anna nicole smith RIP

For whatever else you might think about Anna Nicole Smith and her questionable methods regarding upward mobility — and perhaps even more questionable claims to legitimate fame — in the end she was nothing more than a working class girl and a teenage mother who clawed her way out of the abject poverty into which she was born…and for me, having done precisely the same, I just have to say that there is a part of me that understands exactly what compelled her. I understand the notion of reinvention; I have lived it. I AM living it.

For all the drugs, marriages, diets, centerfolds, and legal quagmires that her life had degenerated into — and gosh, what an epic trainwreck it was — I believe, in the end, she was nothing more than an extremely damaged and fragile human being…who simply could not move or breathe beyond the tragic death of the child to whom she had given birth while still a child herself and with whom she had consequently grown up. It was reported that when she awoke that morning in September of 2006 — just three days after giving birth to her second child, a daughter — and discovered her 20 year old son not breathing and unresponsive in the chair next to her bed, it took the doctors and hospital staff FOUR HOURS to pry her off his dead body. At his funeral, she demanded they open the coffin and then tried to climb inside. She said that, “If Daniel has to be buried, I want to be buried with him.” — and I have NO DOUBT that she TRULY MEANT IT WITH ALL OF HER SHATTERED HEART. That’s a biological thing, a cellular thing, an animal thing…and I understand it to the very core of my being. In fact, those same primitive urges ARE the very core of my being; they are every mother’s.

In the end, there are some wounds that can never be healed, some pain that can never be comforted, some horror that can never be forgotten, and some places from which you can never return.

I hope she finds the peace in death that she never, ever knew in life — and that wherever she is, she is with her treasured son and that she feels safe and secure and thin enough and good enough…and loved. At last.

About muffybolding

Muffy Bolding is a mother/writer/actor/knitter/feminist/withered debutante who likes the smell of asparagus pee, and remains obsessed with the bathroom hygiene of her three children -- despite the fact that they are 23, 19, and 16. She is blissfully married to a cute Jewish boy who looks like Willie Wonka, but remains tragically in love with the dead poet, Ted Hughes. She has the mouth of a Teamster, and her patron saint is Rocco (pestilence relief.) Ms. Bolding lives in Southern California, where she enjoys typing words, making movies, and plucking the rings from the fingers of the dead. She was the co-creator and Editor-in-Chief of the award winning satire zine, Fresno Lampoon, and in between writing screenplays, carnival barking, and savagely threatening her trio of darling larvae with a wooden spoon, she currently publishes the zine, "Withered Debutante." More of her work can also be found in the anthology, "Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts", the compilation zine, "Mamaphiles III: Coming Home", as well as in The Cortland Review and hipmama.com. She is currently writing and producing for film and television, and working on a book of essays entitled, "Inside A Chinese Dragon." She has slept around, but not nearly as much as she would have liked.

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