I’ve been reading Danish and Norwegian novels that my husband keeps bringing home. Where he gets them, I have no idea.

But I just read The Vanishing by Tim Krabbe. I keep thinking about it. From the minimal style to the layering of tropes that point to problems of the mind — The Vanishing blew me away.

The Ice Palace by Tarkei Vesaas. A strange little book about two Norwegian girls who form a strange, vivid bond. What an opening.

And The Pledge by Friedrich Durrenmatt, a haunting mystery set in Switzerland.

Check out more here. And if you have any recommendations, send them my way! Now looking for something spectacular…

I used to do this sh*t all day, people. All day.

I’m so glad we finally went ahead and got married. And now I can obsess about something else.

Like writing. Or my kids. Or my job. Or you know…whatever.

Still, wouldn’t change it.

If you are getting married this year or next year or sometime on the distant horizon, do check out  Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings. I think you’ll be surprised by the honesty, truth and humor in these essays.

There is no sugar-coating it: marriage is long and sometimes hard.

The wedding is not a thing in and of itself.

But a beginning. Of your story.

And it is amazing.

Because it’s not about the day…but what comes after.

Read more wedding stories from the real day in Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings.

The Dress: I wish I would have spent more on the dress. We threw our wedding on a budget, but I think I could have spent a few more bucks on the wedding dress and been a lot happier in the end.

I got my dress on sale for $78 at J. Crew. It was probably the least expensive thing at the wedding (Why does everything at a wedding cost $300? Napkins = $300! Tablecloth rental = $300!).

When I look back at the pictures, I cringe. My dress didn’t fit and I threw out any picture from the wedding that showed my back fat. Which turned out to be about half of them.

The wedding dress really is a big deal. You’re not being vain if you try on 100 dresses and look at yourself from every angle. Because everyone at your wedding will be doing the same thing and you want that dress to be working for you, rather than against you.

Even if you only wear your wedding dress once, wedding pictures are forever. And that is a fact.

The Stress: I wish I hadn’t worried so much. Throwing a wedding is a big stress machine – whether you’re planning it yourself or hiring a wedding planner. I planned our wedding – which we threw in our backyard to keep costs down. But that meant I was in charge of everything – from planning the rehearsal dinner to booking the port-a-let. It probably would have worked in my favor to delegate and get more people involved in the wedding planning process.

Spent the Money Elsewhere: Yes, it was a great party. Yes, it was amazing. Unforgettable. Wonderful. Totally spectacular.

But I still wonder, was that the best way to spend our money? What if we had used the money as a down payment on a bigger/better/different house in the city? Maybe then I wouldn’t have so many issues about houses.

Probably because I did the math and I knew it wouldn’t make a difference.

(What can I say? Caviar taste on a french fry budget.)

But I still do wonder — are weddings even necessary today? Is it really just a big party? Why do we do this to ourselves?

But then I read the essays in Altared and they make me want to throw a wedding all over again.

Because there’s just something wonderful about it all –  no matter how much goes wrong or how much you would have done differently. It’s a wild, crazy act of hope. Of belief.  In life and love.

For more wedding mistake and success stories, check out Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings.

*Photo of our wedding cake with blue hydrangeas. I wouldn’t change one thing about that cake.

Check out Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings, an anthology of very smart, very funny essays.

Perfect for any bride-to-be.

From throwing a wedding on a budget to being pregnant at your own wedding to being subjected to the singles’ table for the gazillionth year in a row — Altared explores what’s it’s really like to throw a wedding today and how to find meaning in it.

The essays in this book are unconventional, honest, raw and real.

Twenty-seven true stories of “the most important day in a woman’s life.” And what that really means.

(Hint: they don’t mean a 10-carat diamond ring or a picture perfect day or any of that other stuff you’ll read in a glossy magazine.)

Altared = perfect gift for anyone planning a wedding this spring.

When I edited the book, I had just taken the leap of faith myself  and finally said– what the heck, let’s do it!

Now it’s six years later and I have a few more thoughts on the process.

Next up: What I Would Have Done Differently at My Wedding

This story was recently published in Alaska Quarterly Review’s 30th Anniversary Issue, Spring/Summer 2012.

Big Enough For Slaughter

Alaska Quarterly Review

My father-in-law bought two calves for the baby. He won’t name them, which I think is a bad sign.

They are black and white bulls that he bought for thirty dollars a piece. The dairy sells off the males and retains the females for milking in the spring. He keeps them in the barn behind the house. He closed them in with fencing made from electric wire.

I used to try to make my husband go out there with me, alone, when we first got married. I thought the barn was incredibly sexy. But he didn’t like it and we never did anything in there. He prefers a proper bed or not at all.

The calves drink their milk in the barn. They drink out of galvanized buckets with rubber nipples and bright, cheery labels: Calf-Teria. Steam rises from the buckets. The baby plays in the hay.

“Show her the milk parlor,” my father-in-law says.

My husband shows me the milk parlor in the back of the barn. I was thinking of an ice cream parlor but this is a windowless stall with built-in levels that zigzag up the wall. It is dark and dirty with a drain in the floor crusted with rust. It’s where my mother-in-law used to milk the goats.

“I was beautiful when he met me,” my mother-in-law tells me whenever she comes to visit. They are divorced now. “But then he worked me to death.” Her face is carved with lines and looks like a side of a suitcase that’s been left out in the sun.

“This is Triangle Head,” my father-in-law says. “And that is Square Head.” He pets the heads of the calves while they nurse. They are bull headed and big eyed. Their eyes bulge, gelatinous and nervous. They make a steady, rhythmic clicking sound as they nurse from the Calf-Teria buckets. The baby throws the hay. He tries to grab one of the calves by the eyeball. The calves nurse: click, click, click.

“Aren’t you too old for this?” I ask. My father-in-law is eighty-three and pigeon-toed, lurching across the field with the Calf-Teria buckets.

“Did you see that?” he says. He points to the electric wire fencing running around the barn. It lies in dangerous, quivering spools on the ground.  “I put that up myself,” he says.

I work in an office downtown.

“How was your weekend?” my boss asks on Monday. I put my lunch on my desk: a sandwich, an apple, a package of crackers, a bag of low-fat biscuits. Turn on my computer. Start the routine. She sits across me from me in an identical grey cube.

“That’s really random,” she says.

“What is?”

“Your story about the cows.”

“My husband’s family lives on a farm.”

“Really?”

We work for the newspaper’s website. My boss has a baby too, a girl that she never sees. My boss is at work when I get there. She’s at work when I leave. I go to meetings and I come out of them. I stare at the computer, at miles and miles of HTML code, a language I don’t really understand.  It’s like staring into the abyss. I think about the baby at daycare. I think about him all the time.

“You can’t quit,” my husband said. “We can’t afford it.”

“But I want to,” I said.

“But you can’t,” he said. He’s a high school English teacher. He says we can’t survive on his salary alone. I’ve done the math. I’ve tried to figure it out. Stretch the money this way and that way, but it never works out. It never covers the basics.

The weather is turning to spring. The sky is the color of eggshells.

I put the baby in the car every morning, fix all his latches and drive across town. He holds on tight when I pick him up and carry him into daycare. He smells like angel food, dusted and sweet.

I walk across the lawn, the baby holding on to my neck, and get my ankles wet from the grass. The walk is the worst part, if you ask me. I walk across the lawn so that I don’t have to walk behind the other mothers. I watch them and think: How could you do that?  Leave your baby behind? And then I go ahead and do the same thing.

I spend Saturday in the sandbox with the baby. We move the sand through our fingers. “Like sand through the hourglass,” my husband says.

He goes inside to turn on some jazz. There are coffee and black plums that we bought at the store. Even the baby eats them.

My father-in-law comes into town for dinner. We sit outside on collapsible chairs. He drinks all the wine in the house.

“I painted Picasso’s daughter once,” he says.

“You did not,” my husband says.

“I did,” my father-in-law says. “She wasn’t a handsome woman. She looked over her shoulder, like this,” he says. He stands up and bats his eyes, coquettish, over his shoulder.

He lived in Italy for the first three years of his marriage. It’s where they got married. My mother-in-law thought she was going to see the world.  They lived in a small apartment off the Spanish Steps. Then she ended up on a farm in Virginia, milking goats.

“How are the calves?” my husband asks.

“Fine,” my father-in-law says. He looks at the street. “Do you all like veal?” he asks. Everybody laughs.

Monday morning, I’m running late. The baby throws all his food on the floor and pitches a fit when I try to put his arms in his jacket. He clings to my neck, tearful, when I drop him off at day care.

“Who’s being a baby?” Debra, our day care provider, says.

She reaches out her arms and the baby goes to her. He rests his head on her shoulder. She rocks him from side to side. There is a din of noise around them: kids playing, yelling, crying.  Dora The Explorer is on the TV, shouting about something. But they are the silent center, my baby and the woman who watches him, rocking from side to side. He wraps his arms around her neck.

I walk into work dazed and it takes me the whole day to figure out, what am I doing?  Who do I need to call?  What’s going on here? Sometimes I’ll spend the whole day, inputting events into the calendar: festivals, concerts, sew ‘n’ sips. It is easy and mindless and stupid.

“Where is the package on farmer’s markets?” my boss says. “And theme parks? What are you doing?” she says. She is fast and busy typing. “Did you spend your whole day on calendar again?”

It took me a year to understand what “packages” meant. It means I’m supposed to write the content for the package. And the HTML code.  I have to make tables, insert columns, close lines.

“Don’t you have a program that will do that?” I ask my boss, every time.

“You have to do it this way,” she says and opens up a whole page of code: brackets and back slashes. Just looking at it makes me feel sick. I don’t know how to write code. I’m a writer, but I was hired to work on the newspaper’s website. Which apparently means I need to write code and not sentences. I have books on my desks, little dictionaries, filled with the stuff, but I still don’t understand it. So I avoid it, do what I know how to do, type in more calendar events. Canoe Run Field Day. Half-off sushi and Wii bowling. Where do they come up with this stuff? They’re so hopeful and promising. Like a date.

“We could move to your father’s,” I say to my husband. To the big white Colonial on the farm.

It’s about an hour and a half drive out of town. Not convenient, but do-able. Some people have worse commutes.

“Don’t start,” my husband says.

“I can’t help it.”

We have the same conversation we have every Sunday night. We go at it in circles, pacing the same steps, working out the same circular logic.

“What do you want me to say?” my husband says.

“I want you to say you’ll fix it.”

“I can’t,” he says.

We tried living on his salary alone, once before, when I tried to make it as a freelancer. We were always short, always overdrawn, always on the brink of financial disaster.

“But I’m his mother,” I say.

“Are you really going to do this?” he says.

“Do what?”

“Ruin everything.”

…

To read the rest of this story, please pick up the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. AQR can be found at most Barnes & Noble bookstores  or through the magazine’s website. Many thanks to AQR for publishing this story.

I knew it had been accepted, but I didn’t know when it was going to come out.

But it came in the mail the other day and it’s a really beautiful 30th anniversary edition with stunning photographs. I thought, What timing!

Because I’ve been blogging about Warsaw lately – the story was inspired by it and what it was like to return to work after having a baby.

Which felt pretty awful, to be honest.

I don’t feel like that anymore. But I did then.

The icehouse at Warsaw.

The well.

The pond.

Sculpture in the bell tower.

Baby Gus and Henry. Please excuse my thumb.

I wrote about the first house. And the second.

Now the third: Warsaw

My husband’s dad lives in a big old plantation house out in the country.

It’s big and white with black shutters. There are huge rooms with soaring ceilings. The house was built in the 1800s. If you look closely at the windows, you can see girl’s names written on them that they carved with their engagement rings.

It’s like something out of Faulkner. It has a smokehouse and an icehouse. Both of them, filled with old trash: busted tires, an old kiln, hammocks with holes in them, snakes.

But it is beautiful. So beautiful.

There is a viewing wall. My father-in-law’s sculpture everywhere, craggy and staring at you. A front hall with a sofa where you can sit and get a good breeze: from front to back. A screened-in porch. A pond out back. A barn, three fields, and stars, everywhere, at night.

Of course I have this fantasy. That we could move in, fix it up. Drink gin and tonics on the screened-in porch. Swimming parties at the pond. You can’t help but see this house and have the same thoughts: What it could be. The fantasy life.

It’s perfect for the dreamer in me: what could be rather than what is.

And I’m all for big dreams, high hopes. I think they’re important. But I want to find a balance. The problem with being a dreamer is that you’re never happy with what is. You’re always thinking about what could be, how happy you could be if things were just a little different.

My father-in-law is 87. He’s one of my favorite people in the world. He is funny and smart and eccentric. He made his living as an artist. His paintings fill our walls wherever we’ve lived.

We visit Warsaw on the weekends. In the summers, we swim in the pond.

It’s only recently that I realized: Oh my God. Oh my God. This might be the closest that I ever get to living out here.

And because of that I’m trying really, really hard, to be happy with what I have.

I want things to be perfect, but they never are.

And I think the same goes for my writing: I keep working at it and working at it and I am frustrated that I’ve been working at it, all this time, and I don’t have anything to show for it. At least, right now.

But I really like what I’m working on. And that makes me happy. To work on it. To focus. To find time for it — no matter what. To be in the moment with it.

Because really, this is the best part. Even if nobody else knows it.

The suburbs.

I thought I was ready. I knew we need a bigger space and a good school district.

But I’m finding it difficult.

I’m a wife and a mother now. I spend a lot of my time cooking and cleaning up after people. But that’s just part of the package. Once you go down that road, it’s inevitable. I don’t have as much time to write and it’s difficult to focus. I’m writing this now as I sit on the floor and play with my eight-month old. He is learning how to crawl and he keeps reaching out, trying to prop himself up, trying to move forward, but then he just flips over and I have to turn him right side up again. Sometimes he gets frustrated and he cries. But I encourage him. Good job! That’s how you do it! You getting it! My focus is split, all the time. But I’m here. I am trying. Regardless.

I’ve heard differing points of view about families and what it takes to make them work.

I heard that if you want a family to work, the marriage comes first.

For an artist, the artist always comes first. They’re a selfish bunch. They have to be to get anything done.

But I know there are female writers, artists, with children. You just have to figure a way around it. You have to juggle. You have to balance. And you often feel like you are letting someone down: whether it’s yourself or your partner or the kids. You fail. And you succeed. But mostly, you fail at something you want very badly to be good at: mothering, writing, being a good partner. Because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to be good at them all.

Throw a day job into the mix and it all sort of goes to hell — finding anytime for yourself, for your own dreams and desires.

I keep dreaming of another house where things would be perfect. Where I can have it all and be all things at once: the perfect wife, mother and writer.

I can’t even picture it really: what that perfect house would look like. It changes and morphs in my mind’s eye.

Sometimes, it’s a house in the city where I can walk the kids to school. Sometimes, it’s just a different house in the suburbs that has something this one doesn’t: a sunroom, a front porch or a better location.

But most of the time: it’s my father-in-law’s big house out in the country.