What I Can't Say to My Mother After Spending a Day with Her in NYC

It begins when she pushes through the front door of my sister's suburban New York apartment.

Despite the fact that she and my grandmother will only be in town for a few hours, she lugs a heavy bag inside.  And of course, she leaves my frail 83-year-old in-remission-from-metastasized-to-her-shoulder-from-her-no-longer-existent-breasts-cancer grandma to deal with the heavy, sticky door.

My mother's shorts are too short, and her tank top is too tight.  Her thick black bra straps stretch across her exposed back like freshly paved roads through cattle-grazing lands.  In my kinder moments, I liken her jiggly, cellulite-dimpled thighs and ballooned out arms to those of an elephant because I think elephants are beautiful and wise.  In my less forgiving moments, I see a woman in denial about her mortality, and I judge her for it.

When she sits down on the couch and busts out her computer to check her email while my sister makes smoothies for all of us and proceeds to loudly exclaim over and over again that she can't log on, but doesn't seem to hear us when we say we'll help her with the password in just a minute, I think she's an impatient child.

When she snarls at my grandma for forgetting which water glass is hers, I see her as insensitive.

When she answers a phone call from her verbally abusive, deep-into-his-alcoholism boyfriend and proceeds to sit next to me on the couch and talk at the decibel level of a jet taking off as I quietly read, I escape down the hallway and hide in my sister's room because I hate how my mom's loud talking is just a bid for attention--she wants us to know that she has a man's approval.  She wants to feel loved and popular, and she wants us to know it so that we will then see her as worthy of love too.  But the judgmental bitch in me just thinks she's pathetic.

It's time to go, and Mom says we need to stop at the car to grab Grandma's hat.  In the interest of time, Mel offers one of her own, but Mom just yells, "Let's go!  We'll stop by the car."  On the elevator ride down, she remembers she's forgotten her keys in the apartment.  "Oh, well," Mom says, "I'll just buy a hat for Grandma when we get to the city."  (She doesn't wind up getting a hat, but she does buy herself an expensive book about olives.)

My mother charges ahead of us as Mel and I take Grandma's extended hands to help her balance over the bumpy, broken sidewalk that leads to the train station.  When she reaches a corner, she jams her fingers into the crosswalk button so hard and so frequently that I say something despite my intentions to be on my best behavior.  "It's not like it's going to change any faster that way."  And I immediately feel like a self-righteous bitch and my comment doesn't get her to stop pushing the button or smirking at me as she does it.

At the station, time is short.  We have to buy tickets from the machines before we can board, and Mel calls out to Mom, who is fifty feet ahead of us, "The machines are in the brick building!"  But my mother is losing her hearing or has just never been able to hear her daughters and fifteen seconds later turns around with a frustrated look on her face and demands to know where the machines are.  I am surprised my sister does not lose her shit but only because I'm projecting because I want to lose my shit and say, "Why do you always have to sound pissed off, like we're all holding out on you?"

On the train, she leans across my grandmother and into the aisle separating us and talks so loudly about her job all the other passengers shift uncomfortably in their seats.  Some avert their eyes.  Others stare at me as if they know I'm the only one who can stop her.  I sit in my seat and nod at my mother and try to remember that I have her brown eyes, that I am part of her.

When we arrive at Grand Central Station, we have to walk down a series of winding halls filled with people who are of the "when push comes to shove" mindset.  My grandmother is the only gray-haired person in the throng, and I worry that she will be trampled.  For some reason, she worries that I will get lost, and she keeps looking back when I fall behind to act as a barrier between her and the people who seem to have fires to get to.  Finally, I succumb to my grandmother's concerns and take her free hand so that she is once again between my sister and me.  Eventually, Grandma needs a breather, and we pull off to the side to give her a break.  When Mom turns around fifty feet ahead to find herself alone, she flinches and then hardens and charges at us, "Come on," she orders.  "We're almost there."  

We have to take another subway afterwards to reach our final destination, and the trip has taken longer than Mel anticipated.  Since she is our guide for the day, she is the one who bears the brunt of my mother's unhappiness.  "We should have taken a cab," Mom says, not in a laughing familiar way but in a Cinderella's stepmother way that kicks my codependency into high gear; I wonder how my sister feels inside, if she feels stupid or like our mother's lack of love is somehow her fault.  I tell my sister that we couldn't know it would take so long and that it's fine, that it's no big deal.  Because it isn't and I don't want my sister to think I'm concerned that we've "wasted" time.  

We find a restaurant at Chelsea Market and are put on the waiting list.  Mom tries to force a menu into my hand but I don't want to feel rushed and refuse it.  She tells me she's buying and that I should pick something.  I shake my head and Grandma sits down at a table that is not ours, and my sister and I smile at each other, not in a mean way but in a way that says Life Is Funny.  A host with twinkling blue eyes tries not to laugh and takes us to a bench to wait.  I can't stand the thought of sitting next to my ear-crushing, says-nothing mother in such a claustrophobic space and excuse myself to do the rest of the wait time outside the restaurant.  I feel bad leaving my sister with them, but I also don't realize until she comes out a few minutes later that she is suffering as much as I am.  She's so good at playing the patience card.

When we finish eating, Mom does not renew her offer to pay.  My sister throws down more money than she should, and I throw down a little less than I should because we're using cash and I don't have the right bills, and then on our way out of the market we stop someone to take a picture of us.  We gather together like a family, looping arms around each other's shoulders and waists, smiling for the camera.  We thank the guy and when he walks away, my mom looks at the picture she took of Grandma, Mel, and me and compares it to the one the stranger just snapped and declares that his picture is terrible.  We turn towards the wishing well behind us and dig in our purses for pennies.  I wish God could help me stop being a bitch to my mother.

When we get outside, my sister grabs us a cab.  We scoot in, and I revel in the cabbie's smiling eyes, his silence, how his quiet energy somehow gets my mother in the front seat to shut up.  We arrive at Grand Central Station about $11.00 later and my mom, who does not live in the overpriced suburbs of New York and who makes something like $80,000 a year, does not offer to pay so my sister grabs her credit card and tells us all we can just give her our unused metro cards as repayment.  I am glad she has made this request.

Even getting onto the train back to my sister's apartment is a trial.  Mom wants to dive into the first train car she sees, but Mel wants to find one that is less crowded.  Wanting to get away from people, I follow Mel until she dives into a car after Mom impatiently pulls Grandma into the train.  I walk to the next car up and think about how wonderful the forty minute ride back will be.  Then I see Mel coming towards my car, and I motion to her.  She sits next to me.  We heave a collective sigh and begin to exchange thoughts about the day but are cut off a minute in when Mom appears in the doorway separating her car from ours.  "There's plenty of room in our car," Mom booms.  "I'm not moving," I say, resolute.   "We don't know where we're supposed to get off!" Mom shouts, and Mel tells her to calm down, that we're getting off where she lives, that it'll be announced.  That seems to mollify Mom, and she swivels on her heel to return to her car, and I think we are free.  But she comes back a minute later pulling Grandma behind her.  They sit in front of us, and Mel closes her eyes and I pull out my phone, and the train goes.

Back at Mel's apartment, Mom takes her time packing up her bag.  I hide in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet much longer than is necessary or sanitary.  Finally, I hear her calling my name.  I return to the living room and am relieved to see they are ready to go.  I carefully hug Grandma and can hear the tinny buzz of her hearing aid as our cheeks rub.  I tell her I will see her again "next time."  Then I plunge into my mother's arms like a body into cold water, backing out just as quickly as I entered.  "Drive safe, you guys," I say, and I mean it, but my loving tone is more about them leaving than it is about their safety.

My Mom, having complained about the weight of her bag, asks my sister to carry it for her.  I tell them there's no reason for me to leave the apartment, and I park myself on the couch as my mom pouts about me not escorting them down to the street.  "Have fun camping," I say, knowing that my mom's next destination is her alcoholic boyfriend's arms in Massachusetts.  I hope my grandma is taken care of.

When my sister returns to the apartment, she heads to her bedroom for a nap, and I head to the couch to figure out why I resent my mother so much, but I already know the answer.

It's mainly because I can't let go of the past, of how unlike the mother I wanted her to be she was.  But it's also because, of course, I see myself in her, and that scares me.  There she is at the corner, impatiently crushing the button like how I angrily thrust my fingers into technology's parts when I am tired and edgy, like how I think to myself, "Come on, come on already!" when I'm stuck behind a group of slow-walkers on campus and I'm running late.  There she is with her tiny shorts, and I think of my own microscopic shorts, of an ex-girlfriend telling me how slutty they are so that every time I wear short shorts now, I think not just of how comfortable and cool they keep me but of how trashy I might look, so that I constantly tug them down when I walk.  

I think of my mother's soft arms and legs, her marshmallow neck and fleshy face, and I am ashamed for seeing her as anything less than the woman who sacrificed her body to bring me into this world.  I hate how she has let herself go because some part of me wants to eat 1,000 calorie meals all day long for years at a time, climb into my microscopic shorts, and not give a shit.  Some part of me worries that one day I will lose the drive to maintain this body and I will become a 56-year-old woman who wears skimpy clothes and talks too loudly to draw attention to make it seem like I'm confident when in fact I'm terrified that no one will notice me.

I think of the times I've said I will do something and then reneged, sometimes without acknowledgment or apology.  When I think of my mother paying my cell phone bill every month, I flush with shame that I hold her accountable for saying she'll pay for something and then not doing it; I am guilty when I expect her to do something like pay a cab fair just because she makes more money than I do.

I am the mean girl my mother probably always wanted as a friend in school.  I am the girl who does not  want to sit with her on the train and who eats with her not because she wants to but because she feels some kind of pity which is actually just judgment.  I am the girl who gets upset when the woman she most does not want to be like points out that they are wearing similar outfits.

I do not like seeing my mom because she reminds me that I am capable of being just as selfish and oblivious as she often is.  And it is difficult to be with her because sometimes she is so generous, and I do not hesitate to take what she offers though I have betrayed her, over and over again.

There are things my mother does and did today that I make smaller so that I will not have to see her as human and take on the feelings that are mine to own.  

When she saw me today, she asked me how my classes are going, and when I told her about the website I designed, she asked to see it, and she was actually sincerely interested.  

My grandma is losing her memory and requires a lot of care.  My mother is her primary caretaker.  My grandma can ask you the same question five times in the span of ten minutes.  She has also been known to make herself more a victim than she actually is.  I remember when I was a kid how Grandma would make me fetch her a cup of water from the kitchen ten feet away from the couch where she sat watching TV.  She was in her young 60's and perfectly capable of getting the water herself.  I must remember that my grandma is my mother's mother, that they have unspoken history between them, that just because someone is old does not make them a different person, that my mother must have thrown some part of herself under the bus to watch her mother, who from what I can tell may have been just as deficient at mothering as my own mother.  There were many moments today when my mom took my grandma's hand as they stepped up or off a curb.  There was an instant on the train when Mel suggested we stand to prepare to deboard, but Mom said the train was still moving and that it would be best if Grandma remained seated for the jarring stop.  There were minutes today when I fell behind them as my mom linked arms with my grandma, and I saw how we can be kind to each other, even when we try each other's patience, even when no one has apologized for the past.

At lunch, I stopped staring at the sagging flesh of my mother's arms and forced my eyes to her face and saw the light in her eyes, how beautiful she was when she was younger, how vibrant she still is.  How our cheekbones share a shape, how our eyebrows match in arch, how our eyes are the same shade of brown.

As she wrapped her arms around me just before she left, she wondered aloud when she'd see me again, and I knew this was her passive way of asking if I'd come home for Christmas, but I'd decided earlier in the day that since I could not endure even a few hours with her that it would not be wise for me to go home for the holidays.  I said I wasn't sure, we'd have to see.  And after they drove away and Mel returned to the apartment, she told me Mom had asked her at the car if she (Mel) was coming home for Christmas, probably because she already knew by my vague answer that I wasn't, and my sister intimated that she was not.  

My mother is a child with a broken heart.  I am convinced she is the loneliest person on the planet, lonelier even than the guy on the bench at the train station this afternoon who lamented in a muttering voice that nobody cared about him, that he was nobody.  My mother wants to be liked, appreciated, and loved.  She wants this so badly, like a kid who wants something just out of reach at the toy store, that she makes a mess of everything trying to get it.  And though I tell her I love her, we both know there's nothing in it; my words are an empty box.  And I could say I want to love my mother, but I know that's not true because loving her would be easy.  All I'd have to do is forgive her for being human, for breaking my heart, and I'd be so full of love for her, I wouldn't know what to do.  But for now, I am my mother's daughter, just as closed off from her as she is from me.  Maybe one day I'll be able to forgive her as I have forgiven my father, and we'll sit together on a train, my hand on the soft arm that held me when I was a baby, her brown eyes on mine, our laughter echoing through the car.

Second Chances

As I clung to my tiny home, the only world I'd known for eight months, the doctors lifted my twin sister out.  I know she went first not because I remember but because I have reliable sources that have told me so.  Well, somewhat reliable.  I suppose one of these sources was at the time split open like a melon and high on some medical cocktail, her drugged blood glimmering on sanitized scalpels and sheets. The other source was tucked behind a camera, documenting his wife's c-section, the birth of their first children.  But he couldn't have possibly captured everything. What if he was scoping out the room for the best angle the same moment the slick latex gloves hoisted me up from the broken womb like treasure from a sunken ship?  What if I'd been the first one out but there'd been a mix-up because when my dad realized he'd missed the shot, he'd asked the doc to rewind--to set the baby back down in the cramped swamp of my mother's ravaged reproductive system...to lift her back up again, now that the angle was right, and the doc had set me down but had then picked up my sister, his OCD flaring up in the instant, his hands seeking balance, his mind seeking an even number?

It is really of no consequence who came out first, I guess.  What is remarkable are the minutes after liftoff.

I'm sure she cried right after they cut the cord.  My sister always cried when she was uncomfortable.  And when she screamed, the nurses must have rejoiced, impressed by the power of those tiny lungs, glad this baby wouldn't be A Problem.

Once they'd gotten the Not A Problem baby out of the way, they turned their attention to the one who was still attached, the breech baby--the reason the woman on the table had to be cut open.  In my imagination, a white-gloved hand picks me up by the leg, like one might pick up from the floor a pair of underwear, spins me slowly under the fluorescent lights, inspecting my body with the careful scrutiny of a diamond collector looking for flaws.  As he slowly turns me, the umbilical cord looped around my neck falls away, and my jaundiced body radiates like a sick sun.  This one, the doctor says, his voice muffled behind a paper mask, is A Problem.

The loosening of the noose around my neck is my first second chance.

And then: She's not breathing right, the doctor says.  In reality, what he probably said involved a lot more medical jargon, words like pulmonary and arrest and apnea.  In any case, The Problem is hooked up to a cardiorespiratory monitor and set under bili-lights and eventually left in an isolette while her sister, who is 10 ounces heavier than she is, and their parents go home to bond, where, in fact, they will live for weeks, even celebrating Easter together, before The Problem is finally sent home attached to electrodes and a machine that beeps loudly whenever she forgets to breathe.

The machine delivers my second second chance.

I develop fairly normally, despite all the complications of a premature birth.  And when I reach toddler-hood, I even do the usual things toddlers do, like touch hot stoves and run into the sharp corners of coffee tables and nearly drown.  I am three years old when I jump into the deep end of a pool in a seemingly perfectly orchestrated moment when my parents aren't watching.  I sink like a stone but am almost immediately hauled up by my mother and thus miraculously escape the cliche CPR scene.  The hands pulling me to the surface, that sharp rush of air; this is my third second chance.  But I am old enough to know what I might have lost, so I refuse to take baths for half a year, and my mom has to bathe me in the sink like I'm a baby.

A few years later, I slip into a scummy duck pond at the park when my father isn't watching.  I have not yet begun swimming lessons, though I will soon, but I am stronger and wiser than I was the first time I found myself in over my head.  I kick and scream against the weight of my OshKosh B'gosh pants soaking through to my skin.  My sneakers may as well be filled with sand.  Everything I touch is slick with green slime, and soon the brownish-green water is in my mouth, dampening my pleas for help.  Fortunately, my sister witnesses my plunge.  And fortunately, she runs to my dad to tell him.  And lucky for me, he is not too bothered to follow her to the slippery edge where he leans over and thrusts his hand into mine.  "I got you, Carol Baby," he says, pulling me out.

The tears running over my swamp-stained cheeks: my fourth second chance.

When I am ten years old, I start to lose my appetite.

Relationship Hiatus Blue Balls

Twenty-five days ago, I swore off romantic relationships for a year.  Why would anyone in her right mind make such a vow?  Well, I was pretty newly out of a relationship and had been reviewing choices I'd made when I realized that I needed to focus less on a partner and more on cultivating my own happiness and sanity.  But that's not the point of this entry.

The point is this pledge has some drawbacks, especially for someone who has a sex drive that rivals that of a burgeoning 14-year-old boy's.  Indeed, sometimes all I can think about is sex.  That's when I'll start daydreaming about how sexy my next partner will be (because apparently even though I'm not actively seeking a relationship, my hormones are).  This dream woman has a tendency to arrive in the maddening lurch of a late afternoon red light, and at night in the long, itchy minutes before dawn.  Who is she?

She is cinnamon and sugar.  She is spice.  She smells like maple syrup and raindrops filtering through the needles in a pine tree forest; she is sun-warmed roses and the whitest snow.  She is the electric tang of summer air just after lightning's had its way with the sky.  She tastes like peaches and turquoise and the way a cello sounds when the musician forgets her ego.  Her voice is the fine plink of a penny hitting the water at the bottom of a wishing well.  But it's also the thin blade of a knife drawing out the blue and red that run through every seam.  And her hands are soft and sure as hummingbirds' wings and quicker than the pulse.  But it's her eyes that really cast the heat, their flames longer than an elephant's love.

When she finds me sitting in traffic or staring into the dark of a maddening midnight, she brings me moments from the future, words and scenes and promises that sometimes leave me with a case of lesbian blue balls.

[1]
She comes home with a newly purchased pair of cut-off shorts that threaten to reveal everything when I bend slightly or even cough or sneeze.  She demands I wear nothing under them when we go out, promising she'll make it worth my while.

[2]
She calls me in the middle of a work day to tell me just how exactly she plans on making me cum later.

[3]
She slips a hand between my thighs when I'm at the stove, presses her braless breasts against my back, and whispers innocently in my ear, "I'm starved."

[4]
She wakes me with a kiss on the lips.

[5]
Yes, those lips.

[6]
She follows me down the hall when I'm on my way to do something and then, expertly and firmly yet gently, spins me around, pins me against the wall (one hand grasping the back of my head, the other forked around my wrist), flashes sparkling eyes and a wicked grin, flips me 180 degrees, and, pressing herself against my back, moves her lips along the curve of my ear before pushing her hand up the length of my back and into my hair.  "Listen carefully," she says, giving my hair a tug, and I do, I do.

[7]
She brings me flowers and orders me to enjoy them for the remainder of the day because she "has plans for them--for you--later."  Later, she asks me if I like the flowers, and when I say, "Yes, of course," she peels off my clothes, pushes me onto our bed, and glides the blooms over  my skin until I'm a flushed flurry of petals. When she's finished, she strokes my hair, kisses my mouth, and with an impish smile and a look, says, "I'm glad you enjoyed the flowers."


Three hundred and forty days left.  I can only imagine how many more scenarios my dream vixen will bring me, how many more pleasureful aches.

It's Hot

It's the kind of hot that makes your cat throw up on the wood floor in the hallway.  It's a hot that sends you to the fridge for the third time in an hour, not because you're hungry but because your body needs the air.  You don't even know you're standing in the cold glow of the 40 watt bulb until the bushy tail of your overheated cat rubs against your leg, startling you.  You close the fridge and fill a glass of water from the tap before returning to the couch.

It's so hot you can't concentrate on your work, or on anything.  You think a movie will help, something relatively mindless, something you've seen before.  Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill 2 seems fitting.  You put it in but find that watching people kill each other in the desert only makes you hotter.  How are they doing anything in those pants? you wonder.  How do they have the energy to lift those guns?  And those swords? There's blood everywhere.  Jesus, those pants!  The sweat pooling behind your knees makes you want to claw off your own skin, or at least your clothes.

You almost can't believe it, but it's too hot to masturbate.  You wonder if you'd even be inspired to have sex in this heat, if that is, you had a partner to bump uglies with.  Would the slick of your bodies make it impossible?  You doubt you'd even get that far; the mere thought of having to push, pull, or pump anything is exhausting.  Hell, just the thought of having to lift your arms over your head to remove the t-shirt adhered to your chest and back makes you want to take a nap.

Eventually, you find yourself in a sort of in-between place.  You're sitting on the couch or walking down the hall or standing in front of the fridge, or you've finished a cold shower and are lying in your PJ's in your bed, knees propped up, typing mindlessly into your computer. Sweat trickles down your shins and you tell yourself it's good you're single, that you wouldn't want to cuddle with anyone in this heat (even though you actually love cuddling and would probably still choose to do it even if it meant dying a sweaty, dehydrated death).  You remember how puffy and greasy your face was this morning, how dry your mouth.  You probably smelled like a mummy.  It's good to be single, you think, staring at your cat, who doesn't care how much water you retain or that you sweat all over his side of the bed as you tossed and turned the night before.  He doesn't even care when you moan anxiously in your sleep, or when you curl around him and secretly wish he was someone else.

Finally, when you realize you've been staring at the wall for an indeterminate amount of time, you slide your hand through the damp hair at the nape of your neck, click off the light, and spread yourself out on your big bed like a beached starfish as the pinwheel of your electric fan spins warm air at you and your vomit-breathed feline.  In the darkness, you tell yourself tomorrow is a new day, that it won't be as hot, but you know it will be.  You know too that if it were any cooler, you'd be complaining about goosebumps and the chill of your sheets, all the while telling yourself that it's good to be single, that you'd rather not have to fight someone for blankets in the middle of the night.

You run your hands through your cat's fur and tell him tomorrow he'll feel better, tomorrow tomorrow. You kiss his nose, close your eyes, rub your greasy eyelids, and let the heat settle into the darkness like a hand in a hand, like a cat in your arms.

These Fragments I Have Shored

How when a woman I loved told me for the first time, "You are so fucking beautiful," the air in the room immediately cinched like a drawstring before exploding in my chest like a shot of tequila.  How later when she said, "I'd love you even if your face burned off in a horrible car accident," I was still so full, there was not enough space for me to take it in.  How later still, after so many disappointments and fights, after I stayed again and again, I often wondered whom she was fooling.

A few words from a woman with a keen third eye, the way I immediately recognized the truth, how steady her voice, how clear her eyes, how awake now the unnameable something that had lived inside me since I was a child, shifting with her syllables, turning like a secret wall, her prophecy pulled from my chest like a scarf from a magician’s sleeve, her words flat as a cookie’s fortune to anyone else but to me real as the whiskers on a rabbit: “You will achieve greatness in your life…you will create something extraordinary.”  A silver-coined dare, a mirror of a promise, a woman sawed in two.

How the first woman I loved like a fairytale rose above me in the moonlight shining through her dorm window, her silver cross glinting in the space between us, the pillow on her bed damp with my tears. How she gazed into my eyes with an intensity like fire and wolf's teeth, gently wiped my cheek, and said, slowly, each word a covenant, "If I ever meet your father, I will break his kneecaps."  How I would have given her anything for that kind of devotion, how from that moment on I didn’t believe she was real.

How the night before the towers fell and the smoke and ash choked New York like an impossible trick, I grabbed up all the magazines around the house, picked up a pair of scissors, and began absentmindedly cutting and pasting images from articles and ads to a piece of paper until every bit of white was gone.  How I went to bed and forgot about it until after school the next day when I found it on my desk, how the blood bags and buildings and fire engines and planes rose up to meet my startled eyes, how I could hardly remember the scissors in my hand, how I was never one to make collages, how when I showed it to my mom when she got home from work, explaining that I'd made it the night before, she called me a freak, how as we watched the news that night, the word singed my ears and crashed down through all my stories.

How my father frowned at me in my bathing suit the year I turned fourteen when he took my sister, brother, and me to the Grand Canyon.  How he grimaced when he saw the softness around my hips and stomach, how he said, "Looks like you need to lose some baby fat," as if I'd put on weight carelessly, or even deliberately.  And how, absurdly, horribly, this was almost worse than before, when he'd look at my legs and lick his lips, worse than his fingers on my skin.

The way my cousin, two years older than my thirteen, the person I admired most in all the world, slipped into our shared bed at the beach house after a long night of flirting with the older guys downstairs, kissed the side of my head and whispered, "I love you, kid."  How she had little or no idea what my home life was like because this was her first time coming out to see us rather than the other way around and we were on vacation, how I never told her about my stepfather's heavy hands, how her words, because they were uttered when she thought I was asleep and because she used the word love when neither my stepfather nor my mother ever did, buoyed me up, kept me from sinking for the next year or two until social services came and removed my stepfather from the house.

Sitting in the leather passenger seat as my stepfather drove us along the winding roads to the nearby orchard store for hoagies, the air conditioning cooling my cheeks, the windows down, my hair whipping around my ears, my Neil Diamond cassette tape playing on repeat, our voices filling the cabin.  "The boat that I row's big enough for two," we sang, him forcing his voice into falsetto to make me laugh, me driving mine down below Neil's.  How I felt oddly contained in those moments, safe with the man I knew could break me like a twig.  "Just me and you..." he sang, and I was happy.

The way my sister, after I'd run through the woods to escape another kick to the back from our wild-eyed stepfather and she'd found me huddled in the bushes at the bottom of our hill, asked me if I wanted a hug; how this was exactly what I needed, how this really did make everything better.

I was in third grade when a headhunter spotted me at a fair, and I began going to modeling school.  When I told my father over the phone, I could feel him rising on the other end; I could almost see the pink of his tongue against his upper lip.  He rarely asked me questions about my life in Florida, but he wanted to know how I looked these days, how I liked the catwalk, if I would have pictures to send him.  "I'm not very good at the catwalk," I reported.  "The other kids are older, and they keep trying to give me tips, but I just walk funny."  He assured me I'd get better with practice and told me to send pictures to him in California when they were ready.  "Love you, Carol Baby," he said, smacking his lips before hanging up.

My brother, maybe five years old, and me standing in the corner of the backyard where the side of the house met the fence, standing over the raised beds of dusty dirt filled with remnants of sand dollars we'd broken, me about six and a half, we standing in the California sun, no parents around, me asking in a voice I could barely hide the tremble from, "Do you think I'm weird?" He, really stopping to consider, his soft grayish-black eyebrows squinting, his voice high yet quiet, his lips the color of the roses growing nearby, "What do you mean?"  Me: "Weird.  Different.  Special kinda, but not really...more like strange."  The eyebrows.  The rose of his mouth opening, his t's and r's playing hide and seek: "I don' think you' wei'd."  And this, after all my cruelties, after every penny I'd promised and never given, after every undeserved pinch and unkind word.  "You're not weird,” he'd said, and I knew he loved me.

The lumpy purple-gray, glazed clay ostrich I made in art class in the first grade, how my teacher beamed when she saw it, how she said I was special, how she told my mom I was her favorite, how she loved my ostrich so much that I gave it to her, how I loved her and her giant yellow boa constrictor and her huge head of silver curls.  When she'd hug me, I'd disappear into her bosom like a quarter behind an ear, like I'd been there all along, and her arms would seem to wrap around me twice to cover all the empty places.

On Parenting

I have been thinking about children and parents, maybe because so many of my cousins and friends have recently given birth, some for their first time, others for their second, third, or fourth. Maybe because I'm 28 years old and gay and not in a relationship but am nonetheless receiving visions of a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy named Benjamin whom I know is my son. It could be, too, that I am stuck on dispiriting conversations from past relationships, discussions with potential lifemates who had ideas about raising children that did not sit right with me or who told me that they didn't believe we would be good parents together or that I would be a good mother. Maybe I've been thinking about my own mother. Or my students, who all seem to be parents, and I'm wondering if my parenting will grow completely out of responses to what I have seen and heard and whether parenting by response is the way or if intuition would be wiser.

In any case, I have begun developing a mental list, a plan, a doctrine for how I will raise my son. Here are its beginnings.

1) I will not allow the medical establishment to circumcise my son. However, if he wants to opt to cut off a piece of his body when he is at an age where he can make such a decision, I will not stand in his way.

2) I will enroll him in many different kinds of activities and allow him to make decisions about how he would like to spend his time and energy. I do not remember being part of a sports team when I was a young kid, and I wasn't enrolled in dance classes or art classes or music lessons or anything of the sort, though I remember picking up a violin in maybe second or third grade and feeling a pull, and I remember asking for a guitar and eventually receiving one but never being enrolled in lessons so that the guitar sat in its case gathering dust, and I felt I was a failure. I would like my child to try many different activities, and if he expresses interest in any of them, I will support him in his passions.

3) I will cheer my kid's successes, and I will count successes on his terms. A few years ago, I was in graduate school and had gotten a poem published. Excited, I called my mother to tell her. I should have known better, but I was still yearning for the mother I never had, the one I'd seen on T.V. and read about in books. Instead of congratulating me, she said, "When are you going to publish a story or a novel? Why are you wasting your time on poetry?" She said it with such disgust, like not only was I wasting my time writing poems, but I'd wasted her time by calling to tell her about the publication. She couldn't see my success because it wasn't a success in her eyes. It was always this way. None of my pictures were ever good enough. My good behavior was never good enough. My good grades, not good enough. I was an exceptional child, but I never felt worthy of praise because the one person who should have loved me more than anything didn't show me love when I needed it most.

4) I will teach my child manners. There are so many people walking around who seem to have been raised in barns because their parents treated them like kings and queens. These people do not have manners, or when they do, they use them not out of a sense of love and appreciation but to manipulate. They say please, but it's a demand. They say thank you, but it's a sneer. Or they don't say anything because they expect. Some of them even go so far as to expect YOU to say Please and Thank You when you are the one giving, as if your very giving was an offense. Manners remind one to be humble; they engender goodwill and love and community. They remind us to slow down, to be aware, to take care of each other. They are not just a simple formality. I would like my children to remember themselves, to remember that they are part of the world, but are not the center of it.

5) Piggybacking on the manners bit, I will set and maintain healthy boundaries with my kids. They will feel secure because of these boundaries. They will be healthier, happier adults. They will be better adjusted than the kids I see today because they will know the meaning of a time-out, a spanking, a grounding. They will know that "no" means "no," and they will come to understand that their actions have repercussions. In this way, they will also begin to understand that they are part of the web of life, and that they have great responsibility to themselves and to others.

6) I will foster my children's curiosity, intuition, creativity, and imagination. I will not squash their innocence with my ignorance, with the world's knowledge and teachings. My children will still learn science, math, history, and all the facts textbooks and teachers have to offer, but they will go beyond the intellect; they will be intelligent because I will not stifle their right brain.

7) I will let my kids be who they are. Someone once asked me what I would do if I had a kid who didn't like to read. I can't remember what I said, but I remember what I felt--a great wall rising up in me, a sort of horror and indignation. Such a thing could not be possible! But I suppose it could be, even though I think reading is a skill that, if taught and fostered, is agreeable to all children. In any case, if I have a child who prefers not to read, I will love him anyway. I will hope that he is finding the magic that I find in books in his other interests/endeavors. His path is not mine to command.

8) I will teach my children about value and money (they are two different things with some overlap). I've noticed that many people do not know how to manage their money; they do not spend it responsibly when they have it, buying far too much and/or buying things they do not need or will not use. Some people even spend money as a way to fill the void inside, as a way to convince themselves that they have power, that they are productive human beings, that they are free, that the sacrifices they've made --the tradeoff: happiness, soul, joy--are worth it. And then when there is an emergency or when they have a real need or a real desire, they do not have the financial means to gain the solution. I am not talking about people who do not earn enough because our system is broken; I am talking about those of us who earn more than enough to keep a roof over our heads, food on our tables, and clothes on our back but who still fail to have any savings because we've opted to spend the money impulsively, without any thought of the future.

The moment I started earning an allowance--and I earned it, unlike most kids today who "earn" an allowance for merely existing--I started saving. I had a goal. I wanted a Super Nintendo game system. I made my bed, took out the trash, washed my dishes, fed the dog, did my homework, took in the mail. I did whatever chores were asked of me, knowing every month with the growing dollars in my piggy bank that I was that much closer to my reward. And after a year of diligent, committed work, I bought an SNES and was finally able to meet Mario and Luigi. My brother and sister were so jealous; it was almost like they were mad at me, like I'd gotten something from Santa and they hadn't! But they'd blown all their money every month on candy and jewelry, and I'd suffered a bit every month when they were able to buy three or four times as many candy bars, but I'd stuck it out, knowing a controller in my hand would be worth more than a Snickers in my mouth.

Okay, so that was a long, roundabout way of saying that I am responsible with my money and have found that it generally pays off and that I'd like my kids to learn this lesson. Other examples of how this works: I bought my first car with cash, so I didn't have to pay interest. In fact, I've NEVER paid interest on anything but student loans. My credit card bills? I pay them off before the interest is tacked on, and in that way, I earn miles/points without having to pay 18 or 20% interest on whatever I spent on groceries and gas.

It helps that I am so frugal and stubborn. In college, I wanted to be sure I had enough money to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach while still having enough bus money and cash for textbooks and course materials, so I resorted to measures that most people perhaps wouldn't. I had a 1 bedroom apartment, and it was expensive, so I asked a friend to move in and share the rent. She took the huge living room as her bedroom, which was fine with me as I never had reason to go in there, and I wound up saving 350 or so dollars per month.

Oh, and instead of buying a car on credit to get me around to all of my jobs, I took the bus for many months, saving my money until I could buy a car without having to pay interest (this was not my first car but another one I got after that car died). When it came time, I cut a check for something like $5200. I would no longer have to be a slave to Rhode Island's public transit system.

Okay, I've used an excess of examples, which I'll probably pull out again when I'm explaining these concepts to my kids. It's just that I want my kids to understand how money works so that they can make their lives work a little more smoothly.

I also want them to understand value. Buying something because it's cheap is not always the best idea. In fact, it's rarely a good idea. I remember how many cheap PC's we blew through at my house when I was growing up. My mom refused to buy a quality computer, and consequently, we were constantly at war with the PC. It seemed like the computer would break every time I had a really important project due. Our computers got every virus that was every created (it probably did't help that we were all, I presume, secretly looking at porn sites filled with trojan horses). My mom was always having to buy anti-virus software or bring the computer in for hardware repairs. In the end, I'm sure she paid far more money buying new computers and trying to maintain them than she would have had she bought something of higher quality, like a Mac. ;) This, too, will be a lesson I teach my kids.

9) I want my kids to learn the value of being present. It bothers me to see so many kids with their faces glued to a screen. How many of them have played Kick the Can? Or have climbed a tree? Or built a blanket fort in the living room? Or made up their own game? I remember with great fondness spending hours on my bedroom floor, inventing board games with my brother. I never felt closer to him than when we were creating something together. And I had profound moments in nature--discovering tadpoles and deer and the way the moon looks rising over a lake. I remember sitting on couches listening to my elders, to their stories, watching the way their mouths moved, how their cheeks lit up, how their eyes softened when they were remembering something sad, how their voices changed, how they gave themselves away. I was much more of a wizard then, but at least I had those first 8 years, relatively free from screens, to live in a world of real magic. I'd like my kids to have the opportunity to be wizards, to live IN the world, to experience it through their senses and intuition rather than through someone else's interpretation of it. I will be limiting screen time, for sure!

10) I want my kids to feel safe to express their emotions. When I was growing up, I was laughed at more times than I can count. Not just by the bullies on the playground, but by my parents. I was not listened to, and my emotions were not validated. I would say I was scared, and someone would say, "There's nothing to be scared of," which is not the same thing as saying, "I understand you are scared. Sit with that for a minute; feel it all the way through. And then when you are ready, move through it. I'm here for you." And when I was vulnerable, when I shared something that I feared would make me look "bad" or that might make me look foolish, instead of being received with love, I received exactly what I feared--condescension, laughter. And when I cried, I was either ignored or spanked or laughed at. So I hardened, and I became a very angry, sullen child. It took me years to open again, to let myself be soft and trusting, to stop resorting to walls and anger as a first defense. And so, I will give my children the gift of respect for their feelings.

Well, there are many other gifts I'd like to give my children, but I will cap the list here for now.

Apple, Gump, and Smelling the Roses

I've been listening to Fiona Apple's newest album, known in its abbreviated form as "The Idler Wheel," nearly non-stop for the past week.  

What I love about this album, aside from the fact that it's so textured and raw, is that it's clear Fiona Apple doesn't give a shit about the status quo.  She isn't writing for the radio, and she doesn't care if her music fits a genre.  She doesn't even care about her audience or whether anyone knows the word "moribund" or if any of her listeners knows what the fuck she is talking about when she's singing about werewolves and her tears "calcifying" and how she's "all the fishes in the sea."  She changes rhythms every 15 seconds, rhyming in one section but not the next, and she sings and doesn't sing and yells and at times yodels and she puts it all out there with a myriad of instruments, including some that might be Macgyvered (is that a lead pipe she's banging in the track "Anything We Want"?).

I read in The New York Times that she finished the album about a year and a half ago but chose not to release it at the time because of a change in management at her label, and that this delay (coupled with other things going on in her life, I presume) caused her to go to a dark place (darker? isn't she always in a dark place?), and consequently she started walking up a hill outside of her home every day.  According to the article, "She started to climb that hill for eight hours a day, day after day, until she could barely walk, until she was limping, and then until she could not walk at all. Her knees required months of therapy."  

She said of the experience, “I think it’s really healthy to lose things or to give things up for a while, to deprive yourself of certain things. It’s always a good learning experience, because I felt like it really was like, ‘I must learn to walk again.’ I had to walk out all that stuff, and I knew it was stupid, and I kept on walking.”

It made me think of Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump in the scene where he just starts walking, like he needed to walk out all the pain and frustration of his disappointments, of his whole life.  He walked and walked, and soon he had a following.  Some probably thought he was crazy, but many found him inspiring.  I think Fiona is the same kind of icon.  Is she crazy?  Or is she someone who just embraces the moment?  Is it crazy to live that way?

There are moments when I would love to just start walking.  I'd pack a backpack with a few clothes, a can opener, and some money, I'd pick a direction, and I'd move my feet.  I'd leave my head in the dust, leave my bills and obligations, and carry myself forward until my knees gave out, until my body was as wasted as Fiona Apple's, until I was as hairy and clear-eyed as Forrest Gump.  I'd walk until my heart was the only thing still beating.

It took seven years for Apple to finish and release this album.  I wonder if that's because she had long days, like the one I had today, where all she could do was fall asleep in the sun or read poetry or admire the way a neighbor's cat allows a complete stranger to take it in her arms and stroke its spine.  If I live in the buzzed seconds of a honeybee's flight, if I linger in the shadows cast by a fence lit up at night, if I smell the flowers growing there, will I eventually finish writing something so raw it chafes my bones?  Will my audience hear the clanging of a muscle walking free?