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We grew up without mirrors. I mean, there was a round, smallish mirror in the dining room and standard size medicine cabinet mirrors but nothing to see your entire body or even most of it. For a family of mainly women, three daughters and a mother, the aspects of femininity that I noticed in friend’s houses, the vanities, the collection of makeup, the mirrors, just didn’t exist. My mother’s credo, honed at Harvard design school, was “form follows function.” She washed her thick, chestnut hair in the kitchen sink with dish detergent, rarely wore makeup, and remained absorbed by her work and my father. Luckily, she was a knockout and when she did dress up, lipstick, mascara, she took my breath away. We were important but tangential and reflective; our beauty reflected on her. My father’s judgement was sacred and harsh. His only caveat applied to weight. Whatever you do, don’t get fat.

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I drove six hours from Leland, Michigan to Chicago to spend  time with my new granddaughter and immediately got the cold from hell which banned me from any further contact. The nadir was a lunch at Gibsons when I sat alone at a separate table while my son and daughter-in-law sat with the baby, I believed far from anything infectious but apparently the entire restaurant was considered too close. I was told I didn’t respect boundaries and other awful ways that boomers violate the code of millennials. I spent a day crying and then, as this cold worsened, realized I was in fact, sick. 

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I’m waiting to hear whether a good publisher, a dream editor, actually wants my novel tentatively titled The Heart Wants What it Wants. The title is inspired by Emily Dickinson and, as it turns out, Selena Gomez. I feel like killing myself. I can’t write, I can’t focus, I’m angry and sad and certain I’m going to get my own heart broken. Again. I keep choosing parts of the book to reread and then I think, “Jesus, I suck,” or “Hey, I’m brilliant,” but neither is true and I’m tired. My husband tries to be supportive but he has no idea what it means to write books and wait and wait and then discover whatever it was you thought you’d managed to accomplish could be dismissed in a sentence: “Not what we’re looking for.” “Ultimately, I remain unmoved.” “Molly has such a unique voice but our list is full.” Yadda, yadda, yadda.

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