Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  “Each of the books I’ve published were at some point deemed a failure by some twenty-two-year-old publicist in New York named Jennifer. They were all named Jennifer. All my Jennifers—they’re a bit like my discarded wives. My Jennifers were all graduates of Brown, they deserved so much better than me as an author, they had such beautiful hair, beautiful educations…They’d been groomed to have much bigger successes. But I and my incorrigably midlist work destroyed them.

  “Somewhere, in some hip bar in Manhattan, are my Jennifers, about thirty-three now, still cutting great figures in the dark, but with hard lines around their mouths. It is my career that put them there.” I gesture wildly. “I mean, look at Frida Kahlo! Look at the walls of this café! She was one of the most famous women artists of her time, and in any ONE painting, I ask you…does Frida ever look happy? Nails in the neck—that’s the life of the Artist! And poor Frida Kahlo, did she have her own Jennifer to disappoint? Her own Jennifer? Or maybe, in Mexico, a Yennifer? Or maybe an Xchtl, a disappointed Xchtl!”

  As if to punctuate, there is a crash of glassware. A murmuring clot forms around a capsized barrista.

  Certainly I have blown it—blown to smithereens my students’ fondest hopes, the already flimsy veil of my classroom comportment and whatever I had left of my reputation for groovy, simpatico hipness on the Marymount campus. No matter: What my coffeehouse meltdown has shown me is that I am not a calm, sedate, resting-on-my-laurels teacher but a bold, vibrant, and still passionate writer with interesting things to say. In this year of fog, what I’ve forgotten is that the important thing is my work—my weekly witty, sharply literary musings about city life for KCRW. And KCRW is after all the key to Kentwood: All my Marymount embarrassment will soon fall away when Hannah’s kindergarten acceptance is finally nailed. (And I’m still glowing from Kentwood’s amazing API…907!)

  But here comes the next rude turn. I am just headed out the door to record for KCRW when the phone rings.

  It is the KCRW station manager, whom we will call Ruth, as that is her name. By coincidence she has the same name as my therapist, Ruth, but the call is not therapeutic.

  “SANDRA!” my station manager exclaims. “DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID OVER THE WEEKEND? YOU SAID ‘FUCK’ ON THE RADIO! HOW COULD YOU SAY ‘FUCK’ ON THE RADIO? OF COURSE, I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO FIRE YOU IMMEDIATELY, AND PLEASE, SANDRA,” she adds, “GET SOME HELP. GET…PROFESSIONAL…HELP. GOOD-BYE.”

  I fail to stammer out a request to see if KCRW could be a media sponsor for the Kentwood Elementary fund-raiser, so my daughter can go to kindergarten there.

  But it’s ever so much worse than that.

  Clearly, a horrible error has occurred.

  Over the years, my engineer and I have worked out a system, in our sleepy basement control room. If the text colloquially yearns for it, to highlight some personal frustration or other, I’ll record an expletive…and mark it for him to bleep out later.

  Like me, he has recently suffered some sleep deprivation. Like me, he has two small children.

  He has clearly forgotten to bleep and now I’ve been fired, not just fired but…

  “Fired for obscenity…on public radio,” Kaitlin says in wonderment. “There is actually no conversational number for this.”

  I call Aimee, give her the bad news about KCRW, how I will not be able to “bring it” for the Kentwood Elementary fund-raiser…My ex-boss hates me, now Mrs. Carla Feninger will too…

  “I’m so sorry,” Aimee says tersely. “In a meeting. Gotta run.”

  And now I may even lose my Marymount College job. The dean is a devotee of public radio—that is how I got hired. That KCRW radio gig was the last shred of a professional, creative toehold I had in this world…

  I am such a fuck-up. I’m utterly fucked. Fuck!

  It’s all too much for me.

  I can’t do any of it anymore.

  I take to bed.

  I give up.

  I shred my KidSmart Museum card.

  I holler, “Kids? It’s watch-all-the-TV-you-want time! And look…” I open the cupboard, pour it out into a bucket. “Stale Halloween candy!”

  There are cries of joy, cheering. It’s Christmas!

  My daughters dance around me, hugging me! Apparently I am the greatest mom who ever walked the planet!

  Chewing furiously on their lollipops like Teamsters chewing cud, my girls get right down to business in the bathroom, bathing all of their stuffed animals. What with all the educational flashcards and rushing about to science museums, all their ponies, unicorns, Doodle Bears have gotten so dirty…They need shampooing, and rinsing, and much brushing, with tiny doll hairbrushes. Jonathan and Aimee’s children are violining their way into Carnegie Hall by age nine, fencing their way to the Olympics, and completing all the leading-to-Harvard-early-admission math puzzles of the dangerously highly gifted. By contrast, here in The Nuys, if we gauge our spawn’s eventual careers by their current interests, it appears we have a small tribe of pint-sized future beauticians, or cosmetologists.

  But then I get to thinking, gloomily, as I click on the television, maybe it’s okay. Why does EVERY child have to be exceptional? Perhaps Bill and Melinda Gates could create a kind of wilderness sanctuary called “The Island of the C Students,” a safe place for children to go who are not exceptional. When they turn twenty-one and are still flailing, not having graduated early from Princeton, they can move to our island to enjoy responsible and fulfilling citizenry. Our C students can perform extremely useful tasks such as inputing checkbook data into Quicken, separating out everyone’s recycling, and cutting up watermelon. (Recently I was at a brunch with a roomful of Ph.D.’s, Ivy Leaguers, and various other media professionals. Did ANYONE make the slightest move to cut up the watermelon! No-o-o-o-o!!!)

  C students have many other attractive features. They don’t destroy a Scrabble game like 1600 SAT’s do, and are fun to play cards and watch television with. They also don’t play the violin, practice the violin, or sit around boring people with long monologues about how they have fallen behind on their violin—How they just saw Nadia Sadja-Salerno or whatever her name is do some Live at Wolf Trap thing on PBS and fell into depression and went to therapy for four weeks over somehow not finding their true potential on the violin and being stifled by their dad.

  (I remember when Jonathan and Aimee’s son Ben first developed his extraordinary childhood gift for the violin. Jonathan was especially thrilled at how much Ben clearly loved playing, how passionate Ben was about music. “I never had that,” Jonathan said, “that love of music. For me growing up, practicing was always a chore.” “That’s wonderful,” I said. “Perhaps Ben can grow up to become a musician, a real working musician like Mike, and move out to where we live, in Van Nuys.” Jonathan visibly started, checked himself. Then added: “Well, there are plenty of surgeons who enjoy playing the violin!”)

  Or massage! That’s what our C students can do: massage. As I lay in bed and watch the Home Shopping Network—which is amazingly interesting—my girls sit on my back, roll over me, walk on me with their clammy, slightly sticky feet. It actually doesn’t feel too bad. Instead of a four-hand massage as at the Auberge, it’s a four-feet massage…At a price I can afford.

  And perhaps my firing—it’s all for the better. My slot was so obscure, no one even wrote me at the station anymore. And, in fact, when the expletive ran at 7:30 A.M., no one even called the station to report it, so it ran again at 9:30 A.M.! My KCRW pay was only $150 a week, anyway.

  So no one knows about it. The humiliation is contained. I can probably keep my Marymount job at least. Things will be okay.

  Mike comes by. Sits gently by the side of the bed.

  “Honey?”

  “Wha—?”

  “The L.A. Times is preparing an item on your, well, your being fired for saying ‘fuck’ on the radio. Apparently your boss gave them some pretty choice quotes about you.”

  “That I’m an insane raving maniac who will never be hired again?
”

  “Something like that. Do you want to give them a quote?”

  “No,” I say.

  I close my eyes.

  In a way—the obliteration—it feels good. What a relief not to even pretend to write anymore. Anything. This’ll give me time to take up some new hobbies. For instance…

  Where’s that knitting kit?

  Here it is!

  Turquoise wool! Fluffy! Nice!

  Via much long-distance phone calling, Kaitlin and Mike busily arrange an emergency I-CHAT with my therapist, Ruth, who has been on leave in the San Juan Islands.

  Mike props his Mac up on the bed, opens it, adjusts the tube-shaped camera eye.

  There is static fritzing in, fritzing out…But suddenly an image pops up. I see Ruth, my Ruth—the nice one, not the mean one. Her cloud of dark gray-and-silver hair bobs gently in front of me. She is resplendent in an orange-and-gold caftan.

  “Sandra dear heart!” she cries out waving her turquoise-beringed hands. Then she looks to the side. “I can’t hear anything. Is she there?”

  “Look right,” an offscreen voice says.

  “Oh, THERE you are!” she cries out. “Sandra dear heart! Trust me!” She hugs herself. “You will survive this! You will survive this! Another public radio station will snap you up right away! You’re THAT good!”

  I lean up on one elbow, the better to get at the jalapeño Kettle Chips my husband has been kind enough to procure for me, at my request.

  “Let me tell you something, other Ruth.”

  “I am here,” she says, moving her arms in an aura-like circle. “Boy, I wish I could hear better. But go on.”

  “Public radio commentators—those gentle, trusted souls, characters, and types who venture into your car or into your home five minutes before the hour? The bond they build, with their audience, is through their quirkiness. But it must be a gentle quirkiness, a charming quirkiness. No one will want you after that ‘quirk’ sheers off into something grotesque and pervy like, for instance, saying the word fuck!”

  “Well, you didn’t mean to,” Ruth says. “It was a technical error. Surely when you get your story out—”

  I pick out another chip, a great big fat one, curled over in grease.

  “Oh no no no, my friend, I’m afraid the damage is done! It’s the sort of gaffe that is irreparable. It’s that Gary-Hart-on-the-yacht moment. Let me explain.

  “NPR listeners do not want to see:

  “Andrei Codrescu exposing himself in a Louisiana adult movie theater, à la Pee-wee Herman.

  “Garrison Keillor caught red-eyed and wild-haired in a police mug shot, raving, drunken, bedraggled, Nick Nolte–esque.

  “Five words no one wants to hear? ‘Bailey White is in rehab.’”

  The enormity of the injustice hits me.

  “God! The forties…These were supposed to be my Maya Angelou years! My Live at Wolf Trap years! Amy Tan! When is she going to retire! I…want…her…spot! But I guess my judgment is shitty. The older I get, the more I seem to be just…LOSING it. My forties have been just some kind of debacle. Worse and worse. The last time scary radio Ruth called me, two years ago, was to inform me she was cutting my commentary that week as, in case I was unaware of it, public radio commentators cannot call Osama Bin Laden ‘the Towelatollah.’ Which, I admit, sounds bad—‘Towelatollah’—but you have to understand this word came three-quarters of the way through a painstakingly framed essay about language, political correctness, and the complex vagaries of our post–September eleventh world. I mean, is it worse for ME to call the Taliban the ‘Toweleban’ than for them to herd women into the backs of pickup trucks and, before howling football stadiums, shoot them in the head?

  “See—to me, ‘Toweleban’ seems like something brave to say, a searing linguistic/semitoic point of some kind, but to other people it’s just…stupid. I’m losing it! Thank God for that Marymount College job. I hope I don’t lose that. All I want to do is keep my little teaching job.” Now I’m babbling. “In a way, it’s great to be finally totally out of the public eye, even if the last bit of that eye was at seven-thirty on a Sunday morning. The public eye was basically closed. Still, it’s kind of a relief. After the Clive Barnes years, I’m just tired of being attacked and paraded.”

  “GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF!” Ruth suddenly screams. My Ruth. My therapist.

  She has my attention.

  Ruth raises one fist.

  “You are in a cauldron now. You are in the pressure cooker. You are in the battle zone.”

  She raises the other fist.

  “You are in the hot seat. You are in the cockpit. You are in the gladiator pen. You must…strap on your armor!!!”

  I have to admit, it is rather mesmerizing to see my tiny therapist floating on Mike’s computer screen. She’s like my own miniature little destroying Shiva goddess.

  She shakes both fists, screams!

  “The only way home is through Bagdad!”

  “What are you talking about?” I say.

  “Was it right for her to fire you? Did you mean to have that word spoken on the radio?”

  “Well, no.”

  “It was wrong, and if you don’t say it, you’re a PUSSY! The buck stops with you! What are you going to do in life, just roll over and roll over and roll over? You keep giving others the power!”

  “I’m just too tired to have…my own power,” I admit. “It’s like I had the power, didn’t enjoy it. It gave me indigestion. I guess I really didn’t want the power. Power is exhausting. I just wanted inner peace.”

  “You have NO CHOICE now! Destiny has thrust you into this position! The power wants you. The power CALLS to you.”

  Ruth raises her hand in a fist again, but which now has the thumb through it, in the Italian way.

  “You must tap into your inner FUCK YOU!”

  “I’m just so tired,” I say.

  “Apparently she also said that your work is trivial and that you’re emotionally unstable, that you tried to harm the station, and that you should get therapy! And guess what—I AM YOUR THERAPIST. You need to fight back at that toxic being!”

  I make a dismissive motion with my hand.

  “That’s just Ruth. You have to understand her. She always fires people like that. She’s kind of, I don’t know, a ferocious mother bear. She fires you, starts yelling, says YOU look depressed…you should get therapy. Although, as with Joe Frank, I hear she usually does it at Peet’s Coffee in Santa Monica. The only thing I didn’t get was the Peet’s coffee. But really, in the long run, you’d have to agree she has done more good at that station than harm—she’s a talent picker—I owe my career to her!”

  Ruth makes two fists, with two thumbs poking through them.

  “You are calling the L.A. Times. You are giving them the quote that you are sad…AND ANGRY—”

  “I guess I’m not really angry. I’m just humiliated and depressed.”

  “That’s called anger!” she yells.

  “Really?” I ask. “That’s what anger feels like? It’s just kind of a headache.”

  “You’re ANGRY!”

  So I upgrade my emotion to anger.

  And as soon as I say I am angry, my dominant emotion morphs into fear, fear of repercussions…

  But here instead is what happens.

  Here is how my small tragedy of being fired from a $150-a-week job shears off into surrealism, like something out of Woody Allen’s Zelig.

  The complication is my firing occurs just weeks after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl breast baring, and it seems there’s a new FCC filing every day.

  Because of the FCC/Janet Jackson thing, any obscenity firing in any media outlet is major news, no matter how little known the person. And as most of the firings occurring are of morning shock jocks, how fresh and interesting is the firing of a forty-something minivan-driving mother? Who talks a lot about sorting her daughters’ socks. Subsequent instant headlines read HOWARD STERN, BUBBA THE LOVE SPONGE, AND…SANDRA TSING LOH? WHO THE H
ELL IS SHE? Inquiring minds wanted to know.

  And, like pings on a radar, all my friends and acquaintances—even very old acquaintances, people I haven’t spoken to in years—are calling me with excited media updates. All at once, my removal from a three-minute time slot so obscure the FCC actually slept through it (twice) is starting to make ink.

  Jonathan calls: “Oh my God—look at this…you’re on the Drudge Report!”

  Rachel e-mails me from Europe: “You’re on the BBC!”

  Even Brenda phones in, slack-jawed in wonderment: “So I’m standing here in the elevator taking Cal to the dentist, and on the wall, they have one of those new red teletype things, and it says…

  “‘RADIO COMMENTATOR SANDRA TSING LOH FIRED FOR OBSCENITY! RADIO COMMENTATOR SANDRA TSING LOH FIRED FOR OBSCENITY!’”

  Which my dad now actually sees on the crawl under Larry King—“RADIO COMMENTATOR SANDRA TSING LOH FIRED FOR OBSCENITY! RADIO COMMENTATOR SANDRA TSING LOH FIRED FOR OBSCENITY!” Or sometimes it’s just “SANDRA TSING LOH! FIRED! OBSCENE!”

  And like a rolling stone gathering moss, lichen, and other peaty things, the meaning of my firing is now flipping. Like the little “fuck” that could, the shooting media star of my obscenity takes on a glamour—a cultural heat—my actual employment never has. And I mean NONE of my actual employment, twenty years’ worth of books, theater shows, and numerous radio pieces. Of all the thousands of painstakingly labored-over literary words I have written by age forty-two, it is but four magic letters—F-U-C-K—that have vaulted me to the next level.

  The congratulations are pouring in—“You’re in Rolling Stone!” It’s like winning an Oscar!

  Even my agent calls…a man I practically forgot existed! NBC Casting called—they want me to come in IMMEDIATELY to read for the part of Jeff Goldblum’s therapist in this new pilot!

  That’s the way Hollywood works—WHY I’m in the news doesn’t matter. For them it’s just “Asian person on radar: Call her in.”

  Even my gloomy ex-boyfriend Bruce interrupts his Dick-Cheneyis-behind-every-evil-Republican-conspiracy mass e-mails long enough to place a bitter personal call: “Man, I wish I could get fired. You’re lucky, Sandra. I wish I could get a career break like that.”