It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  Secondly, these people are like caricatures of college-studenty hipsters. When I walk up to the box office I literally have to wade through a cloud of clove cigarette smoke. I mean, clove cigarettes. Honestly.

  But hey, I was twenty-one once, and God knows I was ridiculous (though, I would say in contrast to most of these people, not ridiculously tattooed or pierced), so I should shut up. I meet my friend Lisa from work, (who is a lesbian, so it’s not like I’m having a date while Kirsten sleeps, okay?). She also likes watching beautiful women kick the shit out of people, though I think she comes at it more from a female empowerment angle than my own prurient angle. This despite the fact that she’s a Quaker and therefore morally opposed to all asskicking. Well, everybody’s complicated.

  Anyway, they tell us that there will be a short performance before the movie, and I am very nervous about this because the woman who sells me my ticket says, “it’s some kind of mime thing,” but it ends up being a very funny excerpt from this guy’s one man show in which he plays this mime teacher who’s been forced to teach a combination mime-rap-tae kwon do class. And the movie just totally kicks my ass, even though they have found an incredibly shitty print that must have been sitting in the basement of some Malaysian theater for the last five years. In addition to the action, there is a very sad scene where one of the babies dies, and another kind of moving scene where the one woman’s boyfriend dies, and even though, yes, it’s about decapitation and women who turn invisible, run across power lines, or ride a 55-gallon drum with an explosive charge in the back into a hostage situation, two of the three have worked for the androgynous demon before turning good, so it is also really about redemption. But not so much that you sit there going, “ok, ok, enough about redemption, kick somebody’s ass already.” And Michelle Yeoh is just really breathtaking in this movie, except in the admittedly laughable part where the skeleton of the androgynous demon has wrapped itself around her and made her fight her friends against her will.

  I get home at 2:00 A.M., and I feel like complete shit the next day, but I am really glad I went.

  Sunday Morning Coming Down

  Sunday morning I have almost recovered from my Friday night movie extravaganza. Rowen and I go to church, but Kirsten has to stay home–apparently her T-cells, which are the virus fighters, won’t be back to normal strength for a year, so it is basically a bad idea for her to go inside where there will be lots of people during flu season. This is why Dr. J and the nurses yelled at us about going grocery shopping.

  Anyway, it is the first Sunday of the new year, and in our church every year at the beginning of the year we light candles on this day and members of the congregation share their hopes and concerns for the new year. First we have a little mini-sermon. The Minister manages to slip a fun factoid into his sermon, which is the reason why the symbol of Unitarian Universalism is a flaming chalice. We have always had this thing in our order of service that said the flaming chalice “commemorates the spirit of reformer Jan Hus” or some such thing, but this guy says that what Jan Hus did was to share the communion chalice around the congregation, which was a big no-no at the time he did it, 450 years ago or whenever, so they burned him at the stake. Now anybody who’s giving communion regularly shares out the chalice. Wonder if they’ve ever officially retracted the order to fry his ass. Anyway, we don’t get this kind of blood-and-guts, martyr-for-the-faith stuff much in a Unitarian church, so I dig it.

  When it’s time for those who feel so moved to light candles, I make my way to the front, because I feel that it’s really important to thank people, I mean the members of this church are still cleaning our bathroom all the time–they’ve stepped it up to nightly now–not to mention doing a deep clean on Saturdays, and it helps us a lot and makes us feel loved, so I have this very calm thing to say. And then I get to the mike and I can’t say it. I start to cry. The congregation nicely waits while I collect myself. Here is what I eventually say: “My hope for the new year is that my wife, Kirsten, can be healed this year, and that other people who are suffering can feel the same love and support that we have gotten from friends, family, and from this church.”

  I walk back to my pew and I see several people crying, and some people kind of grab me by the arm or the hand or whatever, and while I meant everything I said, there is the hammy performer side of me that is looking around at these teary faces and going, “Man! I knocked ‘em dead! I killed!”

  Probably I’ll go to hell for that.

  Anyway, after the service, many people come up to me and say nice things, and people I barely know tell me that they pray for Kirsten every night, and that is pretty spectacular. Many people also thank me for saying what I said, which initially seems kind of odd to me, but I guess my getting up there and saying something real and personal made the service seem more important, or something. I don’t know. Being Unitarians, we usually get a lot of, “My hope is that the people of Nicaragua…etc. etc.” and I like the people of Nicaragua as much as the next guy, but those things usually don’t move me much when I hear them the way that personal things do, so maybe that’s why people are thanking me.

  Kirsten’s folks are coming for dinner, so Rowen and I go to the grocery store to pick up few extra things. When we get back to the house at about 1:30, her folks are there. And Kirsten is in tears.

  As I have said, her crying is an event, so I am immediately trying to figure out what’s going on, but she won’t talk about it. I figure she must have been telling the story of me being a dick and she got upset again, so I keep pestering her to tell me what’s up, and she finally says, “We were just having a little heart to heart.”

  Well, you could just about knock me over with a feather. Heart to hearts are pretty unheard of in Kirsten’s family. Indeed, in the twelve years we’ve been together, this is the first one I can remember even hearing about, except for a bungled facts of life talk from her early adolescence that Kirsten occasionally remembers, that was something like, “You guys are learning about that in school, right?”

  So there is weirdness in the air, and Kirsten’s parents leave after about an hour, and I say to her, “I thought they were staying for dinner,” and she says, “Yeah, well, I guess they decided not to.” She then starts to cry again, and she reveals how the talk started out as banter about, “get off my back, Mom,” kinda stuff, and it eventually worked its way around to her mom saying, more or less, “You never tell me anything, that’s why I bug you with annoying questions all the time, and we’re doing the best we can and trying to help out, and you’re always pushing us away.” And she can’t really deny any of that, and she feels guilty and horrible, and as a result she becomes thoroughly depressed, getting into this funk that’s almost exactly where I was a week ago, just feeling incredibly tired of all this and wanting it to be over. (I guess it says a lot about our respective personal strength that I reached this point before Kirsten, who is actually sick, did.)

  And I get sad. I am sad because Kirsten’s illness seems to be pulling at the fault lines in both of our relationships with our parents. I tell Kirsten that it’s not her fault that she doesn’t have the kind of relationship with her parents where she shares her innermost thoughts with them, because she’s never had that kind of relationship with them, and it has never really appeared to be a problem before, so if they want something different now, it’s kind of too bad.

  I am also sad because, as much as this whole thing has demonstrated to me the depths of people’s selflessness, it also seems to show that there is a limit, and that most of us, and yes, I certainly include myself here, have a hard time being completely selfless. And so my mom comes here to help out, but there is something she wants, and she gets mad when she doesn’t get it, and so I weasel out of it when Kirsten asks me for help, and so Kirsten’s folks are making demands on her, and what we should all do is just shut the fuck up and do exactly as much or as little as she wants us to and worry about how we feel about it later. Why can’t we do this? I guess we can all talk
a pretty good game about putting someone else first, but when it comes down to it, we can’t really do it.

  Kirsten is lower now than she has been since this whole thing started. I am so worried that the next day I secretly call Jen and ask her to arrange for regular visits and phone calls to keep Kirsten’s spirits up. And the visits and phone calls come, but Kirsten seems to snap out of this on her own after a day.

  I wish I had about half her strength, but what I really wish is that she didn’t need so much.

  Let’s All Go to the Lobby

  Kirsten bounces back from her depression quickly, and though she is still not anywhere near a hundred percent, we have a nice little intermission for a few weeks. She is, of course, still bald, but she seems more like herself than she has in a long time–since we are not constantly running to stressful, painful tests and she is not stuck in the hospital, this is the closest we have had to a normal life in months. Dr. J tells her that her tumor markers are now half what they were, which is good news.

  For the first time in months, I am able to think about stuff besides Kirsten being sick. Here are some examples:

  I actually manage to drag up some outrage about the way the election was stolen, which I didn’t really care about much while it was happening, and I marvel at the guy who is supposed to be the attorney general saying nice things about the Confederacy and wonder how the South, which I always think of as the most rah-rah America part of America, just loves its historical anti-American traitors. Go figure.

  I listen constantly to the U2 record that my mom left here. She asks me to send it to her and I totally refuse, and, laughing, she asks if I don’t at least feel guilty for basically stealing from her, and I say no, and it’s true. I guess it is a strange, and somewhat uncharacteristic moral lapse, but I don’t feel the least bit guilty.

  We have Rowen’s birthday party, and it ends up being fun despite the fact that three of her friends cancel on the day of the party because they all have the same puke-causing illness. She gets a fair amount of Barbie stuff, and I think Barbie is pretty heinous for any number of reasons, but all the girls at school have one, and I guess I don’t feel strongly enough about it to forbid them in the house or anything like that. I guess I hope that if we raise Rowen with good ideas of what being a girl is about that she will be able to overcome Barbie’s evil counter-messages. Or maybe she will grow up to drive a hot pink Corvette and live in a Malibu dream house, and what the hell, I guess you could do worse.

  I have a few dreams about the Troll or his wife in which we sort of reconcile. When I wake up, I think these are very strange, because I don’t think I care whether they hate me or not, and I also know that no kind of reconciliation is possible–I think if you’re going to reconcile with someone, that involves both parties sort of giving a little and admitting that they might have done this or that thing differently, but the thing about these people is that whenever we made such overtures in the past, they interpreted it not as an opening for them to also give a little, but rather as confirmation of their view that we were wrong wrong wrong and they were right right right. I think I may be right about the fact that I don’t care whether they like me or not, despite the dreams. I think what’s hurting me is that I still hate them. I really do. And I know it makes me a shitty person, and my subconscious mind is telling me to let it go already, but how do you do that? How do you forgive someone who isn’t sorry? How do you change how you feel about someone you never speak to? I don’t know, but I hope I can figure out a way to stop dragging my hate around, as Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks might have said, but didn’t.

  Danny comes to town, and it is great to see him, and he and I go out a few times, and you can tell these are rowdy outings because I have two drinks, and we sit in bars and do what pathetic old married men do: we look at the attractive young women in the bar and go, “Oooh, I think she’s really cute…” “Yeah, she’s more your type than mine. That one over there, on the other hand..” you get the idea. Pathetic.

  I should say in fairness to Danny that we spend a lot of time talking about politics, and movies, and how some really great kid at my school was caught with a weapon, and that we do actually act like adults for most of the time, though we also do act like we’re sixteen–well, sort of, I mean we don’t actually play Dungeons and Dragons, but you know what I mean.

  Our life at home seems like a bald version of what it used to be. I know that Kirsten’s second hospitalization is coming up, but I am totally back in denial. I feel like my normal life is coming back. I think these two weeks are the first time since the diagnosis that I have felt happy in an uncomplicated way. That is to say, it hasn’t been tinged by worry, or sadness, or pain. Sure, we’re both still bald, and Kirsten still has to be careful about being in crowds and stuff (well, actually I am sure Dr. J would have a heart attack if she knew half the stuff Kirsten has been doing, such as dropping Rowen off at preschool with all of those septic, just-got-over-a-puking-virus-that-could-lay-Kirsten-out-for-weeks little kids running around, but they gave her instructions that were basically impossible for any human to follow, which were basically, get out of the house, but don’t actually go anywhere where you might come into contact with other humans. This limits your options quite severely in Boston in January.), but we are together and we are happy.

  As I write this, I know in my mind that Kirsten is going back in the hospital tomorrow, but I just can’t feel it. I am so desperate for us to have our life back that I think we do already. But we don’t, and there are really no guarantees that we will. But I really hope we will. I miss it so much.

  Act 2, Scene 1

  I get up on Friday morning, and all my uncomplicated happiness seems like a weird dream. It’s like someone has thrown a switch, and I am suddenly grumpy and hassled again. I wake Rowen up, and she complains terribly and moans and groans. It takes her forever to get up and get moving, so I figure I will drive her to school so I can get to work on time. I look out the window and discover that this will be impossible because somebody is parked across our driveway.

  I run downstairs to look at the car. I think it must have been stolen and abandoned, because the doors are unlocked, which is very very unusual in this neighborhood where everybody has a poorly-calibrated, screeching, whooping alarm that goes off whenever a heavy truck rumbles by, and the windows are open. I figure the car’s gun-toting owner will round the corner the minute I try to get inside to move it, so I decline to get inside. Also I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to get it out of park without the key.

  So I go in and call parking enforcement, and, miraculously, they show up in about ten minutes. They slap a ticket on the windshield and leave. I guess I have to hand it to them for the lightning quick response, but, you know, I still can’t move my fucking car.

  So I am feeling frustrated, and I watch as the minutes tick off the clock, and I am doing all these mental calculations trying to figure out if there is any way I can get to work on time, and as Rowen is getting ready, she says, “Daaa—aad. Don’t look at me.” This is not any kind of modesty–this is just one of those things that she insists on and gets furious if it’s violated. It’s because she doesn’t want us to see her until she is dressed in her outfit so it will be a surprise. I assure her that I am not looking at her. I am down the hallway and could not see into her room even if I was trying to. She repeats: “Don’t look at me!”

  “Honey, I am not looking at you, now will you please hurry up and get your snowsuit on, because we have to leave and I’m going to be late for work!” She repeats that I am not to look at her. After about two more minutes of this, I totally lose my mind and start yelling at her that she has to get ready, that I can’t possibly stand here arguing about whether I am looking at her for one more second because I am going to be late, and will you zip up that snowsuit NOW!

  Well, I admit this is kind of a pain in the ass right now, and I am sure that some of you will read this and cluck at my permissiveness and say how parents being afraid t
o use the belt is ruining this country, just look at those Columbine boys, all they needed was a good whupping now and again, but Rowen is totally not cowed by my anger. It just infuriates her. She screams back at me. I hope this means that she will be the kind of person who won’t take any shit when she gets older. Then again, taking shit is a talent that will keep you employed and generally make your life easier, so maybe I shouldn’t wish that on her. Still, I always admire people who are not intimidated by authority figures, even though it is a giant pain in the ass when I am the authority figure in question. I am not really rational enough to think this out right now, though, so I scream back at her. At one point I pick her up so as to carry her out the door.

  It is 7:30 in the morning, and I am already in a screaming contest with a four-year-old. This is not a good way to begin the day. I go to another room and leave her to put her snowsuit on, and I immediately feel guilty. I did not swear at her or hit her, but I did completely lose it with her, and I feel like a dick. Like she doesn’t have enough stress with mommy going into the hospital, dad has to turn into Mr. Hyde too. Ugh.

  If you don’t have kids, you probably think that I am completely unhinged, but if you do have kids, I guess you have probably been where I am–as much as I try to stay calm and remind myself that she is four and I am thirty-two, sometimes I just dive right into the sandbox and have a tantrum of my own. Anyway, if you have kids I hope you’ve been where I am now, because it comforts me a lot to think that I’m not the only terrible parent out there, so if you’ve never lost it with a kid, just keep your mouth shut and let me cling to my pathetic illusion.