The Ones We Loaf

When people tell the story of the first time they ever saw their father cry the usually talk about catching the winning ball at a little league game, or watching the old man take a shovel to a beloved family dog or something else fatherly and manful. 

The first time I saw my dad cry, he was about 10 feet off the ground in a fake hand glider at Disneyland, flying over a projection of Yosemite and central valley farms. “Oh my god you can smell the oranges, how neat,” he said to me, and squeezed my arm as we left, wiping a tear with the back of his hand. 

The second time I saw my father cry was when we were watching Annie Hall, late at night, on the first Christmas since my parents announced their divorce. 

Woody Allen, bringing fathers and daughters together since 1997.

I suppose I should start at the beginning, or rather the end. My parents decided to divorce last thanksgiving after almost 30 years of marriage meaning that just like light up sneakers, Gigapets, and the appeal of Full House I was the last person to experience something most of my friends had got in the early 90s. 

“Hell,” my own partner said to me later that evening, trying to relate as I was sobbing into a deep dish pizza “my parents were divorced before I was even born!”

Until that day I’d been the smug boaster of parents who seemed to really like each other. I told of how our camping tent still smelled like champagne because my parents insisted on toasting romantic things to each other on vacation, or of how I used to think as a child that random days in june were Valentine’s because they’d write lipstick notes on the mirror.

They’d had ups and downs of course but even as recently as two years ago on a visit to San Francisco there were sparks. After a stern warning not to engage in any PDA with my new partner in front of my father, I was particularly peeved to turn around and find my parents full on making out on a street corner. But of course, I wasn’t peeved, I was smug. This disgusting love has a lot more years on it, I thought averting my eyes. 

In my childlike memory of my parent’s marriage I chose to erase the recent years of fights and pregnant, malicious silences. I chalked it all up to a few bad years, sure that in a few years we’d look back at this as a blue period, like the years when I decided to be a goth or when I pretended to hear voices to get out of doing homework(which weirdly were not the same years). 

But things didn’t change. And as much as they tried to hide the strain I think everyone close to our family smelled the end. 

I want to be a hero here and say that I am mature enough to understand that breaking up doesn’t mean failure, and that sometimes adults grow apart and love means many things to many people, but in actuality my brain is constantly screaming “NO NOT MY MOMMY AND DADDY!”

This is I think the shittiest part of it all. When you’re a kid going through a divorce you can slam doors (or if you think your parents still have a shot, you tie elaborate rope mazes to said doors -Parent Trap style). When you’re an adult you have to open these doors and listen. You have to be a part of this process because you know that love and life are complicated and nuanced. You essentially have to be the adult to your parents and their tantrums (even if they’re really civil, cold, tantrums). You’ve passed the threshold of being babied and you have to finally grow up. And that is fucking rough. 

Nothing was rougher though, than that last first christmas. It was the last christmas because it was the last time we’d all be together as a family in our house for a holiday. And it was also the first Christmas of this new life we all had to start. 

Before this, our christmases were loud with many people bursting to talk, to laugh, to ask for more champagne. This year, the four of us sat around the tree, everyone staking out their own corner territory like a game of Risk. My brother and I practically screaming to exclaim over our presents, anxious to fill the void of our parents talking. When they did speak it was a lot of “your mother got that for you,” and “Your dad told me you’d like that”.

The tiny changes in languages sting the most. The verbal papercuts of “your mother” when it used to be just “mom”. The too close to cuticle, resentful sounding “Gary” where “Papa” used to live. 

The worst is when they forget. Every now and then during that christmas, the last and first christmas, they would backslide into habit and an accidental “babe” or  “Gars” would fall out of their mouths. Innocuous maybe but to me it sounded like a tiny perk of hope and then a sickening squelch of remembrance. 

All of this lead to me on the couch next to my drowsy father at midnight. Both of us were groggy from a day of champagne and repressed familial ickyness and he nudged me and said “did you get any good videos, Buttercup? Let’s watch something.”

As the opening credits of Annie Hall played he sat up straighter and patted my arm. “I remember seeing this for the first time,” he chuckled wetly “I’d never seen anything like it.”  

Annie Hall doesn’t bullshit you. From the start it says “life – full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.” I cut a glance over at my father, trying to see if he instantly regretted this movie choice, maybe looking for signs that this hit too close to home. But he was placid, and he was wearing a robe with a hood and that’s about as placid as anyone can get. We kept watching. 

My dad isn’t what I’d call stoic. When he’s angry you can feel it in the air, when he’s happy his energy crackles through you. But through this whole process, the divorce, I’d never seen him express any grief. Doubt, worry, hurt I’d seen all these things on both of my parents and felt them roiling in my own body almost constantly. I’d be walking around, like a functional, not wounded adult and the tears would ambush me. I became a crazy person whose sentences could start normally “oh yes I’m going home for christmas,” and become the waterlogged ramblings of the insane in seconds flat “WHY DON’T THEY LOVE EACH OTHER ANYMORE??” I sobbed when Lady GaGa broke off her engagement. Lady. Gaga! 

But I’d seen none of that from my dad. 

I’m struck by how much Diane Keaton looks like my mom, the goofy, timeless beauty and I wondered if my dad felt the same way. As they chase lobsters around their kitchen I remember a picture I found in a drawer. It’s my mother and father during their courtship. They’re in front of a fireplace, wearing matching white long underwear and twin tight perms. They’re looking into each other’s eyes. It’s not the kind of picture you ask someone to take of you. It’s the kind you take of yourself, in the days before selfie sticks or social media. There was once a time when these two people that made me got dressed up, set up a tripod and tried to capture something to remember forever. 

It dawned on me, as Annie squealed with delight and my mom and dad giggled as a camera timer dinged, that every couple must have pictures like these. Even couples who can’t stand to be in the same room- did at one point like each other so much that they needed evidence for posterity. It means so much, and so little. 

“Love is too weak a word for what I feel, I loaf you, I lurve you”

“You love Mitchell?” My dad asks at this scene. I nod, not taking my eyes of the screen. 

“Why don’t you marry him?” he asks. 

I rattle off a bunch of reasons – I’m too young, I have no money, we have no space, but the real reason booms in my head. How could I now? What kind of idiot survives the Titanic and the very same year goes on a Princess Cruise? I was shaken, this shook me. In after school specials the girl with divorced parents always says something like “I just can’t beleive in love right now”. In real life, my real grown up life, it’s more like “I’m scared, because it looks like you can do everything right and still end up mad.” I look at him, and I feel so sure and ready but now there’s a grumpy voice in my head that says “yeah, but they were sure too.”

“I like him so much, but I don’t know what to do with that,” he muses “I feel like we’ve met so many people, everyone’s new boyfriend or husband or girlfriend and then they break up or divorce and they leave. And what are we supposed to do with them then?” 

All we can do is sigh and keep watching. 

We’re at Gammy Hall’s house for Easter. My dad laughs at her father in law and remembers his own, my grandpa who died years before. “I always liked Lenny, I always hoped he liked me too,” he says and takes a swig of my IPA before grimacing and pushing it far away. I remember my uncle pulling me close last night, the first Christmas Eve with that family that my dad had missed in years. “Tell your papa, I say we miss him,” he whispered in my ear like a secret. That’s what my dad feels like now at these parties, a secret. There’s this void in these events that I used to enjoy and on the corners of the void are people whispering about the thing that’s not there. It makes me feel so alone.  As my dad watched that dysfunctional family on the screen (with the Christopher Walken cameo I bet you all forgot) I could tell he was thinking of the one he was leaving. The team that he wasn’t a member of anymore. 

Annie moves to California. Woody comes to meet her and she kisses him on the cheek. 

“That’s all I want,” my papa says wetly. I turn and realize he’s tearing up. “I just always thought it was sweet when women kiss me on the cheek and no one does that anymore, that’s all.”

I contain multitudes. I have love and admiration for my mother’s strength and her struggle. What I’m mourning is the loss of this life that was so sweet and so warm for so many years. That life doesn’t happen on accident. Two people work really hard to make a life like that, and they worked their hardest on it for as long as they could. 

I have resentment for the unseen forces that tear us apart. I have doubt about what’s going to happen in their future and mine. I have compassion to know that divorce is not one person’s fault and I have days where I lay awake and wish somewhere along the line someone had said or done just one thing differently.

I have deep deep grief that creeps up on me unawares. Selfish greedy grief that’s simmering just below every kind thing I say to comfort my parents. And there’s still the girl in there that would kill to slam a door or two. 

Yet the only thing I could think at that moment was “for the love of god, give your dad a kiss”. 

I kissed his cheek and hugged him tight, not because he’s right, not because he’s blameless, not because I’m picking sides but because I love him and this family with everything that I have. I’ll loaf  the broken, mended bits of us until we die. That’s all I can do.

I squeeze his hand and the movie ends. Annie marries someone else, Woody maybe finds what it is he’s looking for. I stretch as the credits roll and try to make a teachable moment. “See, they broke up but they can still be friends, everyone’s ok.” The spell is broken, my dad looks at me glumly and says with clarity “no, that’s just a movie..” 

We can sit in the same living room, try to reenact the same routines, but it’s never going to be the same and  it won’t be ok. Later that Christmas, like differently charged magnets, we start at separate corners of the house and slowly but surely we attract. We end up in the living room, the same one where we sat stiffly before, and we play board games. We scream and laugh and tease each other. I close my eyes in the midst of this, brutally sacrificing my winning move in Catchphrase, and realize I’m experiencing a taste of years from now. After everyone is mad, when we finally pack up and leave this house, when the papers are signed and the dogs divvied up and the dust settles, we’ll be here. We’re a foundation that can last across states, in different houses and maybe with a few new additions along the way.  It’s going to take years and some of them are going to be awful and none of them are going to be easy. 

But the point is, loving and loafing and lurving means you at least sign up to try.

Stop Asking Women If They're Pregnant

Originally published in The Bold italic

Nov 14, 2014 at 6am

The first time it happened it was no big deal.

I was standing at the bus stop with two little kids I sometimes squire around town. The older of the two, who was seven, put a hand on my tummy, patted it reassuringly and said, “There’s a baby in there!”

I cracked up, wrote it off as kids saying the darndest things, and assured her that the only thing in my belly was a super burrito and all the fruit snacks I’d eaten from her lunch box. We laughed and moved on.

The second and third times were weirder. A coworker asked if my “pregnancy” was the reason I was quitting my job. A woman who asked the same thing raised her eyebrows suggestively when I said I wasn’t and remarked, “Well, maybe you are but you don’t know it!”

I’m going to spoil the rest of this story for you. I’m not pregnant. At no point during this story (or please god, my life, until I can get my shit together) am I ever pregnant. This isn’t one of those stories where everyone in the world knows I’m pregnant but me, and in the end I have a baby in the toilet at a Denny’s.

I would like to read an article like that, but I’m not writing one.

I stared at myself naked in the bathroom mirror the night of my coworker’s question. I did look a little different than normal. I’ve never been rail thin but my stomach is usually flat. I saw that there was a little pootch there. It was unusual but I shrugged it off. I was newly in love, which meant I was living in a hedonistic haze of weekends lying in bed with his and hers Jack’s Munchie Meals from Jack in the Box. I could see I had put on a little extra but I was getting loved up on the reg by a man who made me feel like a fucking Botticelli painting. I resolved to eat a salad for lunch and forget the pregnant thing.

Mostly I would demur and respond to these people’s (all total strangers) questions with a polite, “Nope, just fat!” or “Yes, we’re naming it Bud Lite Strawberita.” But the thing is, I felt more embarrassed by these questions than they felt asking them.

“

But then it happened again.

And again.

Mostly I would demur and respond to these people’s (all total strangers) questions with a polite, “Nope, just fat!” or “Yes, we’re naming it Bud Lite Strawberita,” and people would laugh. But the thing is, I felt more embarrassed by these questions than they felt asking them. One day I got fed up, and by fed up I mean drunk.

My boyfriend and I were participating in our favorite couples sport, taking shots and drinking beer at a local bar. I had just downed my shot when a drunken girl hobbled over to us. “Excuse me,” she slurred, “ but my friend over there wants to know why a pregnant girl is taking shots at a bar.” I swiveled my head around. A pregnant woman taking shots at a bar? That’s the kind of freak show I’d love to see live! Then I realized what was happening. She was talking about me. I was the freak show. A sort of drunken calm came over me and I leaned forward and said, “Well, tell your friend that he’s buying our next round because I am not pregnant and both of you are huge assholes.”

Her face went red, though maybe that was more because of the vodka than because of a social faux pas, but she meekly returned a minute later with beers for us.

Good for you, Sanchez, I thought to myself as I fell asleep that night, you stood up for yourself.

The victory was fleeting.

“Fucking no!” I said. As soon as the words left my mouth I wanted to apologize for being rude. But then I remembered, I may have a potty mouth, but at least I don’t go out of my way to tell a stranger they’re fat.

“

Then one day it happened, one really bad day, the kind of day where you’re at a Muni stop and the tracker can’t decide if the next bus is in three minutes or 43. A woman engrossed in a phone conversation was walking toward me. I backed up slightly so she’d have room to pass. As she walked in front of me she said a quick “thanks” and then doubled back, interrupted her phone conversation, pointed at me, and said, “Oh girl, are you pregnant?”

“Fucking no!” I said. As soon as the words left my mouth I wanted to apologize for being rude. But then I remembered, I may have a potty mouth, but at least I don’t go out of my way to tell a stranger they’re fat.

She apologized and I answered that it was OK. “But that’s really kind of rude, don’t you think?” I added. She stammered something in reply and then shuffled off into the night. I bet you could power a smart car with the force of the confusion from the person on the other line.

I get that for a large portion of the population being pregnant is an exciting thing. And I get that when you want to see something good, you end up seeing it even when it’s not really there. Hell, I’m the girl who walks up to everyone with a star tattoo and asks, “Oh my god, is that a Vonnegut asshole?” Except in these scenarios I’m assuming someone has really good taste in literature (even though that’s never what their tattoos are about) and not that they’re carrying another person in their body.

I sat down on the Muni bench after my interaction with the woman on the phone and cried.

I cried because apparently everyone thought I was fat. I cried because I was maybe a little fat. I cried because I never in my life wanted to be the girl who would cry about being fat.

Realize that when you ask someone if they’re pregnant, you’re not saying, “Wow, you’re glowing” or “Someone’s getting fucked on the daily.” You’re saying, “ It looks like there’s another person inside of your belly.”

Something had to give.

These incessant queries go beyond people’s curiosity about fertility. They’re another way of co-opting women’s bodies, in the same vein as telling women on the street to smile. Asking if a woman is with child is saying, “I’m a stranger but you owe me an explanation about your body.” And that’s not OK.

“

And I’ll take responsibility here. I was eating like crap. Contrary to the sage, spring-break wisdom of my friend Kelly, calories do count even when you’re in love, or on your period, or in love on your period, and hungover.

My Munchie Meals had to go. When I went out I started having only one really good beer instead of several cheap and icky ones. I packed my own lunches (inventing a truly bitching chicken salad in the process) and started walking everywhere. I felt better, healthier, and my food baby bump was receding a little bit every day. I was striding through the Mission wanting to treat myself to a you’re-not-pregnant burrito when a man catcalled me. “Ay, mamí!” He whistled as I passed, then when I ignored him he hissed, “Embarazada.” I don’t know how many of you took Spanish in 10th grade, but embarazadameans “pregnant” in Español.

Que coño?!

So even when I do my part and eat like a normal person and not like a stoned teenage boy with a tapeworm, people still ask if I’m pregnant!

Look, I’m never going to be perfectly skinny (as you might have seen on Wednesday). I can do my best to be healthy but I’ll always have a body type similar to a lusty tavern wench. And I love my body and will do my best to love it at any size. Everyone else who isn’t me? Mind your own business. Bump or no bump, never ask if I’m pregnant.

These incessant queries go beyond people’s curiosity about fertility. They’re another way of co-opting women’s bodies, in the same vein as telling women on the street to smile. Asking if a woman is with child is saying, “I’m a stranger but you owe me an explanation about your body.” And that’s not OK.

So everyone, stop asking me if I’m pregnant! Stop asking any woman, ever! It’s appropriate to ask a woman that question only if she is actually crowning, and even then you should open with, “Did you get a haircut or something, Jill? You look different!”

If someone is pregnant and wants you to know about it, they’ll fucking tell you. Have you ever heard someone stoked about being pregnant who shut up about it? No! And more power to those women, smug though they may be.

You can, however, ask if I’d like a taco. The answer to that will always be yes.