I have some good news and some not-all-that-surprising news.
The good news: The doctors say my cancer is gone.
The not-all-that-surprising news: I’m ceasing publication of Full Grown People, for real this time. I have absolutely loved working with our amazing staff photographer Gina Easley and all the amazing writers. We had a great run, I think. (Check out the “about” page for some horn-tooting.) There are a lot of reasons I’m shuttering the magazine, but it boils down to my just wanting to free up some of my creative energy and direct it toward other projects.
Thanks, my lovelies, for the community and support over the years—it means a lot to me. Here’s hoping our paths will cross again!
I have a bit of personal bad news to share. I’ve been diagnosed with what’s classified as a head and neck cancer; I don’t want to go into it further publicly until I can process it better/write about it. It’s curable—(and let me emphasize this for my beloveds) CURABLE!—but the treatment (radiation and chemo) will be a rough ride. I thought this might a better year for me than last, what with Full Grown People coming back strong and my book out with some really nice reviews and a short essay I wrote that went maybe a teensy bit viral. Plus, I had a spell of unrelated breast cancer treatment at the end of 2021 and the beginning of this year, and I’d hoped that was the bad thing in my charmed life.
I’m telling you this to explain why FGP is going away—again—at least for the short term. Long-term, I don’t know. I don’t know how many times you can start and stop a publication. I don’t know what I’ll want my life to look like when I come out the other side of this. I’ll still be me of course, so it’ll be some combo of reading and writing and editing.
Until we meet again on the flip side, thanks for being such a stellar community!
I first saw Frank when I was twelve, a jittery small-town California girl during my first week in a public school at the weedy edge of town after six years at tiny St. Thomas Elementary School. I would now eat lunch in a cafeteria instead of bringing a mortifyingly wholesome meal packed by my mother. I was in the cafeteria line, thinking less about the sulfurous vats ahead than about where I would sit with my tray. Then I beheld this boy on the other side of the counter helping the lunch ladies, wearing a hair net and smock just as they did. It did nothing to diminish his beauty. I experienced my first sexual swoon, my brain lighting up with the astounding and unprecedented words, “I want to kiss him.”
Not that I had never fallen in love before. Since the age of three, I had been in love with my cousin Judy’s husband Pete. I’m sure every girl or gay boy was in love with him. He was as handsome as a movie star (think George Maharis, but laughing instead of smoldering) and always kind, and he was the star of the summer lake scene. He once jumped from the top of a boathouse in a tuxedo to land on one ski and slalom merrily away from a wedding, a ten-foot watery rooster tail bursting in his wake.
But I never desired Pete; I just adored him. I hadn’t desired any boys in my short life. I hardly noticed them unless I wanted to beat them at some game. A few had crushes on me. A boy named Clifton sat near me in second grade and pointed to a picture of a pot of honey in a book and then gestured at me, suggesting that I was sweet. A boy named Jimmy—he looked just like The Little Prince, which was not an asset—gave me a necklace and took me to the movies (with his parents) in the third grade. But I was dedicated to horses and books and searching for arrowheads and buried temples. I wasn’t interested in boys or even flattered by their attention.
But that vision of Frank flipped a switch. I tried to spot him when we were outside for recess—there were eight classrooms each for seventh and eighth grade, and he was in the eighth grade wing—and observed him from behind the curtain of my friends. His dark hair was on the long side before long hair was a countercultural totem, and he was skinny—pretty much everyone was skinny in the early 1960s. He might not have been as shy as I was, but he seemed quiet and nice. He looked unvarnished by money and expectation, and this appealed to me and, maybe, set a pattern for life. My parents were among the more monied families in our little agricultural town, and it was a constant source of discomfort. Frank was different from the boys my parents would later urge me toward, boys who had been given everything and still hungered for more.
I couldn’t help talking about him to my friends, and they couldn’t help teasing me. When my friend Kimmie and I rode my horse, me in front and her behind, she’d nuzzle the back of my neck and croon, “It’s Frank!” When my friends and I danced into the sunshine of recess, they’d sing out his name, knowing that would make me bolt back into the shade. I’m sure he had some inkling that there was this seventh-grade girl who was crazy about him, but the more I pined for him, the more terrifying his presence was. My friends finally approached him and set up a rendezvous that was supposed to take place in one of the hallways during recess, but I panicked and hid in one of the bathroom stalls until long after the bell rang.
And that was that. However much (or little!) his interest had been piqued, it was clear that getting to know me was too much trouble. I think I stopped talking about him to my friends, and they stopped teasing me. He graduated from middle school and went on to high school. I went on to boarding school and off to a college across the country and wound up living in Cleveland for forty years. I never saw him again.
Until I found him on Facebook a few months ago during a bout of procrastination that included looking up girl friends from long ago—including a clever mean girl who made my life miserable off and on—a few old boyfriends, and Frank. And there he was, fifty-eight years later, still in the Sacramento Valley near our hometown, still pretty freaking cute despite the inevitable weathering. But now a Trump supporter, now with a wife who looks like a blonde, toned Fox News host, now an insurance agent.
Friends ask if I have spent hours looking at his profile because I daydream about, “What if we had gotten together?” But that’s not it. I’ve had a lovely man in my life for going on six years—I finally learned to say “I want YOU”—and don’t muse about other possible pairings.
Part of the fascination is that stalking Frank on Facebook allows me—a liberal now in Portland, Oregon—to ponder the nuances of someone who’s fulminating at the other end of the blue/red spectrum. Because he keeps surprising me, both with the extremity of his Trumpy ideas and with ideas that people like me assume people like him never have.
I roll my eyes when he calls California “Commiefornia” and when he calls the governor “Nuisance” instead of Newsom. Also when he posts right-wing articles from faux news websites like www.yourbrotherinlawsbasement.com—I made that one up, but they’re all about that credible. Most infuriating, most bewildering, he and most of his friends are among the nearly one-third of Americans who think Trump lost because of voter fraud. One of his Facebook friends claimed to have voted for Biden 400 times in Florida and another 700 times in Pennsylvania. Hilarious!
But he doesn’t completely insulate himself with Trump dogma. Among his Facebook friends are a few that cop to different thoughts. He posted a question several months ago asking who voted for Biden, and when a few brave souls admitted that they had, he was respectful. And when one of his Trumpy friends said that the real criminals were the people who voted for Obama, Frank outed himself as one of them—leaving me to agonize again at the cultural shredding that’s been going on since he and I were on the same side of the ballot.
Frank has surprised me in other ways, too. Despite succumbing to so much misinformation—maybe we should call it malinformation—he routinely pushes everyone he knows to get the Covid vaccine and puts up with no small amount of shit for it, all in a good-humored way. When the vaccines first started to become available, he announced over and over where people in his area might find them. Now he posts stats from local hospitals showing the huge discrepancy in illness and mortality between those who are vaccinated and those who are not—and he keeps at it, no matter how many wacky claims some of his friends make in response.
And I don’t know what inspired it, but one day last March he posted a big colorful box saying, “Stand Together Against Asian America Hate.” Fourteen of his friends liked that post, but no one commented. It seemed a risky thing to say if you’re running in a deep red crowd and you revere a former president who seems eager to stoke hatred of Asian Americans. I was proud of him. I almost gave a thumbs up to the post myself—just as I’ve almost argued with many of his other posts—but am determined to remain an anonymous stalker, one who will soon ditch this preoccupation altogether.
Still, I’ve come to realize that I would probably like Frank if I knew him in person. Not “like like,” as my grandchildren would say, but appreciate him even though I disagree with most of what he thinks and would probably loathe many of his friends. He seems kind and is always posting messages about various people in the community who need help. Most of his recent posts have been about the fires that ripped through the west coast. We could at least share our anguish about that.
I can’t help but wonder how much more we would share if I hadn’t left my hometown, along with everyone else in my family. We’ve all learned over the past five or so years how much individuals are shaped by the company we keep and the communities in which we live, how both taste and truth seem to have their own terroir. Would I look more like his female friends than the women I’ve surrounded myself with in Portland, all of us flaunting our gray hair instead of dying it? Would I still have two different containers of artisanal kimchi in my refrigerator? Would I be reading different books—maybe more Jody Picoult and less Elena Ferrante? And would I be simmering along with Frank—sometimes with humor, sometimes with fury—about Trump’s claim that the election was stolen? My old crush’s Facebook page brings that other possible self into focus, and it’s hard to look away from her.
•••
KRISTIN OHLSON is the author of The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, which looks at the movement to create a new agriculture that respects nature, heals landscapes, and produces plenty of food. Based in Portland, Oregon, she is an independent journalist who has published articles in the New York Times, Discover, Gourmet, and many other publications. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing and Best American Science Writing. Her new book, Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World, will be published by Patagonia in September, 2022.
Suddenly, I found myself living in Brooklyn, in the same building as my twenty-five-year-old son Tobi. His presence there made my move feel grounded and comforting, like it made more sense.
“You framed me!” he joked when I told him I was moving in upstairs from him, and added, “No judging of me, promise?”
“Honey, no judging of me,” I retorted. I was newly single at fifty-four and had fantasies of living it up. Thankfully he laughed.
I was going to live by myself for the first time in my life, and the thought overwhelmed but also excited me. Mostly excited. My twenty-three years-long marriage to the father of my three sons had ended in divorce ten years earlier, and six years later, when the boys launched from the nest, I followed my new partner Tony to Maine, where he had retired. Now I had broken up with him and moved out.
Ours was a relationship that had felt bashert —meant to be—on so many levels, it used to make us giddy. Both Tony and I had emotional and exuberant personalities, and he was a convert to Judaism as was I; he was a professor of French and I had a Ph.D. in French, and we both yearned to live in a more northern climate (he is a native of Maine and I of Norway) than the hot and humid Connecticut where we had each raised our combined large brood of kids, nine in all. We also shared a challenge: neither of us was particularly good at letting go of a disagreement before it spiraled into an exhaustive fight and sour moods that could easily ruin the day or, worst-case scenario, turn our much longed-for Sabbath, a day of peaceful rest and loving, into a period of disconnect and silence. Though we usually managed to rally and turn things around, when the latest storm hit, I felt I had reached my limit, and I wanted out.
When I left Tony, I felt as if I was facing a huge, white canvas: the possibilities seemed endless and thrilling, but the vastness of this unexpected and open space was also scary. I was free, but now what? A text pinged on my phone from my son’s landlord, a family friend: there was another opening in his building. Did I know anyone who might be interested?
•••
Even though the apartment was rent-stabilized, nothing about this made any financial sense, but I wanted to listen to my guts, not shy away from change just because it would be a challenge, wasn’t the “safe” thing. I was in my third semester of a low-residency MFA program and bills ticked in from the university every month, and I was still paying for my two younger sons’ college educations. I knew deep inside that an impulsive move during an emotional upheaval was probably not the wisest path, but I quickly imagined a new beginning and fantasized wildly about how I would re-invent my mid-life from sleepy Maine to hipster Brooklyn. I was going to be a New Yorker, after all! It had been a fantasy of mine since I first left my childhood home in Oslo, Norway, at nineteen and came to America as an au-pair, nearly thirty-five years ago.
“Can we talk about this?” Tony tried, as I packed my personal belongings from our house in the quintessential New England college town where it sat steps from the quaint campus and lush town green. “Please don’t go,” he pleaded, “What we have is too precious, Nina!” But my heart was hardened, and I was exhausted from our latest debacle. I didn’t see all that preciousness now; all I could say was, “No.”
Our Maine house was built in 1865 and had an adjoining, raw barn with cracks in the walls and a two-seater, wooden outhouse; “the honey-pot” Tony called the ancient privy and thought it was the most romantic thing ever. When I moved up from Connecticut, we renovated the barn and turned it into a colorful and glorious AirBnB where we hosted happy tourists during the summer, and family and friends during the year. We’d put our hearts and souls into cultivating the garden where tomatoes, kale, and blueberries thrived, and the vibrant colors in our flower beds brightened our days; Cosmos, Zinnias, Coneflowers, and Bachelor’s Buttons, their heads turned toward the sun on summer mornings, we’d sip our coffee and read the paper in our blue and green Adirondack chairs facing each other, feeling blessed.
Now I was driving the twenty-five-foot U-Haul truck south, filled with odd pieces of furniture I had gathered from the house, a few flea market finds, and suitcases stuffed with my clothes. I made a strategic stop at IKEA in New Haven on the way south and picked up a simple, pine bed frame and a white, round, dining table with four aqua colored plastic chairs, their contemporary design totally out of character for me who normally prefers things showing the imperfect patina of age and use.
I navigated through narrow city streets and completed a gutsy parallel parking stunt under low hanging branches that creaked ominously across the roof of the truck. Tobi and his roommate greeted me from the apartment building stoop. “Hey mamma, welcome home!” he said with grin and gave me one of his delicious bear hugs. They helped me move in to the top floor, one-bedroom apartment with hardwood floors and high ceilings. Located across the street from Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in a once-elegant, pre-war brick building, its old-world charm had dwindled over the decades but was still palpable. I was in love.
I quickly got to know my new neighbors, some whose families had lived in the building for generations. I recognized the faces of the owners of the shabby bodegas on Franklin Street and was on first name basis with Rawl at the Laundromat and Maggie at the coffee shop owned by the Palestinian grocers next door. She called me “mami” and knew I liked oat milk in my coffee and capers on my bagel.
In the apartment, I pulled up multiple layers of grungy linoleum from the kitchen floor and covered the mismatched and crooked floor tiles in the bathroom with soft bathmats. I splurged on a teal green, velour sleeper couch, and I painted the kitchen wall orange. In a whirlwind I nested like a fervent mammal expecting pups and turned the rundown place into a cozy and colorful lair. Candles flickered everywhere, plants perched on windowsills, and jazz piped from the speakers. I relished living by myself, something I had never experienced before. My son even said he loved having me close by, especially when I cooked dinners for him upstairs and stayed away from his messy den of iniquity downstairs.
•••
After a brief period of separation, Tony came to Brooklyn for a visit. We had been in touch via email, and as days turned into weeks, something softened in me. We were both wordsmiths and romantically inclined, and early tentative exchanges turned warmer until eventually, we agreed to see each other. He said he wasn’t excited about coming to the apartment that symbolized our break-up, but he made the journey anyway. I looked forward to welcoming him and made sure I had his favorite gin in the freezer.
Having him next to me again felt really good, and after four days and a few difficult conversations, we decided to not give up on our couple after all. We agreed on a compromise: I’d keep the Brooklyn apartment and divide my time between Maine and the City.
“I’m happy in my own company,” I told him, as I tried to explain how much I had relished my alone-time. “I’ll need to be able to have some of this, moving forward.” We were going to work on our relationship, and soon I was back north for a visit. We made plans for an extended trip to Israel, where Tony has kids and grandkids.
But then Covid-19 happened, and the trickle of strange information rapidly turned into a deluge of scary statistics, followed by travel advisories, lockdowns, and cancelled flights.
Plans changed for everyone. The young academic couple that was subletting my Brooklyn apartment for the spring returned to Spain, as libraries, universities, and archives closed their doors. This meant I was stuck with the rent. Two of my three sons lost income due to the pandemic and needed extra support from their father and me. I kept knocking myself —see what happens when you act on impulse?—and deep inside, a harsh voice kept telling me the whole Brooklyn idea had been foolish.
Yet, something had shifted between my partner and me since I had taken the apartment, and we had both spent some time alone. The heat of the fights had cooled and our hearts had thawed from the frost that made believing in our couple seem impossible. We were able to recall the reasons we had fallen in love in the first place, everything we shared, and how much we loved all that and each other. So, I stayed in Maine for what we agreed would be “a relationship in process.” We were getting along surprisingly well during the many weeks long shelter-in-place spring.
During New York’s most dire pandemic days, a woman from Bangladesh visiting her son in the City reached out. She needed a place to stay until things quieted down—could she sublet? “Your apartment seems like such a happy, comfortable space,” her son said in our Zoom meeting, sitting next to his mom, translating back and forth from Bengali. I was thrilled to offer his mom the apartment, and he was grateful that she would have a warm and welcoming home in which to stay safe.
I scroll through the colorful photos of the Brooklyn apartment and wonder when I will be able to return. I love the urban dwelling I created as a true “room of my own,” yet back in Maine, waiting out the lockdown, I was a better partner. More patient and compassionate, I held Tony’s hand on our walks beneath the pines, and as spring turned to summer and summer to fall, I sensed renewed hope for a future. I realized that although I’m at home in more places than one, my heart has found its way back to my bashert.
•••
NINA B. LICHTENSTEIN is a native of Oslo, Norway, who divides her time between Maine and Tel Aviv. She has a PhD in French literature and an MFA from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. Her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Tablet, Brevity, Hippocampus, Lilith, and AARP’s The Ethel, among other places.
Just before I turned forty-two, I was laid up for a couple of days with a stomach bug. On the third morning, I woke up with my stomach still sour and a new symptom: my breasts tingled. The pit of my stomach plummeted to the floor. I knew.
While my husband and our three kids were at a pickup soccer game, I snuck out to a drugstore that I had never walked into before, in order not to run into anyone I knew. I needed to purchase a pregnancy test. In private.
Of course, I ran into someone I knew. “Oh, hi!” I said, too brightly, thankful the purchase was hidden.
“How are you?” she asked, lipstick and blush painted on a little too brightly, overly cheery tone of voice to match.
“Fine.” I smiled. “You?”
“Yes,” she said. Somehow, in the dingy store, it seemed absolutely obvious that we both were lying.
I waited until she left to approach the register. My periods had become irregular and infrequent over the year or so leading up to that sticky summer morning. My husband and I had played a little fast and loose when it seemed safe. Maybe “safe” was harder to call during perimenopause? At my fortuitously still-empty house, I peed on a stick, then I left the bathroom for exactly two minutes. When I returned, there was an almost florescent pink line.
“Fuck,” I said. Almost instantly, I called my midwife. For me, there was no question about the pregnancy. From the outside, my decision made little to no sense. I was, at the time, actively twisted in longing for another baby. I very much wanted to adopt.
“Fuck,” my husband said later that afternoon once I shared the news.
“Pam already called me back,” I reported. “I’m going to call Monday to set up an appointment for the procedure. I had hoped they could do it in the office, but they don’t. We have to go to the Planned Parenthood clinic.”
•••
I was barely into this unintended pregnancy, and even my skin seemed to quake with nausea. Although I felt extremely ill, and although during the pregnancy before this at age thirty-eight, I’d ended up on anti-nausea medication, physical distress wasn’t my biggest fear. I was most afraid of the depression that had accompanied all of my pregnancies. I didn’t want to impose that upon my family. I worried, too, a few years past thirty-eight, any pregnancy would likely be that much more taxing on my body. The odds for complications had risen dramatically. As I saw it, this pregnancy did not promise a happy ending.
I’d had two abortions, one at seventeen, the other at twenty. This time, I was surprised by how different the prospect of abortion felt from decades earlier. When I first got pregnant, very unintentionally, I was seventeen. At the time, I hadn’t fathomed my body as capable of pregnancy and a baby. Intellectually, I knew it was all possible; I hadn’t embodied this possibility as a high school senior, though. Emotionally, I’d been practically paralyzed with overwhelm and shock. I found out about the pregnancy after an appointment to obtain birth control at our local Family Planning clinic.
In the aftermath of the decision and procedure, I was sad and shaken. I was stunned that my body’s autonomy seemed precarious. If anyone took legal abortion away (or no parental consent or birth control, or so many things that did happen to shrink our autonomy), I would have been stranded. All those years ago, I’d also discovered how quiet abortion was. I was surprised by how lonely privacy could feel. In high school, I was ashamed, at least somewhat. I was afraid of gossip. Like other peers who’d, I learned so much later, had abortions in high school, we kept our own secrets. I’m certain the isolation increased my sadness.
Activism, which I came to with a vengeance after my abortion, became my route to breaking self-imposed silence. I got it: the personal was political. I spoke out. I found community. I found a voice and purpose, because I’d experienced how close I’d come to having my life steered for me, simply because people objected to my right to make decisions about my own body.
In my early forties, having birthed three babies, I wasn’t sad. I was clear. But I did keep my decision private because I worried people would question my “no” to pregnancy and “yes” to wanting to adopt (not that my personal logic was anyone’s to question) and I didn’t want to justify any of my choices. What surprised me was that people seemed to want me to feel sad.
The few friends I told spoke to me in somber tones about the decision. Mary said, “You will feel sad; that’s inevitable.”
Another friend thought I was mourning my waning, wonky periods and accompanying fertility. These friends weren’t in the room when my third baby emerged. Despite nearly hemorrhaging afterwards, I’d remained giddy, even euphoric to no longer be pregnant. I had just turned thirty-nine. I’d birthed three healthy, beautiful humans. I had felt terrible for months on end three times over. Already, during this very early pregnancy, I felt so miserable I just wanted to sleep away the nauseated days and nights.
“I’m really certain about this,” I told Mary. “This part, it’s very clear to me. I am not going to birth another baby, as amazing as my babies are.”
•••
As my husband drove us toward the clinic, I glanced out of the car window. The Connecticut River ribboned beside the highway briefly. I was nervous and I was nauseous. I didn’t know which sensation was stronger. We pulled into the clinic parking lot.
Many years earlier, I had worked in two different clinics as an abortion counselor. Neither clinic existed any longer. The availability of abortion services had decreased dramatically. When I’d worked at those clinics, neither had metal detectors at the front door. Protestors were rare. On this morning, there weren’t any protestors. Barely inside the building, we were stopped to go through a metal detector. An older, slightly grizzled man with a very warm smile screened us. Clearly, he wanted to put people at ease. A metal detector rarely put me at ease, truthfully, because I’d feel better thinking one wasn’t remotely necessary. I would have felt better believing no one cared about a choice I made for my body and my family.
The machine’s stainless steel gleamed a little too brightly for the dingy hallway. I didn’t have anything to hide, except I wondered whether maybe I did, since my friends seemed to expect me to be sadder. My husband wanted me not to feel sick. He wanted me to be not pregnant and not to want another baby. I wanted to feel better—and to have another baby. We took an elevator. My stomach flipped from the motion, and maybe our conflicting desires.
We were buzzed into the clinic waiting room. I registered a sea of very young women. They were like the woman I’d been and the women I’d helped long ago. Some came with fidgety boyfriends. Others were accompanied by resigned moms or less resigned older sisters. Still others brought nervous friends. The waiting room itself felt large, worn, and dim. Generalized agitation made an odd feng shui. I felt nauseated, but weirdly calm. In the new but wholly familiar waiting room, I remembered that I kind of loved abortion. Not loved it, like, what fun, but loved that we had, less robustly, but still, this right to determine our reproductive lives. Abortion had been many things to me, and one was empowering.
There were forms and there was waiting. We kind of glanced furtively at each other a bunch. I leaned over to whisper, “I feel old.”
“Me, too,” my husband replied.
Eventually, I was called back to see a counselor. She was about the age I’d been, maybe a touch older, when I did her job. She smiled at me. “Hello,” she said, warmly. “Part of my job is to make sure you are certain of your decision. I also need to know whether you have a birth control plan going forward.”
“I used to have your job, way back when,” I told her, as I affirmed that I was indeed certain of my decision and I did have a birth control plan. “We played a little too loosely with perimenopause.” I shrugged. Life happens. Mistakes get made.
She nodded. “I understand.” She then directed me to a changing area. There, a few women waited, wearing paper gowns.
“Well, this is chilly,” one woman said.
“Seriously,” another said. It was kind of like any locker room, except the women were nervous and wore paper gowns. There were a few laughs under our breaths and a few more complaints about having to wait in the gowns.
“I’m just glad I’m going to get to move on with my life,” one woman said. “I’m in school, and I’m going to finish. I went back. I have a daughter. I can’t have a baby right now, and I’m relieved I’m not going to.”
“Amen,” another said. “My body.”
“We shouldn’t have to be lucky to make this choice,” I said.
“Seriously,” the woman who had gone back to school said. “Men don’t know. They can’t know.”
Sitting on that bench, I remembered a story a friend told me about when she’d had an abortion after college. She was living in New York City. There was a bomb threat at the Planned Parenthood, where at the time, she was in the midst of having her procedure. Whisked from the room immediately after the abortion in her gown toward the elevator, not the recovery room. When she told me about this day, she said that suddenly her personal act wasn’t hers.
“I realized my having an abortion, my obtaining health care, was an act of civil disobedience,” she’d said, her dark eyes shining. “Turned out, there wasn’t a bomb.” She was able to return to the clinic, recover her clothing, and move on. Her experience changed her feelings about her abortion and not in the way the people who’d threatened the clinic had hoped. She’d become a stronger advocate for reproductive justice than ever before.
•••
My abortion procedure didn’t take long. I’d received medication that afforded me some woozy relief. In the recovery room, I drank ginger ale and ate graham crackers. The dusty sweetness turned to paste in my mouth. I felt slow, relieved, and a little worse for wear. I wondered whether I’d feel sad.
That afternoon, as we drove home, I breathed in without nausea. I exhaled my worry about what might happen next in our lives. I felt cautious, strong, determined, weary. Not only was I angry that anyone believed I shouldn’t have choices, I was angry anyone would think that I should apologize about my decisions. I felt brazenly unapologetic. What’s wrong, I believe, is that we’ve gotten to a place where apology is expected from a person in need of basic reproductive health care. Justice includes the dignity to access health care—and to do so because it’s every person’s right. Our culture never made this leap. We’re slipping further from a no apologies ideal. I do have that daughter I dreamt we’d adopt. She’s thirteen, now, and faces a future where her bodily autonomy becomes more threatened as the Supreme Court reconsiders abortion. Apology, as a thing to worry about or be angry about, may seem frivolous. I disagree. I think an expectation of apology is the beginning of losing our whole selves.
•••
SARAH WERTHAN BUTTENWIESER is a writer and community organizer, based in Northampton, Massachusetts. A graduate of Hampshire College and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, she’s written for many publications, including the recent anthology Tick Tock: Essays on Parenthood after 40.
I’d been looking for her for twenty-six years, periodically Googling both her name and the various ways I thought her workplace might come up. But Penny Harris, my beloved childhood friend, remained invisible. And then last week, I was struck with one of those ideas that spark through the air: although neither of us had ever used her full name back then, I should try it now. Penelope.
In an instant, there she was: Penelope Jane Harris. It was her obituary. She died in August 2019. I was too late.
The memory of the last time I’d seen her haunted me.
•••
“Name’s Penny,” she said. “What’s yours?”
Penny wore thick-framed glasses, her straight black hair cut in a pudding bowl, pale skin erupting into angry patches of red. We met at a neighborhood birthday party where neither she nor I knew how we’d come to be invited. While the in-crowd girls in their frilly dresses gossiped and giggled and played Pin the Tail on the Donkey in the den, Penny and I sat on the turquoise brocade sofa in the living room swooning over our favourite book, Little Women. She preferred intrepid Jo, and I my namesake, saintly Beth. I told Penny that I wept for days after reading the tragic chapter where Beth says goodbye to Jo and then dies with the sun shining on her sweet face.
Penny’s head drooped. She touched her eye, then leaned over and smeared a wet finger down my cheek.
“Real tears,” she whispered.
“Wow. She’s weirder than I am,” I thought, touching the damp on my face, “and she doesn’t care.”
We were soulmates.
This was Halifax in 1962. She was thirteen. I was eleven.
•••
My new best friend lived in a child’s drawing kind of house, a white box with a pointy roof and black-shuttered windows. The windows were always closed, the downstairs rooms spotless and airless. Penny’s dad was tall and hurried, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland; when Penny introduced us, he bent quickly to shake my fingertips and vanished. Her mother was short and wiry with sharp eyes and a sharp voice. She was always tired, never offered Kool-Aid and cookies like mothers were supposed to. It was clear she wasn’t keen on me, Penny’s only good friend, coming over to play, but she never allowed her daughter to visit my house, I didn’t know why. She ordered us to keep quiet. Quiet!
We tiptoed to Penny’s room and closed the door. Playing outside, even in the backyard, was not an option; my friend was always wheezing with allergies and asthma. She also had eczema, scaly bumpy patches on her elbows and the backs of her knees that made her scratch until she bled, although she struggled not to. “My scratching,” she whispered once, “makes Mum very angry.”
We played with dolls, real ones and paper ones, while we talked about our schools and books and dreams. One day she wanted to tell me a secret.
“Guess what?” she murmured, pushing her glasses back up her nose, as she did constantly. “I was adopted.”
I’d never met anyone who was adopted and wasn’t sure how to respond. “Neat,” I said, holding the shapely new Barbie paper doll we’d been dressing. “Were … were you in an orphanage and everything?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “I heard my real mother had tons of kids already and didn’t have room for me.”
“I hope you were in an orphanage, Pen,” I said, thinking of Anne of Green Gables. “That’s so romantic.”
She turned away. “When I see a woman with lots of kids,” she said, her finger tracing the bright paper dress in her lap, “I wonder if she’s my mother. I wonder if she ever changed her mind.”
I’d often imagined I was adopted. Surely my actual birth parents were nicer than the ones I was stuck with. But deep down I knew that was a fantasy, whereas, it shocked me to realize, Penny really did not know who her birth parents were.
I was a demonstrative girl and wanted to hug her, but I sensed it best to keep my distance. We never touched.
Penny was excited to invite me one Saturday for lunch with her parents. We sat stiffly in the dining room around a large mahogany table, exchanging awkward remarks, while her mother served Campbell’s tomato soup and Kraft cheese sandwiches, not quite enough for the four of us.
My family has lots of problems, I thought, but coming up with food and conversation is not one of them. If I’d been invited back for a meal, I would have found an excuse not to go. But I was never asked again.
•••
Penny and I were mad for figurines. When either of us had saved enough allowance, we’d get the bus downtown to Woolworth’s on Barrington Street and buy a new figurine, small china horses mostly. We gave them names: Violin, Dancer, Fanfare. One day, playing stables in her room, we decided to create special homes for our horses out of whatever we could find. I sprawled on the floor on one side of her bed, and she on the other, in silence all afternoon, making up dramas.
For some time, our afternoons together were dedicated to creating a miniature exhibition that we called Project X. I would decide, say, on a hospital scene and make beds out of cardboard and Kleenex, an operating room of Plasticine and matchboxes, a row of bandaged horses lined up, recovering. Wheezing on the other side, Penny was creating a fairy horse’s treehouse of old cheesecloth dusters, bits of jewellery, wood scraps glued together.
And then we had the thrilling notion to create an entire new world; words and ideas tumbling out, we pieced the story together. I became Helen Foster and she Kristine Foster, orphan twins—fraternal, not identical—whose parents had died in a terrible fire. We’d been sent to stay with our curmudgeonly Aunt Gwendolyn on Foster Island, off the coast of England. In real life, I was sturdy with short brown hair, but my willowy Helen was completely different, with blonde locks cascading to her waist and a delicate face and voice. Everyone loved Helen for her selfless kindness. Penny’s Kristine was a fierce, reckless tomboy always charming her way out of scrapes. “She looks like me,” said Penny, “only prettier.”
Foster Island was mostly fields and woods, so we had our own horses. Mine, Champ, was a golden palomino. Kristine’s Firefly was a pinto. We rode bareback.
Penny and I kept two diaries, one for Foster Island and one for our real lives. At home, I was miserably caught between my parents, who’d separated once and still frightened me with their quarrels. Though I’d been pressed into reluctant service as my mother’s confidante, my little brother, with his blonde curls and dimples, was the adored favorite of them both. The injustice of my exclusion from my father’s heart burned in me. Dad, a noisy social activist, intimated that girls who liked dolls and dresses were boring conformists. He wanted a rebellious tomboy, like my Foster Island sister Kristine.
But I was gentle Helen, and despite the pain caused me by others, I tried to forgive everyone and everything. “Helen,” I wrote in my Beth diary, “is a kind of saint with an indescribable inner radiance.” When my mother yelled that I should clean my room, or Dad smacked the side of my head for some misdemeanour, as he often did, I’d choke back tears and do my best to turn into Helen. In my room, I’d look around at the jumble and murmur, “Oh, dear Kristine, look what a mess you’ve made! I’ll clean it up for you.” And humming softly, I sorted the clothes, tidied the papers, put away the stacks of books. How good it felt to be someone else, neat and serene and cherished.
With all my miseries, however, I sensed in the way Penny crept about her sealed home that her life was way worse than mine. Although she was an only child, I never saw her parents hug her or even talk much to her. Sometimes when she opened the front door, I tried not to notice her swollen eyes. On those days, as I stepped inside, the white house felt darker than ever. But I pushed away any thoughts about my friend’s difficulties; maybe the chilly remoteness I sensed in her home was normal and happened in other homes. In all our time together, Penny and I never discussed our family situations or our parents. I caught glimpses of her real-life diary, covered with her big black scrawl, but never saw what she wrote. We only discussed Foster Island—how we, brave sisters, could thwart foolish, crabby Aunt Gwendolyn to get what we wanted.
Drawing of the cottage, courtesy Beth Kaplan
One afternoon, a new treat: Kristine and Helen discovered a perfect little house deep in the forest. We loved being on Foster Island, but the secret cottage was our favorite place. In my Helen diary, I drew a picture of it, hidden in the trees, with a thatched roof and bright sunny windows. There were matching hooked rugs in the bedroom, beside Kristine’s bed and mine. Champ and Firefly grazed in the field of wildflowers outside the front door.
By the time Penny turned fourteen, she had a bra and her period and had discovered pop music. “You don’t listen to the hit parade?” she asked one day, and I boiled at the condescension in her voice. She began to spend her money not on figurines but on 45s, which she insisted on playing for me, snapping her fingers. I told her “Louie Louie” was the stupidest song I’d ever heard. “I guess twelve is too young to get it,” she shrugged.
The change in my friend upset me. But still, most weekends, she and I sailed to our island and played there all day.
When Penny told me her father had taken a job in Victoria on the other side of the country, we both cried real tears. But immediately, we turned our separation into a story. Kris, we decided, was being sent far away to a special boarding school, but her unfortunate twin couldn’t go. Helen’s faithful German Shepherd had chased a rabbit onto the road, and she’d thrown herself in front of a speeding car to save him. Legs crushed, she was now confined to a wheelchair. But she bore her disability with infinite patience.
Penny and I swore to write to each other forever, and for a while we did, one letter from friend to friend, and another, in the same envelope, from sister to sister. I wrote to Penny that school was a drag and I was making a Hayley Mills scrapbook, and Helen told Kristine she was gaining strength in her legs and “Imight even walk with crutches one day!” There were also notes in Aunt Gwendolyn’s flowery script, hoping her far-away niece was doing her algebra homework and eating her lima beans.
Envelopes from my friend included scribbled missives to Aunt Gwendolyn from despairing teachers at Kristine’s school, while Penny wrote about the actual boarding school her parents had decided to send her to, which she liked a lot and where she’d made a friend. And then came the day Penny sent only one letter. “I can’t do Foster Island anymore,” she wrote. “I’m too old for little kid crap.”
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I was not ready to be exiled. Just a bit longer, please, I wanted to beg.
A few days later, I carefully hand-printed and mailed an official-looking document. “To Miss Kristine Foster,” it said. “We regret to inform you that Foster Island has been destroyed by a long dormant volcano. Everything on the island was buried except for a burned and twisted wheelchair. Please accept our sincerest apologies, and best wishes for your future.”
Penny did not reply.
•••
More than three decades later, I was invited to Vancouver to act in a play. A forty-five-year-old single mother, I was also a former actress attempting a comeback. One night, waiting for me at the stage door was a familiar form with dark pudding bowl hair, pale blotchy skin, and black-rimmed glasses. I knew her instantly. “Penny!” I exclaimed. “Real tears!”
We met for coffee, spilling over with fond reminiscences of Project X and Foster Island. I told her about the confused decade of my twenties, my marriage and divorce, my two children and recent work as a writer. Despite all those vivid fantasies, I said, I now write only nonfiction because I value true stories most. It has taken a long time and a lot of professional help, I said, but I feel pretty good about life.
At forty-seven, Penny had never had a partner and had always lived alone, but she enjoyed her work hunting down tax cheats for Canada Revenue. “I think I might be gay,” she said, looking sharply at me to see if I was shocked, “but I’m really not sure.” I told her many of my artsy friends were gay, and I’d even explored, briefly, if I was too. Another bond.
Waiting until the waitress had refilled our coffee cups and left, my friend leaned closer and told me softly that her mother had recently died.
“After the funeral,” she said, her face expressionless, “Dad finally apologized to me for what happened during my childhood.”
As she took a breath to go on, I knew. I knew what she was going to say.
“There was something really wrong with Mum,” Penny said, pushing her glasses back up her nose, her voice monotone. “I mean emotionally, mentally. She liked to torture me. My playtime with you was one of my only escapes.”
My stomach heaved as my friend talked about years of anguish at the hands of her mother. “She locked me in the basement—sometimes I didn’t even know why,” she said, as I shook my head in horror. “She beat me and mocked me when I cried. Or it was just that she wouldn’t give me anything to eat. No dinner for you for a week, she’d say.”
“Oh, my friend,” I said, appalled.
“Before I met you, my parents adopted a little boy, Sean,” she told me, chapped hands gripping her coffee cup. “He was the joy of my life. I’d run home from school to take care of him. Then one day, I got home and Sean was gone. Without a word of warning, my mother’d sent him back. She told me she couldn’t cope with him,” Penny said, “and if I wasn’t careful, the same thing would happen to me.”
I writhed in my seat, heartsick. “I should have done something, helped in some way,” I cried.
“Nobody knew what was going on, Beth,” she said, so quietly I could hardly hear. “No one.”
I made a move to hug my friend, to convey concern and care, but the prickly barrier surrounding her was as impenetrable as ever. Perhaps now as then, I thought, admitting vulnerability, allowing in compassion, would hurt too much.
We pledged to renew our correspondence—not by email, but by real mail, like always—and after my return home, the letters began to flow again. Being in touch with a treasured childhood friend, reading her familiar black scrawl, gave me immense pleasure; something vital and long missing had been found. I smiled to think how wise we’d been back then, two intense, unhappy girls who’d imagined themselves, with such vivid detail, into a kinder place. Though still anxious and hyper-sensitive, I was well on my way to feeling truly at home in the world. I hoped my friend was as well.
One day she wrote to say she had exciting news: she’d met a wonderful man and was madly in love. He was struggling financially, she said, with an unfair, demanding ex-wife and two children; last year, through no fault of his own, he’d lost his job. She had invited him to live at her place and would gladly support him until he got back on his feet. She was sure he’d soon find a job, and her life would be happier than it had ever been.
“Do you remember our secret cottage in the woods?” she wrote. “I feel like I live there now.”
“Yikes, no, Penny,” I said out loud. How could I not be concerned by what she’d described, her lonely susceptibility to what sounded like a manipulative man? Should I say something? I’d failed to help her a long time ago and must do so now. But how? Finally, thinking I might be the only person she trusted, wanting above all to protect her, I wrote a gentle letter, begging her to be careful with her heart.
I never heard from her again.
•••
After all those years of wondering about and trying to reach my friend, I wept to read the brevity of her obituary: Penelope Jane Harris, August 31 1948 – August 19 2019. There were no messages of condolence. I was desolate. If only just once I’d been able to offer an embrace, to express my love, my gratitude for her courage and her imagination and her friendship.
And then, by the miracle of the Internet, I discovered something else: a B.C. woman named Penelope Harris had donated two parcels of land to a local First Nation. I clicked further and found a series of photographs. This Penelope Harris had very short white hair and no glasses. But I knew the cheekbones, the eyebrows. Her lively face.
Penny had bought two small parcels of land near Prince George as an investment; decades later, the area still undeveloped, she’d given the land to the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation. In April 2019, she travelled from her home in Abbotsford to Prince George for a ceremony during which they’d celebrated her generosity.
“I feel there is nothing we can do to fix all the things we’ve done wrong as a society to Canada’s Aboriginal peoples,” she said in a speech to the local press. “The line we were all fed about what the Canadian identity was, how great the Canadian story was, that has now fallen to pieces for all to see. Good. We were all duped. We’ve been lied to for generations. But we know that now.
“What are we doing now to make things right?” she concluded.
In his response, the chief called her gift “reconciliation in action.”
“We will always think of Ms. Harris as one of us,” he said.
Penny died four months later.
The First Nation community gave my friend a beautiful black and red hand-embroidered jacket. In the photos, she’s wearing the ceremonial coat, and her face is radiant.
•••
BETH KAPLAN, a former actress, has taught memoir and personal essay writing at two Toronto universities for decades. She’s the author of four nonfiction books: two memoirs, a biography, and a guide to writing memoir that’s the textbook for her courses. Her next book, an essay compilation, is nearly finished. Her website and blog are at bethkaplan.ca.
My dog Hattie has anxiety. She is afraid of most things in a typical neighborhood: garage doors opening, people working in their garages, pick-up trucks, vans, school buses. She is afraid of landscapers and their trucks with all their equipment. Loud sounds scare her, so on garbage days when the wind blows hard and the trash cans blow over, she jumps. She is afraid of sudden movements, so children are especially frightening to her, especially when they are playing basketball in their driveways. But more than anything in this suburban world we live in, Hattie is afraid of roofers.
She can hear them from blocks away. The rhythmic pounding of the nail guns. Their ladders scraping against the driveway. Tail between her legs, ears pasted back on her head, she immediately begins pulling me, hard, toward the fastest route home. She enters a full-blown panic state and nothing I have tried—treats, kind words, pets and hugs—has ever gotten her out of it. She is gone to me. She is panicking.
Physiologists studying predator-prey interactions observe that the critical need to escape may explain why so much of our stress response is “built around the rapid mobilization of energy to the muscles.” Hattie is strong and she pulls me with all her might when she panics. The energy flowing to her muscles is intense, and it is evident that she is deeply afraid. My shoulders hurt for hours afterward.
On walks, I have trained myself to notice the things Hattie is afraid of, and I do so relatively quickly. We turn around and take a different route as soon as I see a landscaping truck parked in front of a house. If I notice a roofing sign or roofing materials in a yard, I avoid that street for at least four days. But I cannot anticipate it all. There are so many times when I can’t know what will frighten her. There are so many times when I’m caught off guard and her panic sets in and I’m struggling with a panicking dog who just wants to get home where it’s safe and it is all I can do to resist the tears that want to come. She pulls me so hard and the other two dogs don’t understand why we’re in such a hurry. The walk is no longer enjoyable because all we’re trying to do is escape fear.
•••
As a child and an adolescent, I was abused by my older sister. She would wander throughout the house seeking me out so she could punch me in the shoulder or hit me in the stomach. She would wait until our mother left the house and she would beat me in my bed while I tried to read a book. She would pick up the living room chair and chase me through the house, threatening to pummel me with it. She would punch me in the face until blood ran out of my nose and down my chin and onto my chest. She would call me a fat fuck and a cunt and a lesbian and a fucker and tell me that the minute Ma left the house I was dead. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
To get to her bedroom, Margie had to walk a few steps through mine. Thinking about it now, I wonder at the builders’ thought process. Who builds a house with a bedroom that is accessible only by entering another bedroom? Aren’t bedrooms supposed to be spaces of privacy? Whenever she took those few steps from my room into hers, she spewed insults at me, and I wonder now whether she did so even when I was not there, if doing so became so habitual to her as to become nearly meaningless. Many nights I was woken by her telling me I was a fucker or a goddamn lesbian or that she was going to kill me the next chance she got. From a deep sleep, I awake to hear, “You’re dead.”
Where could I go? How could I escape? I was in my home, in my bedroom, and I was not safe. I was being hunted.
•••
I teach writing to undergraduates. My favorite genre to teach is the personal essay, so I learn a lot about their interior lives. What I have learned during the pandemic is that we are living through a mental health crisis the likes of which I do not think we have seen before. The students I’m teaching right now have never lived in an everyday not punctuated by the catastrophic. They have never known what it is to just go from year to year to year with nothing particularly interesting happening except maybe a sleepover or a birthday party on the weekend. They were born post-9/11 into a world of school shootings and lockdown drills and mass shootings and the sense that wherever they went they could be at risk of being killed by a gun. I have sometimes thought, after a mass shooting, that no place is safe, that I risk my life when I walk onto campus or into Target or the grocery store, but there’s a part of me that is still buffered from that fear. That is the part of me who grew up in a time before school shootings, the part of me who went to school and felt safe, safer than I ever felt at home. There is a foundation of years in me that the new anxiety of gun culture cannot rattle. But for the students I see every day, there is no foundation of school as safety. School is a place away from the safety of home, a place where they must practice lockdown drills, hiding with their teacher in the corner after taking a spelling test.
For me, school was my safe place away from the vigilance I felt at home. At school I could relax. At school my teachers praised me for my reading, for my math, for my speed in just about everything I did. I could turn a corner in the hallway and not worry that my sister was going to jump out and punch me. Five years older than me, she was already at a different school. I could sit in my classroom and answer questions and be told that I was right, that I was smart. I could walk to the bathroom and sit down on the toilet in peace even if there were kids all around me. I could talk and laugh with my friends and nobody was going to mock me. My sister wasn’t there. She wasn’t going to punch me, she wasn’t going to call me a fucker, she wasn’t going to jump me.
The students I teach writing to tell me they won’t be able to come to class because they can’t control their panic attacks or because they are too anxious to leave their apartments. When they write personal essays, they write about suicidal ideation and spending time in locked psych wards. They write about the truths they have learned from their therapists. They write about being bullied in elementary school. They write about the terrifying loneliness of experiencing their first years of college on Zoom, about their fears that they will never go back to being the same people they were before the pandemic, about their imposter syndrome and borderline personality disorder. They wonder what it would be like to just not be here anymore.
Or. They don’t come to class and they don’t tell me why. They just disappear for weeks at a time.
•••
We adopted Hattie when she was just under a year old. Nobody knows her actual history, but she was transported up to Illinois from Texas, where she was found with another dog. Our best guess about what her early life was like: she was born on a farm somewhere and was tossed food here and there and barely survived. We know for sure that she was not socialized. When we first met her, she would not come to either me or my husband Steve, and I have since said that I’ll never again adopt another dog who doesn’t come to me when I meet them. But we have Hattie and we love her to pieces and we thought we could work with her anxieties.
She had heartworm when we adopted her, and treating that took a lot of time, patience, and money. The foster agency had been treating her using what’s called the “slow kill” method, but that takes more than two years to complete, and during that time, the dog is supposed to be kept calm. We opted for the “fast kill” method, which was more expensive and involved injections but required less time for Hattie to be out of commission. Four months. One hundred twenty days of no walks and no playtime with Marshall, our three-year-old Beagle mix. At times it was excruciating to watch her do nothing all day long. But in October of that first year, she finally got a negative heartworm test and we were so grateful. She had made it.
Lately Hattie has refused to go on walks altogether. For more than a year after she’d been cleared of heartworm, she’d come on walks with us and, while there would be panic moments here and there and, at times, an especially bad walk where I really wondered if walks were the right thing for her, for the most part, she did just fine. But then in October, something shifted. Her panic seemed to envelop her. She became unable to control her panic even on short walks around the block. She approached each corner with trepidation, looking up to me for reassurance. Steve and I aren’t sure what broke in her, what happened to make her suddenly more afraid than she had been, but we both agreed that she suddenly got worse. She became more insecure. She became more clingy toward me. When I would get the leashes out, she would run upstairs to her crate in our bedroom. She no longer wanted to go for walks.
So I would leave her home alone and take Essay and Marshall for walks while Steve was at work. I hated leaving her alone, but I hated even more the thought of forcing her to come with us. And while on these walks with the two older dogs, I would still scan the environment for Hattie triggers. People working in their garages, making banging noises. Landscapers cleaning up for the fall. Trucks and vans with ladders on top parked in people’s driveways. I was now triggered by these things, even if just for a split second, knowing how scared Hattie would be. I’d look down at Essay and Marshall, relieved they felt no such fear.
In mid-November, we started Hattie on Prozac. She had been on a different anti-anxiety medication, but it clearly wasn’t doing its job, and we needed something stronger. I’d heard so many success stories from friends about their dogs on Prozac, and I wanted that for Hattie. I wanted calm for her. I wanted the real Hattie to come through. I wanted her to feel safe in her surroundings, to live a happy life.
About a week into her taking Prozac, I was taking a walk with Essay and Marshall when we ran into our friends Bob and Joy and their dog, Honey. Honey and Hattie are best buds and love to play together. They run around the yard chasing one another, hopping over each other, mouthing and barking at each other in ways that never fail to make us laugh. The Prozac hadn’t yet taken effect, and Hattie was not doing well, which is why she wasn’t on the walk, and she hadn’t been out in days. I asked Bob and Joy if they wanted to bring Honey around to the yard to play with Hattie. I thought Honey and Hattie could play together like they always did.
The outdoor furniture had been put away weeks earlier, but it was relatively mild out, so all four of us adults—Bob, Joy, Steve, and I—stood out on our patio and watched and waited for the dogs to play. Marshall played with Honey a little bit, but Hattie just sort of sat on the patio sunken in on herself. Ears back, shoulders hunched, she looked like she wanted to be anywhere but here. She looked like an abused animal. She went back inside while we all stood there not knowing what to say. I am hoping that was her lowest point. I had never seen her look so sad.
•••
I write now, as Hattie is between anxiety medications and my students are still living through a pandemic that so many people have grown tired of, in order to understand the ways I am ill-equipped to help either Hattie or my students. How can I, a person who grew up feeling like she was hunted in her own home, help Hattie feel more secure or help my students feel able to face the world? I have come to realize in the last year or so that my sister’s constant seeking me out in order to attack me has led to what I once thought were just quirks of character but I now understand to be direct results of feeling constantly hunted. For instance, I am triggered by too many people wanting too many things from me at one time. I do not like to begin projects with other people that do not have foreseeable ends, that threaten to drag on interminably. I tend to check things off my to-do list diligently. I get students’ work back to them pretty quickly. I like, in short, to know that things will end, and I do my best to facilitate that end. Semesters are a good fit for me, then, as each January and each August I get to start again, knowing that, however chaotic the semester may get, it will be over in May or December. And then I get to start again.
I knew that as long as I was home, my sister would never stop hunting me. There was no end. Now all I want is an end to things.
I want things to end so I can be left alone.
Leave me alone.
That is the story of my life: leave me alone. I want to read and I want to write and I want to do my own thing away from the feeling of being constantly hunted. That feeling has followed me everywhere I’ve gone my entire life. I don’t know how to shake it.
•••
In the fall of 2020, I taught an advanced writing course focused on the theme of “witnessing the suffering of others.” We read a number of personal essays and longform journalism pieces about, well, the suffering of others and what it meant to witness it as part of simply watching the news. This was following the summer during which none of us could look away from the suffering of others; it was the summer of George Floyd. It was the summer following Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. It was the summer of Black Lives Matter protests all over the world. And it was the first summer of the pandemic. The teaching and learning we did together happened on Zoom rather than in a classroom. Together we considered what it means to look, what it means to look away, who is required to look, and who has the privilege to look away. We read essays about suffering and witnessing that suffering, and we analyzed those essays and students wrote about their own witnessing and we talked about that writing. We talked and wrote a lot about suffering—others’ and our own—and we considered the relationship between seeing and knowing. It was, to put it mildly, intense. Many of us were tired after each class session. John Scott Price, a psychiatrist, advises his patients to avoid the news and he advises his patients’ families to protect the patient from the “horrors of contemporary life.” His patients with anxiety, he writes, only become more anxious with the arrival of endless bad news from daily reports of tragedies, so his advice is to avoid the news and watch sports and nature programming instead. I tend to do the very opposite with my students, many of whom I know suffer from anxiety. I tend instead to bring the real world into the classroom, as I did in fall 2020, insisting that we look together at the world we’re living in. Though I suspect I am making things worse for them, I don’t know how to teach any other way.
•••
Anxiety is the feeling that the bad things will never end. It’s the feeling of danger around every corner. Anxiety is future oriented, but it forestalls our ability to imagine a present for ourselves. When Hattie is in a panic, she is not living in the present; she is, instead, aiming to get as far ahead as she can, trying to get out of the moment she’s in, wishing for the fear to end.
She just wants the fear to end.
I want to know when Hattie’s anxiety will end. I want to know how long until the Prozac kicks in, until we can see some improvement.
Little things: after being on Prozac for exactly two weeks, Hattie took a long afternoon walk for the first time in a month. Later that evening, she snuggled up to Steve on the couch. She had never done that before, not once in the entire eighteen months since we’d adopted her. She would come up to him and kiss his face or kiss his hands but never had she snuggled up to him for a nap.
Students in this semester’s personal essay class suggested that maybe—just maybe—I think about including a few more essays that aren’t directly about death or dying. And so I will. I am. One student pointed directly to Seth Sawyers’ essay, “That There, That’s Not Me,” as the kind of thing she’d like to read more of. “Nobody dies. It’s an essay about a guy who doesn’t love his job.” Students seem to agree that the most emotionally difficult essay we read together was Sam Pickering’s “George.” That slayed me, they say. I had to call home and FaceTime with my dog, they tell me. In “George,” Pickering writes about and against his emotional reactions to the impending death of his fourteen-year-old dog, George. “But it’s so good,” I tell them. “The entire essay is one big psychic defense against feeling anything for his dog. I have to include that one.” They sigh.
I think bringing stories of bad news into school comforts me somehow, as though my taking them out of their original contexts and sharing them with students in ways that make them into objects of analysis dilutes their impact. Maybe it’s because school is a safe space for me and I grew up learning that intellectualizing was one way to tamp down the panic. If we can cut it up into its parts, maybe the news will be less terrifying.
•••
As I’m working on this essay, news of yet another school shooting reaches me, this time in Oxford, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Four students are dead, six students and one teacher are wounded, and a fifteen-year-old student is in custody. We know, immediately, what kind of gun he used, but we don’t know where he got it. All of the news stories search for a motive. Was he bullied? Does it matter?
A student posts a video to Tik Tok from inside a classroom in Oxford High. The room is dark and students are all huddled together. A muffled voice comes to them from the locked door, asking them to open up, to come outside; they are safe. He identifies himself as a sheriff. “We’re not willing to take that risk right now,” one of the students in the classroom responds. The person outside the door says something else and punctuates it with “bro.” “He said, ‘Bro.’ Red flag,” says a student from the huddle. And then we see them all escape the classroom through a window.
The video makes me heartsick. I see these students climb through the window to safety, and I think of my own students. I think of the terror these students must have been feeling and of the wherewithal it took to record it for us all to see. I am unable to intellectualize what I am seeing. I instead fall deeper and deeper into despair, wondering how any parent can bear to send their child to school, wondering how teachers come to terms with the fact that the student whose work they were just reading is now dead or even worse, was the shooter. How do you make sense of the senseless?
Watching that video, too, makes me realize that it’s not just that students have lived in a world with catastrophe after catastrophe their whole lives. They, too, have lived in a world in which they feel hunted even when they are in school. If this is true, of course they want school to end. Of course they want to know how to get out of it. Of course they want their futures to begin now. Of course. Of course.
They just want the anxiety to end.
•••
On the last day of the personal essay course this semester, I asked students how they felt about reading and discussing essays such as Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” and Jasminne Mendez’s “Lesson Plan: This Is Not a Drill,” both of which foreground school shootings. I wanted to know if I was adding to their existing anxiety. What they told me surprised me. The anxiety is already there, they said. The essays aren’t creating more anxiety. What they’re doing instead is giving us a chance to talk about it. In all their years of schooling and all their years of practicing lockdown drills, nobody has ever asked them how they feel about them. About it. About the prospect of dying at school. They’ve never had a chance to talk about it. The essays give them a chance to talk about it.
They also tell me about how, in each classroom they enter, they mentally make an escape plan.
They want to know how to get out safely. They want the fastest route home.
•••
AMY E. ROBILLARD is a writer and a professor of English at Illinois State University. Read more of her FGP essays.
When my daughter was nine, I bought a tiny Norfolk Pine in a tiny plastic pot. It was my only houseplant. I’m not the kind of person who hangs lush ferns in the windows and grows lemon trees in the corners of the living room, though I wish I were. I wish I knew how to sprout an avocado pit and keep it alive forever; I wish I knew about orchids. But I do know myself. I forget to water my houseplants and they dry out, and then they turn brown, and then they die, which is depressing. I gave up long ago trying to become a better plant person. Still, it was winter and cold and dark, and I wanted something that was alive, however briefly. I didn’t want a hacked down tree. We put our Norfolk Pine on a table and adorned it with tinsel and outsized Christmas ornaments and called it done.
To my astonishment the tiny tree survived. Stubborn, it lasted through the cold, dark winter and through the extended periods of drought I imposed upon it. It even survived being knocked over numerous times by child and dog, its soil strewn across the floor, its pitiful roots exposed. I could, and should, have celebrated its persistence, but instead the tree reminded me precisely how terrible I was with houseplants. It made me feel guilty just looking at it. You are a Bad Person, it seemed to tell me, when I’d finally remember to water it after weeks and weeks of neglect. I tried to find another home for my tree, offering it to various neighbors, but nobody wanted it. Maybe my tree realized what was what. Maybe it said to itself: Well then. I’ll just keep very still and try not to grow very much.
But it did grow, despite itself, despite me, despite everything. At some point it outgrew its tiny pot and I transferred it to a larger plastic bucket, although I do not recall doing so. It’s now a leggy three-and-a-half feet tall, with long uneven branches. People who know about houseplants have informed me that a Norfolk Pine isn’t a true pine, but I’m not sure what that means or what difference it makes. I do understand that Norfolk Pines don’t like too much water and don’t want too much direct sunlight. In point of fact: my tree has survived. My neighbor, a retired landscape gardener, called it “scrawny” and small for its age, but otherwise healthy.
Eighteen years have passed since I brought it home. Almost two decades gone poof, and my daughter has moved away, and two old dogs have broken my heart, but my tree refuses to leave. The landscape gardener neighbor suggested that it would benefit from a bigger bucket, so this past summer I bought a gigantic pot, along with the most expensive bag of potting soil available. I plopped the tree into its roomy new home, patted the dirt in place, and gave it some water, but not too much. There you go, I told it. It takes up the whole table, but I don’t mind.
Because despite myself, despite everything, I now know that I love my tree. After years of fretting and feeling guilty, I’m glad that I couldn’t give it away. I’m glad it didn’t die. These are not the best of times, and I’m glad that my tree seems unaware of that fact. I appreciate how it just keeps to itself and keeps on growing, albeit imperceptibly. Love has grown imperceptibly as well; my affection for this tree has crept up on me. Next summer I will lug it, my one and only successful houseplant, out to the back porch. I’ll sit next to it with a cup of coffee as it basks in the morning sunlight. I’ll bring it back inside before the first chill of fall, and when it outgrows its current pot I’ll find a bigger one. Norfolk Pines, I’ve read with some consternation, may get to be twenty feet tall indoors. I’ll deal with that somehow. I look forward to such a fine problem.
But for now, we are set. Look at you now! I say when I walk by its table. My lovely tree! Ah, it says, stretching its lopsided limbs with pleasure, filling in the empty spaces with its perfect, stubborn life.
•••
ELIZA THOMAS is a piano teacher and accompanist. In a former life, she imagined herself a beginning writer. That was ages ago however, and she is happy to be working again on essays and stories. She lives in Vermont with two dogs and one houseplant.
Last semester, one of my students asked me to change his grade on a quiz. The way I’d phrased a particular question wasn’t clear, he said, which is why he earned a 95 instead of a 100. I explained to him that the quiz was one of four, which together totaled twenty percent of the semester’s overall course grade. In other words, a five-point difference on a single quiz was meaningless.
He was having none of it. He was clearly worried about his permanent record. No matter what I might have told him, I know that he wouldn’t accept that the grade on this quiz, or any quiz, has no bearing on who he is as a person. That no school administrator is going to come roaring into the room with his grades from middle school. That for the rest of his life, no one is going to judge him on his GPA.
But who teaches him, or me, about how to judge ourselves as people? Parents, to start with. Teachers, perceived as proxy parents, even if we don’t want to be. I’m thinking here of my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Moye, who left us to our own devices while she stepped out for what I realize now was a smoke break. For however long she was gone—and it couldn’t have been terribly long—the noise level in the room rose to a solid wall of released energy. I was the kid who hunkered down to read ahead in my textbook, wishing I were as audacious as the over-excitable boy who managed to climb out of the classroom via the transom over the door. When Miss (I have no idea of her actual honorific—in Atlanta in 1971, all adult women were addressed as Miss) Moye was on her way back to the classroom, the PA speaker over our heads would click on. From the principal’s office, she’d whisper, “teacher’s comin’.” No matter what we’d been doing, judgement came from above the coat closet. Act right even when you’re on your own, because someone’s watching you.
Now that I’m a teacher, I love her for this. She must have cracked herself up.
I wonder when I stopped believing in the power of the Permanent Record that loomed over school like a wagging finger. Earn a bad grade and see my “permanent record” forever scarred. Get caught passing notes or miss my turn feeding the classroom hamster, and be told by someone (A teacher? A principal? A game of telephone on the playground?) that these temporary oversights will haunt me throughout adulthood and possibly into the afterlife. The permanent record that no one ever actually saw? It would follow me to the grave.
My elementary school grades, on their flimsy pink paper, have vanished into the ether. My high school adhered to the trend in “alternative education” by disdaining traditional letter grades. Instead, our teachers, with whom we were all on a first-name, Frisbee-tossing basis, wrote paragraphs-long assessments of our personal growth and individual strengths. I have no idea what happened to these dispatches from the barefoot and bell-bottom jeans front, but I appreciate the attempt to broaden the interpretation of how a person becomes whole. My college transcripts were useful only as items in my graduate school applications. My graduate school studies resulted in my first book, which was written as a kind of permanent record of a place, a time, and a family in crisis.
What is my permanent record, if it’s not decades-old grades and well-meaning teacher commentary? On every elementary school report card, I was given a checkmark beside the “uses time wisely” criteria, verifying that I had done just that: used my time wisely. That checkmark made me proud. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is what it means to use time wisely as an adult, if it’s not reading ahead while the teacher’s out on a smoke break. Who teaches us a viable template for a “wise” use of time? When do we learn to do that for ourselves?
•••
When my father was dying, he asked me to forgive him. As I sat by the crank-up hospital bed in his living room, my impulse was to list every act of his for which I could not forgive him. “What about this?” I wanted to say. “Or that?”
Instead, I lied. I said that I forgave him. Nothing good would have come of telling him otherwise.
My father had turned sixty-seven that month. After a lifetime of four-pack-a-day smoking and decades of drug abuse, he had been diagnosed with cancer a year or so earlier. At that moment, he had less than a week to live.
When I was a child, my father intoned over the Passover Seder plate, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” All the adults at the table laughed, and I did, too, believing this was the actual prayer. Of course it was, spoken by the irreverent, fun, charismatic version of my dad, acting like the kid who climbed out of the transom while the teacher was out of the room.
But this not why my father asked my blessing.
A few months ago, I awoke unsettled, because I felt that my father was in my bedroom. I could smell him. Pall Mall cigarettes and anxious flatulence. He had been dead nineteen years, but he was somehow present.
“Why are you here?” I asked the air near my husband’s nightstand.
“Forgive me?” my father asked. He was wheedling, like a child.
I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “Go away. Maybe later, but I’m not ready yet.”
Proud of having told even a ghostly version of my father to leave me alone, I went back to sleep.
•••
My real permanent record is written, in part, in my father’s hand. That same hand that held an electric carving knife to my throat at a family dinner. I was about ten years old, and my laughing made sounds that grated on my father, especially when he was very, very high.
I wondered for years if I’d created a false memory from a roast, a carving knife, and my father’s instability. When I reconnected with a childhood friend last year, I got proof that it had happened. My friend described my mother frozen in fear at the table, unable to pull my father away from me. I remember my father’s face so close to mine that I could see his pores, his pupils spinning like pinwheels. I remember thinking, “Oh, he’s on acid.” I remember believing that was a reasonable excuse.
This is the same man who brought me, at eight years old, to Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral. As we made our way through the solemn, slow moving crowd outside, and then inside Ebenezer Baptist Church, my father, gentle and grieving, lifted me to eye-level with the adults and turned me toward the first open casket I had ever seen. He wanted me to see Dr. King’s face up close, not on television as I had so often. What he wanted was for me to absorb the need for justice in the world.
Within a year, my father tried to shove me out of a moving car. When I tell this story, I laugh and say, “It was only in second gear,” but the irrationality of his act, his absence of judgement—or the presence of his cruel judgement of me—is what strikes my listener. My attempt to make this into a funny anecdote doesn’t land well.
I am trying, here, to reconcile a permanent record that can’t be graded. My father tucked me in at night when I was small and sat at my side reading poetry in the same elegant baritone he surely used defending his clients in court. The ballad meter of Countee Cullen’s “Incident,” telling of a child stunned and hurt by racial violence, and the mystical images of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” lulled me to sleep.
The last time I saw my sister Susie alive, my father was cradling her in his arms as he rushed her out of our shared bedroom to the hospital. She had been ill with leukemia for a year, and died a few days later. Through my lashes, I watched him run with her. He was terrified, my mother was terrified, Susie was terrified, and so was I.
After my father died, my husband and I helped his second wife sort his possessions. My husband found my father’s Twelve Step workbook. He will not let me see it. “He blames you,” my husband says, “because you’re too much like him.” Throughout the workbook’s pages, my husband says, my father blames other people in his life, but he never accepted his own role in his permanent record.
It’s become clear to me since my father died that he lived with a mental illness that may never have been diagnosed. Within its rapid cycles, he treated himself with amphetamines and Scotch. That the amphetamines were (sometimes) legally obtained and that the Scotch was eighteen-year-old single malt is immaterial. His emotional and psychological turmoil escalated as my two sisters died of illnesses, as he brutalized my mother for failings only he imagined, as whatever had transpired in his own childhood ensnared his mind. Abuse is real, no matter the ZIP code, no matter if the clothing hurled to the floor is a Brooks Brothers’ suit or coveralls.
My aunt, my father’s sister, told me the other day that her mother once refused to let a woman wearing green nail polish into her house. I can’t corroborate this, but I believe it. My father’s mother, was, as the phrase of the time went, uptight.
What I’m saying is that my father must have been harshly judged, and then judging himself harshly, turned that blade to me. I am the first daughter, the oldest, the one in whom he saw himself.
•••
A few years after my father died, my husband and I vacationed in Memphis. We visited Graceland and Stax Records, and we toured the National Civil Rights Museum. It was there, in a display of photographs by documentary photographer Benedict Fernandez, that I came face to face with an image of an unsmiling young man in a suit and tie, sitting on a curb beside another similarly attired and equally serious young man. The Black man held a placard reading “Union Justice Now!” The White man held one reading “Honor King: End Racism.”
The White man was my father.
I knew the placard. It’s framed in my house. My father had given it to me the night he came home from the vigil in Memphis in 1968. I had never seen the photograph before, never known of its existence, and there in the museum, I screamed. A group of middle-schoolers, touring the exhibit, stopped and gaped at me.
“That’s my father,” I said, pointing at the image on the wall. I began to cry.
One of the students approached me. She peered at the photograph, then at me, then at the photograph again.
“You do favor him,” she said.
•••
My father visited me again the other morning. He seems to surface when I am emerging from sleep. Maybe it’s his presence that wakes me. I think this time he wanted me to forgive myself as well as him, to stop hearing the echoes of his angry words in my own head. To stop allowing him to judge me, even now.
I don’t know if I can forgive him, entirely. I can’t grade an abusive father’s relationship to a daughter. If he gets an A for some things and an F for others, does that really average to a C? On the days when my own fist splits my lip to silence his taunting voice in my mind, I’d say no. On the days when I turn to a poem and physically, truly, feel his longing for words, I’d say yes. If I wrote an assessment, as my high school teachers did for me, would I implore him to get the help he needed, or would I suggest something benign like learning to meditate or taking up a musical instrument?
Perhaps I should be grading myself, since I’m the one living with this permanent record.
I am trying to understand how to create a permanent record for him and for me. For us together. I want to teach myself to judge him fairly. I don’t know if I can forgive him, as he asked, or if doing so is a requirement for his, or my, final grade. But in trying to learn this, to read ahead in the book that he’s put down, I want to believe that I am using time wisely.
•••
JESSICA HANDLER is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Bookseller’s Alliance “Okra Pick.” Her memoir Invisible Sisters was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,Full Grown People, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing. www.jessicahandler.com.
As we drove back from our daughter’s two-month check-up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, my husband Aaron and I were primed for an argument. Once again, the pediatrician’s message was that we were bungling things, especially in regard to our daughter’s constipation. “Pear juice hasn’t worked. She won’t drink it,” Aaron said in clipped speech.
“What if we make the bottles with more water?” I offered.
“When it seems like she has to poop, we need to hold her knees up to her belly. It will help, ergonomically. That’s how Baby Jesus designed us.”
Up until this moment, the utterance of Baby Jesus was accompanied by sarcasm, but I could tell by the coldness of his words that he wasn’t joking. Just in case, I clocked him for a smirk, but it only arrived after my second glance.
Baby Jesus first entered my lexicon when I met Aaron’s parents nine years earlier in North Carolina. In advance of the visit, Aaron mentioned his parents had become more conservative since they’d moved from Cleveland, but this didn’t concern me. I was raised by Republicans.
Compared to my fiscally conservative and socially still quite conservative parents, I found Aaron’s parents hopeful, adventurous, and open-minded. They were religious, some would say very, especially his mother who possessed the zeal of a converted Catholic, but as long Aaron and I were on the same page, their beliefs were less relevant to me.
After dinner, I grabbed my suitcase and followed Aaron upstairs. Exhausted from teaching, LaGuardia, and smiling so much my cheeks hurt, I half listened as I rolled my suitcase on the ivory carpet. “This is the frog. It stands for ‘finished room over the garage.’ It’s the only guest bedroom with a bathroom,” Aaron pointed to a large, sunken room. He walked further down the hallway and gestured to a bedroom with a twin bed and ceiling fan. “This is Denver Broncos. When we moved in, it had Bronco’s trim.”
Then he stopped at a guest bedroom next to a bathroom. “Here’s your room.” He gestured inside. “Jeanene Horses.”
For the moment, I put aside Jeanene and her horses. “My room?”
“Yeah, I’m in Broncos.” He rolled his eyes.
“But we live together.” We shared an apartment in Brooklyn, as we had in Los Angeles.
“It’s just because of Baby Jesus.”
Like Jeanene Horses, he seemed to think the phrase “Baby Jesus” communicated something to me, but it didn’t. “What does that mean?”
Aaron pulled his arms close like a T-rex, made his lips loose and gurgled like a baby. Then he stood on his toes, glared down at me, and said in a high-pitched voice, “You’re not married.” For effect, he twirled his arms and let out a high-pitched, maniacal giggle.
I pursed my lips.
“We’re not married,” he said in his normal voice and wiped drool from his lips.
“I see,” I said. As I wheeled my suitcase into Jeanene Horses, the ivory carpet muffled the sound.
On the last night of my visit, I sat next to Aaron’s mother at dinner. I knew not to discuss politics, but on a personal level she was sweet and curious. Unlike many religious people I’d met, she was open-minded and kind. Against type, she was knowledgeable and well-spoken. Even her obstinance was charming because she wore it with such confidence. Until, like any good heathen, I curled away when she let loose some disparaging comments about gay people and the doozy “I don’t think young people today feel enough shame.”
It was 2011. Shame was everywhere. There were more abortion restrictions than in the previous three decades and several states enacted the strictest voting laws since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I swallowed my rebuttal with my Brussel sprouts, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her comment.
As I ate, I weighed her comment against other family intel. Aaron’s cousin once told me a lengthy story about how she’d briefly joined the Church of Scientology. While she spoke, I tried to focus on her ability to feel a level of rapture and rhapsody I would never feel and not on the fact that Scientology rejected psychiatry, demanded a large amount of its followers’ income, and pushed an expensive list of courses called The Bridge to Total Freedom. In fact, several of Aaron’s family members were prone to spirited, irrational assumptions, but when I brought up his cousin’s involvement with Scientology, Aaron assured me he too was alarmed.
I was an atheist, raised by atheists who were overtly skeptical of organized religion. My family could be impulsive, demanding and capitalist, but we were logical. There were many lawyers among us, and we could distill any argument to a rational motivation. Throughout my life, I’d been repelled by organized religion not only because of everyone the church left out—women, gays, trans people—but also because I couldn’t bear irrational people.
In the 1990s, I grew up as the rare child of divorced parents in a heavily Catholic Cleveland suburb. In middle school, my boyfriend broke up with me because I did not attend Parish School of Religion classes. PSR classes were taught at several local churches and provided catechetical education to kids in public school, but because it was a loosely disciplined after-school activity for thirteen-year-olds, it was also a meat market. Even as a teenager, I knew it was nonsense that I was dumped over PSR. I knew religion was nonsense. Now as a filmmaker and adjunct professor in New York, my distrust of religion had grown. Essentially, I didn’t think I could spend my life with a religious person.
“That sucked what your mom said about gay people,” I whispered to Aaron during a clandestine visit to Denver Broncos.
“Oh, she just thinks they’re defying Baby Jesus,” Aaron said and dismissed my concern with a swipe of the hand.
I’d always cherished the fact that he was the black sheep of the family, but this was the second time he’d mentioned Baby Jesus. I looked at him. Were beliefs and personality innate? Even if buried during his rebellious twenties, later in life would his upbringing rear its ugly head?
He smirked at me. “You know I’m not religious at all, right?”
I dug my toe in the ivory carpet. “Were you ever?”
He shook his head like he was annoyed to answer. “Even in eighth grade, I refused Confirmation. I knew it wasn’t for me.”
In that moment as the two of us stood in Denver Broncos against the wishes of Baby Jesus, his comment was enough. We wrapped up the trip sure we were on the same side of the divide.
•••
Little changed in the next nine years of our relationship. Looking back, those were blissful years where we flouted God-fearing values, had sex for pleasure, teased heteronormative expectations, and bashed the church with abandon.
Occasionally, there were inklings of Aaron’s religious upbringing. When a performance class at our Los Angeles film school planned a visit to a Baptist church in South Central LA, Aaron refused to go. The professor thought the vocal stylings of this particular Baptist preacher were affecting, winsome, and authentic, but Aaron wouldn’t bite. “I’m not comfortable laughing at people in church,” he said.
“That’s not what the field trip is about,” I said with a half smile. I was excited to use the word “field trip” at the age of twenty-five, while at the same time I related a genuine sentiment. If anyone laughed, the alternative but deadly serious professor would have reprimanded them, but the notion of attending church for anything other than worship pulled at Aaron’s heart strings.
Concerned, I turned to my trusty astrology book. I preferred this book because it listed horoscopes not by month, but by day, and it grounded its descriptions in personality traits. As I turned to Aaron’s page, I knew this route wasn’t entirely logical, but I needed guidance and I’d rather have it from the occult than white men in robes who stood behind podiums. Unfortunately for me, spirituality was all over Aaron’s page. The meditation for his birthday, The Day of Inner Fervor, was See God in everything. Notable passages of his horoscope included Belief is an important theme in the lives of December 10 people. Devotional types, they pray at the altar of character, wisdom, morality. The final sentence was the kicker: They may put their faith in God, the Universe, scientific laws or in a moving Spirit behind all things, but they generally put their faith somewhere.
To calm myself, I chose to believe Aaron put his faith in art. He had a BFA in photography, nearly an MFA in filmmaking, and he worked as a producer on film sets and as an artistic director for a record label. He had such a blind devotion to artmaking that he put up with many things I would not. On set, he spent fourteen hours a day on the Canadian border in below-zero temperatures and bathed in an outdoor shower in November. He wrote emails at 4 a.m., and he drove three hours to buy an actor a Peloton, all in the name of art.
I, too, worked in the arts, although sometimes begrudgingly. I occasionally fantasized about having a more stable or lucrative career, but Aaron couldn’t fathom it. He didn’t see the point, even when we were so broke. After years of supporting us in reality TV, he’d pulled the plug on his stable job when we’d saved enough for a sandwich. Aaron and I also diverged in how we categorized artists. I thought an artist was someone who exhibited work, while Aaron thought an artist was someone who saw the world through an aesthetic lens … which sounded awfully … spiritual. So, he was spiritual, that wasn’t bad. His faith was in art, I told myself as I settled under the sheets at night.
•••
Suddenly, when Aaron became a dad, Baby Jesus was uttered not with sarcasm, but as a salve during intimate moments and a solution in times of stress.
As new parents, our anxiety was completely intertwined with the frequency and texture of our daughter’s excrement. We had graduate degrees, we were award-winning filmmakers and writers. We had slowly, steadfastly crafted the lives we wanted—but everything we held dear was at the whim of our daughter’s poop. When she was backed up, she wouldn’t play, sleep, or sit. She screamed, fussed, and was inconsolable, and our lives came to a screeching halt.
Generally, after a day and a half without a poop, we began to troubleshoot. At our disposal, we had a variety of strategies our pediatrician encouraged, and some he allowed with reservation. Judging when to utilize the emergency measures was obviously a fraught decision. When the lack of shit hit the fan, it was no surprise that Aaron tended toward abstinence, or divine intervention. As the vessel who carried our daughter, her screams pierced not only my ears, but my uterus and soul, or maybe I was just a wimp. I preferred to use everything in the medicine bag until the turd left the building.
During a particularly long bout without a poop where we followed Aaron’s method of doing nothing, our daughter clung to us and whimpered for the better part of three days. When the moment finally presented itself and our daughter passed a boulder so well-packed, she screamed in pain, I shouted over her cries, “I told you we should have used the mineral oil.”
“That’s not how Baby Jesus made assholes!” Aaron screamed. There was not a smirk before, after, or anywhere in the vicinity of his comment.
Our warring perspectives were probably not helped by the fact that our daughter was born in February 2020, a few weeks before the Covid-19 lockdown. We suffered not only the isolation of new parents, but the seclusion of the pandemic.
At night, we were relegated to our movie projector. Like any two people, our tastes diverged, and we were both filmmakers, so obviously we argued about movies. I was a film professor who could handle more academic material, while Aaron’s taste drifted commercial. In the past, we’d disagreed over Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which he considered romantic, while I found it depressing that the hero only loved the heroine when she was disguised as another woman. I’d put off watching It’s a Wonderful Life until my mid-thirties because I sensed it was… well… Catholic. When I finally saw it per Aaron’s suggestion, he cried at the movie’s sense of love and sacrifice, while I thought it was blaringly disheartening that Jimmy Stewart never left his dying small town and instead lapsed into depression and alcoholism.
Once Aaron became a father, his taste skewed in a direction I could not grasp. Over his former preference for stand-up, horror, and boundary-pushing foreign films, he chose family movies. Weeks after our daughter was born, we streamed the TV show Virgin River about a woman who finds love in a small town, followed by both the original and remake of the maternal suburban The Stepford Wives, before landing firmly in the 1950s with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This riveting piece of cinema culminated with Elizabeth Taylor lying that she was pregnant to please her extended family. This was not the impetus to the story; it was the end. In the final frame, Director Richard Brooks winked at the audience with a kaleidoscopic fade on a long kiss between Elizabeth Taylor and her husband suggesting that maybe, finally, she’d just do what everyone wanted and get pregnant. After that hot mess, Aaron and I settled for less confrontational content, but, even ironically, there are only so many times a film professor can watch the Hallmark Channel.
A chilly spell at the end of April caused me to bring out our daughter’s stroller sleeping bag. With her zipped in the bassinet, I walked laps in Prospect Park amongst socially distanced crowds. After the genius move of not discussing whether we should have a child before I became pregnant, Aaron and I followed that up with the winning decision of not reviewing how we would raise our daughter. In forty-degree rain, I was desperate to talk to other urbanites. All I needed was a quick jab or poke at religion, but even with a mask on, no one would come near me.
As I pushed the stroller back toward our apartment, I was sympathetic toward my husband, to a point. For me, everything changed a year ago when I became pregnant. For him, things didn’t really shift until two months ago when our daughter was born. The entire time my body ached and ballooned, I mourned the loss of my childless life, but I also promised myself that not everything would change.
When I returned home, Aaron stood in the kitchen and unwrapped a cardboard box that had arrived in the mail. On my walk, I’d concluded that a pandemic not only prompted isolation, but fostered beliefs of the less sound mind. Maybe my logical husband had fallen victim to the mental toll of the pandemic. As I set our sleeping daughter in her crib, I approached him with extra compassion.
He pulled the last piece of bubble tape off what was clearly his childhood advent calendar. The calendar that hung in my childhood home was fluffy and bright with candy canes, mittens, and snowflakes. This austere, biblical calendar featured a wooden baby cradle, an ornate urn, and a goblet to drink Baby Jesus’s blood. I was mortified. Also, it was April. I took a deep breath and remembered my sentiment of compassion, but my gaze narrowed on the urn. “What’s with the urn? Whose ashes are in it?”
He shot me a glance.
I smiled, willing warmth into my face, if not my words.
“It’s not an urn. It’s a jar of frankincense, or perhaps myrrh. It’s one of the wise men’s gifts. See?” He pointed to the nativity scene at the top of the calendar.
“It’s April.”
“It’s homey.” He walked to the sink. As he fetched a glass of water, he added, “It’s good for her to become familiar with the iconography.”
“The iconography?” I blurted out.
He nodded as he drank. My compassion left the room, so I did, too.
The next day, I woke from a nap in our railroad apartment to hear Aaron bouncing our daughter on his knee in the next room. “Baby Jesus made these toes, these legs, this belly,” he sang. He kissed each body part after he named it. It was cute. Cute, and troubling. I rolled over, acquiescing that Jesus was in the house.
•••
Two months later we were forced out of New York. Moving during the pandemic was no treat, magnified by the fact that Aaron found work well off the beaten path in Bozeman, Montana. Days before our car transport service arrived, the company tripled the price, so we decided Aaron would drive, and I would fly cross-country with an infant and a cat.
Alone in the apartment, I took care of our daughter and cleared the wreckage of our presence. The day before our flight, Aaron called.
“Hey!” I said, sidetracked with the list of things I had to do before I turned in our keys.
He merely breathed into the phone.
“Honey? Hello? Are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you?”
“South Dakota.”
“Good, you’re almost there.”
“I think I should turn around.”
“What? No. Why?”
“I don’t know about you flying alone.”
“I can do it. It’s fine.” Four months postpartum, taking two flights with an infant and a cat was not a walk in the park, but I could do it.
“What if they take the baby?” he asked in short speech.
“Who?”
“TSA.”
My glance darted around our empty apartment and landed on a wall mirror—here on the heels of Baby Jesus was the spirited irrationality. I looked at myself in the mirror. “TSA is not going to steal our daughter.”
“You don’t have her birth certificate,” he said.
This was true. His family had planned a trip to Ireland, so we’d sent away for her passport. Still, TSA was not going to take the baby. “I have other documents. You just miss her, but she’s doing great. She pooped today. Actually, she pooped twice. Soft and large.”
There was a time when news of our daughter’s silky excrement was enough to elevate Aaron to a state of euphoria. This was not one of those times.
He sighed into the phone.
“Stay the course, honey. It would take longer to get back here. You wouldn’t make it before our flight,” I said as the tires of our basement-level Prius C hummed into the phone. It was his third day on the road, and my heart went out to him. “It’s crazy to drive alone for that long. It messes with your head. You’re almost there. We’ll be there tomorrow, and we’ll meet you.”
“Not if it’s up to TSA…” he muttered.
“Remember, she has my name. That’s why I’m flying with her. It’s cleaner, logistically. Plus, we didn’t steal her, so it’s all good.”
“They don’t know that.”
“Honey.” I bit my lip. “TSA is not going to take the baby. It’s a domestic flight. They’re not even going to check for identification.”
He seemed to mull over my words. As I counted the dust bunnies on the adjacent wall, I prayed that I got through to him. If I put my faith anywhere, it was in my husband.
Right now, he was probably cruising on a desolate stretch of I-90. Sioux Falls was at one end of the state, but it was a long six hours until The Badlands, Black Hills National Forest, and Rapid City at the other end. In between, there wasn’t much more than a raw sun and an occasional shopping center, or maybe a field of sunflowers. After three days of fast food, lumpy motel beds or—if I knew Aaron correctly, reclining in the driver’s seat at a truck stop—he was wan, uninspired, and sprouting acne. Alone in the car, he went without A/C in late June to save gas. With his t-shirt and the driver’s seat coated in back sweat, he drove, feeling the strain and uncertainty of another move while missing his wife and daughter.
I could handle a spiritual man but not an irrational one. Aaron was logical; he was under the stress of becoming a new parent and moving across the country during a pandemic. He was living proof that personality was not innate. Nurture triumphed over nature. Aaron knew the TSA did not steal babies; he was rational. In his long, slow breaths that permeated the line, I could hear his brain working it out this very moment.
Then his breath quickened right before he wailed, “But … what if they take the baby?!”
•••
JENNY HATCHADORIAN has been published by Story Club Magazine, Role Reboot, and Little Old Lady. Her comedic essay New Family won Story Club Cleveland’s Audience Award. She is working on a book of comedic essays titled Midwestern Witch. Follow her on Instagram @hatchadorianhere or Twitter @hatchadorian
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