Just In Case

French Day Bed and White Pillows

There are things in my apartment I don’t need or want, but I keep none the less. There are useless items taking up space in my kitchen, the bathroom, the closet, and really, in every room. There are things that serve no purpose. Things that no longer work. Faded things, ill-fitting things, multiple things.

Light where I write

Stuff I Don't Use

The brunettes have it

My hair is cut at the crown to stand up on its own, and while the style requires some product to give it that just got out of bed, but I want it to look this way, I’m a total unabashed hair product whore.

Used and not used

Wax, paste, styling serum, pomade, gel, mousse, molding cream, spray, fixatif, root boosting formulas…endless varieties of product litter my bathroom. If I never bought another jar, can, or tube of hair crack, I would die with a bucket full of stuff that someone would have to throw out. But I buy it anyway. And I will. And I know I will. So I just keep making room.

A Good Hair Day

Some work. Others are over priced VO5. Sticky or paste like, but I can’t  throw them away. Sometimes I toss them into the trash, but almost immediately take them out. Action reminiscent of someone trying to stop smoking. They toss their smokes in the trash, take them out, and instead of smoking in the house, they go outside. That’s me. I’m on the back porch with my Newports.

There are things I wish I could get rid of, but instead the same unnecessary items get put back in their place after I clean house each and every time. I drag useless things with me from house to house, apartment to apartment, from coast to coast, and back again. I spend my valuable time carefully wrapping household items I haven’t used in forever and a day.

Not For Soup

My eight white soup bowls have been wrapped in newsprint, placed in cardboard boxes, and unwrapped at least six or seven times in what becomes my newest home. Recipes for curried lentil, split pea and hearty vegetable soup are part of my repertoire, but given a choice these days I would rather write than chop onions, so my sturdy knives stay in their block and i eat salad in my soup bowls.

There is no dining table in my apartment to even put eight soup bowls on, and my kitchen is too small for any sort of table at all. Most of the time I sit on my bed eating something that has little chance of spilling.

I love these forks, spoons and knife

The flatware I love has service for eight, but I never invite anyone over for a shared meal. There’s a rolling-pin in my cabinet, next to the casserole, and baking pans I have very little use for. My fifteen quart All Clad stock pot has been stockless for years.

I work eight hours (or more) a day, write and do research many nights, and go out often, leaving very little time, or interest for anything domestic. But I am at heart what in Yiddish we call a “balabusta.”

Clean

That means I’m hardwired to clean crevices with a toothbrush. It means I cook well, and that my bed is always made. It literally means a good housewife.

It Looks Great From a Distance

The Devil's in the Details

My marriage gave me the opportunity to have success with the house , not so much as the wife.

upside-down

Waiting To Be Used

My ordinary possessions have been my constant. Serving spoons and forks that don’t serve, books that haven’t been read for some time, shoes unworn since 1990, but are classic, I keep all these things. I love them, and am attached to my utilitarian objects.

Will Always Keep These

Unimportant objects and things that clutter corners of an otherwise organized space.

Not The Right Button

Small plastic bags containing the buttons that come with newly purchased clothing are kept in my sewing kit, while still others are hastily shoved into the drawer with my socks and underwear.

Just In Case

Just In Case

The replacement button the manufacturer supposes will be needed someday when one button goes missing. I have these bags. Some are labeled, at the ready, with every intention of using the lone button. In fact I anticipate the loss just so I can smugly go into my stash and get the one perfect match. But alas, it’s always the button I didn’t keep that falls off unnoticed. Hope springs eternal. There will come a day when the button I need will be the button I actually have.

Just Passing Through

All this stuff. My three girls will keep what they want when the time comes, the rest will get tossed, given away…it won’t matter.

Something spills in the refrigerator at just the wrong moment, I’m late, have to leave, plan to clean it later, with the intention to remove everything from the shelves. Wipe clean any and all jars caught in the crossfire, and wash the entire refrigerator. Repair the damage and leave it faintly smelling of lemons. Instead I come home late and forget it happened. The liquid dried and became colorless. It may have been a slow syrupy trickle, or an avalanche of goop, but in either case it made it’s way from the back of the top shelf into crevices of the second and third shelves. Pooled into unseen sections rarely cleaned, but undeniably there. It stays this way for so many months it appears as if it’s always been this way, always.

Still Here

That is how certain people have harnessed my heart. The slow drip of emotion that I haven’t found storage for. No cabinet, no drawer, no under the bed container to house the memories of people I’ve cared for. There’s no place for them. No place for what hasn’t worked. No place for a heart that’s been broken. No place for wishing what might have been. I can sort dusty bins of objects I don’t need, delete names from contact lists, and block email addresses, but feelings don’t  get neatly filed, or strategically categorized. They’re messy, and uncontainable, and not deletalbe.

She Belongs Here

They’re under the bed, they’re in the drawer, they scatter my stillness when that cabinet is opened. They’re everywhere. The friends I don’t see anymore. The lovers I don’t kiss. The men that haunt me.

Take It

They’re still here, and will always be. They’re mine.

Sugarland

It Happens

Songwriters: Bush, Kristian; Nettles, Jennifer; Pinson, Bobby;

Life don’t go quite like you planned it

We try so hard to understand it

Irrefutable, indisputable

Fact is it happens

Ain’t no rhyme or reason

No complicated meaning

Ain’t no need to over think it

Let go laughing

It's Time

All For One

Zazu is my youngest daughter. When she was eight she and my two other daughters then ages ten and twelve went to live with their father – permanently. After seven years of joint custody he sued for, and won sole custody of our children.

“Your children will not be coming home with you Miss Slaughter” said the judge. I could compose a sentence to tell you what I felt, but no need. Those of you who are parents can imagine, those of you that aren’t can also imagine how the breath left my body. I remember driving home on the Westbound 10 freeway in Los Angeles at about twenty miles per hour, blinded by tears.

Sat For Days

I sat at the dining room table in our Venice house for what might have been days, and I never turned the lights on.

My girls are now seventeen, nineteen and twenty-two. We are, and have been reunited for sometime. I started Raw Candor to tell this story. I could not tell you straight away. I needed to introduce my candid, truthful, sometimes funny self. And I did.

I had a conversation with my children to ask them how they each felt about me telling my story of Parental Alienation, because it truly is our story. By virtue of me going public each of my daughters is exposed. I am willing, they are willing, we are willing.

Painting by John Scott

Parental Alienation Syndrome became my badge of shame. I will write more about the experience of always believing that my girls and I would be able to openly love each other again, and what it required from me to keep that focus.

On February 4th I will be speaking at the unconference Heartcamp, an informal conference modeled after the technology driven Barcamp conference. I will be speaking about Parental Alienation.

I look forward to meeting you.

With deep appreciation and gratitude for reading raw, and warmest wishes for keeping an open heart and mind.

Jill

Heartcamp http://heartcamp2011.sched.org/event/01272e250a35da4ed0d8f32583305213

Paintings by Jill Slaughter

Detail of Change

The Button I Need Is The Button I Have

*Last night I read Just In Case at Next@19. Afterward when sitting at a small table in the lounge of Soyka I glanced over the rim of my drink and noticed a button had fallen off the sleeve of my jacket. My friend had been at the reading, he knew about “the button.” We laughed, I laughed in that bruised and busted part of my heart. It would seem that the day has come when “the button I need will be the button I actually have.” I will sew it on today.

Karma baby!

Like Miss Diana Ross says:

I’m Coming Out

I’m coming out, I want the world to know

I got to let it show

I’m coming out, I want the world to know

I got to let it show

There’s a new me coming out, I just have to live

And I wanna give, I’m completely positive

I think this time around I am gonna do it

Like you never knew it, oh I’ll make it thru

The time has come for me to break out of my shell

I have to shout, I’m coming out

I’m coming out.

I want the world to know

Karma baby!

Listen to original writing, read original writing, sit outside in a beautiful place.

Director Jenni Person – Next@19 – http://www.nextat19th.org/

Fantastic restaurant to hang – Soyka – http://www.the55thstreetstation.com/soyka/default.asp