head to Florida.

I think my dad understood my predicament, although he sounded tight and scared on the phone during those days leading up to the operation. I was scared too. I’d never really gotten to know my dad—not really—and now his mortality was breathing down my neck. I was afraid, too, of burdening him, afraid of the possibility that he might think my frost-bitten forest-fire of a life was a disaster beyond redemption, a failure, a father’s greatest disappointment. This was my fear, never mind the fact that the reason I don’t know my dad much better than Max does is because he and my mom split up when I was two years old and we have spent only a handful of years living in the same state.

All this distance and unfamiliarity made the talks we had in the weeks following my dad’s surgery that much more tender. Having his chest pried apart left him more open, as if all those stitches couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty all the way back together again.

Suddenly we were talking once or twice a week instead of once or twice a year, and when I told him I’d been worried about disappointing him, he gave a small, sad laugh and told me that was the silliest thing he’d ever heard. This was enough bonding to make us both cry before we slid back into our usual awkward passion of weather analysis.

Which, by the way, is colder than usual in Florida at the moment, but he promises that’ll improve with my arrival. And I’m thinking ever since my leopard-skin seat covers, anything’s possible.