Through the doorway to choice and hope were the saddest girls I have ever met. Not because someone beat them or because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother.
My rage became nuclear. But I did my time. I exited the program with a certificate. I wanted to punch my mother - my mother the puffy hypocrite, the woman currently putting away a fifth of vodka a day - in the face. But she was the same woman who would sign the signature on my scholarship papers a year later. So I did not punch my mother’s mouth off of her face. I just thought this: get out. Hold your breath until you can leave. You are good at that. Perhaps the best. This woman’s pain could kill you.
Later in life, after I flunked out of college, I lived alone in Austin in a crappy-ass efficiency off of the freeway. I got into some more trouble living on my own that led to another round of mandatory drug and alcohol counseling for six weeks in a very strange basement of a medical clinic serving underprivileged folks. Poor people, Mexicans, unwed mothers, African Americans, and me.
There, I was meant to “find meaning in life’s traffic through clearing spiritual barriers.” A different healing slogan. More self righteous hypocritical Christians. There was even a woman in my sessions named “ Dorothy.” My mother’s name. Or The Wizard of Oz. I did my time there too, and left with yet another certificate. Trust me when I say I definitely found “meaning in life’s traffic.” Eventually.
So then this is not an addiction story.
It’s just that I have a sister who walked around for nearly two years when she was 17 with razor blades in her purse seeing if she could outlive the long wait waiting to get out of family.
Her first round.
It’s just that I had a mother who ate a whole bottle of sleeping pills at middle age with only her daughter the swimmer at home to witness the will of it.
Her first round.
I know that will well now. It’s the will of certain mothers and daughters. It comes from living in bodies that can carry life or kill it.
It’s the will to end.
Crooked Lovesong
PHILLIP DID WRITE ME A SONG. HE DID. AND IT WASN’T about how my life was spiraling away from bold swimmer toward comfortably numb. It wasn’t about the three abortions I’d had before I was 21. It wasn’t even about how much money I’d won drinking Texans under tables. Or all the nights I made him break into other peoples’ homes the way my father had broken into me.
The song he wrote for me was mostly instrumental. But you have to understand, and my archangel and his lover will back me up on this - he could play the acoustic guitar better than … you know, James Taylor. So the song took on a rather epic quality. Way before Windham Hill. But there was one, small, tender refrain that would come out of nowhere, or rather, it would come from the very heart of the music, deeper than anything I’d known, and it went like this: Children have their dreams to hang on to. How they fly, and take us to the moon. They flow from you. They flow from you.
The first time I heard it? Sitting on a driftwood log at our wedding, which was on the beach of Corpus Christi, Texas. And it wasn’t just me who couldn’t breathe from the jesusfucking - christknot in my throat and the salted water pouring out of my eyes rivaling the ocean. The whole posse of people there bawled. Nothing nothing nothing nothing about me deserved it. But very deep down in me, very tiny, very afraid, was a girl who smiled from within the cavernous place I’d hidden her.
Is that love? Was it? I still don’t know. It’s possible. But none of us are any good at naming it. It comes and then goes. Like songs do. I do know this: it’s the kind of thing that happens in stories.
Phillip and I tried to make a go of it as something called “married.” In Austin, Texas. I don’t know how to explain why we went busto. OK, that’s a big fat lie. I know exactly why we went busto, but I don’t want to have to say it. Look, I’ll tell you later. OK?
While we were trying to be married in Austin he got a job - the only job he could find - at a sign-making company. That’s what happens to artists like him - a man with the talent of the most revered painters in art history has to go work at a sign factory. I got a job with ACORN. Yep, that ACORN. But I didn’t give a shit about humanity or common cause or grass roots. By then, there wasn’t much I gave a shit about. I’d so colossally failed athlete/student/wife/woman at that point I felt like something an animal puked up. A human fur ball.
This is something I know: damaged women? We don’t think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It’s threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well. Seriously. Like abandoning a child at the bottom of a well because it’s better than the life she is facing. Not quite killing my little girl me, but damn close.
So I set to work destroying things.
The first thing I did was get drunk one night and punch Phillip in the face. Yep, I punched the most beautiful talented musician and painter I will ever meet in my life, also the most passive and gentle man I have ever met, right in the face. As hard as I could. Wanna know what I said? I said, “ You don’t want anything. You are killing me with your not wanting anything.” Classy. Astute. Mature. Emotionally stunning. I am my father’s daughter.
The second thing I did was get fired from ACORN. Which is hard to do. But I hated it. I hated having to go out into the hot Texas sun and knock on door after door begging assholes for money when all they cared about was their next latte and what pair of jeans that cost more than my rent they were about to buy. I’d go to maybe 10 houses or so, enough houses to get beer money. Then I’d sit on curbs and smoke pot and drink beer. Then I’d fill in my canvassing sheets with made up addresses and names.
The third thing that happened is I got pregnant. I’m still not sure why, I took my birth control pills regularly. And more and more JT and I were not making love - shocker. But a seed went up and against all odds, in. Breaking my fucking heart.
Look here it is straight no chaser. The me I was if I leave Phillip out of it? Abortion. But something about him and something even deeper down inside me - like a hidden blue smooth stone - it all made that impossible for me to choose. And yet, there was no way to keep pretending the life we had together was anything but a sad ass country song, so as my belly bump turned into a hill, I did the only thing I could do, given the life I’d frankensteined. I called my sister in Eugene where she worked as a Professor of English at the University of Oregon and asked her if I could live with her. Across her leaving me as a child, across the waters of our age difference, across her life as a successful academic and my life as a reckless fireball. The fact was, we were both adult women now. Living adult women lives. Meaning we had something very deeply in common: the tyranny of culture telling women who they should be.
It’s not possible to explain to you how quickly and profoundly she said yes. Maybe she was waiting for me to come back to her. Bringing my big as a house belly with me. To birth and raise a child together, to make a family outside the lines. Because it was the only story I could think of that might live. And though she’d left me to save her life, she somehow knew how to make a space for sister, child, self. But I know too that it was a sacrifice to bring a daughter in from the cold.