I'm Trapping the Damn Leprechaun and You Can't Stop Me

In the past few days, quite a few of my Facebook friends have posted Kristen Howerton's blog post from Rage Against the Minivan-- a mini-screed entitled Can We Take the Holidays Down a Notch? She opens with an anecdote about her children's desire for a "leprechaun trap," to which she responds (to her readership), "Are you serious?" She goes on to cite children's increasingly amped-up expectations for holidays, and to call for a general drawdown of the celebratory craziness surrounding them.

With all due respect to Ms. Howerton (and much is due, because on some level I feel her pain)-- I must object.

Above is a photo of my children a couple of years ago, constructing a rather elaborate leprechaun trap. We have made them every year for-- well, I don't even know how long, but since long before "Pinterest" was a word. We still haven't caught the little twerp, but every year he drops his gold before he escapes, leaving my kids with a respectable stash of Rolos, chocolate coins, and Werther's caramels. We also celebrate Pi Day, and have an Easter egg hunt in our backyard complete with a Golden Egg that involves extra shopping and (inevitably) some losing child's tears, and have a watermelon seed-spitting contest in our driveway on the Fourth of July. With respect to the holiday stories my kids tell their friends, if you want to take it down a notch, I am the enemy.

Plus, not only do we celebrate Christmas with all suitable shock and awe, but we also celebrate St. Nicholas Day, which is where the kids put out their boots by the fireplace on December 5 and awaken to find them filled with candy, little Santa-themed toys, and new hats and gloves. We've done that for more than a decade-- since my 15-year-old, James, was a preschooler. Their friends think it's awesome, and beg their parents to do the same.

It wasn't like this when I was a kid, that's for sure. For one thing, my family was Jewish, and although I enjoyed Passover, I spent the month of March paging longingly through the J.C. Penney circulars in the Sunday Washington Post, cutting out pictures of girls in Easter dresses with little gloves and hats and playing with them like paper dolls. You can imagine the near-fatal case of Christmas envy I suffered every year. While I don't defend my covetousness, it wouldn't take a degree in psychiatry to figure out why I grew up to be a mom who cranks every once-forbidden holiday to Eleven.

But this isn't just about me and my unruly inner child. There are other, perfectly valid reasons why I think it is a perfectly fantastic idea to celebrate every special day in epic style.

This is my 15-year-old, James. He's the healthiest kid in the world. Last Fall he woke up one morning feeling dizzy. The next day I took him to the pediatrician, who sent us straight to the ER. By the time the neurologist assessed him an hour or so later, he couldn't walk anymore, or turn over in bed without vomiting from dizziness. His eyes jumped around when the neurologist pointed a light at them. She told us it was probably a brain tumor. If not, it was likely a meningitis-like swelling in his cerebellum, and he would be admitted to the ICU. The sentence she used was, "I believe we are witnessing a significant event."

I didn't want a significant event. Not this kind.

In a matter of hours, our life had swung from happiness and predictability to the absolute and terrifying unknown. My baby, my firstborn, had transformed from the sibling-wrestling, pancake-making, "Burn Notice"-obsessed kid I knew to a rapidly deteriorating, profoundly ill neurological patient. Because my sister had passed away at age 11 from a brain stem tumor, I knew all too well what James was likely facing, and what his siblings would be facing as well from the upheaval this would cause. My husband and I were beside ourselves. It was the worst day, and somehow it felt like a day I had always feared would come: when my wonderful child, who I had always suspected I didn't deserve, would be taken back. 

Over the next two days they expedited his MRI, and then his second, contrast MRI, and then his spinal tap. He got sicker and sicker, but one by one they kept eliminating the possibilities: first, it wasn't a brain tumor, and then it wasn't meningitis either. They decided it was probably viral, and started talking about eventually discharging him to a nursing home, where he would re-learn how to walk. Then his headache got really bad, and they put him on a bunch of IV drugs, and a few hours later he stood up and walked to the bathroom, then asked if they could send in the video game cart.

Discharge diagnosis: one major MF-er of a migraine.

His four days in the hospital were, in the end, the most incredible gift. My husband and I had stared down the barrel of what it would look like if our lives were turned absolutely upside-down by something terrible happening to one of our children, and as a result saw the fragility and precious beauty of ordinary life. During that time I realized: we are not promised a single day. Every single day we wake up and things are ordinary, and fine, and normal, is an act of grace.

Since then, when I have a lousy day-- checks not arriving, fights on the internet, dogs creating more messes than my toddlers ever did, obnoxious relatives making trouble-- I'll step back and think, "James doesn't have a brain tumor. Today is a GREAT day." Maybe it's a little bit Pollyanna of me, but it puts it in perspective to think about what March 21, 2013 might have been like, if the universe hadn't grabbed us by the collar and then slowly lowered us to the ground.

So.

Catch the damn leprechaun. Because inevitably, no matter how carefully you arrange your life and how thoughtfully you raise your kids, there are going to be days where there's not one thing worthy of celebration. There are going to be days that suck. An ordinary day is a fantastic day. But a day that gives you an excuse to hand out the sugar, have fun as a family, and take a break that leaves everyone exhilarated and smiling?

Kick it up a notch. Celebrate like there's no tomorrow. You won't regret it.

Day 3: Denial

Here are some things I did today that were NOT writing and/or promoting:

1. Read about Reese Witherspoon's new baby and mused on whether "Tennessee" is a redneck name or a literary one, eventually settling on literary

2. Watched the "Gangnam Style" video, again (twice)

3. Giggled through a sexy short story by my writing bud Allison Leotta

4. Ate a gyro (note: not part of my diet)

5. Googled myself and checked my Amazon number (more times than I will own up to)

6. Took my eldest kid to Starbucks and got a Frappuccino (note: also not part of my diet)

My youngest was home with a stomach bug today, and knowing that at any given moment I might be called upon to attend to this issue kind of threw a wrench into my creative gears. I swear, if it's not one thing it's another: my kid's got a fever, my husband's got his arm in a sling, the dog's on an antibiotic, my boss wants to know why I missed the deadline to submit to the bulletin, Verizon sent out their electronic thugs to remind me that I forgot to pay my bill again, and all that's just since Saturday.

But there are positive developments as well. I managed to make slightly brilliant progress on Wonder Girl despite the distractions, I'm getting some glowing reviews and good press opportunities on Heaven Should Fall, and my heart has been fuzzily warmed by the many eminent authors who wished me a happy bookbirthday on Twitter (check out my feed!). As for productivity, I'll do better tomorrow. No more K-pop. No more Reese. Back to the business of listening to my imaginary friends, and I mean it this time.

Day 2: My Tennis Ball Guru

I've been saying for years that I need a mentor. More recently, in my more confused and desperate moments, I have commented that what I really need is a volleyball with a handprint on it, a la Cast Away, that speaks in the voice of Stephen King. In my mind, I mean. It would scoff at my concerns over whether my prose is quite literary enough, what that reader said about my book on Goodreads, and whether I will ever feel worthy enough to dare to apply to the MacDowell Colony, because in On Writing he specifically (without naming it) jests about his own long-ago MacDowell fantasies.

From the photo above, you can see where this is going. I did it. After a somewhat fraught phone call with my agent ("You can always send your new manuscript to me before you send it to your editor," she told me, "I'll give you my honest opinion," to which I replied, "that's what I'm afraid of") I came home, grabbed a tennis ball that has never been used by my lazy non-retrieving "hunting" dogs:

Lightning. Today.

... and drew on it an artistic interpretation of Mr. King. He has a seat of honor on the bookshelf just to the right of my writing chair. Writing is a lonely profession, so how delightsome it will be that I now have someone to talk to. And this will be a relationship of mutual respect: no "#1 fan" jokes from me, no comments about how "The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition" could have maybe stood to be a little less complete and more cut, and in return he won't berate me for being slow and neurotic. Stay tuned as he doles out advice to me and hopefully offers me guidance on an upcoming sex scene.

Meanwhile, the blogger reviews for Heaven Should Fall are coming in slow but positive. One of today's: "a grim and compelling tale whose finely crafted characters reveal a thoughtful study of an insular family stunted by extremist views and shocking tragedy." Oh, grimness! The end is uplifting, I assure you! And on another uplifting note, it looks like I will be at the Baltimore Book Festival this Saturday after all. Please drop by and allow me to sign a copy of my shocking tragedy for you.

Day 1: And We're Live

My Facebook post from late in the day said it all: "If you could see my true inner self at the moment, you would see Britney Spears shaving her head and attacking a car with an umbrella." Today I was the "First World Problems" meme come to life. Yes, my husband let me sleep in, and it's Book Release Day, and I got to go out to an all-you-can-eat taco buffet for lunch. But I also learned that there's a major snag in my plans to be at the Baltimore Book Festival this Saturday, and I spent much of the day fretting about my dog, Thunder, and taking him to the vet, who lightened my Visa by $172 and gave me more to worry about. Thunder-- fun fact-- makes a guest appearance in Heaven Should Fall, along with his sister Lightning, as Dodge's dogs. Here's a "special features" detail about our rescue dogs that you won't see on Shelfari: Lightning is the heartbreakingly sweet, emotionally needy beagle who turns up her nose at a kibble breakfast but will gladly eat out of the bathroom garbage can, and pees in random locations on a whim; Thunder is the Good Dog, the strong silent type who has turned out to be so medically fragile that he's more like a porcelain sculpture of a beagle. He suffers from back pain, for which he takes two pills, and now has a problem with a gland I can't discuss in polite company, which has so far required two gazillion-dollar antibiotics to address.

Other than dealing with those two different types of pains in the ass, I spent much of the day responding to the copious amounts of social media love offered by my friends and colleagues. Writers, by and large, are terrific people. So are friends. I hardly got any writing done on Wonder Girl today, so distracted was I by the outpouring of affection. As for the diet, that didn't go so well; there was that aforementioned taco bar (wow, was that good), but I did manage to get in a walk with a friend. The day can realistically be summed up with a screenshot from my calendar:

The latter appointment belongs to my husband, with whom I share a calendar. He deserved it. Not only did he let me sleep in and supply me with tacos, but he stopped by Barnes & Noble to take the pic at the top of this post. So after a long and eventful day, we're all enjoying the warm glow of a day well spent. I have a new book out, and he has, well... beer.

So my new book comes out in two hours. That's it up there: my 351-page sojourn into a world of grief, love, and right-wing nutjobs, with (I believe) literature's first homicidal Quiverfull fundamentalist mom. I like to break new ground.

I'm nervous. Pregnancy and birth metaphors are used lavishly among authors, so I hate to join the cliché, but it's true-- having a second book come out does feel a lot like having a second baby. With the first one, you have no idea what you're getting into but you have this written birth plan you're very sure everyone will stick to; you made copies in triplicate, to make sure you and the doc and the unborn child are all on the same page. And then you still end up hooked up to a bag of Pitocin, you're not dilating fast enough, and as a result the infant is not born onto the New York Times Bestseller List. It can be bewildering for any new mom. The second time, you know how wonderful it all will be, but also that you can hardly control a damn thing about it. That part is scary.

Here's what the book is about:

"When Elias at long last comes home from the war, Jill's first impression of her future brother-in-law is of a gruff and battle-hardened soldier, nothing like his charismatic and ambitious brother Cade. But the Olmstead boys aren't as different as they first appear: raised in rural New England in a family torn in two by extremist views, both aspire to something higher than the toxic environment of their upbringing. It's a family dynamic Jill doesn't understand, but as she and Cade retreat to the farm to wait out the birth of their child, it becomes clear to her that the family home is no less a battlefield than the one Elias left behind.

As the family's troubled history and the war's psychic toll churn to form a perfect storm, Jill is convinced that she and Cade have been brought here by fate to prevent a tragedy. But when their efforts fail, Cade's angry grief spawns a desire for revenge against the government he believes abandoned his brother. Jill believes his love for his infant son will set a limit on how far he's willing to go-- but in the Olmstead family, it's never safe to presume a person will be reasonable."

As you might imagine, it was tough to write. Really tough-- more so than The Kingdom of Childhood in many ways, because with that book I had lots of time and nothing to lose, and this one was more or less the reverse of that. I'm very happy with how it turned out, and now, as it finally hits the bookstores, I'm going to use this blog to take you-- my faithful readers-- through the next five weeks with me, day by day. In that time you'll get to see me:

1. Promote the new book (Heaven Should Fall)

2. Finish writing the work-in-progress (Wonder Girl) that's due to my editor on October 31

3. Obsess about the previous book (The Kingdom of Childhood)

4. Work my day job, raise my family, prevent my husband from giving up and leaving me, et cetera

5. And attempt to lose the thirteen pounds I gained in a sudden, frenetic burst of chocolate dependency last fall while revising Heaven Should Fall.

Stick around and join me for the ride. It'll be the Here Comes Honey Boo Boo of professional writing. See you tomorrow, and wish me luck.

The Girl With the Kidney Stone

So I see I haven't blogged since April. In case you were sitting around wondering why, it's because I never set down my actual novel projects long enough to blog, or bathe my children, or call my mother, or any of those things normal people are expected to do. I really am the stereotype of the Obsessive Writer. I have never seen an episode of Mad Men or even Modern Family, despite very much wanting to, because I Don't Have Time. If I go to bed before 3 A.M., I consider it "an early night." I have three novel projects going at a time, and I wake up in the morning thinking about where I'm going to go with that scene today. I don't do these things to be cute and affected. I often wish my brain would fricking slow down.

As some of you know, I have a day job as a Children's Ministry Coordinator for a church here in my town. I love that job, and I'm devoted to it. The week before last I was gearing up to host Vacation Bible School (VBS), my church's biggest community outreach of the year and a major part of my job. It's a week long, for three hours every evening. This takes months of planning and intense coordination, as well as a ton of volunteer help. This would be an incredibly bad week for anything to go wrong-- for example a widespread, multi-day power outage, or a tree falling on the Craft Leader's parents' house, or, say, a sudden guerrilla attack by kidney stones.

In case you didn't already guess, I got all three.

After a four-day outage here at chez Coleman, I leaped to finish the printing and Internetting and shopping for VBS once the lights came back on and the City of Bowie scraped all the sixty-year-old maples off the main roads. The highway to Annapolis was literally closed due to melting-- the heat wave was that bad-- but hey, I didn't need anything in Annapolis anyway. The Craft Leader's parents had good insurance and escaped tragedy, and so now, like some kind of twisted Super Mario Brothers game, all I needed to do was dodge the medical emergency. And just like in the original Nintendo game, I found myself running straight off the cliff.

I got through Monday just fine. I was super-dehydrated by the end of the night and got myself a ginormous soda at 7-Eleven on the way home. On Tuesday morning I woke up thinking (as always) what I was going to write that day, and as soon as I stepped out of bed I felt, as my husband would quote, a disturbance in the force, as if a million voices suddenly cried out in terror. That day I managed the whole escalating catastrophe with over-the-counter pain meds; frankly, I was assuming this was a really kick-ass case of run-of-the-mill cramps. By evening, though, I was starting to suspect-- in all bewilderment-- that this could be a kidney stone. I had heard tell of such things, and my symptoms seemed awfully suspicious; after all, I'd never actually thrown up from pain before, except during labor with a daughter who shall remain nameless. Still, the show must go on, and so I ran VBS as scheduled. With a little help from my friends.

As dawn broke on Wednesday, while I paced the floor of my bedroom, I calmly texted my husband-- who was close to the end of his shift at the firehouse-- and told him that as soon as he got home he was taking me to the ER. Now, I had not been treated in an ER since I was three years old and decided to play "Scuba Diver" by jumping off the coffee table with the wooden base of one of those Fisher-Price ring-stacker toys in my mouth. I am incredibly healthy. Superwoman healthy. I can say that out loud now because it isn't tempting the Gods. They've already gotten the last laugh.

In the ER (no line!), they gave me a morphine drip and a CAT scan that determined that I was not, in fact, paranoid or insane, and I really did have a rock lodged in my left kidney. But it was only a LITTLE one, and it should be out in no time. They sent me home with four different medications, I took a long nap, and got up in time to run VBS again.

I limped through Thursday and Friday, finishing out the week of a very successful and hard-won Vacation Bible School. Still, no stone had popped out. The weekend crawled by; I called my doctor after-hours and coaxed him into giving me a prescription for a muscle relaxant so I'd be able to get up after a couple hours' sleep without collapsing into a puddle of misery, and that improved things by a notch. I felt like I was 85 years old. All of this was absolutely foreign to me: the charts to help me remember what drugs I'd taken and when, the medicated haze, the hot showers at 2 in the morning, the calls to the hospital's Registered Nurse Hotline and the naps and the humiliating conversations about my urinary tract and shuffling slowly around the house in my pajamas. And warning my kids to hug me gently. And missing things, like my niece's birthday party, because I was too sick to go. That sucked. It all sucks. It sucks in epic fashion.

My husband was awesome through all of this, my parents and friends sympathetic, and I felt like it was just a matter of time until the damn stone worked its way out and everything could get back to normal. Meanwhile, as far as my novel was concerned-- and for those with sensitive ears, I'm going to use a technical term here-- I wasn't writing shit. Usually I hit a thousand words a day, sometimes three thousand. In the past week I've managed to squeeze in a thousand words, and they weren't even on the project that's due in October. Apparently I'm on sabbatical; won't my editor love hearing that! But creativity is impossible under these conditions. I can work my day job just fine-- that's been proven-- but there's no way my mind can go on flights of fancy when it can only think one four-letter word, and that word is PAIN.

Monday rolled around, and I went in to see my primary care doc. I figured this was a technicality, since the stone is still stuck in there and all I really needed were more pain meds. Imagine my surprise when he whipped out my CAT scan and told me, oh no, this stone isn't going anywhere without SURGERY, and by the way you have another one up there about the size of the Minotaur and to get that out you need to have a completely different procedure done.

Ya know, back around my birthday at the end of June I called my dear friend Laura and joked that now that I'm 36, I'm in the second half of my life. I kept working that riff for the remainder of the conversation, while she teased me for being morbid. It was meant to be a joke, and it seems a lot less funny now that I'm facing the first medical crisis of my life-- something I can't ignore or wait to heal on its own, because it won't. Thankfully it IS something treatable, but I keep thinking about that maudlin country song I like so much-- "Live Like You Were Dying"-- where he sings about how "the moment came that stopped me on a dime/ And I spent most of the next days looking at the X-rays". Yes, I'm sedentary and drink a ton of Coke Zero, but a lot of people do that and they don't all get kidney stones. I have no family history of this, and it's not like I had a hunch that something might be wrong. It came completely out of left field. And now I'm crossing my fingers that I can still make it to the RWA conference where I'm speaking and signing books next week, and that I can hurry up and get back to the sweet overworked overscheduled NORMAL chaos of my life instead of this unpleasant substitute.

I'll just leave you with this one thought: a while ago a friend posted on Facebook the quote, "Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness." I don't know exactly what caused this, but I deserve to take a hit in the Lifestyle department. I'm too old to think sitting still won't come back to haunt me soon enough. Wish me luck.

Stranger Than Fiction at Montrose Christian School

Oh, dear. Today I caught a story about a kindergarten teacher at a Maryland private school accused of having a sexual affair with a sixteen-year-old male student. Sound familiar? But nope, it's not "The Kingdom of Childhood" this time... it's Miss Ashley Campbell at Montrose Christian School in Rockville.

Ashley Campbell arrested for sexual abuse of student

I feel bad for all parties involved here. After spending over two years writing from the point of view of someone who committed this crime-- and researching exhaustively-- I know these things don't happen in a vacuum. And what a huge mucking mess it makes when it all comes out, as it inevitably must, because now the poor kid will have legal issues to contend with-- the statements, the reports, the possibility of serving as a witness in court-- in addition to the emotional aspects of guilt and a sense of betrayal and embarrassment and remorse. I can't speak for him, of course, but I know what others in his position have gone through. As for Ms. Campbell, if she is guilty of this crime-- which she may or may not be, that's to be determined by the court-- I have sympathy for her as well. She wouldn't be the first one to fall down the rabbit hole of blurred boundaries, and the shame she will feel will be familiar to all of us who have made serious mistakes. That doesn't excuse a darned thing; offering sympathy is not the same as offering clemency. It's only a way to acknowledge that the accused is human, because if we imagine only monsters can do these things, we will miss the signs that are right before our eyes, again and again and again.

I'll tell ya, I get tired of seeing in reader reviews that in my book I'm attempting to make some kind of "excuse" for Judy's behavior via her failing marriage, or childhood traumas, or what have you. I don't usually criticize reviews, but when I see that particular comment, I know the reader completely missed the point. The point, in "The Kingdom of Childhood," is that for all of the reasons that inform Judy's decision to seduce Zach, not one of them is an excuse. The key is this: people do things for reasons that make sense to them, even if they don't make sense to anybody else. If we can ask why sexual predators do the things they do, and be willing to hear the honest answers, we might actually be able to stop those things from happening so much. But if we keep making assumptions and applying stereotypes, we will continue to get the same results. And the thing about female sexual predators is that they defy our stereotypes and circumvent our assumptions. There are lots and lots of teachers out there who have failing marriages, or surly teenagers, or childhood traumas, who don't act out by sleeping with teenagers. What is exceptional about Judy is not her circumstances, but her psychology.

I'm very sorry to see this in the news once again. The school appears to have handled it well. The trouble is that the details are all so familiar-- as a friend said, "I feel like I've seen this story all the way to the point of her turning herself in." If we want to see less of this story, maybe we should pay closer attention when we have the opportunity-- and see it not as a salacious tale, but a human one.