Pump and circumstance

...A dispatch from bewilderness

Eight hundred million years ago, microbes banded together, creating multicellular life. Then there were sharks with wings. No, really, there were. Then there were galloping crocodiles. Really, there were. Around that time –- well, not quite that long ago -- I was a freelance writer at the low end of the food chain at a few big magazines.

This means I framed a few thousand hacks, which were called secrets then. The best hacks told you what NOT to do and when NOT to do it. My stuff was tested, so, if I wrote a line for a magazine cover, management would know if it did or did not boost newsstand sales, and by how much.

For example, a line like, “Are you wearing the right bra” could get me fired. But if I wrote a line like, “are you wearing the WRONG bra,” I could keep my job. Speaking of bras, once I was about to meet a new client and had to pump before going there. As in pump my breasts. In the stalls of two different ladies’ rooms before going to see another client, and then heading home.

Those were the days. I wish I could have just ten minutes with the toddler she was, and the newborn she was, and the in-between baby she was. Just ten minutes as we were then. Or more if possible. Way more. Or ten more minutes of reading with her, or sitting in our tree house with Zeke, our golden retriever. Or hanging on rafts in the pool.

Then I was higher on the food chain of magazines and my child was in college and I got hit by a truck. It didn’t seem possible that you could lose your mind like that. Or your life. But it was and I did. I wrote myself into some sort of existence again, if not into my former life, and started tackling life, bras, faith, death, and grief with humor, charm and brain damage.

Eight hundred million years ago, there were no nursing bras like this