The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  * * *

  In my early thirties, we bought the condo. I remember being shocked at how quickly we became adults. We had passwords. Documents in triplicate. Our signatures were required here and here and here and our initials here. I found myself researching safe-deposit boxes, what should be stored at the bank and what should be at home, immediately accessible and sealed in waterproof bags inside a portable titanium biometric security safe with a fingerprint reader kept in the refrigerator for added precaution.

  I may have been watching a little too much Alias.

  I may have been spending a little too much time on the Internet.

  I may have already been pregnant, carrying sleeves of saltine crackers in my purse and worried about the world. I wanted to save everything, all of us, to summon the superhuman strength mothers get when they lift trucks off of their children; instead, I filled out paperwork. I got things notarized. I tried to be prepared.

  Birth certificates: —in case we died.

  Power of attorney: —in case we died.

  Life insurance: —in case we died.

  Deed to the condo: —in case we died trying to sell it which, believe you me, almost happened a couple of times.

  Letter to my little boy, telling him how fiercely he is loved.

  * * *

  Our upstairs neighbor ran to warn our downstairs neighbors, leaving our front door open. From the hallway, I smelled smoke. The sirens had multiplied—three fire trucks outside now, maybe four. I turned toward the front of the apartment: our books and art and photos lit red and flashing, the closet with the lockbox. Then I turned to the back, where my now six-year-old son was fast asleep in his bedroom off the kitchen. There were twenty steps between him and me. Twenty steps and we’d be out the back door, down the back stairs, into the car, and out of there.

  “I’ll get him,” I said to my husband.

  “Great,” he said, already moving, dog at his heels. “I’ll grab some stuff and meet you in the car.”

  I remember thinking: Stuff? What stuff? How do you decide, the clock ticking? I vaguely remembered the list I’d made in my twenties. Back then, objects were sacred, not people. Back then, I hadn’t experienced loss. Back then, love meant something different entirely.

  The question isn’t: what would you grab in a fire?

  It’s: what has meaning in our lives?

  * * *

  Kid. Ask most mothers what we’d grab in a fire and the answer is easy: kid(s). But it doesn’t mean our being mothers is the only thing that matters. It took me a while to figure that out. So much of what’s sold to women is that motherhood is our purpose as opposed to our choice, that we have to have children and put the other parts of our selves at best second, and at worst away for good. I’m here to join the chorus of fuck that noise. If you want to be a mom, be a mom. Be a mom and a working artist and whatever the hell else you want and yes, you will make work after the baby comes and yes, it will be hard and yes, you will be tired but more than that, a thousand times more, it will be amazing and life changing in ways I’m only beginning to understand. And if you don’t want to have a kid, if you choose not to go that way, then I’m standing behind you, too, cheering my face off because what has meaning in this life is living it full and true.

  * * *

  On the way to my son’s room, I grabbed a pair of pants, the same ones I’d taken off in the bathroom mere moments before. I put a toothbrush in one pocket and moisturizer in the other. Then I ran into my bedroom and, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, grabbed the knife from my bedside table, the same one my dad had given me years ago, and slid it under my waistband. How long did that all take? Thirty seconds? A minute? But during that time my husband, still in his underpants, ran to the back of the house carrying our laptops, backup hard drive, and necessary cords. It’s fair to say that he values technology. It’s expensive, of course, but it’s more than that: In those laptops is the website he built, the one that supports our family. They also hold the book I was working on, essays about fear. It didn’t occur to me to grab my own book.

  What occurred to me was: Pants. Toiletries. Knife.

  I’ve examined these objects obsessively, trying to figure out why they seemed so necessary in the moment, a weird reverse of my long-ago game. Instead of: what would you grab in a fire? It’s: why the hell did you grab that? Some of my reasoning is logical: it was January, cold as hell, hence pants. Some of it is ridiculous: we’d been watching The Walking Dead so, instead of grabbing something to help me in a fire, I grabbed a knife for the zombie apocalypse. Some of it, I’m now realizing, is an attempt to process loss: my writing isn’t in the hard drive, the Dropbox, the journals. It’s a practice, a process, like my friend Pete taught me years ago with the tubes and the sketches and the mess. You can’t grab it as you run out the door, can’t hold it in your hands any more than you can hold your own heart.

  There were twenty steps from him to me, an invisible line between us.

  I stayed on that line.

  The mind’s got nothing on the gut.

  * * *

  My kid sleeps through everything. After years of falling asleep across the street from a rock club, you can run a marching band through his room and he won’t budge. Sirens were still blaring out front—were there five trucks now? Six? Feet pounded up the hall stairs, god-awful noise coming from above our living room but he would not wake up. I slung him, still sleeping, over my shoulder, ran down the back stairs, and into the snow-covered alley. I wore pants, but no shoes. My feet were so cold they were on fire. I slid into the front seat with him on my lap, next to my husband who was already behind the wheel. The heat was blasting. The dog cowered on the floor. In front of us, our building loomed three stories high, enormous and eerie and backlit red and flashing.

  It happened so fast: One day we had a home and then—

  Snap your fingers.

  I imagined our charred living room, piles of black dust, furniture drenched from fire hoses. In my head I was already fighting with insurance companies, living out of a hotel, calling our parents for help. We could call our parents for help. We had help. What if we didn’t have help? What if we hadn’t made it out? What if I hadn’t got to my son in time, what if I’d tripped running barefoot down the stairs, what if the fire caught up with us? I can still feel the heat, the fear—can’t move, can’t cry, breath locked. I talk about setting walls on fire and worry that I jinxed us. I talk about climbing through fog and feel it surrounding me, thick like soup. Here is my heart, laid out in the open, and when I look, really look, I don’t always like what I see.

  You have to see it if you want to fix it.

  “Where should we go?” my husband asked.

  I listed names, and with each remembered how lucky we were. Our friends would take us in. Our kid wouldn’t remember a thing. Our upstairs neighbor had gotten up to check his locks. Our downstairs neighbor, we’d later learn, was a thirty-year veteran of the Chicago Fire Department. He’d run upstairs in his pajamas and attacked the third floor with a crowbar, ripping clear a pathway for the hoses and extinguishers and chemicals that wiped the flames away before they spread. This was one of a thousand nights that could’ve gone one way, but it went another.

  Not long after, we’d get the call that it was safe, but just then we drove down the alley, leaving yet another home behind.

  I wrapped my body around my son’s, feeling him breathe: Slow. Easy. Calm.

  I can still feel it.

  A memory not in my head but my bones.

  Acknowledgments

  Emily Griffin and Meredith Kaffel Simonoff make me want to climb higher. Every day they challenge me to see this world as something bigger than myself, and I am beyond grateful that they were on the other side of these pages. My love to Cal Morgan and Maya Ziv for their fierce support, at the beginning and still, and to the dream team at Harper Perennial, especially Amanda Pelletier for believing in me, Joanne O’Neill for my heart, and Paula Cooper for the epic con
versations in the margins.

  Thank you to my teachers. This book is for you.

  Thank you to the young writers I’ve been lucky enough to work with. Your intelligence, vision, and discipline are contagious. Look out, future.

  Thank you to Rachel Jamison Webster, Eula Biss, and the Department of English at Northwestern University for bringing me on board; the Ragdale Foundation for the gift of time and space; and the Bongo Room who took care of me while I figured out what the hell I was doing.

  Thank you to Soo La Kim, Maggie Ritter, David Noffs, Brian Block, and Ashley Kennedy Makdad. I am so proud to have been part of your team. Thanks, too, to the hundreds of educators we learned from over the years, especially Jennifer Peepas, who so graciously allowed me to write about her work.

  Thank you to 2nd Story, The Paper Machete, and the Chicago literary community for giving me a home among brilliant artists. You light the best of fires under my ass, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

  Thank you to the editors who reached down from the clouds in the moments I most needed you: Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Gina Frangello, Clay Risen, Emily Schultz, Jennifer Niesslein, Lauryn Allison, and Zoe Zolbrod.

  Thank you to the many wonderful people who touched this book in profound and mysterious ways: Sarah and Sophia Zematis, Jess and Gus Tschirki, Bobby Biedrzycki, Amy Martin, Amanda Delheimer Dimond, Aaron Stielstra, Ryan Meher, Khanisha Foster, Deb Lewis, Adam Belcuore, Samantha Irby, Elizabeth Crane, Jennifer Pastiloff, Nicole Piasecki, Amy Danzer, Anna March, Molly Each, Kristin Lewis, Elsie Kitchen, Craig Jobson and Judith Grubner, the Zemans, the Sudyka-Ryans, the Kretas whom I love so very much, and my secret online communities of women who make me laugh when I want to stick a fork in my eye.

  Above all else: thank you to my family.

  Randy Albers, Jeff Oaks, Lott Hill, and Dia Penning hold me together every day. Without them I would have drifted untethered into space like twenty years ago.

  My mom read to me and my dad told me stories, and they both love me like mad and the feeling is so totally mutual.

  Christopher and Caleb Jobson. Here is my heart.

  Tools or Weapons, Depending on Your Translation

  Angels in America, Tony Kushner

  Asking for It, Kate Harding

  “The Aquarium,” Aleksandar Hemon

  Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay

  Beloved, Toni Morrison

  bitches gotta eat, Samantha Irby

  Bloom, Anna Schuleit

  The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

  Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, Joe Meno

  The BreakBeat Poets, edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  “Building the Man I Am,” Thomas Page McBee

  “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates

  The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch

  Citizen, Claudia Rankine

  The City of Lost Children, Jean-Pierre Jeunet

  Colossal

  Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend, Erika T. Wurth

  Crown Fountain, Jaume Plensa

  “Dancing Outside Yourself,” Khanisha Foster

  “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Adichie

  Dark Sparkler, Amber Tamblyn

  “Darkness, then Light,” Deb R. Lewis

  “Dear Straight People,” Denice Frohman

  “Dear White Moms,” Keesha Beckford

  Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

  Don’t Kiss Me, Lindsay Hunter

  “Done,” Frazey Ford

  “Door to Door,” Scotty Karate

  Drawing Blood, Molly Crabapple

  The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison

  Eva Luna, Isabel Allende

  “Every Single Night,” Fiona Apple

  Excavation, Wendy C. Ortiz

  The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit

  The Fifth Element, Luc Besson

  The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

  Firefly

  The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, Jessica Hopper

  “The Fourth State of Matter,” Jo Ann Beard

  Free Street Theater

  From Doom to Boom, Collin van der Sluijs

  The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel, Dan Sinker

  “Good Bones,” Maggie Smith

  “Groundhog Day,” Corin Tucker

  “The Guns of My Girlhood,” Ann Patchett

  Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda

  “Heartbeats,” José Gonzalez

  HEAVN, Jamila Woods

  Her Story

  Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, Randa Jarrar

  Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, Diana Sudyka

  How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon

  “Human Behavior,” Björk

  I Am Still Fighting with My Big and Small Fears. But Lately I Seem to Be Winning, Jasmin Siddiqui, (Hera of Herakut)

  “I Like Giants,” Kimya Dawson

  “I Wish I Was the Moon,” Neko Case

  “If I Had a Boat,” Lyle Lovett

  “Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules,” Sister Corita Kent

  The Impossible Will Take a Little While, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb

  In This Land, Sweet Honey in the Rock

  “Jazz Music,” Bobby Biedrzycki

  “Kubuku Rides Again (This is it),” Larry Brown

  “Landslide,” Stevie Nicks

  The Last Illusion, Porochista Khakpour

  Lean With It, Paul Octavious

  Lemonade, Beyoncé

  “Let’s Go Crazy,” Prince

  Letters to a Young Artist, Anna Deavere Smith

  Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

  “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard

  “Just Looking for Trouble,” Hafiz

  Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich

  Louder Than a Bomb

  Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller

  “Mad Rush,” Philip Glass

  “Madonnas and Whores: On Mothers Writing About Sex,” Gina Frangello

  Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link

  The Matrix, Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski

  Me, My Mom and Sharmila, Fawzia Mirza

  Measuring the Universe, Roman Ondák

  Meet Me in the Moon Room, Ray Vukcevich

  The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Lauryn Hill

  My Only Wife, Jac Jemc

  The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

  No Hay Mal, Lily Be

  “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” Toni Morrison

  Notes from No Man’s Land, Eula Biss

  The Obliteration Room, Yayoi Kusama

  “OCD,” Neil Hilborn

  “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” Haruki Murakami

  “One Source,” Khuli Chana

  Orphan Black

  Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire

  “Pluto Shits on the Universe,” Fatimah Asghar

  “I Give It Back: A Poem to Get Rid of Fear,” Joy Harjo

  The Princess and the Warrior, Tom Tykwer

  “Rape Fantasies,” Margaret Atwood

  Raven Girl, Audrey Niffenegger

  Reading Club, Cinta Vidal

  Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

  “a remix for remembrance,” Kristiana Rae Colon

  “River of Names,” Dorothy Allison

  Rookie

  Safety Fifth, Mucca Pazza

  salt., Nayyirah Waheed

  Same Sex Symbol, Cameron Esposito

  “Save Me,” Irma

  Scandal

  The Scared Is Scared, Bianca Giaever

  “Searching for Eve,” Meredith Talusan

  “Self-Portrait of the Artist as an Ungrateful Black Writer,” Saeed Jones

  SEXomedy, Melissa DuPrey

  Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde

  Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion

  Smart Girls at the Party
/>   “Soy Yo,” Bomba Estéreo

  Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley

  Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, PJ Harvey

  “Summer in the City,” Regina Spektor

  Syllabus, Lynda Barry

  Symphony City, Amy Martin

  Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks

  Teen Vogue

  The Telling, Zoe Zolbrod

  “Thanksgiving Poem, 2012,” Coya Paz

  Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

  “They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist,” Jenny Zhang

  Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed

  Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other, C. Russell Price

  “Toward a Pathology of the Possessed,” Esme Weijun Wang

  “True Colors,” Cyndi Lauper

  “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” Gabriel García Márquez

  Vessel, Parneshia Jones

  Walden, Henry David Thoreau

  The Watch, Hebru Brantley

  “We’re Not Good Enough to Not Practice,” Kiese Laymon

  “We Belong,” Pat Benatar

  “We Didn’t,” Stuart Dybek

  Weather Systems, Andrew Bird

  “What Adults Can Learn from Kids,” Adora Svitak

  When the Messenger Is Hot, Elizabeth Crane

  Witness!, Jay Ryan

  Work Hard and Be Nice to People, Anthony Burrill

  A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

  “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  “You Are the Everything,” R.E.M.

  You Can Fly Higher, Joseph “Sentrock” Perez

  You’re So Talented, Samantha Bailey

  Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury

  About the Author

  Megan Stielstra is the author of Once I Was Cool and Everyone Remain Calm. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Guernica, BuzzFeed, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she performs regularly in Chicago and has told stories for National Public Radio, Radio National Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Goodman Theatre, the Neo-Futurarium, and The Paper Machete live news magazine at The Green Mill. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University.