There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

-Leonard Cohen “Anthem”

I used to believe that the universe was a random place. Everything that happened to us was simply, well, random. If I ran into you at the store, it was only a coincidence, not something that was “supposed” to happen or part of a preordained master plan with the two of us merely bit players on a much broader stage.

I don’t think I believe that any more.

Certainly, I believe there are many random parts of life. I don’t believe in some gigantic playbook that dictates when and how I will go about my day:

Tuesday, January 24, Becky Sherrick Harks will have Cheerios for breakfast at 9:45 AM and she will remark that they smell like pee. Delicious pee!

but I simply do not believe that what happens to us – the connections we make, the experiences we have – I cannot believe that they are entirely random. Maybe I’ve had too many weird, fucked-up experiences in my life. Maybe my brain is trying to find patterns where there are none. Maybe I’m just grasping at something to make it all more meaningful, I don’t know. Frankly, my Pranksters, I don’t really care.

This is the way I started 2010:

I approach 2010 full of renewed hope for the future, because no matter how full of the darkness I feel, I can feel the light on my face and I know it’s all around me. Soon it will be within me.

I am hopeful.

I have hope.

Happy New Year.

Days after I wrote this, I randomly found the famous tattoo artist through a referral on The Twitter who started my phoenix tattoo. She’d had a cancellation in her booked-months-out schedule and could fit me in right away.

Phoenix Tattoo Outline

Months later, when I went back for more work on my phoenix tattoo, I’d find out that she had just been diagnosed with an encephalocele. Like my daughter. I do not need to tell you that the odds of this are cataclysmically tiny that I’d find another with precisely what Amelia was born with.

Starting with that phoenix tattoo, I vowed that this would be the year that I Brought Aunt Becky Back and I have.

The process, however, has been excruciating. It’s incredibly difficult to take a look at the life you’ve deliberately crafted for yourself and realize how fucking miserable you are. It’s brutal to have to mourn everything you’ve swept under the rug when you were all EYE OF THE MOTHERFUCKING TIGER, AUNT BECKY. Especially when you feel you have no ally with whom to share it with. After all, there are people with no legs in the world. How can you possibly hate your life WHEN THERE ARE PEOPLE WITH NO LEGS?

There were days when all I could do was curl up on the couch and weep. My heart broke over and over again. The darkness obliterated the light and it was all I could do to make it from sun-up to sundown again. It wasn’t the kind of darkness that a pill can help. It’s the kind of darkness that you simply must slog through.

Eventually, though, there were entire hours that the darkness would just…leave.

Those hours melted into days and soon, the darkness only tinged the periphery. The rest of my world was bathed in the most wonderful rich, vibrant colors.

It was like I had begun to wake up after a long sleep. I felt like myself again for the first time in a very, very long time.

When I saw that Leonard Cohen was playing in Vegas, my jaw dropped ungracefully open. Kismet.

Sometimes, when I was adrift in the darkness, it was his words that kept me going. Whether or not you care for his music, his words are beautiful. And words – all words – are more true a love than anything I’ve ever known. Letters strung together into words elegantly arranged into sentences that flow into paragraphs can make my heart soar; make me weep, and give me hope. Words can cut into the darkness.

I found myself alone in the theater, watching rapt as Leonard Cohen sang and the tears inelegantly rolled down my cheeks. I’m certain that had anyone noticed, I’d have been locked away at the hospital for such a vulgar display of emotion, but I simply didn’t care.

Listening to him in that dark auditorium was like neatly wrapping up the year in cheesy wrapping paper, like vindicating my sorrow and sadness and allowing me to finally release it. It felt like the end of an era. It felt like a new beginning.

I’ll never escape the darkness entirely, I know that. It’s part of who I am and it’s what drives me. You cannot go through hell without bringing a little darkness back.

But in that light, in those un-random connections, I will find redemption.

I will find me.

Phoenix Tattoo

After the way Vegas had been built up as a “weird place,” I’d half-way expected to be greeted in the airport by a midget Freddy Mercury impersonator juggling several quail. When all I saw were a handful of cowboys, I was slightly disappointed.

EYE OF THE MOTHERFUCKING TIGER, AUNT BECKY, I said to myself as I hobbled to meet my friends. So WHAT if you haven’t seen a two-headed woman? So WHAT if the TSA ignored you even though you tried to dress like a hooker in the vain attempt at trying to get some action before you went to Vegas? SO WHAT?

At least, I cried, you have your KITTY SHITTER picture!

(Sky Mall, you never, ever disappoint. Let’s get married and have really bizarre babies.)

All I Want For Christmas is a Kitty Shitter

Indeed, that is what comforted me as I checked into my hotel only to find perfectly ordinary desk clerks. No one busted into an impassioned Elvis song. No one tried to barter with me for my room. No hookers tried to accompany me TO my room (except, of course, the hookers I was staying with – Mandi and Jana.) It was all very…normal.

Jana even brought me this all the way from Georgia (I’ve often bemoaned that I have never eaten one):

Chick-Fil-A, YO.

I might have wept. A lot.

It was time, then, to meet for lunch in the hotel. Which meant we had a bazillion options; all of them good. Apparently Vegas is an eatin’ town. I was hoping feverishly that this might be the time to see something weird. Tiny go-go dancers? A guy in a sequined bikini?

Nope.

Just the rodeo.

RANDOM.

This IS My First Rodeo.

I was also straight-up exhausted. It turns out that having major abdominal surgery 5 weeks before a Vegas trip is pretty EYE OF THE MOTHERFUCKING TIGER. But I tried to muster up some enthusiasm. Plenty of sleep when I was passed out from reenacting Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (or dead). RIGHT?

Right.

It didn’t work. I have a slew of pictures where I look like I’m about to weep. I look like someone just kicked my dead dog’s grave.

Eye of the Tiger Doesn't Always Work

No one did. Even AngiePangie.

It was time to start drinking. Before I did the lamest thing that anyone ever did in Vegas, well, EVER.

Aunt Becky + Mama Spohr

While the rest of my group went to a male strip club with the express purpose of having testicles placed on their face, I went out by myself. On a Friday night. To a concert.

A Leonard COHEN concert.

Don’t know who Leonard Cohen is? He’s a hippie singer/songwriter/poet who is probably best known for singing Hallelujah. But since my parents are depressing old hippies, I’ve been listening to his music since I was in utero. I’ve been anxious to see him perform for years. Even if it made me suicidal.

When I saw he was in Vegas, I realized that it was now or motherfucking never.

It was now.

*cue guitar solo*

Leonard Cohen

When he sang “Anthem,” it was exactly what I needed to hear.

Even if there were no dancing bears.

My longest running television husband has been Anthony Bourdain. Marriage is way easy when you’re sitting on the other side of a television screen, staring lovingly at the man you love as he surreptitiously drops the word “pube” on television as you dreamily imagine a fake relationship wherein you two take the world by foul-mouthed storm.

It’s pretty much a win.

And it’s evident that a good writer will be able to captivate his (or her) audience no matter what he (or she) writes about because I sat in the airport this weekend reading Medium Raw, his newest book.

Normally, I’d rather gnaw on my own toenails than read about cooking. I’m so not a cook. Lengthy discussions of complicated and pretentious ingredients makes me want to skewer my own eyeballs out and saute them in a nice truffle sauce. I’d rather do just about anything than watch a show about cooking. Food porn makes me nauseous.

Yet he’s a food writer. And I willingly both bought his book and read it. Proof that if you can write, you can write about anything.

The book, of course, is fantastic. If you like his sort of style, that is. I breezed through the food porn parts because frankly, reading about eating chicken ass doesn’t interest me, but overall, Medium Raw is precisely the sort of book you’d expect from Anthony Bourdain.

What I didn’t expect was this: bloggers are mentioned frequently. Food bloggers, but still. BLOGGERS.

I’ve been a blogger for so long that dust comes out of my fingers when I type and still, when I’m asked, “What do you do?” if I am not giving the flip answer (“I am a life coach”), I don’t really know how to answer that. Certainly my blog is a labor of love. Blogging IS a labor of love. Why else would we pour our lives out onto a blank WordPress Screen in the vain hopes that someone else somewhere else might read it and say, “Hey, I like this girl,” or “Hey, I hate this girl, let’s send her a fart in a jar?” It’s certainly not the glamor of it all.

Half the time I say, “I’m a blogger,” people look at me like I’ve sprouted a second head. “A BLOBBER?” They cry, as though I’ve just taken a poo on their car. Then I revert back to my second answer, “I’m a nurse.” Invariably, they know a nurse and want to know my specialty. When I reply, “I’m retired, it wasn’t for me,” they’re even more deeply offended by my answer. (aside: what the fuck?)

It goes to show that you simply cannot win.

It’s not as though I’m ashamed of what I do – far from it – it’s just that there are so many people out there who simply don’t get it. Not yet. They will.

Seeing one of my favorite bad-boy idols talking about the power of bloggers – even over that of print media – really struck a chord with me. I’ve never joined in those circle-jerk “we are BLOGGERS; we are so influential!!” conferences because, frankly, they remind me too much of the same sorts of pitches I’d get from any of the companies I’ve worked for: Our company is great, here’s a t-shirt for you wear to promote your company!!! TEAM PRIDE!!!!

I suppose I’d never really thought about the influence of blogs. Blogging is so self-important* and I never really wanted to be all *blank-eyes* “We’re CHANGING the WOOOOOORLD!” That’s a little too Drink The Kool-Aid for me.

But really, we are.

I don’t mean that the press-release-passed-off-as blogs are going to do much of anything. No one reads those anyway. I don’t care what rosy picture my hotel’s “blog” paints. I want the nitty-gritty. I want the dirt. I want to know who was murdered in my room. I want to know where the fucking ghosts are.

And bloggers, at least, the ones you want to read, they’ll tell you that. Why? We have nothing to lose. I’m way more likely to listen to a trusted blogger than anyone, well, else.

So thanks, Mr. Bourdain, for reminding me to be proud of what I am.

I’m a blobber, dammit.

*says the person who has been blogging regularly for 6-7 years.

I was somewhere over Chicago when the drugs began to take hold.

Subterranean Homesick Blues squealed through my earphones and for a split second the airplane was submerged into complete darkness. I opened my mouth to shriek; to warn everyone that we’d reached the abyss and just as my vocal chords let out a squeak, warm color returned. My seatmate turned to me; he clearly hadn’t seen the black, and as I moved to explain that we’d hit the edge; there was no going back, when I realized that he’d see it all soon enough.

We were going to Las motherfucking Vegas.

I couldn’t explain myself properly at this altitude. Instead, I grinned a fake toothy smile, hoping it passed for the real deal, mumbled something about vodka and turned up the volume on my iPod, my eyes darting to the bag on the floor. It was filled with a dazzling array of uppers, downers, grass, cocaine, mescaline and some ether thrown in for good measure. The ether, for sure, was the hardest to procure. I wondered if I could get away with using some mid-flight.

As the plane touched down in McCaren Airport, my seatmate began to weep openly, which scared me. I don’t handle emotions and I knew the tears meant that he too was entering the abyss.

Welcome to Vegas, motherfuckers.

Email me if you’re going to be there so that we may swap phone numbers. Because we need to HANG OUT. Have no fear, I am no longer sunburned. In fact, I am pasty white. “Blinded By The Light,” white. BUTT ASS white. So you need not fear my redness. Only that I may make you act as my attorney. Which, DUH.

Even I figured that I was slightly mad for trying to squeeze in major surgery five weeks before I was going to rip the shit out of the strip in Vegas, but EYE OF THE MOTHERFUCKING TIGER is the way Your Aunt Becky rolls* and really, it’s no more insane than the normal stunts I manage pull off. And I always manage it one way or another. Why? Because I’m Aunt Motherfucking Becky.

But I underestimated precisely how laid-up I’d be by this surgery, which, frankly, is a good thing, because otherwise, I probably never would have gone through with it and although I may be in a lot of pain, so far, it’s been totally worth it. I’ve cut my dose of Topamax in half. I’ve had less headaches; less spasms. AMAZABALLS.

That all said, I’m still leaving for Vegas on Friday (by my lonesome) which means that I have to navigate the airport by myself.

The airport itself is no big deal. I’ve flown in and out of O’Hare a kajillion times. The problem is, well, me.

We’ve established that I’m a lightening rod of bad luck for security searches and weird, random stuff happening. Last January, the plane I was on nearly crashed. In May, my luggage was pilfered and stuff was stolen out of it. It’s better that I travel alone, lest I bring down the fury of The Airplane Gods, but still, it’s not terribly easy to walk to the bathroom, let alone try and travel a couple of hours with twenty pounds of crap.

Which means that I’m going to have to voluntarily bring myself out into the open at the airport, rather than the person who tries to behave like a nice ficus, blending into the background.

I’m going to have to be That Person.

I’ve thought about it thirty different ways, and there’s simply no other way. I’m going to have to ask for Airport Help. I’m going to be The Passenger With Special Needs. I may need a skycap.

Now, you might be saying, Aunt Becky, that’s okay. Who cares?

Well, if you’re the person who has been so thoroughly desensitized to the TSA’s searches that the NEW searches make you say, “Um, wait, that’s NOT what normal people have to go through?” then you know that calling more attention to yourself is like standing in the middle of a rainstorm on a golf course with a lightening rod. I’ll be the asswipe who needs to be screened in private because I cannot stand in a security line for an hour; the contents of my bags under total scrutiny. Can you say, “body cavity search?”

(I can)

So maybe I’ll just play into it. I’ll wear my white patent leather hooker boots and an extremely short skirt.

Maybe I can find a strap-on somewhere, just for shits and giggles.

I mean, if this is going to be a disaster, it might as well be a disaster of epic proportions.

*Never, EVER to be confused with Rick Rolled.

The good news: Alex is nearly potty trained.

The bad news: Amelia decided that she, too, needed a potty chair.

You’re all, “AUNT BECKY, THAT’S A GOOD THING,” and that’s where you’d be right…sort of. Because my daughter isn’t one of those kids who will just DO as she’s ASKED. Oh no. That would be too simple.

On Sunday, I marched wobbled my happy ass to Target to get her her Very Own Potty Chair. Awesome! It’s sitting in my kitchen. It makes noises and cheers sometimes. I’ve decided that I need a cheering section for the bathroom. It would make peeing a lot more exciting.

Alas, I digress.

Monday, Amelia took off her diaper and streaked no less than three times. Cute, right? ADORABLE. She’s a mini-frat boy.

THEN, as she was eluding my shuffly arms, she took a gigantic pee in the hallway. She was probably holding her bladder for 12 hours just to do that. As I screamed “AMELIA, NO!” she began to tap dance IN HER PEE as she laughed. Mouth open, head tilted back, uproariously laughing as she splashed around in her pee puddle. It was like Singing In The Rain…but with pee.

She was so proud of herself.

I aged 20 years.

The teenage years are going to be incredible.

————–

When my friend Jimmy from Shui Teas sent me some tea, I was pretty excited. Mail makes me happy in the pants because normally all I get is bills and anytime I get something that’s not a bill, I do a Snoopy HAPPY Dance.

Jimmy from Shui Teas, who is also one of my advertisers, sent me the Vodka Tea Infusion Pack to try out because, well, obviously, and suggested that I give one away to my Pranksters as well. He’s also given you a 10% off code: MOMMYVODKA for any orders from his site through December 12.

So to enter the Vodka Tea Infusion Pack from Shui Teas, you must leave me a comment telling me if you were a flavor, what flavor tea you’d be.

For additional entries (up to four total), you can follow me on The Twitter, follow Band Back Together on The Twitter, follow Mushroom Printing on The Twitter or become my Facebook Friend. Just leave a separate comment for each of the things you do.

The contest will end at midnight on December 14 and a winner will be randomly selected on the 15th of December.

In the meantime, I’ll be engaged in a battle of the wills with my daughter.

Send help.

iTunes has betrayed me:

John C. Mayer Totally Hates Me.

Imagine my horror when I pulled up iTunes to download Tom Jones songs for Vegas this weekend (you ARE coming, yes?)(the answer is, of course, obviously) and iTunes told the WHOLE WORLD, or at least, my living room, that I owned some John C. Mayer songs.

I mean, how can I OWN HIS MUSIC after the shit I’ve talked about him? After our “Pulling A John C. Mayer” prank, I’m still number two and three for searches for John C. Mayer:

It goes to show that you really cannot trust everything you read on the internet. Hell, I might be a tiny, tiny man living in my parents basement playing Dungeons and Dragons all day and NOT ACTUALLY Your Aunt Becky. You just never know.

Unless you’re iTunes. Or Jimmy Motherfucking Wales. Then you pretty much know everything.

Dear Aunt Becky,

I am 15 weeks pregnant and have never felt more confused, stressed out and alone. I have been married not even a year and have a six year old stepson whom I have been a full-time mommy to him for in the nearly three years I have known the both of them. The problem is, my husband has serious trust and paranoia issues, which has really taken a toll on our relationship. He is always mad at me for one thing or another, usually something that is just made up in his head. He even says he does not trust me and he has called me a selfish bitch on numerous occasions.

Because of his issues, I do not have any friends and feel hesitant to talk to anybody anymore, let alone my husband. Since he is always upset with me about something, my pregnancy has been nothing but stressful. I am afraid that his anger, which he blames on me, is going to seriously affect my body and our baby. I love him and when he is happy with me he is the most loving, awesome man in the world. He has a lot of past issues ( his ex-wife cheated on him) and he keeps blaming me for things when I haven’t done anything wrong. I think I am a good person but when he gets like this (which is all the time) I just feel like I want this baby out of my body. I get really depressed. Especially last week when he went so far as to pack up his and his son’s bags and leave me.

I really want this marriage to work out for the sake of his (our) son and our unborn child. He refuses to get help for his issues and I just want to crawl in a hole and die some days. My body cannot take much more. I am afraid the stress is going to make me miscarriage. I have no friends and have never felt more alone. I just want my husband to be happy with me again. I love him so much and would do anything for him.

Sincerely,
Pregnant and Hurting

P.S. – Thanks for your blog. It has really helped me through this.

Dear Pregnant and Hurting,

If only I could reach through the computer and give you a big squishy hug. I’m so sorry, Prankster. Now I’m not going to presume to tell you what to do with your life, but I am going to tell you that you do not have to live like this any longer.

I’ve spent much of my life on edge, afraid convinced that someone in my household was Furious George with me, and it’s been an incredibly stressful thing to overcome. Being raised that way (no matter how unintentional), it’s taken a long time to not revert right back to that feeling of being on constant edge from “someone” being mad at me. That’s how living with someone with a serious mental illness is. These are some of the long-term effects.

I suffered terribly from antenatal depression (depression during pregnancy) in at least some part from the stress of my life. It’s a very real thing. It’s not because I’m a bad person or because I didn’t love my child or because I was a bad mother. Antenatal depression just...is. But that doesn’t mean that antenatal depression needs to be in control of you.

You need to seek some treatment for yourself and your baby. There are many kinds of antenatal depression treatments – some that don’t involve medicine – that can really help you through the worst of it. It’s not going to fix everything in your life, but knowing that you have an ally can help tremendously. This is the link to antenatal depression resources on Band Back Together. Here’s (my friend) Katherine Stone’s Postpartum Progress; also an amazing resource.

I’m telling you with all of my conviction that you need help of some kind. I wish I’d sought help sooner. I wish I’d told people how much I was hurting. I even knew I had antenatal depression and still thought I didn’t need anyone. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t remember pregnancy as the single worst part of my life (parenting, even on it’s worst days, is so much better). Talk to someone. Write down how you feel. We’d love to have you at Band Back Together. Reach out to people.

I know that all of these things may sound impossible, but you can do it. You’re worth it. So is your baby.

As for your marital situation, I only want what’s best for you and your baby. Your husband’s trust issues are not your fault. You cannot fix someone else. You cannot take responsibility for his emotions or his actions. I know how much it hurts and I know how isolating it is to feel so alone all of the time, believe me, Prankster, I do, but you’re not alone.

We’re none of us alone. Please get some help. You’re worth more than feeling like this all of the time.

We love you and we know you can make it. You’re going to come out the other side and know that you can kick any problem square in the nuts. It just doesn’t feel like it right now.

In the meantime, we’ll be anxious to hear how things are going.

Much love,

AB

—————

Pranksters, please help me out here. But whatever you do, remember that “just leave him” or other guilt-inducing statements (“think of the children!!!!!!!”) may make her feel worse. It’s just never that simple.

I was warned that the recovery from the abdominoplasty would be hard. The pain, I expected. I didn’t expect it to be so long, so omnipresent and I didn’t expect that I’d frequently say, “holy fuck, I miss my abdominal muscles.”

But when my surgeon suggested that I might have some postpartum depression-ish feelings during my recovery, I sort of dismissed it. Not that I hadn’t had postpartum depression (hell, I’d had antenatal depression, that’s depression DURING pregnancy), just that it hadn’t been the sort of surgery that I’d been building up in my head for MONTHS or anything.

I kept the possibility in the back of my mind.

And after three weeks on the couch, I realized that I was getting pretty depressed. I don’t sit around well. I’m a terrible patient. I hadn’t expected the recovery to take so long. I ran out of help and couldn’t bring myself to ask for more. I was in pain all of the time. And furthermore, I just didn’t feel very good.

When I don’t feel very well, I get sensitive. When I get sensitive, I don’t feel like writing. When I don’t feel like writing, I get depressed.

For the first time in my incredibly mediocre blogging “career*” I felt stifled. After a couple semi-personal attacks, I simply didn’t feel like writing on my blog. I was tired of feeling like I had to defend my life.

I think therein lies the crux of blogging: we write about ourselves and our lives and that’s what brings people in. But sometimes, when we spill our secrets and expose our underbelly, it’s almost impossible not to open ourselves up to an attack. When they happen, what then? Knowing you have a legion of people out there rooting for you to fail, how do you continue?

I’ve been thinking about that all week.

It’s made me really sad, too, because I love what I do. I’ll never achieve fame and fortune, but I do have a Band of Merry Pranksters who (mostly) understand me and that’s always been more than enough. Telling stories, making people laugh, making people cry, stringing all of my words into sentences that flow into paragraphs; telling stories, that is what I do. Without it, I don’t know who I am.

So there is my answer. I will keep doing what I do because that is what I do. I’m not about to let anybody stop me from doing what I love. When I stop blogging, it’ll be because I choose to stop, not because I feel frustrated or full of the sads.

My life isn’t on trial here. It’s not open for debate.

And moreover, I’m nobody’s bitch.

*career is used VERY loosely** here.

**after seeing “loose” misused as “lose” for so long, it looks bizarre now.

Probably the best part of not hosting Thanksgiving besides the obvious “not cooking” and “not having to behave like Martha fucking Stewart” is I don’t actually give a shit if my children eat Thanksgiving food. I mean, I didn’t spend 70 hours slaving over anything, so if you want to eat corn only, be my guest, I’m not crawling up on the cross today.

Traveling to my rival state (Wisconsin) is always a downside because we have to drive behind slow (SLOW!) drivers and listen to the ear-splitting shrieks of my daughter, who was all Furious George. Small children do not travel well. Hm. Let me rephrase that: MY small children do not travel well.

Happy Holidays! We’re all deaf!

After we got home from our uneaten Thanksgiving dinner in Wisconsin, my friend came over. My INTERNET friend.

Pranksters, I have friends. ME. I know!

My feelers have been a little lonesome lately and I was all SAD IN THE PANTS that I was supposed to be alone on Thanksgiving (Wisconsin was a last-minute thing), and my friend Dana was all, “I’LL COME OVER, YO.” And I was all, “AWWW YEAH. MY HOUSE IS BRIGHT YELLOW AND I’M NOT A SERIAL KILLER I SWEAR DON’T MIND THE GIGANTIC FREEZER IN THE GARAGE IT’S NOT FOR YOUR CORPSE.”

She came over anyway.

And she brought a bacon turkey.

I pretty much have the best friends ever.

She’s totally not stuffed into my big freezer, either because even though I am married to a television serial killer, I am not personally a serial killer.

I’m going to have to use her as a reference on my Internet Resume.

Also: The Blogroll is back, yo.