Mommies Who Drink

by Brett Paesel

  “Good,” I say.

  This means that he’s not babysitting for Katherine and can do Thursday for me. Enrico has a booming babysitting business among my friends. He’s good with children in that effortless way that is common in cultures where children are passed around easily and crying is as much the music of a busy household as the clanking of pots and pans while a huge evening meal is being prepared. But the biggest plus of Enrico the babysitter is being able to call a friend on the cell phone, while in line at Target, to say loudly, “Enrico’s doing me till two on Friday, so it looks like you can have him from three to six.”

  Unable to marry Genius, Enrico can’t work in the country legally. Employing him regularly probably excludes my friends and me from holding any high political office in the future. I wouldn’t want to be standing in front of a microphone at a televised press conference, Enrico behind me in an orange tank top, saying, “I can no longer pursue the office, as I have illegally employed this Chilean babysitter.”

  “Brett,” Enrico says, putting Spence down, “I do forever need to talk about next month now. I will go to Brazil for to have lipo-vacation.”

  Genius has told me that Brazil is the cheapest place to go for plastic surgery, as Brazilians get liposuction as easily and as often as we get our teeth cleaned. Enrico first went there for a lipo-vacation when he was eighteen.

  “But you’ll be back in May,” I say.

  “Oh, yes. It’s nothing.”

  “Does the lipo hurt?”

  “Not for nothing,” he says. “It is like someone take a big board and keep hitting you for four days.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Then I must so for to be careful when I come back. And not so much lift the babies. For I must for to have this bandage from here,” he says, slapping his thigh with his hand, “to here.” He brings his hand up to his neck.

  “Like a body cast?”

  “For five weeks, yes. Only it is a bandage”

  “What happens if you take the bandage off early?”

  “My doctor say fat will come out like balls on my body.”

  “Little lumps of fat all over you?”

  “Yes. Lumps.”

  “I’ve got to say, Enrico, you look fine to me. If you feel a little chubby, why don’t you just go on a little diet.”

  “Oh, no,” he says, “I love the chocolates and the sauces.”

  Spence knows that a lot of our adult friends come in couples. To date, he hasn’t asked why some couples are made up of a man and a woman and why others are made up of two men or two women—although he did initially ask if Enrico was Genius’s son.

  Most of Spence’s gay uncles come in pairs. Mine came singly, though often there was a friend in the background who visited from out of town and stayed in the uncles’ guest room.

  I don’t think that my mother and I went out looking for fabulous gay uncles for our children, though we were happy to have them. I found, and maybe my mother did too, that some of my childless friends drifted away after I had a child. Maybe those friends assumed that I had suddenly lost interest in the things we used to do together. Whatever the reason, they disappeared completely as if their names had been written on my heart in invisible ink. Of the ones who stayed, several were my gay friends who became uncles by showing up over and over again, by watching our baby, inviting us to dinners with our baby, listening to my postnatal blabbing, and offering up solid advice on how to decorate the baby’s room so it wouldn’t make me gag on its cuteness.

  Christian and Doug have been babysitting Spence since infancy and have followed his development since then with avuncular pride. Recently, they decided to raise a child of their own.

  Christian calls to thank me for filling out their adoption recommendation. He tells me that he and Doug are making little books for the birth mothers to look at. Books that describe their house, their relationship, their individual histories. Doug wants to put kitty stickers on the pages. They’ve been told to put things on and in the book that will appeal to young, undereducated girls. Anything that will make your book stand out.

  I ask if being a gay couple will be a handicap.

  “Not really,” he says. “Most of the girls grew up without a dad in the picture. The agency told us that often birth mothers choose gay couples because they figure it gives the baby two dads. A dad and a spare.”

  That night I lie in bed thinking of a young girl turning the pages of Christian and Doug’s book. I see her touching the kitty stickers. I think of her reading what they wrote about how they would raise her child. I see her close the book.

  I fall asleep thinking of her choosing them.

  Finding My Religion

  After twenty years of truancy from Western religion, I have returned with my son. I’ve always assumed that I would return—once I had children. Taking Spence to church has seemed as much a given as potty training and birthday parties. No doubt because going to church was part of my weekly routine until I left home.

  Apart from Reverend Jensen, the preachers of my youth were uniformly dull. Handsome Reverend Jensen disappeared one Sunday, yanked by higher-ups for some indiscretion or another. Probably for getting it on with one of the clucking matrons who took covered dishes over to his house during the week. At the age of eleven I thought he had been fired for being too interesting, since I was sure that a requirement for the job must be a talent for creating a somnambulant effect on listeners during the sermon.

  It is one of those preachers I hear, intoning his dreary message, when I picture myself sitting next to my mother in a pew, as my brother Erik plays at our feet.

  My mother has written a note on the bulletin: “Do you think my rear end is bigger than, smaller than, or the same size as *?” The arrow points to a straight-backed woman in the pew ahead of us.

  I look, circle “smaller than,” and pass the bulletin back.

  My mother reads it, smiles, folds the bulletin, and writes, “The minister looks like Les,” as I look on. Les is a friend of my father’s who looks so average you can’t describe him. Whenever someone looks like no one, he looks like Les.

  I nod discreetly.

  We pass the bulletin back and forth until we stand to sing the next hymn.

  Note-writing during church is only one aspect of what my father calls “your mother’s peculiar brand of religiosity.”

  Mt. Pleasant United Church of Christ is a “Just Peace Church.” On any given Sunday Spence and I walk up the steps after having had our milk shakes at the counter of a local diner. A banner that says “Let My People Marry” flaps in the wind. A large man in a choir robe paces and smokes a clove cigarette as an older couple makes agonizingly slow process through the side door.

  The congregation of this church is left-wing activist. Luke, the openly gay minister, gives thoughtful, funny sermons on social issues. A woman who looks about sixty-five (her long frizzy gray hair suggesting a youth spent on peace marches and mescaline) keeps us posted on the many “actions” she is involved with, including a recent “nude women spelling out the word ‘peace’ on a mountaintop.” Kids chase each other through the pews. Cans of food, off to a food bank, pile up in the back.

  My own peculiar brand of religiosity has included everything from being tapped with a feather by a Siddha Yoga guru, to desert meditation retreats, to attending temple with my Jewish friends on High Holidays. A religious dabbler, I even sampled rebirthing—a psychospiritual practice based on the theory that all of your problems trace back to the original birth trauma, requiring you to “relive” the trauma by submerging yourself in a warm pool in a snorkel and reenacting the journey through the birth canal.

  People at Mt. Pleasant pretty much leave Spence and me alone. Which I appreciate, since I’ve never really wanted to explain that in many respects I am a fraud, soaking up the sweet, anachronistic optimism of their devoted hearts, while hiding the fact that I’m not particularly Christian.

  I am an interloper. And Spence loves hanging out at the nursery, whe
re I drop him off fifteen minutes after the service has started. I am grateful that no one has asked me to actually join the church. I would have to come clean. Not just about not being a Christian, but about the fact that joining any kind of group makes me tired and rashy.

  The last time I officially joined a group, and stuck with it for any amount of time, was in the tenth grade. Full of feeling I took to be divine, I joined the Hear and Now religious singers. We were a group of teenagers outfitted in gray bell-bottoms, pale yellow shirts, and smart black vests. After only a month with the group, I was tapped for the Madrigals, an elite subsect who sang solos in the middle of snappy tunes that incorporated sign language and dance moves.

  I loved it. And I saw my career as religious sign language soloist taking off. When I think of it now, I realize that the God I worshipped was more one of belonging. I believed in Christianity being the One True Religion because I was snug in that group and they thought I was a star. An eccentric teenager with glasses the thickness of paperweights, I wasn’t generating a whole lot of heat on the boy scene. But I could rock the house on Sunday mornings with my solo verse in “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” For reasons known only to our group leader, Mr. Telsgaard, “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was one of our top religious tunes, along with “Rocky Mountain High” and “Killing Me Softly.”

  Mr. Telsgaard looked like Les, but his bland face was deceptive. He was ambitious and worked us like crazy. After six months of intense rehearsals Mr. Telsgaard announced that we would be giving a Gala Concert. He listed some of the pieces and then announced the finale: “The group will sing ‘Morning Has Broken’ while Brett reads the first five verses of Genesis in the instrumental breaks.”

  Surely, this is what I had been waiting for all my young life.

  “Thank you, Mr. Telsgaard. With God’s help I won’t let you down.”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said. “Just don’t do anything fancy. Say the words and keep it simple.”

  The next few weeks we practiced like mad, each rehearsal ending with a half hour devoted to “Morning Has Broken.”

  Mr. Telsgaard would swell the blended voices, then bring them low as they sang, “God’s re-creation of the new day.” Then he would turn to me and nod. I would lean into the microphone and start, “In the beginning, God created . . .” My voice cracked with intensity. My eyes sparkled with tears.

  After each rehearsal Mr. Telsgaard pulled me aside.

  “Brett, I need it with a little less . . . feeling.”

  Every time, I nodded, not hearing.

  A week before the Gala Concert Mr. Telsgaard pulled me aside again.

  “Brett, I’m taking you off Genesis.”

  At first I thought this was a test. An extension of the trust exercises Mr. Telsgaard required us to run through at the beginning of each rehearsal. Exercises that involved jumping off tables into a gaggle of fellow singers. Or being fed a mystery food while blindfolded. This must be the mother of all trust exercises, I thought. Did I trust myself—did I trust Mr. Telsgaard enough—to know that he was bluffing?

  “I know, Mr. Telsgaard,” I said. “I know that the piece is very moving. I trust it. I trust myself. I trust you. And I trust God.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m taking you off Genesis.”

  My throat hurt like something was balled up in there.

  “You stand out too much,” he went on. “Hear and Now is a group. It’s an ensemble. Your feelings are too big. You overwhelm the singers. You overwhelm the group.”

  I continued attending church for a couple of years after being fired from “Morning Has Broken,” but the juice had gone out of my interest in belonging to any group, particularly a religious one.

  At Mt. Pleasant, after listening to Pastor Luke’s impassioned sermon on gay marriage, a mom stops me outside the nursery. Sharon is the only person in the congregation who has doggedly insisted on engaging me. She is also the Sunday School teacher.

  “The Sunday School curriculum has just arrived. We’re going to start doing some lessons with the preschool kids to get them ready for Sunday School. I think you’ll love the little pamphlets.”

  This is the moment I’ve been dreading. I have hoped against hope that I could continue coming to church without ever having to weigh in on core Christian beliefs, like the existence of a man named Jesus or the concept of original sin.

  Sharon hands me a pamphlet with a cartoon Jesus dancing with children of every color. A bubble comes out of his mouth: “Love is the answer.”

  “Yep. Looks great.” I smile, folding the pamphlet.

  Up until now, Sunday School has been about Spence playing with toy dinosaurs and occasionally singing “This Little Light of Mine.” The fact that he hasn’t come home with a memorized Bible verse yet is probably the only reason Pat has quietly tolerated Spencer’s and my churchgoing sedition.

  Pat and I sit on the couch, our feet propped up on the coffee table, the radio turned down. We’ve had dinner, played with Spence, read him three stories, and endured his two attempts to win our attention post-bedtime. Finally, we hear deep breathing from his room. This is precious adult time.

  “So,” I say, “looks like they’re going to start some kind of lessons in Spencer’s Sunday School.”

  “Lessons?” Pat’s body tenses.

  “Yeah, you know, like ‘God is love,’ ‘Love is the answer,’ ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ That kind of thing.”

  “You mean ‘Jesus is love.’ It’s going to be about Jesus, isn’t it?”

  “I imagine Jesus will be mentioned. Yes.”

  “In a positive light,” he says.

  “Well. He was a great guy,” I say. “I mean, you don’t have anything against Jesus the man, do you?”

  “Um. No. Just Jesus the one and only son of God.”

  We stare ahead. My heart pounds. Here it is. One of the little locked boxes of our marriage. Every couple has them. The boxes they agree not to open. This box contains Pat’s anger at the church of his youth. The church that told him he was a sinner. That he should repent. That he needed to be saved.

  Pat gets up to close Spencer’s door.

  “Are you going to teach him about the Greek gods as well?” says Pat. “Athena was born out of Zeus’s head.”

  “I’m sure he’ll learn all about the Greek gods in school someday,” I say.

  “Why don’t you teach him all about that Indian blue elephant god with all those arms?”

  “I don’t know anything about him. Her.”

  “I just think,” says Pat, “that if you’re going to teach him the mythology of one religion, you should teach him the mythology of all of them.”

  I say okay. But I don’t know all those other mythologies. I’m familiar with the Christian stories. Pat says that that’s just it. Their familiarity gives them credibility to me. I say I don’t know what he means.

  “Like the myth of immaculate conception,” he says.

  “Well. I happen to believe that immaculate conception is possible,” I say.

  Our locked box explodes.

  “AN ENTITY CAN’T KNOCK UP A HUMAN!” screams Pat, stomping into the bedroom.

  I follow him. He walks back into the living room. I follow. Words start flying. Some make sense, some don’t. We trail each other around the house, yelling, slamming doors. Pat puts on his coat. Takes it off. Puts it on again. I cry and tell him to keep his voice down.

  “I didn’t say that I thought immaculate conception is probable,” I say. “I think that probably Mary and Joseph did it before they got married, and she got pregnant with Jesus, and they probably couldn’t tell anybody that they’d done it, and so Mary said, ‘Guess what, this angel said I was having the son of God.’”

  “So what are we talking about?” yells Pat.

  “I’m just saying that immaculate conception is possible. I think anything is possible.”

  “Even a blue elephant god with lots of arms?”

  �
��No. I don’t think a blue elephant god is possible.”

  “There you are!” He throws up his hands like his point is made.

  “But that’s just me,” I say. “If someone believes in a blue elephant god—I say, ‘Thank God, you believe in something!’”

  We face each other like hostile strangers—tense, waiting for the next lob.

  Then something switches. The air changes. It all slows down. Probably because we’ve reached the nut of it.

  Pat slips off his coat and lets it drop. He looks at me as I stand, shaking.

  “What is it,” he says, “about you and religion?”

  I sink to the bed and sit on the edge, no fight left. I reach back in my mind for an answer that makes sense. I search and search, while Pat stands with his coat lumped at his feet.

  “It’s what keeps me hanging on,” I say.

  I must have been in my late teens when I asked my mother about her unusual take on religion. She doesn’t believe in heaven or hell. She doesn’t believe in an anthropomorphic God. She doesn’t believe that Christianity is the One True Religion. And yet she goes to church every Sunday, passing silly notes to whoever comes with her.

  “Kristin,” she said, “I don’t care what you believe. I don’t care what anyone believes. I just hope that it’s something. When you’ve fallen over the edge of a cliff and you’re dangling with just your fingers digging into the rock, I want you to have something that gives you the strength to hang on.”

  Weeks after the argument with Pat, I realize that this is what I want for Spence. I want him to believe in something—anything—that will keep him hanging on.

  Pat skulks around the edges of the Sunday School classroom as I throw things into Spencer’s backpack: a couple of dinosaurs, a Baggie of Cheerios, and his crayoned cartoon pamphlet. He’s scribbled all over the Jesus who has a modern-day kid sitting in his lap. Spence smiles at me and I notice a circular sticker on his shirt—a drawing of two hands praying.