by Mia Mercado
If you’re wondering what the Midwest is like, allow me to be your corn-fed, surprisingly only half-white tour guide.
* * *
Being from the Midwest is like being from anywhere else in the United States, just five to ten years in the past.
It’s that feeling you get when you drive on a country road between two seemingly endless cornfields and are like, “Huh. Yeah, that’s a lot of corn.”
It’s the loud, nasal whisper of someone saying, “Just gonna sneak by ya real quick” while scooching into a church pew.
Living in the Midwest is so cool. It’s also warm, hot, icy, autumn, three feet of snow forever, no sun and then too much sun, three months of gray slush, the idea of springtime but never really experiencing springtime, and apple picking.
It’s seeing a cow and going, “Cow.”
The Midwest is where horse girls go to become horsewomen.
It’s wearing overalls to be trendy but ending up matching the farmer who is also shopping at this Farm & Fleet.
Have you ever seen Lake Michigan in the summertime, beautiful and vast, lined with three thousand dead alewife fish? That’s the Midwest, baby.
In the Midwest, Facebook is just for telling you who from high school is married to each other. Every pop-up notification is like, “Wait, wasn’t he a senior when she was a freshman?!”
Being from the Midwest is all about your mom dropping you and your friends off at the mall, which is twenty to forty-five minutes away from the suburb where you live. You’ll call her when you guys are done? Oh, honey, she’ll just be waiting in the parking lot with this new James Patterson novel. Make sure you put the directions into the GSP . . . er, GPS . . . er, whatever you kids call it. Oh, hang on to the grab handle, mama’s gonna make a hard turn. Do you know which buildings around here used to be a Blockbuster? Don’t worry, mom’ll tell ya.
The Midwest is where everything is measured in how many hours away you are from your childhood home.
It’s like two dead deer on the side of the road arguing over whether they like the Packers or the Bears.
It’s like if every store you walked into was a Pottery Barn, and by that I mean it’s extremely white.
It’s like “wisCAAAHNsin” not “Wisconsin.”
The Midwest is that feeling you get when you find free parking, but the free parking is literally everywhere, if that makes sense?
It’s like seeing a celebrity at the grocery store, but instead of a celebrity, it’s your local CBS weatherman or the girl who sat behind you in pre-algebra but moved in eighth grade.
It’s never knowing if that person is smiling at you just to be friendly or because you babysat them in middle school.
It’s having to write a thank-you card to your priest for coming to your birthday party even though you only agreed to invite him because you thought priests weren’t allowed to eat cake.
The Midwest is where the world’s supply of “ope” comes from.
Being from the Midwest is the best. And if you disagree, well . . . no one here will fight you on it. We’re a nice people.
Mamma Mia
Like the stereotype of the suburban Midwest I sometimes am, I used to think I’d be an elementary school teacher when I grew up. Everything around me had primed me to spend the rest of my days surrounded by kids between the ages of “baby” and “can’t quite use an oven on their own.” I had younger siblings and grew up around younger cousins. I attended, graduated from, and some might even say peaked in elementary school. I’d been babysitting since I was in—and I cannot emphasize this enough—fifth grade. In the same way you likely don’t remember your first step or trying solid food for the first time, I don’t remember when I first changed a diaper. I assumed this was a normal part of growing up until, as an adult, I saw many of the childless men around me panic in the presence of a baby.
I loved babysitting. I still love it. It’s always felt easy to make kids like me, something that’s often felt forced with my peers. At ten and eleven, I was better at being A Little Grown-up than A Child Who Acts Her Age. Perhaps it was my enrollment in the accelerated reading program or the fact that I grew facial hair long before the boys in my class, but parents trusted me (a child) with their own children.
This is something I’ve only thought of as strange in my late twenties. Have you seen a middle schooler recently? Did you know that seventh graders are a literal twelve years old? Do you remember being twelve? Being so horny your brain and butt might explode while also being terrified of your own body? Having homework, your main if not only responsibility, cause you to have full-on, nightly emotional breakdowns because there’s just, like, A LOT going on right now that you don’t know about, MOM! Imagine handing your baby to that, leaving for a couple of hours, and returning to pay them in cash.
I saved a lot of the money I made from babysitting. My family was the exact combination of financially stable and money conscious (also see: half-Asian) that the balance of saving and avoiding unnecessary spending has been instilled in me since birth. I still always order the cheapest burger on the menu, like my dad will find out if I don’t.
I didn’t start babysitting because I needed money or because my parents pressured me into getting a job. I did it because I genuinely enjoyed being around kids younger than me. I liked having some semblance of authority. I liked having adults praise me for something that came naturally to me. I liked how the kids I watched made me feel cool and smart and good at playing pop covers on the guitar. Babysitting made me feel how I assume a straight white dude feels every day.
I also liked having stories to tell my friends, anecdotes that provided an excuse for me to tell Drew C. all about my day in hopes that he’d be wooed by my natural maternal instinct at fifteen. I spent most of my summers in high school babysitting. I’d watch kids during the day, making sure they stayed alive while I looked for the parents’ stash of Diet Coke in the basement fridge or tried to figure out where they kept their kids’ old Halloween candy. At night, I’d hang out with my friends and regale them with my tales of babysitting. “The kids were insane today,” I’d say, like a weathered mom of four.
I told them about the kid who crocodile-death-rolled while I was trying to change his diaper, how he smeared his own shit on the carpet, an air mattress, and the walls in three different rooms. Have you ever tried to get poop out of popcorn walls? Would not recommend.
I talked about the kid who greeted me in a full WWII uniform after I came out of the bathroom. He’d been wearing a t-shirt and shorts when I went to go pee not five minutes before. “This was my grandpa’s,” he said, and I had to be like, “Extremely cool, Bobby, but can we maybe put that knife down?”
Then there was the four-year-old girl who wouldn’t stop scream-crying in the bathroom, begging me to call her dad. When I asked what was wrong, she sobbed, “My poop! Is too! BIG!” She wasn’t constipated. She had just done one very big poop, and it scared her.
In between going to town on a bunch of pumpkin-shaped Reese’s in April, snooping through bedside tables and medicine cabinets, and eating oatmeal creme pies while I made myself boxes of mac and cheese, I was a bomb-ass babysitter. I’d do crafts with the kids, in part because that sounded like a cute Baby-Sitters Club-esque thing to do. I taught them songs on the piano despite how tone-deaf and uninterested they were. I took them to parks and pools and wherever else was within walking distance. I also made a neighbor kid named Greg piss his pants a little because I startled him while playing Cops and Robbers. This isn’t an example of good babysitting, but it does show my comedic sensibility.
I never gave much thought to the parents whose kids I was watching. Only now am I fazed by the number of times I was driven home by dads who, in hindsight, were probably too tipsy to be operating a motor vehicle. Only now do I think about how weird it is that I babysat for my high school teachers. How they’d come home from happy hour, asking questions like, “Do you think I look older than Mr. Davis?” How I’d lie and pretend lik
e anyone over twenty-two didn’t look like a dinosaur to me.
The kids I used to babysit regularly are now years older than I was when I started watching them. They’re posting thirst traps on Instagram and sharing questionable statuses on Facebook, and it makes me want to be like, “I used to have to start your apple for you, Dennis.” I can’t even imagine what parents must feel.
Like many girls who grew up in the Midwestern suburbs, primed by babysitting and Sunday school, I thought I’d start having kids by twenty-five “at the latest.” I remember being in elementary school, calculating at what age I’d need to start having kids in order to be young and hot when my hypothetical children started going to school, learning to drive, going to college, and eventually repeating the cycle themselves. “I don’t want to be a super old grandma,” I’d think well before having my first period.
I’m turning thirty soon, and sometimes I worry that my body has a broken clock, forgetting to chime “baby” every hour. It’s strange, after spending so much of your life terrified you’ll get pregnant, to suddenly reach a point where you begin worrying you may not be able to grow a child inside you even if you tried. To have relatives, teachers, and congresspeople scream “ABSTINENCE” at your vacant belly and then pivot, seemingly overnight, to scream “BABY.” To have distant family members and government agencies look at your body as a host for life instead of life itself. To have your gender function as a living résumé whose job options begin and end at “mother.”
It seems like kismet or a curse that “mamma” comes before my name so easily. My grandma lovingly calls me “Mamma Mia.” (Thanks, ABBA.) I have always felt like a mother bird, and only now am I wondering whether that is in my nature or nurture or both at the same time.
I have yet to have “baby fever” as an adult. My body has remained at a steady 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, selfishly childless. My symptoms are more tied to sweating at the idea of “needing” to have a baby “soon.” If I’m being honest, the most appealing part of being pregnant right now is that I’d actually have an excuse for wanting to nap and eat away most of the day. My ten-year IUD will expire when I turn thirty-five, the same age that pregnancies are scientifically dubbed “geriatric.” I wonder if I will be ready for kids by then. As if anyone feels ready ever.
I worry a lot about being pregnant, what my body will and won’t do. I worry what my post-pregnant brain will and won’t think. I worry whether or not to circumcise the son I may or may not have. I worry about how I’ll talk to my daughter about anything at all. Am I doomed to have some sort of post-birth Frankenpussy? Will I get a parallel C-section scar to match the one that currently stretches across my stomach?
I was born with an ileal stricture, a piece of tissue blocking my small intestine. This is a scientific way to say that I could not shit when I was a baby. Pooping, as you may know, is a key part of being a baby. I used to use it as my Fun Fact on first-day introductions. “When I was a baby, I almost died because I couldn’t poop,” I’d announced to my fellow fourth graders. “Oh. Well. We’re glad you didn’t die,” the teacher would respond, unblinkingly.
My parents still talk about how scary it was, their ten-day-old child vomiting up gunk that didn’t look like the right kind of gunk babies usually vomit. The idea of doctors operating on a ten-day-old baby didn’t fully faze me until I held my newborn niece for the first time. Babies, if you can believe it, are tiny. They are soft little noodles with heads too heavy for their weak baby neck muscles to lift. The fact that there are people smart enough to diagnose something hidden in a baby’s intestines, and that there are medical instruments delicate enough to fix a baby’s insides, is all horrifying and incredible and just generally bonkers. I still don’t understand how they haven’t made indestructible phone cases but for babies.
This isn’t to say I don’t trust myself with a child. I know I am great at holding children—part of which comes from the confidence of someone who has always been expected to know how to hold a child. I have friends whose husband’s first time changing a diaper came with their first child, friends (male) with pregnant partners who ask if they want to hold a baby “for practice.” The idea of never having held a baby seems like a cardinal sin to me, though not one ever preached aloud in the Catholic Church.
People applaud, cheer, swoon over what a great father my husband, Riley, will make every time he does something as brave as standing next to a baby. Riley will* be a wonderful parent. He is patient and smart and has worked as an elementary or middle school teacher his entire adult life. He’s better trained to be around kids than most of our peers with children of their own. Still, my potential parenthood is expected, where his is lauded. We each have our roles, though his is always “Man” and mine is “Childless Wife.”
Riley’s biological clock ticks in sync with mine. Every time after we babysit our nieces or hang out with our friends who have kids, we look at each other and perform a ten-second play called Should We Have Kids? It goes like this:
“Not yet, right?”
“Right.”
“So cute though.”
“Yes, the cutest!”
“And great for them.”
“Yes, we love it for them.”
“. . . But not yet for us.”
“Oh my god, not yet.”
Depression Isn’t a Competition, but, Like, Why Aren’t I Winning?
I think a lot about this 2005 commercial for the antidepressant Cymbalta that’s all about how “depression hurts.” We open on a Sad Woman.* She’s lying on a couch, blanket askew, face lit by the television. A classic depression scene. A moody female voiceover asks where depression hurts. The Sad Woman is still on the couch. Everywhere, the same voiceover responds breathily. We see a montage of disappointed children, a dog waiting to play fetch, a woman walking away from her husband at the dinner table. The voiceover asks who depression hurts. We see a person sighing while looking into the middle distance. Everyone, she exhales, exhausted that she is the only one participating in this question-and-answer exercise. I don’t remember how the commercial ends but certainly not with me calling my doctor to order “one Cymbalta to go, please.”
But I’ll admit, the voiceover does sound similar to the way my depressed brain talks to itself.
Should we get out of bed yet?
No. *deep sigh*
But it’s already noon.
Okay. *even deeper sigh*
And it’s a weekday.
Correct. *yet another sigh*
Is this me being lazy or depressed?
Yes. *sighs while looking knowingly toward camera*
Most of my experience with depression has involved asking myself and the people closest to me whether I am “sad enough” to be clinically depressed. Am I depressed in the normal “ha ha aren’t we all so sad right now” way, or am I, like, depressed depressed?
If I have depression, am I supposed to cry a lot, all the time? Should I not be crying ever? Should everything around me make me feel bad? Should I not feel anything at all? How long do I have to stay in bed in the morning? How late do I need to stay up at night? Can I technically be depressed if I still laugh at the episode of Bob’s Burgers where Louise has a crush on a member of a boy band and that attraction manifests itself in her wanting to slap the boy in the face? What if it’s the fourth time I’ve watched the episode that day? What has to happen to my appetite? If I go to McDonald’s twice in a week, does that count as a cry for help? If I tweet about eating McDonald’s being a cry for help, does that make me depressed or relatable? Would being more relatable on Twitter cure my depression altogether?
I was officially diagnosed with depression at the beginning of 2018. In hindsight, that was far from when I’d first started feeling depressed. I’d seen a counselor a couple of years prior, at the beginning of 2016. She thought I might have premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which is like PMS on X Games mode. After reading the common symptoms (extreme mood shifts, sadness, irritability), the counselor said, “Hmm. M
aybe everyone with a period has this.” If you’re wondering whether that’s a reassuring thing to hear from a medical professional, the answer is I stopped going to her pretty soon after that session.
Before that, I thought my depression came and went with the birth control pill I started taking in 2013 and stopped in 2015. Before that still, I thought I’d rid myself of any deep spells of sadness after graduating from college in 2011. (Most of what I remember of college is me, living at home, and crying a lot in my twin-size bed.) I’d diagnose myself with Bad Relationships, Lack of Friends, Watching Too Much Law & Order: SVU. Anything to avoid admitting that maybe the depression call was coming from inside the house. Everyone gets sad, I’d think. It’s normal to feel sad, I’d say. It’s healthy, even, I’d justify before settling into my daily three-hour afternoon “nap.”
I don’t remember my family having many in-depth discussions about mental health growing up. I know my mom, who experiences chronic illness and physical pain, slept a lot during the day and was up at strange times during the night. I know my dad said nothing when my mom would wordlessly leave the house, angry-crying or sad-crying or both. She’d leave alone, take the car, come back in a few hours, and neither of my parents said anything when she returned. I also remember my mom allotting us an unlimited number of “mental health” days from school. If I was sad, she’d pick me up at the front office, say I had an orthodontist appointment despite having gotten my braces off years ago, and let me sleep in her bed for the afternoon. Such are the pros and cons of having a parent who understands this particular brand of sadness.
Ana and I play this one depression game a lot. The game goes like this: We say how we can’t be that depressed because we got out of bed to pee. We say we can’t be that sad because we went “aww” at a dog once. We say we can’t be that sick because, well, we’re still here and alive, aren’t we?