I hated every second of it. It felt like putting on a costume. In fact, that was what I called it: my “Grown-up Suit.” Still, given where I worked, I had to look like that. Every. Damn. Day.

By contrast, on my way home to the warehouse I inhabited in Williamsburg, I would look at Hasidic women in their headscarves and long skirts with something akin to envy. Gawd, I thought. How nice would it be not to have to think about stupid crap like the latest accessories and whether my hair had gone limp?

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If you don’t already know, the Silva Mind Control Method was founded in the 1950s, but taught in the 1960s around the same time as the Human Potential Movement. The HPM was an American subculture that yielded "The Inner Peace Movement," thinkers like Alan Watts and Jean Houston, and the Esalen Institute. Even among such radical minds, Jose Silva’s research stands out as unconventional and exemplary. The self-educated American parapsychologist trained his own children in deep relaxation, visualization and ESP techniques in effort to help them in school, and noticed remarkable improvement. In a 1953 letter to Dr. J.B. Rhine, renowned parapsychologist of Duke University, Silva claimed his methods led to his children’s improved mental acuity and test scores, and suggested he had found a possible key to human psychic performance.

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I stiffened and silently debated whether or not to tell him my secret.

“You don’t like horror?” he asked, his smile wilting in my silence.

I remembered reading that you should never talk about mental health issues on the first date. “I get really scared,” I said, which was easier than telling him the real story: I watched my mother die when I was a kid, and now I live my life avoiding things that trigger that memory and the severe anxiety that comes with it.

“That’s cute,” he said, but he raised a brow and gave me that look: You’re a 30-something woman. Grow up. 

So I decided to go with him. I told myself it was just a movie. But I spent the entire film looking away from the screen, darting my eyes from ceiling to floor and wincing every time I heard that shrill, piercing scream that reminded me of my mother’s.

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Like most families, we’ve experienced the occasional lapse in honesty and integrity. Unlike most families, our worst offender isn’t one of the kids. It’s Grandpa.

Grandpa has spent the last five or so years living with Uncle Sam, otherwise known as a federal correction facility in Florida. He was sentenced to 63 months in connection with a small hedge fund he ran that went belly-up. His victims included his family, neighbors and friends.

Our daughters were young when he was convicted, ages 3 and 5, which was something of a blessing. When we explained that Grandpa had taken money from people and was going to prison, they accepted it easily, as if we’d told them he was being punished for getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar — which, in a way, he was. Over the years, we delivered his birthday wishes, sent via prison email, and talked about him just like you’d share the latest news about a grandparent. Only this grandparent didn’t get to visit over the holidays.

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Although I live in Los Angeles and my father now resides in Florida, we’ve been collaborating on single-panel cartoons for the past year. Monday through Friday I email him a short paragraph and then he illustrates it by hand, scans it and sends it back. Sometimes there are tweaks to be made, but for the most part he nails it the first time.

My father attended Pratt Institute on an art scholarship and started his elementary school career as an art teacher but for the past three decades or so, he’s had no time to pursue his craft for his own edification.

In 1977 my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As her health deteriorated, they both had to retire prematurely; she because it’s hard to teach from a bed and he to take care of her. After moving from Long Island to Fort Myers my father continued to be my mother’s sole caretaker.

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I spit out my coffee when my friend shared this with me. Look, Cr8zSexyThang99, I thought. No judgment on your sexual practices (or your spelling), but is the vagina shout-out really necessary? I mean, on your own time, do what you want — go for it! But it’s hard enough monitoring what my kids are doing online. I don’t want to be up at night worrying that I’m paying their baby sitter $16 an hour for lessons in sexting.

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We went out for dinner, out for drinks, out for more drinks and then dancing in a warehouse where they gave us drinks for free (my ex-boyfriend is much better looking than me). The night was amazing. And after we got back to the hotel at about 3 a.m., we had drunk sex and a drunk talk where he admitted he missed me. Mission accomplished! I might have spent two weeks’ salary on one night of fun, but what I got in return was the ultimate satisfaction. I was officially “the one that got away.” He thinks I’m AWESOME.

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My voice rose, along with a sense of dread. “For a threesome?”

“No, for you — to sleep with,” he said. “I could watch. From the closet. He wouldn’t know I was there.”

I fought a swell of revulsion. Jack wanted me to sleep with other men? And he wanted to watch? It defied the laws of romance.

Jack and I met online four months earlier (although his name isn’t really Jack). He was cute, with blue eyes and dark stubble. Feeling lonely after having recently moved 3,000 miles from Brooklyn to San Francisco, I ignored my initial anxiety about his age (39 to my 29). He was an accomplished artist and musician and, being a sucker for tortured creative types, I invited myself over to his place at the end of our first date, where we finished off a bottle of cheap Cabernet before having hazy sex that I could barely remember the next day.

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In an act of piousness, I did to him only what I would have had him do to me: I Googled his name.

I was met with dozens of pictures: grinning in Confederate flag T-shirts, grinning in “Straight Pride” T-shirts, grinning in mid-interview stills excerpted from the evening news.

He was the founder of the White Student Union. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he would be in my fiction writing class.

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“This fucking pencil won’t work,” he said.

I was boiling pasta at the stove top. “What did you say?” It wasn’t an accusation. I was pretty sure I’d heard him wrong.

“The fucking pencil,” he repeated earnestly. “It's broken.”

He didn’t have that sheepish, "oops" look on his face, and there was nothing in his tone that indicated an awareness of crossing any line. My son has always prided himself on employing the mot juste, ever since he was 2 and announced proudly that he was too “selfish” to give me a lick of his ice cream. It was clear that in this moment, he was only trying to find the appropriate adjective to describe the pencil. And thanks to me, he thought that word was a four-letter one.

I curse. A lot. More, certainly, than many other mothers of three young children; more, maybe, than most people in general, excepting phone sex workers, sailors and actors in Tarantino films. Not just the soft stuff either, like “asshole” and “hell,” which I don't even consider a real expletive. I’m a fan of the f-bomb in all its forms and yes, sometimes, I go whole hog, and stick a “mother” in front. Once, in a moment of rage and sleep deprivation, when my year-old son had a 104 degree fever and the mechanic who’d towed our car was holding it hostage, I went so far as to indulge in, “motherfucking cocksucker.” My mother, feeding the baby a bottle a few feet away, looked aghast. The mechanic wasn’t too happy either.

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Jeff was speechless. August was married to Dana, also a friend (their names have been changed, of course). Did she know what her husband was doing behind her back?

After gently declining the invitation and hanging up, Jeff told me about their conversation. “August made me promise not to tell you, but I didn’t think it was right to keep it from you,” he said.

I wanted to close my eyes and pretend this was not happening.

Our couples friendship with August and Dana had been going so well. The night before the phone call that changed everything, the four of us feasted on Chinese soup dumplings in the San Gabriel neighborhood of Los Angeles and laughed so hard that tears dribbled down our cheeks. A month before that, we toasted our friendship over glasses of almond champagne in Temecula. August was so enthusiastic about going on the road trip, he’d spent hours drawing a cartoonish itinerary that included caricatures of us and multicolored illustrations of the wineries we’d visit. A month before that, they came over for an elaborate high tea that included silly hats, homemade scones and petits fours, and fake English accents. We saw August and Dana often, cooked meals for each other, and had long, meaningful conversations. Finally, I thought we’d found our people in L.A.

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When it was clear he would live, he underwent surgery for his fractured skull, eye sockets and nose, after which he was weaned from a medical coma. For months, all I did was hope and pray. It wasn’t until he was in rehabilitation that I allowed myself to think about how intimacy would work. But now, I felt like a virgin at 33.

Once, when his eyes were still glued shut and he had yet to speak, I slid into the hospital bed with him. He shared a room with a man flown in from Alaska who had hit his head on a cast iron wood-burning stove. The guy was doing surprisingly well, which made me feel depressed. Miles moaned and thrashed underneath wrist restraints; meanwhile Alaska flipped through channels and barked at the nurse for Oxycotin.

There was a vinyl green curtain separating their beds. When Miles had been in intensive care, I had laid my chest across his, pleading for him to come back to me whole. But here I could lie horizontally along him. On an afternoon when he was calm, I asked him to “scoot over.” He didn’t respond. I knew he wasn’t sleeping, but he wasn’t awake.

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So why am I feeling so open-minded these days, so ready to roll with the experience instead of relying on what I thought I knew so well? There are probably several reasons – some known, some perhaps still opaque – but the event that triggered my most recent evaluation of life in the slow lane is clear.

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Actually, as it turns out, breast-feeding is really f’n hard -- despite the claims of every baby book, blog, doctor, midwife, woman and some men (who always seem to be fans of anything having to do with boobs). Is there a chance that your baby will pop out and land square on your boob, latch perfectly and nourish itself with no problems whatsoever? Yes, of course (and yes, of course, I will want to slap you as a result), but I believe there needs to be a very real shift in expectations among pregnant women when it comes to their breast-feeding capabilities.

As it stands now, we are all told that breast-feeding is the ONLY option for feeding your child if you actually love that child and want them to ever have more than a third-grade-level reading ability. If you don’t breast-feed your baby, you might as well just immediately drop it off at your local prison because that is where it’s going to end up anyway after such a horrible start to its life. Breast-feeding is beautiful and natural and the best and only socially acceptable way to nourish your baby. It is the most natural thing on the planet, you see.

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After spending hours in the personal growth section at Get Lost bookstore, I splurged on a hardback edition of “How to Get a Life That Doesn’t Suck” to add to my already enormous self-help book collection. I also unearthed my dusty deck of Louise Hay’s “Power Thought” cards from my nightstand drawer, buried under mismatched jewelry, the TV remote, miscellaneous receipts to file, and a lubricant that promised to be warming and tropical but was neither.

I sat at my desk writing down affirmations just like Wayne Dyer told me to do:

I, Kirsten, never have to worry about money again. Ten times. Then I looked up to see my parents staring back at me from a silver Pottery Barn frame. My mom wore a silk mango-colored blouse that complimented her complexion; my dad sported a grey suit with a crisp white dress shirt and a navy and green striped tie.  The photograph appeared in the St. Peters Episcopal Church Directory. One of the reasons I refused to call them to borrow money: They would tell me to go to church. The more obvious reason was that it would make me feel like a complete loser.

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Your life has been upended, and your face tells the story: Shock. Pure, unmasked shock. The tornado that ripped through Moore left you feeling as if today you awoke on a planet other than your own. This is not your life. It’s not the way you left it. But it is what you now have to face, and that is the most shocking thought of all.

I know this is true because six months after Hurricane Sandy wrecked my house, leaving three and a half feet of water and months of chaos, I am still processing how your life can go from utterly routine to completely unrecognizable in less than a day.

You look around, and that which you once found so comforting -- home, community -- are suddenly foreign, scary, dangerous. You seek out something familiar and when you find it, you embrace it — the neighbor down the street, a cracked dinner plate, a mangled stuffed animal.

You’re looking for normal, but you’re not going to find it. Normal got swept up by that tornado, just as our normal got washed away by Sandy’s storm surge.

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The discussion prompts I prepared were politically neutral, meant to promote deeper thinking about all perspectives of the debate, but when I put it together I knew what side I was on. I’ve been pro-choice since before I even understood what was at stake. And yet, when I chose to have a baby while still in my allegedly fertile late-20s, all I could produce were the kind of clots sucked out during a D&C. I chose baby. Where was my baby?

I still don’t know. I mean, I know where my babies are. The end results of pregnancies No. 4 and No. 5 are now bounding preschoolers with scraped knees and very firm opinions about tomatoes (one for and one against). I am lucky among people who choose to reproduce in that I eventually got to. I would like to say that my son and daughter are the children always intended for me by some force that I don’t understand and probably don’t believe in; that those other pregnancies were just my real kids making RSVPs they couldn’t keep, but that’s just not how I feel. It doesn’t make any sense to me, at least not intellectually, but I feel like I have five children — two born and three who were not born, which is a point-of-view that is hard to reconcile with being pro-choice.

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The locusts became real to me one evening as a friend and I walked my dog Tova, our boots treading on the hard-frosted ground. She asks me how I’ll keep Tova from eating them.

“They’re canine delicacies,” she says with a laugh, driving her heel into the grass to make the crunch-crunch-crunch of snapped shells, teeth clicking shut. She describes a Biblical plague: Cicadas clustering on light poles and canopies; flying dumbly into car windshields, into people’s open mouths. They are prehistoric monsters muscling their way through the earth: fat-bellied locusts with hot coals for eyes.

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One night, while sipping wine in my apartment, we started adding items to the list of lascivious things we wanted to do together:

A shopping spree at a sex shop.
A threesome with another woman.
Sex clubs.
Light S&M.
Role playing.
Orgasm control.

I didn’t even know what “orgasm control” was. It sounded frightening.

“Anything else?” I asked.

There was one other thing Sophia wanted on our compendium of carnal delights: an open relationship. Sophia, who was openly bisexual, was convinced monogamy wasn’t for her, even though she’d never tried polyamory herself.

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My high school class and I moved like a school of fish: we graduates were capable of going off on our own, in whatever direction we chose, but something demanded we all swim as one, curving, cutting, sashaying together, wiggling our way to college. Except for a few miscreants, we all ended up in college.

In high school, if someone asked me what my “plans” were, I’d click into brainwashed robot mode: my body would become rigid, my pupils would dilate, and in a monotone, I’d recite, “I-will-go-to-the-best-college-I-can-get-into. No-matter-the-cost.” At some point, I’d convinced myself that going to college was what I really wanted to do. So I went to Alfred University, a pricey private college in southern New York. My first year at Alfred would cost me $18,450. Later, I would transfer to a cheaper state school, and my total price tag for higher education: $32,000.

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