Last week I wasn’t myself. David’s parents took the kids for two nights, which left me three days where I wasn’t a mother, or was only barely a mother. I went into the city. My skirt had been ripped into pieces by the train so I had bought a new skirt at Grand Central, and this was the skirt I wore for the next three days. It was tight, and hard to walk in, and I wore it with high heels. I didn’t feel like I looked like a hooker but there was whistling.

I went to the Benglis/Bourgeois show I’d wanted to see. Bourgeois is a genius, she sculpts in some kind of language that is entirely invented and completely transparent, to express feelings that you have, but that you didn’t know you had. These feelings were mixed up for me with the fact that there were people working in the gallery who wouldn't acknowledge that I was there. I said, Hello, and they looked away. I searched up and down Ninth and Tenth Avenues for the book store I liked but couldn’t find it anywhere. I hailed a taxi.

I met David for dinner and he brought me roses, which I also experienced as not normal, not for me. The food was spicy and my nose ran. We walked back up to our hotel and my legs rubbed together and chafed and in fact I was in some pain. At the hotel, everything was dim, faded, ugly, cheap and old, and the anonymity that I normally love in hotels joined in the general assault on my self. In the morning David left before I got up and I didn’t want to leave the flowers in the room. I knocked on the door to the staff hall and offered them to the people there, who had been laughing and happy. When a woman came forward to take them I said, Happy Valentine’s Day, early? Or late? And she laughed and hugged me.

Crap, I felt weird. I couldn’t write in the blog, I couldn’t shape myself into anything, and I still wonder if I am shapeable, if I am a thing, or if I'm something less defined than that.

But the children are back, which helps. And I know what I am going to write next, which also helps. Tennis team tryouts are next week. Our kitchen has windows and doors. Everything will start to appear orderly again, and I will know my place.