You're Not Special

by Meghan Rienks

  Thanks to modern technology and my paranoia, we got security cameras, so every time someone rings the doorbell, it taps into a live video feed. Let it also be known that when I say “doorbell,” I don’t mean the standard ring. It’s a twelve-second jingle involving chimes and gongs in various octaves. My mother rang the doorbell nonstop for nearly an hour. Every time the last note of the bell chimed, it would start right back up again. The second she arrived, I texted Mats a picture from the security feed. He called me immediately with a “IS THAT YOUR MOTHER? WHAT THE FUCK?!?” I told him I was fine, even though I was curled in a ball and hiding in the kitchen in the dark, afraid to be anywhere close to the curtains I hadn’t managed to close. He told me if she didn’t leave within the next half hour, he’d come home from work. She didn’t leave. By the time Mats arrived, she’d been at it for an hour and a half. At this point I think the doorbell jingle had gotten so deep into my psyche that I’d developed an eye twitch and a stutter. I had told Mats that I had locked both gates, and upon arrival his goal was to make it inside the apartment without letting my mother through the outer perimeter. He pulled into the driveway and she bolted from her perch outside our front gate and immediately started chasing his car. He parked, jumped out, and raced her to the back gate, ignoring her screams as he managed to unlock it, slip in, and relock it before she could push her way through. Now, here’s where I’ll let him take over to relate what happened while I just hid inside.

  * * *

  mats’s account

  Driving home, I tried to formulate a plan for when I got there. My goal was to avoid a direct confrontation. I figured Meghan’s mom was either going to be standing at our gate or sitting in the passenger seat of Karen’s car in front of our apartment. If I could swing my car into our driveway fast enough, I would be able to hustle into our apartment without having to argue with Jennifer in the middle of the driveway, instead being able to go back and forth with her from behind a door. I knew I had to be fast.

  As I turned onto our street, I saw Meghan’s mom standing at her gate. When she heard my car coming down the street, she instinctively turned and caught sight of me behind the wheel. Like a cornerback making a jump on a poorly thrown pass, she started moving toward the driveway to cut me off. Seeing this, I cut the turn a little too close, clipping the right-hand side of my bumper as I turned into the driveway. (You can send me a check for the repairs whenever, Jennifer.) As I screeched to a halt at the end of the driveway, Jennifer rounded the corner, speed walking with a purpose. “MATS!” she yelled. “I’m her mother and I have a right to talk to her!”

  “Nope!” I jumped out of the car and didn’t even bother to grab my bag. The stupidity of this didn’t hit me until I was inside, because if Jennifer had been a little more patient, she would have realized I needed to get my bag eventually. Alas, her normal wiliness must have deserted her.

  “MATS!”

  “NOPE!”

  I made it to the back gate and locked it behind me just as Jennifer came around the last corner. I jumped up the back stairs two at a time and ran through the apartment as I made my way to the front door. Jennifer was already waiting for me.

  I opened the porthole in the front door. “You need to leave. She doesn’t want to see you,” I said firmly.

  “She is my daughter and I have a right to talk to her.”

  “No, if she doesn’t want to talk to you, then you don’t have that right. You need to leave now.”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “If you don’t leave now, I’ll have to call the police.” And that was it. I shut the porthole and walked upstairs.

  * * *

  I called my attorney and let him know what was going on. He informed me that I needed to call the cops, regardless of whether I thought she was dangerous: she was trespassing, and having a 911 call on record would help in the process if I wanted to get a formal restraining order in the future. I’m pretty sure I made Mats call; he told the operator that it wasn’t an emergency, and they said they’d have officers swing by when they were in the neighborhood. He thanked them and hung up. About forty-five minutes after Mats showed up, my mom and Karen finally left. A few hours after that the cops stopped by to take my statement. I gave them an abbreviated version of the past two days, along with our security camera footage and the make and model of the car they were driving. I assured them I felt safe inside my apartment and that I would call 911 if she showed up again. Thankfully she didn’t.

  My friends didn’t leave me alone until my mother was confirmed to be back in Marin. They took shifts at my apartment, calling me when they got outside so I didn’t have to hear that fucking doorbell again. It’s the silver lining in all of this: when you realize how much you can be loved and taken care of by people who aren’t obligated to do so. I swear I heard the doorbell in my head for weeks. Every time it rains I get paranoid, as if it’s an omen that she’s coming back.

  Since then, she’s bought a house with Sierra’s dad, and officially divorced my dad. For some reason they insisted on mediation, which is designed for people who actually like each other and want to get it done quickly. But the process ended up being drawn out. My dad was buying my mom out of the house, and the value went up daily. The more time my mother stayed in the house, the more the house was worth, which meant she got more money out of the property settlement. The day their divorce was finalized, she texted my dad, “I’m sad :(” (I hope to God you’re rolling your eyes as hard as I am.)

  When my movie The Honor List was gearing to come out, the press asked me if any of it was inspired by my real life. I had written the story the script was based on, and while it was fiction, one plotline was based on what happened between my mom and Sierra’s dad. I was pretty petrified for people to see it. I was nervous Sierra would think it was based on our relationship (it wasn’t), but I was mostly nervous about what my mother would do once she saw it. She had been posting trailers to her Facebook page, writing over-the-top captions, keeping the public appearance up that we were closer than ever. My friends would send me screenshots with eye-rolling gifs, and I asked them to keep me updated once she posted about actually seeing the film. To my surprise, she told people that she saw the movie, and that she thought my character’s mom reminded her of Sierra’s mom. (Let me remind you that Sierra’s mother did not cheat on Sierra’s father with Sierra’s best friend’s father. That was my mother. And that was a plot in the movie.) She posted about it on Facebook, encouraging people to watch the film and saying how *proud* she was of her little girl. Eye fucking roll.

  Truthfully, I don’t feel like I “lost” my parents. To be frank, I didn’t really have them to begin with. As I mentioned earlier, I was less like their kid and more like their weapon to be used against each other. I was a pawn. They would scream and shout, and get into each other’s faces, with zero regard that their little girl was sitting right there. They’d argue about me, in front of me. Even if it had nothing to do with me, they’d rope me in, asking me whose side I was on. My mother would tell me how mean my dad was to her and how he didn’t care about me or love me. So I hated my dad. My dad would tell me how mean my mother was to him, how mean she was to me, and that it was her fault he was never around. So I hated my mom.

  There’s a lot I didn’t remember about my childhood. Initially, I blamed it on just having a shitty memory, but through therapy I’ve been able to see that it was a coping mechanism. My six-, seven-, and eight-year-old brain recognized trauma and blocked it out. My parents’ relationship scared me. Any moment with them in the same room ended with doors slamming and floors shaking. They’d scream in each other’s faces so loud I thought the windows would shatter. I remember crying, begging them to stop, and one of them would take notice and yell “NOW YOU’RE SCARING THE KID!” as a way of using me against the other. The physicality and intensity of my parents’ fights wasn’t normal. The “playful” nudges and prods from my mother during our interactions weren’t normal, either. She used to tell me tha
t I had a “hitting issue” and she was just responding to what I had started. I don’t have any personal memories of my “issue”; I just took her word for it. Maybe it was true, maybe I mirrored the behavior I saw at home. All I know is that physicality never left our relationship, and it never really felt fun or playful to me.

  The more time and separation I have from my upbringing, the clearer I’m able to see how toxic it was. There’s this video I uploaded to Facebook where my mom is backing out of a parking spot, crashes, and yells, “SEE?!?!” At the time I thought it was hilarious until a friend of mine who had never met my mom pointed out how disconcerting it was—how even though I was already into my twenties in the video, the second she yells at me, my demeanor shifts, my voice changes, and before the camera cuts you can hear me ask, “Why is this my fault?” Watching it now just makes me sad. As “typical” of an interaction as it was, I still didn’t understand the psychological impact that twenty-two years of such experiences had on me.

  The older I get, the more I’m able to understand that, despite my best efforts, my childhood affects who I am today. There’s a part of me that grew up in spite of my circumstances, but there’s also a part of me that grew up because of my circumstances. It took years for me to admit that it got to me, and I don’t know if I would have gotten there without therapy. My therapist once told me that “if it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” If something sends me plummeting, it’s because I’ve been there before. I’ve already paved the way. It’s why any hint of a raised voice sends me into a panic attack. Why doors slamming and loud noises make me feel like I’m a scared and helpless third grader. Those triggers and underlying signs of trauma don’t leave us. But they’re a hell of a lot easier to manage once we unpack them. I have more than two decades’ worth of rewiring to do, and it’s been hard to acknowledge that. There’s this ugly, judgmental side of me that feels like admitting that I’ve been damaged by them somehow means that they’ve won. Or that I’m letting down the eight-year-old version of me who so desperately tried to protect my mind from the trauma. I know none of that’s true, but that ugly voice can be hard to quiet. I’m working on it.

  Sometimes life just happens to us. We’re not at the steering wheel; we’re in a car seat in the back. There are times when we don’t ask for what we’re given. There are people who don’t deserve you who will hurt you. It doesn’t make you weak if it leaves you with scars and a few extra pieces of baggage. Nobody needs our endorsement to wreak havoc on our lives; they come uninvited and leave the place the worse for wear. We can’t control everything—believe me, I’ve tried. People can hurt you without your permission. I used to believe that feeling that hurt was my fault. It wasn’t. Just because I didn’t invite it in, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

  I guess it’s time for the moral of the story. My relationship with my parents has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with, but I’ve learned a lot. Mats and I started dating at the very beginning of all of this, and he stuck by my side the whole way through. He did it without even acknowledging that there was any other option. He made me stop believing that I was unlovable. I learned that if it’s not loving, it’s not love. I used to think I never wanted to get married or have kids—and you probably think that going through all of this would cement that. It’s quite the opposite, actually. It has instilled a determination in me to prove to be a better mother than the one I had. It’s made me want to have my own family and raise my future kids with so much love and support that they don’t doubt their strength for even a second. In the midst of all of this negativity and toxicity, I stumbled upon a sense of self-worth. I began to value myself in a way I never had before. For so long, I felt obligated to accept my situation because it’s what I had. Society put this importance on the idea of “family,” and I had just accepted that I needed to deal with the manipulation and verbal abuse that was quite literally breaking me down. In reality, just because somebody brought you into this world and their DNA runs through your veins, it does not mean they are your family. You can choose your own family. Family isn’t genetics or heredity or the result of a broken condom. Family is love. Mutual, respectful love. It could be the last name you have, the couple who made you, or the people who took you in just because they wanted to. That is family.

  I don’t want to sugarcoat this and tie it up with a nice bow, because I can’t. Healing from trauma takes years. I spend two hours a week unlearning behaviors and coping mechanisms that no longer serve me. I’m constantly discovering ways that my toxic upbringing has seeped into my adult life and relationships. Some days I feel like I’ve made incredible strides; other days I feel like a broken little kid. There is one thing that remains an undeniable fact: I did what I needed to do. There is not one second that I’ve ever regretted cutting my mother out of my life. To this day, it is the single greatest act of self-love I have ever demonstrated.

  finding love and being happy

  I AM A BIG FAN OF ATTENTION.

  chapter 22 obligatory chapter about finding love and being happy

  As you’ve probably noticed, the vast majority of the contents of this book have skewed toward shining a less-than-flattering light on myself. That’s not to say that my life isn’t great or that I’m unhappy with my situation at all; really, that couldn’t be further from the truth. When I decided that I wanted to write a book, I wanted to write a book that I wish I could have read in my teenage years. I wanted it to be like a best friend and a big sister rolled into one. I wanted it to be all the shit I wish somebody had told me. If at fifteen I could have read about somebody else’s awkward moments and all the crap they’d gone through, I sure as hell would have felt a whole lot less crazy in my own life.

  You know those people who bounce from relationship to relationship, whose last single days were in the time when AOL email addresses ruled? Those people who’ve managed to live their years as a series of romantic novels come to life? I hate those people. The prescription-free, perpetually happy, in love, and over-the-fucking-moon-about-their-lives kind of people. Now, I have nothing against relationships at all, or people being happy in them. What I do hate is that those blissfully happy people tend to forget that not every other person in the world cares to hear about every last detail.

  These friends always seem to pop up at the worst times, gushing on and on about their significant others while I stuff my face with popcorn and baby carrots and calculate how many months it’s been since I kissed somebody without being paid. And as I’d sit across from them, multiplying the weeks and carrying the 1, I promised myself that I would never become one of them. Even in the (unlikely) chance my icy Grinch heart would thaw and my cynicism would subside, I pledged that I would never be that hair-twirling, gabbing, giggling creature. Who the fuck wants to watch somebody drone on and on about how AWESOME their love life is? Answer: nobody.

  And yet, I think the message of this section would fall flat without this part. I divulged terrible dates, earth-shattering heartbreaks, and every embarrassing instance in between. I set out to be somebody you could relate to, to make this book be that comforting reassurance that somebody else survived it all too. If I just stop there, then every self-deprecating story I’ve shared doesn’t mean shit. I guess what I’m trying to say without sounding like an inspirational poster is that it gets better. Despite my lifetime of skepticism, I can honestly and personally say that it actually does all work out in the end. It’s pretty fucking cool.

  The first time I ever met my (now) boyfriend Mats, I thought he was gay. I had no actual basis for my theory on his sexuality other than that I thought he was cute and with my luck and previous track record, he’d be batting for the other team. That, and every cute guy you see in Hollywood is pretty much guaranteed to be gay. Also, he was wearing one of those Britney-at-the-VMAs microphone headpiece things. That didn’t help.

  We were in the lobby of my (now) manager’s office. He extended his hand to shake mine, zero irony or acknowledgment of the 2
001-style headphones he was sporting. If it was any other person, I’m sure I would have been squirming in secondhand embarrassment, yet even with only four words exchanged between us he still managed to make me feel like a freshman at a senior frat party. He likened his name to the applesauce brand for the sake of my own memory and offered a genuine smile at my laughter, as if this weren’t the hundredth time he cracked that joke this week. He introduced himself as my manager’s new assistant and I felt my cheeks flush. Why couldn’t their assistant be a flamboyant gay guy named, like, Fabio or something? Or a petite nerdy girl with glasses? Which is all a long way of saying that he was really cute. Cute enough that a part of me hoped he was gay because otherwise I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to be able to look him in the eye. Which of course made me about ten thousand times more nervous. We engaged in surface-level small talk for the duration of the thirty steps it took to get to the conference room, and that was it.

  The next time I saw Mats, he told me that he and his girlfriend broke up. I had my answer to my question about his orientation.

  Fuck.

  The first record I have of my feelings toward Mats was less than two months after we met, when I tweeted this from my (long since inactive) private account:

  I have a crush on my managers assistant

  I know, so elegant. Classy.

  I should be more ashamed to admit it, but I will totally own the fact that I am a big fan of attention. If I could, I would live every single day like it was my birthday (and my birthday was Christmas). This love of attention directly translates into my generally flirtatious nature. Even as a chubby-cheeked ten-year-old I’d twirl my white-blond ringlets around my sparkly blue fingernails and compliment my crush on his new pair of Etnies. I love flirting and batting my eyelashes and having someone to text and that flush on my cheeks. I crush it at crushing. I just have zero to none on follow-through. Intentionally, I may add. Flirting and crushing is safe; the banter and the back-and-forth is innocent and endless. This being said, I also wouldn’t call myself a tease, mostly because, like “friendzoning,” it’s a term created by straight men who feel that women owe them something. I don’t make it seem like I’m pursuing something greater or leading somebody on into thinking we’re headed toward something serious. Or at least I’ve learned how to avoid that awkward moment. It’s all in the selection process. Subconsciously, I tend to develop crushes on guys classified as so untouchable, it surpasses inconvenient and lands closer to nearly impossible. I crush on the guys I can’t have. Not like friends’ boyfriends, or married men or anything of that nature. I mean, guys who live in different states, or someone I’m on set with for six months, or somebody I work really closely with. The inconvenience of these crushes ranges from things as simple as distance to complex things such as an established professional tie between us. Inconvenience that is so apparent to both parties that neither of us would ever even consider each other as a candidate for anything long term. For some, this habit would grow frustrating, as the results are unfruitful, but for me this situation is ideal. If I crush on somebody I cannot or should not have, I never actually have to act on my flirtations. It’s an endless cycle that leaves me in total control yet totally alone.