Fifteen minutes later—because of course we’d arrived fifteen minutes early—Mel opened the door to her office to let a couple—a tall, dark-haired man and a much shorter woman with a blond bob—exit. Mel’s specialty is marriage counseling, but she’d kept me as a client after my divorce because she knew the ins and outs of my brain so well. I tried not to make eye contact with the couple. I thought, Are they going to see me and my mother sitting here and think, That is the strangest pair of lesbians I have ever laid eyes on?
They passed us as Mel approached, a giant smile on her face. I caught the glimmer in her eye, like, My, my, my. So this is Heather’s mom. Of course she is.
“You must be Linda,” she said, beaming, reaching out to shake my mother’s hand. My mother stood up and grabbed Mel’s hand first with her right hand and then placed her left hand on top to emphasize what this moment meant to her. There was going to be so much crying in that room, I just knew it. Stop it with the warm, meaningful embraces, ladies, while I’m wanting to be dead.
“Yes,” my mother answered. “Thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much for what you’ve done for Heather.”
Mel flashed a bewildered glance at me and said, “Well, of course! That’s what she pays me to do!”
We followed her into her office overlooking the eastern half of the valley, the Wasatch Front stretching from north to south. I took my usual seat on the far side of the sectional next to the orange blanket with tassels. My mother sat down on the other side of the sectional, set down her purse, and then straightened out her shirt and the dress coat she was wearing over it. Mel took her seat across from us both, leaned back, and crossed her legs. After an audible exhale, she looked straight at me and asked, “Does she know why she’s here?”
I shrugged and mumbled, “She knows a little bit—”
“I know she’s been seeing you every week for the last several months,” my mother interjected. “I know we need to do something—”
“Your daughter needs help. She needs your help. I asked her to bring you here because she is too afraid to ask you. So I am going to make her ask you.”
“She knows I would do anything—” My mother had negotiated with CEOs and the presidents of international corporations, but she’d never met Mel.
“Yes, she knows all of that.” Mel waved her hand around. “But she can’t say the words or reach out when she needs to reach out. For a list of reasons. Do you know how bad this has gotten?”
“She has told me how she feels, yes. Things are not good.”
“Right. But do you know how bad this has gotten?”
“Things are really bad . . .”
“If we don’t figure out a plan today, right now, your daughter is going to end up in a hospital if she even makes it there alive. And my goal—our goal—is to figure out a way for her to handle the impossible, the unfathomable, load that she carries so that her ex doesn’t come along and claim that she is an inadequate mother. We don’t want her to lose her life.” She smiled in my direction. “But, more importantly, we will not let her lose her children.”
My mother began to tear up. “Heather and I have talked about this. She’s scared he’s going to find out that she’s depressed. I know she is more scared of that than anything else.”
“Frankly, that’s the thing I, too, am most scared about for her. She’s stuck in a catch-22: if she seeks any sort of major treatment, he’s going to find out. But she can’t get better if she doesn’t get some help.”
“We’ve talked about this, too, yes.”
“That’s where you come in.”
“I want to help her, but I don’t know what to do! Tell me what to do! I can’t diagnose her—”
“Heather,” Mel interrupted. “Tell her. Tell her what you need most.”
I blinked back my tears and fiddled with the tassels on the blanket. I bit my lower lip as I swallowed a giant sob. “I’ve told her that I’m drowning in the day-to-day of things.”
“Yes, but get specific.”
I leaned forward and stuck my elbows on my legs so that I could hide my face with my hands. “I cannot comprehend how I am going to unload the dishwasher one more time, Mom. I cannot comprehend how I am going to do one more load of laundry. I cannot comprehend how I am going to help Marlo practice one more song. I cannot comprehend the logistics of taking a shower. I cannot comprehend how I am going to get up tomorrow and do it again and again and again.” I removed my hands from my face so that I could gesture to indicate the magnitude of what I was about to say. “This hamster wheel I’m on, I can’t escape it for even a second.” I spread my arms as wide as they would go, and then leaned back and crossed them over my chest. “And it’s not like this wheel is taking me anywhere. It’s not like I’m going to get to a place. There is no destination. It’s all just rote, mechanical movements taking me in a circle. Around and around and around. And there is no joy in it. I lost the joy in it. And I just want it to end. I just want to get off. I want out of it.” I reached up to wipe the tears from both of my eyes.
“Then let me help you.” My mother held out her hands toward me. “Why won’t you ask me for more help? Why won’t you tell me what you need?”
I shook my head and bit my lip again. My eyes were closed but the tears escaped them nonetheless.
“Heather, why? Please let me help you. Let us help you.”
“No,” I wept, and then a sob escaped my throat.
“Why? We are here to help you—”
“Because I’M THE FUCKUP,” I whisper-shouted. “I don’t deserve your help.”
My mother looked from me to Mel and then back to me. She didn’t say a word, and then she looked down at her hands in her lap with the sudden realization that this was why Mel wanted her here. She shook her head for a few seconds. “Does she really believe this?” she asked Mel, her eyes still fixed on her own hands.
“This is what she needs most, Linda,” Mel answered.
“Heather, you have to know that’s not true—”
“Yes, it is.” I wouldn’t let her finish. “I’m the fuckup. I’m the one who left the church. I’m the one who got fired for her website. I’m the one who got divorced. I’m the one who ends up depressed all the time. I’m the one who can’t seem to help herself.”
“Oh, Heather . . .” My mother’s eyes filled with tears, and she, like me, shut them to try to keep them from pouring down her face. “This just isn’t true. This isn’t what we feel.” She began shaking her head again.
“Heather, you need to tell her why you believe this,” Mel said. “She needs to hear it. She needs to hear it from you.”
My mother suddenly looked up and over at me. I nodded and my voice cracked as I started speaking. “Do you remember calling me up, back when I was living in that apartment downtown, and telling me that we needed to get lunch? That we needed to talk—”
“Chili’s. I asked you to meet me at Chili’s,” she said. A sad coldness infiltrated her voice.
“Yes, Chili’s. You asked me to meet you at Chili’s, and over a bowl of chips and salsa you told me that you knew what I was doing, that you were no fool.”
A few weeks prior to this meeting at Chili’s, at the age of twenty-two, I had moved in with my first boyfriend. He’d been in one of my last English classes at BYU, and even though I experienced no physical attraction to him whatsoever, I’d fallen in love with his brain. He had a photographic memory and loved to dissect issues and problems and spend money that he did not have on computer equipment, stereos, bikes and their accompanying gear, and video games. In fact, instead of using his student loans to pay for graduate school, he bought two giant speakers for his stereo, which in turn he’d bought with the student loan he was supposed to have used to pay for the last semester of his undergraduate degree. I can pick ’em! In a stadium-sized crowd I can pinpoint the man I will bring into my life only to have to take care of him like a child.
I’d found us a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Salt
Lake City, on the third floor of a green brick building next to a Greek Orthodox church, and asked him to move in with me. He wasn’t attending his graduate classes anyway, so it just made sense. It made sense for me to move in with an unemployed man-child who was funneling student loan money into a bike he would never ride, who would not ever finish that graduate degree, and who would play online games for twenty hours at a time while I worked two jobs to pay for rent and groceries. But cut me some slack: I was only twenty-two years old and had never had a cup of coffee, because it was against the religion I’d just abandoned. No coffee, no tea, no sex, no kissing with tongue, no R-rated movies. True story: when my brother was serving his Mormon mission in Montreal, Canada, he wrote the family a letter pleading with us to stop watching R-rated films. I was sixteen years old at the time, and my brother was my hero. I’d cried for weeks when he left for that mission, because I wouldn’t see him for two years—it has been established that melodrama is my specialty—and when I read that letter, I made a commitment to him, to myself, and most importantly to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that I would not ever watch an R-rated movie again. And I kept that promise for over four years. Four years! Right up until the third of four Matts I would date in college convinced me to watch Pulp Fiction. I remember being so traumatized and wondering, Is this even legal to put in movies now? Is the director in jail?
My mother knew that I had moved in with my boyfriend, and this was verboten in the Mormon religion. If we’d moved in together, we’d most certainly at some point consummated the relationship: premarital sex is only one degree less sinful than murder. There was so much that I wanted to tell her as I reached for a tortilla chip. First, that losing my virginity was the most technical and unromantic night of my life, and sex wasn’t particularly fun. And second, why hadn’t she told me so? Why hadn’t she ever told me about urinary tract infections? Why hadn’t she ever told me to go pee after having a penis inside of me? Because of course I contracted one after that awkwardly technical first time wherein I turned on all the lights and made him lie down and not touch me. All I knew about sex was that it was going to hurt the first time. I knew I would bleed. And I did, quite a bit, but we got it over with. I was so relieved that it was over and had no idea that this thing we had just performed could, in fact, be quite pleasurable. Two days later I started peeing fire and had no idea what was going on. I thought I might be dying, and when my roommate at the time heard me screaming in the bathroom, she asked me if I had a UTI.
A what? A UTI? Was that like a UFO?
I didn’t have very good insurance, so my boyfriend helped me find a clinic near his place in Provo where I could get tested for a UTI and get a prescription for the pill. How I wished that my mother were the one accompanying me to that appointment; how I longed for her reassuring hand on the back of my head, stroking my hair as I experienced a gynecological exam for the first time. I wanted to tell her that at Chili’s, but I didn’t. I didn’t tell her about the creepy male doctor who, before reaching his hand inside me, said, “We will fix you right up so that every month you are going to know the exact day that you can pop that pad right into your panties!”
“Pop that pad right into your panties.” He said those exact words. And to this day, whenever I start my period, I hear him saying that in his disturbing, condescending tone and think about how alone I felt. I think about the nurse who saw the terror in my eyes and stood in as my mother, who held my hand when the exam became so painful that I burst into silent tears. She squeezed my palm as she asked him to be gentler, and then told me that it would all be over soon. I don’t remember her name or even her face, but “It will all be over soon” will go down as one of the most comforting phrases ever uttered to me in my life. I wish my mother had been in that room with me. I missed my mother.
She knew what I was up to. She didn’t mention the premarital sex, but she did tell me that she knew I had moved in with my boyfriend. We ate chips and discussed the details of where I lived, what the apartment was like. We also made some small talk about my jobs and my car, my commute and the gas bill, before she finished a chip and became very quiet.
“I need you to know, Heather, that I love you. But without Christ in your life, without Christ in our relationship . . . our relationship can never be the same.”
Today my hormonal teenage daughter could tell me that she hates me and it wouldn’t even come close in impact to what my mother had just told me. No words will ever be as devastating to me as what she said to me over chips and salsa at Chili’s on 400 South in Salt Lake City, Utah.
My very first memory is staring up into my mother’s beautiful face as she held me to her chest and breastfed me. I was the only child she breastfed. She thought my father had fallen out of love with her. And because she wanted to be loved—because she was dedicated to remaining with my father, to working it out and honoring the commitment she had made in their temple marriage—she wanted another child.
Me.
I was born to love my mother, and love her I did. She breastfed me for almost two and a half years because I wouldn’t eat anything else. In fact, she had to leave the house for an entire weekend to force me to eat solid food. I adored her, followed her everywhere. If I was near her, I was touching her. All of my earliest memories are of her skin and her smell and her touch, the silent way we communicated, the soft way her hair would brush my face when she picked me up, the scent of her neck as I rested my face under her chin, the way I would grip the fold of her skirt as I stood in the kitchen next to her while she stirred a pot for dinner.
I remember being at my brother’s soccer game—I must have been three or four at the time, in the late seventies—and a group of mothers were standing around, making small talk. I was gripping my mother’s leg like I always did when we were away from the house, out in public: like a baby monkey. When I came out of my daydream only to see my mother standing a few feet away from me, I realized that I had been gripping another woman’s leg the whole time. They all laughed when I looked up to see the stranger I’d been holding on to, and she assured me that she didn’t mind. But it was exactly like coming out of anesthesia for the first time when I was gripped with panic about piano practice. My mother knew to shush the room, to honor my embarrassment with comfort, not laughter. She rushed to me and swung me into her arms, and the smell of her hair in my face calmed me instantly.
We remained inseparable throughout my childhood, and in the two years leading up to my parents’ divorce when I was ten years old our silent communication achieved a new dimension, one filled with shared pain and suffering. I don’t think I actively considered the idea of them divorcing, but I felt an impending sense of doom. They fought constantly, relentlessly, and my mother began taking her makeup off in the morning, not at night. I was always there, lingering like a little barnacle. I could always tell that she had been crying. Her eyes with their puffy lids and the bags underneath gave it all away, and I would ask her every morning, “Mom, what’s wrong? Why are you sad?”
She would always set down the tissue she was using to wipe the Pond’s cold cream from her eyes, reach out her hand to rub the back of my head, and say, “I’m fine. Nothing is wrong.” I always wanted to plead with her more, to beg her to tell me, but I was worried that would make her even more emotional. So I accepted her explanation, at least in the sense that I didn’t force the issue. But I felt her pain as much as she did; that was the bond we had forged when I was born, through the thirty months I was attached to her breast. And something in my eight-year-old head convinced me that if I didn’t cause any trouble—if I made perfect grades and performed better than anyone else in everything that I did—that somehow this would make her happy. This would dry her tears. I would become the valedictorian of kids.
I never told her this, and it was not a burden she put on me. I just wanted my plan to work. And even when it didn’t work at first—when they sat us around that square, laminate wood dinner table, my legs squirming on the yellow vinyl of m
y seat, to tell us that they were getting capital-D Divorced—I never stopped believing that one day my plan would work. And eventually it did, of course. Who isn’t happy and proud to have a child who makes straight As throughout elementary, middle, and high school? Who wouldn’t be happy to have a daughter who is captain of the volleyball team, president of the honor society, recipient of a full scholarship to the college of her choice? Who wouldn’t beam while sitting in the audience at high school graduation, listening to her daughter give a speech in front of thousands, because she had not only graduated valedictorian but also with a grade point average higher than anyone else’s in the history of the school? Achieving all of that wasn’t easy, nor did it make me a particularly fun person to be around. Imagine a wet blanket who argued against the concept of evolution—Mormons don’t believe in such nonsense—and threw a tantrum when she missed a single multiple-choice question. Even the nerds wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
When I think about that time in my life, sometimes I romanticize it. I want to believe that I was doing it because I was ambitious, because I cared about knowledge and learning and becoming a more realized person. And some of that is true. But I did it more for her. Which is why, when she told me over chips and salsa that she and I were not ever going to have what we had had ever again, I felt like she had reached across the table to strangle me. Didn’t she know I had done all of that for her? How could she not know that I lived my life for her? I had given her my life.
All I had ever wanted was her, and there she was saying, “I don’t want you.”
As we sat there with Mel, I told my mother all of this as I twirled the orange tassels of the blanket between my thumb and forefinger. All of it was a bit less coherent and muddled by tears and aching sobs that had spent twenty years in my chest waiting for their moment. I told her that I felt like I had squandered all of that work, that backbreaking and mind-bending work. I had squandered my life’s work. All by finally choosing to live for me. And she had rejected me.
The Valedictorian of Being Dead Page 10