My month of no snark

I wanted to see if I could change the way I felt by being nice to people. The weirdest part? It worked

By Lauren Frey Daisley

Topics:Life stories

Last week, if you’d asked me what I thought of Gadhafi, I’d have said something like, “I appreciate his whimsical taste in uniforms.” That’s because I’d vowed for one month to live up to the gold standard we all internalized to some degree as children: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

It started when my husband, baby and I drove away from a visit with my aunt, who has Stage 4 breast cancer. I thought back on the 30-some years I’ve known her. I have never once in all that time heard her say anything unkind. Not even in the subtext of her words. That’s one hell — or, in this case, heaven — of a legacy.

While I’m not known for being unkind, I’m not above the occasional barbed joke. Looking at my dad’s “Refudiate Obama” bumper sticker a while back, I remarked to my right-wing brother, “That’s a pretty big word.” Sure, it’s a mild quip, but it feeds into a current of savage speech that underlies much of our public discourse. Personal invectives dominate everything from political commentary to You Tube comments. Snark, it seems, is something to which people aspire.

I began to wonder, how would holding my tongue — or at least changing what came off it — alter my relationships? Would I be forced into becoming a pushover or would I find more direct ways to deal with disagreement? Would I be less interesting? Would I still feel like myself, even? And in a bigger, moral way: Is it actually better?

There was one way to find out. I began my month-long campaign of kind with the following rules:

I cannot say or write anything that could be construed as not nice.

I do not have to school other people on being kind.

I am allowed to tease in a good-natured way.

Simple enough, but the first day began with a challenge. I received an email from an old friend informing me that someone we used to work with, famous for conspicuous sexual harassment involving interns typing his handwritten fantasies, is now seeking to bring in projects related to porn. Reading my friend’s message, I had to physically pull my fingers off the keyboard. After a few deep breaths, I wrote, “Amusing and bemusing.” Failure. That is both borderline unkind and totally lame. But kindness-wise it was better than, “What will his intern have to do this time?”

Then I got a call from a former neighbor who told me about the old asshole down the street [his words, not mine] who egged his house over a fight about spilled garbage. I held my own this time, showing neutral empathy. “What a drag … Oh wow … I’m sorry you have to deal with this …”

Already, I was starting to feel a little Hallmarky. It’s just so much cooler to be more sarcastic and less earnest. But what does that even mean, really? A certain meta-remove is popular now, but isn’t it possible that’s just a cultural phase? Irony can’t be in forever. I hope not, anyway, because however funny it might be, it implies a certain solipsism. It says, I am so above this scene — above other people, even — that I can simply comment on what I see unfolding before me. That may be a good way to get laughs — but it’s a dull way to live.

Later that first day, I took the baby on a stroll through our new small-town neighborhood in upstate New York and met an older gentleman who has lived in town longer than me. When I told him my name, he said, “Watch out. There’s a Loreen, a Laura, a Laurie, and another Lauren on this block … and they all got divorces!” Then he laughed bitterly. But score one for me. I said, “I’ll try not to take that as a curse. Goodbye.”

It may have been a WASPy response, but it was not unkind. That said, I walked away furious and with no way to vent.

But here’s the thing. Without the ability to vent, I had only two options: to let something relatively stupid eat away at me — or to just let it go. So I tried that. What did it matter if a stranger thought my marriage was challenged because of my first name? Giving his weird, offhand theory any stock would be as productive as stepping on a crack in the sidewalk and worrying it would hurt my mom. So I decided there was something to the old preteen-teen mantra: Whatever.

Surprisingly, it worked. If I couldn’t bitch about the exchange, I stopped thinking about it.

As the days went on, I bit my tongue about many things, including but not limited to the following:

The journalist on TV with the squeaky voice

A good friend’s seeming belief that her puppy is human

Tourists screaming outside our house about needing to buy Febreze for their car

The plumber’s inability to make our bathtub hold water

The likelihood that an old acquaintance who has never not cheated will manage to keep his bits in his pants now that he’s engaged

At first I worried that not talking about these things would make me not “known” to the people in my life. Maybe I’ve had too many years of therapy, or maybe we’ve all had too many years of Oprah and the imperative to “get it all out.” But this was an odd and even narcissistic presumption, as though people close to me needed to be aware of my every thought in order for our relationships to be genuine.

Instead of me denying my true thoughts, I stopped giving the unproductive ones much weight. Adding credence to the theory that changing what you do changes how you think, unkind thoughts just dissipated in a matter of days. It actually doesn’t matter much whether my friend’s dog gets to eat sitting on a chair at her table. She has her reasons. What do I care? And it’s not like I don’t do anything weird, either. I think I can tell what’s in the mail before I open the mailbox. Is that any worse?

Not giving voice to my flinty little put-downs also eliminated that weird guilt where you wonder if the person somehow heard you or found out what you said. I also stopped suspecting that anyone might be saying harsh things about me.

Win win win.

Granted, near the end of the month, I had dreams that I was screaming into a crowd stuff like, “The stroller is smaller than your shopping cart, god damn it, so stop giving me that look!” I also found myself sublimating by reading British film reviews that said things such as, “The sex scenes were reminiscent of a slug rolling in salt.”

But out loud and in emails, I walked the line. Where I did struggle, however, was in a discussion with a friend of mine from Amman who brought up Gadhafi.

“Have you heard his speeches?” she asked.

“Excerpts of them,” I said.

“He’s bat crazy, no?” she commented.

The best I could do, considering that mentioning his clothes would have been too incongruous, was, “These are strange times.”

When it concerns real human strife, it’s ultimately not nice to just be polite. No one would benefit if conversations about World War II were only as substantive as “Hitler? Oh yes, he made lovely watercolors.” It is more humane — and, therefore, nicer — to support justice, even if that means unleashing vitriol.

On the day my month was up, I spoke to a wonderful neighbor about how some of the older folks in town seem a little resistant to people from the city moving in. The old man’s comment about women with names like mine getting divorces came to mind and I quipped that it might have been a mild form of hazing.

My neighbor laughed and asked, “Who said that?”

“A guy named Buddy.”

“Buddy Pinchik?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s so Buddy. He thinks that kind of thing is funny. I like talking to him.” Something melancholy entered his expression. “He tells me about what it was like here before I was born. If my dad were still alive, he’d be Buddy’s age. Yeah, I like talking to him.”

One thing that hadn’t occurred to me: Buddy didn’t mean anything at all by what he said. It was a harmless attempt at conversation, maybe even a touching way of reaching out. Either way, why waste energy assuming ill intent? Haven’t we all said something stupid and realized it sounded insulting? If we stop lashing out against perceived insults and stop subtly eroding our friendships — or even kind relations with strangers — by giving so much attention to the things that bug us, quality of life inches incrementally but noticeably closer to excellent.

Kindness doesn’t have to imply repression. It doesn’t rein in humor or impede the fight for justice. But it does require discipline and substantive engagement with others.

If you disagree, feel free to say so in a considerate manner. Or just keep it to yourself.

: Lauren Frey Daisley is a writer and voiceover professional in New York. More Lauren Frey Daisley

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What not to wear after the divorce

I once found joy in shopping, but when my marriage fell apart, so did my retail flirtations. Or so I thought

By Pamela Kripke

(Credit: Greg Kieca via Shutterstock)

Topics:Divorce, Coupling, Life stories

The wallpaper in our new kitchen in our new town was a brick red, with ocher chickens on it, and peculiar little men. Tiny men, hunched over, farming, maybe. I agreed to live in the house on the condition that I could eradicate the itsy male people, slather texture over their bodies and paint them into nothingness. One day, while perusing the phone book for a person who would do the honors, I had the crazy good fortune to discover that Loehmann’s had an outpost within city limits. Yes, Loehmann’s, Chas E. Loehmann’s. The Big L. Lo’s. The department store of my New York youth, right in Texas, the place where I had wound up.

I should back up. There is that bench that rings the perimeter of the store’s dressing room and is attached, somehow, to the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that comprise the four walls. I spent half of my childhood on that bench, a receptacle for my mother’s sartorial decisions. Picks piled on my lap. Possibilities dangling on my head, from the hook above.

There were no individual chambers at Loehmann’s, no doors behind which the women could disappear. Instead, they tried on their selections in front of everyone else. There was an understanding that the ladies in the dressing room would tell you that the trousers you were trying were too tight, and that they’d even touch you and spin you around to make sure. Then, they’d ask the shopper to their left, who might have been bra-less, for corroboration. She’d discuss, as if she were wearing an anorak. There would be a summit about your rear end. And talk about mastectomies and in-laws and grandkids who couldn’t read. There would be laughs and hugs, even. Loehmann’s was life’s microcosmic training ground. It was where I witnessed sisterhood and love and all the levelers, emerging through the velvet curtain like a human garment rack, a very enlightened human garment rack. And when the clothes could fit me, it is where I shopped.

I did not think to look for a store in Texas, where I had moved with my husband. Seeing the name in the directory, en route to Lone Star Painting, was celestial. It was the net under the tightrope.

“Go, with all speed,” came the maternal wisdom from New York.

Once each month, I designated a Friday morning for personal betterment, salvation from the daily routine, from discontent. I emerged luminous and recharged, weighed down only with bags of enviable duds. I wore a different purchase each Saturday that I went out for dinner, snipping off the tags as needed. “Where did you get that?” my husband’s colleagues would ask. I would not tell. The dinners never kept up with the clothing, rendering my closet a flutter of blue rectangles, my own Loehmann’s annex.

Ultimately, there were no more dinners, as our marriage slipped into a private confusion. But I maintained the ritual, nonetheless, fully aware that the methodical march through aisles of atypical designs, adventurous experiments and, of course, designer mark-downs, was valuable. Cathartic. Uplifting. The clothing was independent at Loehmann’s, or at least, the clothing I liked. Not one to ban basics entirely, I learned early how to twist them up, to camouflage them with well-placed insanity, on the feet, down the arm, around the crooked, flared, fringed or otherwise adulterated torso.

During that first year after my husband moved out, I bought a black velvet haltered gown, ankle length; a soft red chiffon-y dress, empire, with spaghetti straps; a raspberry pink faux fur jacket, with a lavender tattersoll motif; among other impulses I thought I needed at the time. I bought skirts with ruffles adorning the hips, skirts with flaps, skirts with exaggerated stitching, skirts that looked like headbands. Sweaters with bows on the waist, bells past the nail beds, holes in the scapula.

In the dressing room, the ladies talked, though less than they did in New York. But I engaged them, because it was Loehmann’s and they were supposed to engage, to confide, encourage, commiserate and prevent a disaster at checkout. I met many lovely women in various states of undress. My closet looked like a costume shop. Just the way I liked it.

The Friday after my divorce was finalized would be no different, I determined. I was officially unmarried, the head of the household, pilot of the plane, which, at that particular moment, had hit a bit of a chop. My book didn’t sell. My column was canceled. My kids outnumbered me. What better oasis. A block away, the bright blue “L” called out like a beacon. But as I drove closer, the shape of the “L” looked unfamiliar. Both legs of the letter were the same width; they should have been different dimensions, I knew. This was not the Loehmann’s “L.” Clearly, not the “L.” I turned into the vacant parking lot and felt the wallop in my belly. It was “L” for Lease. Gone. Blinked into vapor. This, too. The death of my Loehmann’s.

In the months following, I did not shop. I did not shop for eight years, actually. There are fine stores where I live, all the stores, really. In fact, I live in a retail mecca. But I did not participate. Like dating after widowhood, a purchase in a foreign bag would have felt disrespectful, too soon. I would never buy another garment. Never again gaze into a three-way, tilt my head to the side the way you do when you are deciding, twirl to see the swish of a hem. It had happened to me, the loss, the rediscovery, the swipe — the narrative arc was complete. I was not to grow from the experience but instead, exist in pilled cardigans and faded jersey. No denouement pour moi.

“Do you need a hang-y top, soft floral pinkish print, with ties and some teeny pleats and long poufy sleeves?” Mom asked over the phone. “I’m in Lo’s. I’m buying one for me.”

“Need?” I asked. “I don’t need clothes.”

“Wait, hold on, I’m taking off my shirt,” she said. Then, “It’s fabulous, right?” I heard her say to someone. “Just a sec, it’s my baby, in Texas. Don’t ask.”

This sort of thing happens a lot, Mom calling from the trenches to replenish the supply. Maybe once in my life, I’ve worn something that someone gave me. Knowing this, she checks in advance.

“Listen, you could need this, it’s gorgeous.” I waited for the follow-up. “What you have is for a farm.”

The image of a milking stool went with me into my closet that night. There is nothing rural in here, I thought. There are no aprons, or overalls. There is no calico. Mom is nuts. Nuts! These clothes are the kind you want. They are swank. Clever. In the know. After an hour, I had collected four large bags of items to donate.

My daughters, by then 12 and 14, advised, “No one is going to put on any of that. We need to get you on ‘What Not to Wear.’”

Energized by their really viable idea, they retrieved a camera. “Stand over by the bed and look pathetic. The shorts are perfect.”

Though proud of their enterprise, I realized, wincing from the photo, that my story needed a conclusion after all, and in a hurry. I had indulged a loss. I had let it dictate a course of action that was not genuine and, worse, not flattering. I was the girl with the zip, the creativity. I was the NBC peacock for Halloween, in journalism school, for crying out loud. I barely fit into the cab. What peacock in her right mind would look like this?

I made a list of stores that came closest to the spirit of Loehmann’s. I knew that they would not be Loehmann’s, which was the only way I could proceed. On the chosen day, I ventured out, anticipation in my brain, try-on mules on my feet. I eased into an aisle and found the groove, the pace. Soon, my eyes sharpened, catching prospects from just the hint of a collar or stretch of a sleeve. In minutes, the sound of tapping plastic hung off my arm, and crescendoed all the way to the fitting room door.

Inside my little stall, alone, I wrapped myself in a charmeuse sarong. In silence, I tilted my head the way you do when you decide, and twirled to see the swish of many hems.

: Pamela Gwyn Kripke's essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, Redbook, and in newspapers nationwide as a columnist for Creators Syndicate. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and covers breaking news in Texas for The New York Times. More Pamela Kripke

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San Francisco turned me straight

I was a hardcore lesbian when I came to the famously freaky city. So how did I start sleeping with men?

By Anna Pulley

(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)

Topics:Salon -- After Dark, Sex, Coupling, Life stories, San Francisco

This essay is the first in a new series on Salon about bisexual experiences.

I proposed to my last girlfriend in Lesvos, Greece, at sunset, overlooking the craggy shores of Skala Eresou. I carried the ring 8,000 miles. I wasn’t eloquent, but she cried and I cried and as we walked back to our rented house, we played a game where we guessed the number of stray cats we’d see along the way. We said the loser had to kiss the winner a million times.

Shortly after that, we moved to San Francisco. Shortly after that, I was on a different shore and she was on a boat drifting farther away from me each day. Shortly after that, we stopped having sex. Words were somewhere in the absence growing between us but I couldn’t find them. My only weapon was repetition. I made us dinner. We watched “Glee.” We went to yoga. Shortly after that, she told me she wanted to date men, that our relationship was over.

My ex-girlfriend now has a boyfriend and lives in Minnesota. My yoga teacher, who announced to her mom at age 8 that she was a lesbian, now exclusively dates men, and has been in a committed relationship with a man for more than a year. My straightest guy friends have all at least made out with other men, while others are now dabbling in full-on dude sex. Whatever norm you came in with, San Francisco eventually takes it and turns it right on its (uncircumcised, pierced) head. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the City wanted to have its way with me too. Still, I was the last person who thought I’d be a lesbian who spent the next year and a half of her life sleeping with men.

San Francisco is no stranger to the provocative, I know. Nary a rally or Sunday stroll exists without the backdrop of a few naked men in cock rings and pink faux-hawks. Here the rainbow flag is larger than the American one, parents push strollers around the Folsom Street Fair, and spectators can always drop in to the monthly porn wrestling matches at the Armory if dinner and a movie is too passé.

Sometimes I think S.F. is one of those Emerald City-type places where, free of many of the cultural or religious constraints that plague other cities, you can be the truest version of yourself, or at least have a really good time exploring untrue versions of yourself along the way. It’s a city that embraces the idea of potential, not limitations. I realize, of course, that sexuality can’t really be articulated or altered by a ZIP code, but all this flip-flopping seemed pervasive to me, and I figured the City itself, its brazenness, its tendency toward experimentation and spectacle, had to at least play a role in this shifting sexual mind-set.

I didn’t realize I liked girls until I was 20, so I was never a gold-star lesbian (someone who never slept with boys), but I am pretty stereotypically gay. I was a high school gym teacher. I drive a pickup truck. I minored in women’s studies. I know the difference between tempeh and seitan. It’s all womyn and grrls up in this hizzy, in other words. Yet I found myself a few months after my breakup mired in men, and behaving a lot straighter than I had at any other time in my life, which includes the brief affair I tried to have with eyelash crimpers in high school.

The first guy in S.F. I slept with was a friend I’d known for years. He offered to be my wingman at a tranny dance party during Pride weekend, but at the end of the night, we were the lone “straight” couple making out on the dance floor. It was somewhat embarrassing, actually. I felt like I was betraying myself, and “my people,” which was silly because no one knew who I was or cared about whom I made out with. As if the hot boi in the bow tie and suspenders would suddenly leap up and pronounce me a fraud between Le Tigre mashups. I went home with my friend and we had sex for hours. We didn’t discuss anything or stop to wonder if this was a good idea. We just kept moving to the rhythm of each other’s particular hungers. Afterward I felt so relieved. The months of frustration and rejection that led to my breakup were all released during this one marathon night of hetero sex. “I’m OK,” I thought. “I’m going to be OK.” While waiting for the bus outside his house, I burst into tears.

Then there was another friend, a new one. We went to a bar and he told me to tell him my life story, starting from birth. It took 12 hours, and he didn’t once let me ask him any questions in return. We held hands on the way back to his apartment and I remember thinking, “This is so wrong. Our hands don’t fit together. Our hands are just grasping at anything.”

San Francisco’s not an easy city to live in. Everyone is struggling a little, to pay the exorbitant rents, to stand out in a lasting way, to grow up as slowly as possible. I was unemployed the first five months I lived here, then took an internship that paid $6.25 an hour. Without the relationship luxury of shared expenses, I was barely surviving. But I was writing and I was having sex, which somehow made my financial and emotional woes more bearable. After a while, being straight felt more subversive to me than being queer, even more so when I was having queer sex with straight men. I would strap on a dildo and screw men face down on the mattress. I would grip their hips in my hands and feel alive, powerful. “I am moving on,” I thought. “I am free and empowered. This city won’t break me.”

I had a moment of panic shortly after that, where I blamed all of this on my ex-girlfriend. If she can be straight, then so can I, I told myself, as if that would prove anything. As if it would take away the anguish and loneliness of a life that would never again be ours.

Since many of us in San Francisco are struggling, it makes our connections to other people all the more urgent. We may be dropping a grand each month to live in a closet, but at least we have friends, lovers and many of those murky, in-between relationships that resist definition and ease.

I had quite a few of these relationships. There was the writer, the filmmaker, the lawyer. None of them had names really. They were known to me by their professions, or in some cases, their kinks. It was freeing, in a way. In S.F., I wasn’t defined or confined by my identity as a lesbian. Nor did I have to make excuses as to why I didn’t want to be in a relationship with any of these men. It felt radical, for a time. I would tell them I liked girls, always expecting it to be a deterrent, slightly disappointed that it never was. Or maybe they just didn’t believe me. To these new people, my track record as a queer lady existed only in words, in stories that seemed to take place in some bygone era, when in fact it had less than a year.

In my darker moments, I saw my newfound straightness for what it was: a crutch to avoid the pain of being hurt again. If I in no way imitated that girl who got her heart broken, then I was safe. And since I wasn’t getting any attention from queer women anyway, did it even matter?

The longer I went without emotionally or physically connecting with women, the more confused I became. It was like I was watching a foreign film of my life without subtitles.

Being with men started becoming my norm. And it freaked me out. Because even though it wasn’t familiar, it was easy. There’s very little guesswork involved with picking up men. There was no need to scrutinize fingernail length or namedrop “The L Word” in order to determine if someone was amenable to sleeping with me. In fact, it was pretty much assumed that 15 minutes of uninterrupted talk with a dude meant the possibility of sex was on the table.

We like to name things because it gives us a sense of order and comfort. So we can feel connected to one another. If I say I’m a daughter we all know what that means. Or a liberal, or a feminist, or a molecular biologist. But sexuality often doesn’t work that way. If you don’t look the part of a queer, then you don’t exist. I encountered this problem in other areas of my life as well. I’m half Native American, but you’d never know it unless I was standing next to my raven-haired mother. In this way, my queerness didn’t make sense unless it was in relation to who I was fucking at the time, which further alienated me from my former sexual identity. When all you have is your word, you’re always dependent on other people’s beliefs.

On the rare occasion that a woman did express interest in me, she was usually straight, another byproduct of San Francisco’s peculiar lure. Everyone was getting their rocks off, but no one was happy. This became even more evident when my dude sex started to sour. One guy I met online thought he could make me orgasm by simply commanding me to do so. Another guy reached over and took a hit from a pipe while inside me. Then two of my sex partners started having sex with each other and stopped having sex with me. It was all such a big, sticky mess that I am still trying to untangle.

S.F. author Stephen Elliott wrote recently that “San Francisco is this great drug and you sit on top of Bernal Heights and watch boats named ‘Opportunity’ and ‘Raw Ambition’ and ‘Your Worst Self’ sail by so far off you can’t read the red paint on their hulls, and throw your head back and open your mouth in the shape of a cloud.”

San Francisco taught me that a lot of things in my life had to end before I could begin again. It also taught me that there are no right or wrong ways to conduct your life, only honest ones.

: Anna Pulley (@annapulley) writes about sex and social media for SF Weekly, AlterNet, After Ellen and the Chicago Tribune. She's also attempting to lead a haiku revival on her blog, annapulley.com. More Anna Pulley

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Santorum’s policies would have killed my daughter

Without amniocentesis, her rare disease would have gone untreated and she would have likely died at birth

By Sarah Fister Gale

(Credit: AP/Eric Gay)

Topics:Rick Santorum, Life stories, Health

This article originally appeared on Sarah Fister Gale's Open Salon blog.

Next month, my daughter Ella will turn 11. She’s a beautiful girl, with blond hair and green eyes. She’s an amazing artist, a brilliant writer, and she can do the splits without even warming up.

And if I hadn’t had an amniocentesis, she would have died the day she was born.

Just over 11 years ago, I received a call from my obstetrician’s assistant to let me know that there was an anomaly in my recent blood test. “It’s probably just a testing error,” she assured me.

But when I returned the following week to have the blood test redone, the anomaly showed up again. There was a foreign antibody in my blood stream that shouldn’t have been there. I was six months pregnant, and up to that point my pregnancy had been completely normal.

Rather than turning to my local politician for prenatal advice, I followed the guidance of my obstetrician, who sent me to a perinatologist, who recommended I have an amniocentesis. Because he had a medical degree and years of experience treating pregnant women, I followed his recommendation.

That day, he stuck an alarmingly long needle directly into my growing belly to sample the amniotic fluid around my baby. The results weren’t good. She had Rh negative disease.

Rh negative disease occurs when a mother has a negative blood type and a baby has a positive blood type. My negative blood perceived Ella’s positive blood as a foreign body that it needed to destroy. And that’s what it was doing. Every day, little by little, my body was wiping out every one of her red blood cells.

Before the 1960s, Rh negative disease was responsible for the deaths of thousands of babies whose mothers, like me, had negative blood. They usually carried their babies to term and gave birth to them, only to have them die or suffer extreme brain damage as a result of the anemia and jaundice that occurs with this illness.

In 1968, a drug called RhoGAM was approved by the FDA to prevent this disease, and it has since saved hundreds of thousands of lives. In almost every case when it is administered in time it is effective. But in my case, it wasn’t.

Amniocentesis is the recommended test to diagnose this disease, and it enables doctors to define a course of action to treat and monitor these babies for the best possible medical outcome. Had I not had that amniocentesis I likely would not have discovered that she had this illness. I would have carried her to term, given birth to her, and watched her die in my arms.

Instead, thanks to the amniocentesis, my doctor tracked her progress relentlessly. Every week after that I had another (expensive) prenatal screening test, called a serial ultrasound, through which he was able to monitor the anemia that grew steadily worse as more of her blood cells were destroyed — and track the development of her lungs so that she could be delivered at the best possible moment for her safety. The day he saw that her lungs could function on their own, he delivered her.

Ella was born four weeks premature, a tiny 5-pound bag of bones, with bright yellow hair and eerily orange skin from the jaundice. Within hours of her birth she was given a full blood transfusion – they replaced every single drop of her damaged blood with new blood that would save her life. Then she spent the next five days in the NICU with cotton blinders taped over her eyes and five bilirubin lights shining on her to reduce the jaundice, while my husband and I took turns sitting at her side round the clock, watching her struggle to survive.

For months after she came home, she had to have weekly blood tests to make sure the anemia was in control. They had to draw the blood from her heel because her fingers were too tiny to prick. Finally, at three months her own defenses kicked in and she started producing her own red blood cells.

Happily, she made a full recovery and has no lingering effects from the disease. And it’s all thanks to that one medical test.

If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”

Eleven years ago, my husband and I had two kids and a mortgage, and like most young families we didn’t have $2,000 to pay for a test that my husband’s employer might object to on moral grounds.

So, while Mr. Santorum may think that his blowhard opinions about when and where women should be allowed to have medical tests is righteous, I say it’s ignorance.

In the Catholic church where I was raised, pride, arrogance and an overinflated sense of oneself were considered sins. But in Rick Santorum’s world they are virtues, and they make up the foundation from which he proclaims how other people should live their lives.

When I read stories in the news about countries where women are prevented access to birth control, or the freedom to work, or the right to make choices about their bodies and their lives, I wonder how a leadership with such crazy ideals could ever gain power. But as I look at what’s happening in the debates leading up to this presidential election in our own country, it has become chillingly evident.

As a nation, we are at the precipice of a slippery slope where men in power are arguing about how to take basic rights away from women. I shudder to think what lies at the bottom of that slope, but if Rick Santorum has his way we will all soon find out.

: More Sarah Fister Gale

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“Law and Order: SVU” diagnosed my Parkinson’s

Watching a rerun, I saw my own strange symptoms. Three years later, I'm still navigating a mysterious disease

By Judy Oppenheimer

Christopher Meloni as Detective Elliot Stabler (Credit: NBC/Will Hart)

Topics:Life stories, Law and Order, Editor's Picks

People always want to know how you got a certain disease. They’re thinking of themselves, of course — the sore throat, the odd bruise on the wrist, that lingering cough. But people are surprised when I tell them how I discovered I had Parkinson’s. I was watching “Law and Order: SVU.”

I had flipped on a rerun, which I do when I’m tired and bored. It’s better than reality TV, and it’s reliable. There’s always an episode of “Law and Order” playing somewhere.

I’d seen this one before, so I was paying minimal attention. I flipped through a magazine. A man, shaking badly, was telling the detectives about his disease, Parkinson’s. Years ago he’d started having symptoms. He listed them.

I put down the magazine. A chill ran up the back of my neck. I had every single one.

Why hadn’t I suspected anything was wrong until then? Easy. I had found a way to explain away every problem I encountered. My car key didn’t open the door without a struggle? It must have gotten bent somehow. My can opener didn’t work anymore? Ditto. My favorite cutting knife couldn’t seem to do the job right? Fine, I’d replace it one of these days. What did any of this have to do with me?

There was one thing that did, though, and it puzzled me — my right arm didn’t swing anymore when I walked. It wanted to bend itself at the elbow, jutting out stiffly. I wondered about that one, even mentioned it to a friend, a longtime nurse practitioner. She chalked it up to another manifestation of my long-term back problem. I figured it might be punishment for the way I gripped my computer mouse.

Only now, the man on the show explained issues that were all too familiar — he had a stiff arm, too, and difficulty with the simplest motor skills. And more: exhaustion, odd aches, a suddenly clumsy gait.

And hearing him, I knew. I knew with a rare clarity. The clean pop of a ball into a glove: connection complete. I called no one. Tomorrow I’d search the Internet; tomorrow I’d find a neurologist. But none of that was strictly necessary, not for diagnosis, anyway. Finding the specific traits on the Internet the following day, hearing the neurologist confirm it a few days later -all of that was anti-climatic. Sitting there, watching that damn rerun, I knew the truth: I had Parkinson’s.

Everyone knows something about Parkinson’s, thanks to Michael J. Fox. It’s a progressive neurodegenerative disease that involves shaking, rigidity, weakness. What I hadn’t known was that apparently Parkinson’s can affect your mind, too.

“Any problem with word retrieval?” asked the neurologist the first time I saw him, his eyes sharp with interest. Well, sure, I had some now and then, like everyone who is over 60. I dismissed it, airily.

“Any problem with word retrieval?” asked the neurologist the second time I saw him. What was this, a mantra? Again, I said calmly I was doing fine. As a matter of fact, better than him. He was not all that young himself, and an extremely slow talker. Several times I found myself filling in words for him; a couple of times, analogies as well.

“Any problem with word retrieval?” asked the neurologist the third time I saw him. This was beginning to grate. Was it supposed to be some kind of hypnotic suggestion? If you ask something enough times — in a paternal tone of voice, eyes twinkling expectantly, with a distinct aura of anticipation — well, hey, aren’t you going to end up causing it? No, no problem, I said.

That week, I received a long form in the mail for a movement disorders clinic where I had an appointment. It chilled me. Are you able to turn over in bed by yourself / with help / not possible. Are you still able to form sentences (usually/rarely/never). Can you swallow?

Has anyone in the field ever heard of the tyranny of low expectations? Personally, I don’t appreciate these hints, if that’s what they are, that I’m about to descend into mouth-foaming dementia any minute.

Michael Kinsley had a long piece in the New Yorker a few years ago, which dealt with his Parkinson’s. (He’s had it 20 years; he still seems, against all odds, to have plenty of words at his disposal.) He was enthralled by one of the side effects mentioned in the literature, an urge to take up gambling. I haven’t gotten that one myself, but not long after I dumped the first neurologist, I was intrigued by a book in my new doctor’s office, “How to Win at Poker.”

“And what is this?” I challenged him when he finally showed up. (He had the grace to blush, insisting a patient must have left it.)

This neurologist doesn’t bring up the cognitive issue, but he does make sure one of his associates gives me the test every time I drop by.

Not heard of the test? Obviously you’ve never had a relative with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, like my dad, who died of that latter disease 10 years ago. It’s the same test they gave him at each appointment. You’re told to draw a clock, poised at 10 after 11. You’re told to count backward from 100 by sevens, list all the words you can think of starting with an F. (After a few go-rounds you stop trying to avoid the obvious ones — what the hell.) Most irritatingly, you have to remember five disconnected words for five minutes, then spew them back.

I decided to engrave the words (they’re always the same ones) on my brain. And it worked. I may eventually forget the date, the current president, the names of my grandchildren. But what I will never forget — I’ve made sure of that — are those five words, which I generously pass on to anyone with similar concerns: red, velvet, face, church, daisy.

Six months after my initial test, when the associate told me she was going to give me five words, I interrupted her and reeled them off. She was suitably impressed. A year later, accompanied by an intern, she had me do it again, which I did, feeling a bit like a circus seal. Would I manage so well if they changed the words? I don’t know. But for now, silly as it sounds, this hurdle does make me feel like I’m holding my own. Of course I do other things: take my meds, undergo physical therapy, go to the gym, have intensive sessions with a Parkinson’s exercise guru, even take a few drum lessons. Do what I can, in other words.

Parkinson’s has a lot in common with other neurodegenerative diseases: To be blunt, they don’t really know a damn thing about it. Early on I posed this question to a Parkinson’s specialist: I suffered a fairly serious head injury six years ago. Could that have been the cause?

His answer? A giant shrug. Unfortunately, no one else knows either. The Internet is crawling with possible cures. It’s not a week that a friend doesn’t send me one. Tincture of marijuana? Lyme disease treatment? Tandem bike riding? Wet battery packs, whatever those are. I appreciate their concern, even if I’m not necessarily up for trying this stuff.

Of course, Parkinson’s is an extremely individual disease, different for every case. For some, it can be fast moving and brutal. The mother of one of my son’s friends was diagnosed the same week I was, and can no longer live on her own.

Michael J. Fox, our beloved patron saint, calls himself lucky. I wouldn’t go that far, but when it comes to having Parkinson’s, I know I’m one of the fortunate ones.

It’s been over three years since that “Law and Order” rerun. I get exhausted easily, I move more slowly than I did before, I have various aches and pains. But I’m still reasonably intact, still mobile, and I have a handicapped placard, a true advantage for anyone living in D.C.

Some people prefer to keep medical information to themselves. But when people ask how I’m doing, I tend to blurt out my diagnosis. I can’t stand the idea of someone treating this like a deeply unmentionable horror. My candor can lead to confusion sometimes, because people don’t understand Parkinson’s, though maybe that will dissipate over time. After I told one woman, she later informed a party of people that I was dying.

I’m not, OK? Not even close.

: Judy Oppenheimer is the author of "Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson" and "Dreams of Glory," the tale of a high school football season. A longtime freelancer, her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Jewish Times. She lives in Washington DC. More Judy Oppenheimer

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My Facebook angst

The social network site kicks up so much anxiety and embarrassment for me. But that doesn't mean I want to quit it

By Natalie Bakopoulos

(Credit: Salon/iStockphoto)

Topics:Life stories, Facebook, Social Media

A few days ago, my friend Elizabeth posted an item to Facebook. I wanted to comment but held back, though not exactly because I had plenty of work to do. Instead I sent her a text: “Sometimes do you want to say something or post something or like something on FB, but then you think of all those unanswered emails and texts and silence yourself, so people won’t see you ‘wasting’ time when you could be responding to them?”

“Sometimes?” she replied.

“It’s called Twilt, that feeling,” I answered, laughing, having coined the term on the spot.

Twilt (n): the particular brand of guilt or self-reproach that results from posting, liking or commenting on items on Facebook or Twitter while simultaneously not responding to emails, text messages, phone calls or other types of personal communication with the knowledge or anxiety that the specific message senders will notice your public offerings and question your lack of private ones. Twilt, while related, is not the same as the guilt that results from general Internet-specific procrastination such as browsing blogs or online shopping, which, though it may result in its own brand of self-disgust, generally has no public shame component.

Adam Zagajewski, in his essay “The Shabby and Sublime,” says that the poetry of recent years is “marked by a disproportion … between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen.” The same could be said for Facebook updates, our contemporary confessional. I have eaten the plums in the refrigerator, and they were yummy. Facebook is bad for me because I not only embarrass myself but I keenly feel the embarrassment of others whose lack of discretion, as I perceive it, I quietly judge and am embarrassed by all the same.

When someone starts a conversation with me on Facebook, in public, I’m mortified. There’s a message function for that! I have email and a cellphone. Let me respond when I can, away from the watch of hundreds. Sometimes I disable my Wall so people can’t write things there, until someone points it out and I feel guilty that I’ve done this so I change it back. I don’t like to talk on the phone in public and when a friend speaks too loudly in a cafe I am nervous that someone will overhear our conversation. At home I don’t like the sensation of my husband overhearing me order pizza, let alone having more sensitive conversations with friends. I have never been one to kiss and tell, and I like to keep my private life private. Why I have a Facebook account at all still perplexes me. I like the idea of seeing what’s going on, but I don’t want to always be a part of it. I don’t want to not be a part of it either. I want to swoop in and swoop out. But Facebook doesn’t allow for inconsistency without amplifying it, a constant record of our obsessions and our contradictions to the point of caricature.

The conversations between couples embarrass me the most, whether they’re sentimental or self-referential. It’s not that you live with that person and somehow don’t need electronic communication — I often text my husband across the table at a bar to make a snarky comment, or sometimes I send ridiculous things to the online printer in his office just to be impish. But it’s done in private, between us. That’s the point. It’s something about the relationship having a public facade so contrived and self-aware that makes my eyes water with shame. We all have facades and personas, of course, that are not Internet confined. Game faces. Once, at a reading, a poet thanked his wife so gushingly that I whispered to my friend, “That guy is totally having an affair.” I didn’t know a thing about him. But it turns out, I was right. Maybe the wife requested the shout-out, but if I were his wife I would have smiled at the crowd and taken flight. Up, up and away.

Do you remember “This American Life’s” 2001 episode about Superpowers, which poses the question: If you could have a superpower, would you choose Flight or Invisibility? My first reaction was and remains, flight. To fly! I’m petite and have spent a lifetime trying to fight invisibility, being intellectually overlooked, or feeling insignificant (this is not simply a result of my size but an entire slew of issues that would benefit from Lacanian psychoanalysis, which if I had I’d have to talk about in my status updates). I still have dreams where I’m flying, frequent dreams, and when I wake up I feel inexplicably happy. When I fly in my dreams, I don’t sputter or start or anxiously hover. I soar, I glide, and it’s fluid, like a manta ray moving through water. When I fly in my dreams I am all grace. My desire for flight would get me places faster, and in style.

But maybe my desire for flight is a sort of conditional invisibility; the idea of flight not only as the act of flying but the act of fleeing. I want to be part of the scene but to float somehow above it, to engage in the action but then be able to gracefully exit. I want to swoop on in and then glide away. But I want to be seen, for sure, and present. I just don’t want to have to stay, and I certainly don’t want anyone to comment on it.

It is also, of course, part of being a writer, to be part of a scene but also removed. Writing is about observation, but if I observe and immediately state then I’ve lost it, released it. The essay allows an expression of doubt but the Facebook update or conversation has a sort of self-satisfied glibness to it. It doesn’t invite dialogue but somehow challenges it. There is also the lack of control. It could go anywhere. Someone could say something too revealing or racist or just plain idiotic, and there it is, linked to your name. It is not a place for the anxious, Facebook.

And there is the difference of stance. An essay is an attempt at dialogue but a status update is a solicitation; the first is a meaningful hesitation or an assertive pronouncement, a languorous dip in a warm sea or a fast-paced race in a pool. But the essay swims all the same. A Facebook update is a haphazard nose dive into a near-empty watering hole. What if I break my neck? Will someone find me if my head is bleeding? If I post and no one comments, do I exist?

The comparison between the two forms needn’t be made; we know the difference, yet it might explain my relative comfort, even ease, with the personal essay and my fear of any public sort of dialogue. Do I want to be invisible or do I want to fly? Although the personal is intimate there is also the artifice of distance. When I fly in my dreams I can see myself flying while being aware of my place on the ground. Philip Lopate argues that a good essayist must see oneself from the ceiling, must turn oneself into a character. He is not advocating a “self-absorbed navel-gazing” but instead “a release from narcissism,” an ability to be able to “see yourself in the round.”

I admit I am often self-amused by my status updates (what else are they for?), but I am rarely satisfied with them. In the rare case I am amused with myself when writing anything, that to me is a sure sign that it’s going to need a very careful edit, or that it’s garbage.

What I love best about that episode of “This American Life” is the moving analysis at the end, immediately after several of the show’s guests comment on what it means to want invisibility or flight. John Hodgman reflects:

Flight and invisibility touch a nerve. Actually, they touch two different nerves, speak to very different primal desires and unconscious fears … In the end, it’s not a question of what kind of person flies and what kind of person fades. We all do both. … At the heart of this decision, the question I really don’t want to face, is this. Who do you want to be, the person you hope to be, or the person you fear you actually are?

Am I becoming someone on Facebook or am I trying to escape her? I’m happy my partner is not on Facebook because I am spared that public embarrassment, of people wishing us happy anniversary or the pressure to comment, or not comment, on his witticisms or offerings: J. just made fabulous butternut squash ravioli! From scratch! Natalie likes this. And then he would like my liking, and another friend would find it cute, and like it too, and no one would know that we spent the last hour fighting because I overloaded the dryer and almost burned down the house.

I wouldn’t mind if he joined Facebook, though, because he is the face man of our relationship and it would take some of the completely imagined but hugely felt pressure off me. (“Could you please like so-and-so’s photos of her daughter’s dance recital?”) If we had a band, he’d be the lead singer and I’d be the bassist, hiding behind my hair. (No, not the drummer! No one sees the drummer!) The bassist can look up and make eye contact with the crowd for a moment and the crowd will go wild. They don’t expect it but they hope for it all the same. The face man: He has to be on all the time. It’s his job to be on.

Do you remember the scene in “Sex in the City” where Carrie, upon receiving an email, ducks underneath her desk and shrieks, Oh my god, can he see me? A decade later it seems charming, like a text message from our grandmother. Yet the anxiety remains. Now, I suffer from what is surely a new psychological disorder: a DSM-IV classifiable paranoia that all my personal conversations are somehow being broadcast on Twitter. Is there a word for that?

: Natalie Bakopoulos's first novel, "The Green Shore," will be published by Simon & Schuster in June 2012. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, Granta Online, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2010, and she is a contributing editor for the online journal Fiction Writers Review. More Natalie Bakopoulos