Maybe we are just masses of meaningless flesh and blood, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way when I really feel deep into my gut, or look at the ocean or a redwood in Mendocino County, or smell the breath of my baby. Those damn stars glaring down at me. All the clichés. Tell me we know how it works. Tell me science explains it all. Tell me we haven’t just chosen the God of Reason over the God of Mystery and that we’re stronger and braver and more intellectually sound because we don’t have “faith” like those pathetic believers. We’re stronger, I know. But that faith simply has a different polish.
And anyway I didn’t have faith in any damn thing other than that I was not God, and my brain was not reliable for a whole lot beyond making a cup of coffee or doing a math equation or planning my day or a trip or solving problems of the intellect.
But my problems have never been of the intellect. Mine were of the heart and bones.
My brain can’t bring peace. It can’t bring life. For that, I had to let go and hover over the reef, traveling into the black—a nothing, a tiny nothing paddling and kicking across the expanse of blue, taking deep breaths and heading for the shore, all I know of safety, buoyed by ancient waters pulled forever by a cratered moon.
Part Three
12
There Are Three Types of
Mothers in the World—I Am None of Them
Alcoholism killed me three weeks before my thirtieth birthday. Rocket was three and Ava was seven, and I had no idea how to drive either of them to school. They attended private schools in Davis, my old college town, the one I used to frequent with my rhinestone Playboy bunny diaper bag. I neither chose nor paid for those schools and had visited them only a handful of times. Perhaps this should have embarrassed me, but two months before that I was drinking bottom-shelf half pints and smoking Pall Malls alone in a beige Ford Taurus (the very same Taurus I now drove to pick up my adorable kids at their adorable schools). I knew embarrassing, and this was not it.
The front doors of their schools were kept locked, and I always wondered if it was to keep the kids in or the riffraff out. Except there was no riffraff. This was Davis. There were merely “nice” people in sustainably sourced shoes. On further thought, I realized I was the riffraff.
We had to use a code to enter the blue-trimmed, glass-walled fortress, but I didn’t know it the first time I tried to get in. I stood at the door of Ava’s school yanking and observing the button box until the receptionist took pity on me and opened the door, deciding, I suppose, to let the riffraff in. “Hi! Thank you,” I said. “I’m Ava’s mother.”
“Oh! Hello! Heard so much about you!” She smiled. I smiled too, thinking about the layers of potential meaning in her sentence.
“Yes. It’s nice to be here,” I said.
“Very nice to meet you,” the principal said, peeking her head from around the corner. As she shook my hand, I thought for a moment she was gaining a visual on the dirtbag absentee mother. Fine with me. Take a look.
I had never signed the attendance forms on the front desk. I didn’t know where to park, or where their classrooms were, or what the hell “car line” was. I didn’t know about cubbies and folders. I had never met their teachers.
And there were other parents everywhere, specimens in capris and cargo shorts who had been navigating Scholastic order forms for a long time. Moms and dads who had never missed a parent-teacher conference, let alone a kindergarten graduation, and certainly not because the bottle rendered them useless. But I didn’t feel shame, even when the best of them strolled past me. I was too busy enjoying the scenery, a thousand things I’d never seen before.
Until then, I had spent my entire adult life drunk, in the aftermath of drunk, in the pursuit of drunk, in the avoidance of drunk, or in the precarious hell of in-between drunk. In this condition, life is not “dealt with” or “worked through” or “handled,” even during periods of “sobriety.” There is no sober. There is occasional physical detoxification, but there is no mental function of the un-addicted. Or there is, but it’s on the primal instinctual level—as in, eat, pee, shit, work, bathe.
Basically, I was alcohol’s bitch.
This makes for a rather exciting life if one manages to not die and stay sober. The world around me was cast suddenly in Technicolor, and for a moment, the dull grays turned into vivid light.
I was a child those first few months of sobriety. I was a child skipping through the halls at recess, doing cannonballs into a swimming pool, or crawling into bed on Christmas Eve. I was a kid in fucking Disneyland.
Mac and I saw each other often, but I wasn’t toiling for our reunification. Instead, I was chasing sobriety like a desperate lover. I knew I had no ground for demands on Mac anyway, though I yearned for our family. I remember watching him with our babies in those early weeks of sobriety—the way he hoisted Rocket onto his shoulders, and brushed Ava’s hair—this is my family, I’d think. And it was so fucking beautiful. The way he held their hands and tied their shoes and sat with them at night on the couch for as long as they wanted. I was watching a father with his kids. How pure it felt after the life I had been living. How warm, like coming home, like crawling into your own bed after two weeks in motel rooms. I wanted in with my whole heart, but it was not for me to decide.
Mac held me at a safe distance, dropping by sometimes, meeting me for coffee. He came by my mother’s house on my birthday after I got sober. He sat at the other end of her dining table, observing me quietly. He had picked me up a couple of Grateful Dead patches from a record store in Monterey. “I thought you could sew them onto your hoodie,” he said. He didn’t stay for cake, and I felt a little slighted.
When I asked him about it, he said, “I don’t know if I want anything to do with you, Janelle.” I understood that. I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with myself.
Two months later, Mac agreed to take the kids with me to Half Moon Bay, a heavenly coastal town near San Francisco where the cypress trees and dunes turn life into the soft roar of merciless waves. When we were almost to Highway 1, I mentioned I couldn’t see well through the dirty windshield. Mac suggested with brilliant nonchalance that I “use the washer fluid.” When I curled my lip at him to say, “God, that’s rich,” he informed me he had added fluid to my car when we stopped for gas. “Holy shit!” I said, forgetting entirely this was a typical adult activity.
I clicked it on, and it worked. I clicked it on, and it worked! I turned the dial and water came out, and the wipers moved, sweeping the bug guts and dust right out of my way.
“Hey kids! It’s raining!” I yelled. I thought I was damn funny, and so did they, and I remember our delight. I remember feeling capable and alive and real. I had a car with working parts. I had a family. I had a body and air to breathe and I was free to drive to the beach and make stupid jokes and my kids would laugh, because I’m their mother and they think I’m wonderful and funny and nobody cares.
Nobody sees me. I am unseen. I’m just one among all of you. I can use a lawnmower on a Saturday morning. I can punch the numbers in the fancy school door. I can show up for parent-teacher conferences—but more importantly, I can miss them sometimes and still look you in the eye, because I really did forget. I was not taking lines of cocaine off the hallway mirror and remembering the meeting in the quicksand of the morning.
I knew when he told me about the washer fluid that he was going to try, that he was still willing to help me, to show up for us again. He had told me once, “Janelle, I will always help you again,” though I thought perhaps that promise had expired. That we, I suppose, had expired.
We never formally reunited. That was not our way. After we met for the first time, we were together. When were apart, it was only in body. And when he said, “I don’t know why, but I really believe you’re different this time,” I knew we had never left the domain of our love. Although it was twisted up and weird and unspeakable—built on bad decisions and slightly better ones—it was ours.
And for people like
us, who have shivered in the emptiness of stone-cold addiction, the warmth of a family bed need not be discussed. Its existence is enough. One simply crawls in.
• • •
Good News Jack and I met three or four times a week either in his backyard or in the tiny office at his house, where I would sit facing him alongside the family computer and an abandoned treadmill. He would wedge a chair under the doorknob while his five-year-old daughter body-slammed it trying to get in, and I tried to understand the strange things he’d say, like: “If nothing changes, nothing changes,” and that I was “wrong until further notice.”
Under normal circumstances, I would have told him to go fuck himself, but I was fresh out of comebacks. So I took actions I may or may not have agreed with, and often barely understood, because Jack stood in front of me a free man, and I knew he drank like I drank and for the same reasons. I would have followed him anywhere to gain what he had.
And yet, we seemed to speak little of alcohol, and he only mentioned the “tools” I learned in rehab to cackle about how they “never work for chronic alkies like us.” He had no interest in “phone lists” (which, for the uninitiated, are lists of phone numbers of sober friends we are supposed to call when we’re about to relapse. The idea is that we never leave home without the list, and just when we’re about to catapult ourselves into sheer disaster, we call somebody to talk us out of it. My problem was I never believed I was about to catapult myself into sheer disaster. I believed I was going to prove I could drink like a lady this time, whatever the hell that meant. While I did not see a need to trouble my rehab friends with my own innocuous drinking, I did occasionally wonder if I should give them a jingle to help them learn how to drink better).
Good News Jack wouldn’t even feign interest in my “relapse triggers” or complex emotional pain rooted in the tenuous attachments of my inner child. He did, however, grow giddy at the prospect of dissecting at an atomic level the manifestations of my self-centeredness. When I’d protest, he’d say, “Do you really want your life to change, or do you want to remain an asshole with better consequences?” The most shocking part was I found myself admitting I wanted to remain an asshole, and in fact had never heard myself articulated so succinctly.
Saying it out loud felt like cold water on a hot day, some longed-for honesty in a parched mouth. And when I admitted such things, his face would beam, and he’d shout, “Yes! Janelle! That is the honesty you need to stay sober. No more self-delusion. No more bullshit. You’re a selfish fuck!” He’d roar with laughter, as if being a selfish fuck was the happiest thought he’d ever entertained.
“That’s what’s killing you, you know? All of us—we’re all whistling past the graveyard, sayin’, ‘Well it ain’t gonna happen to me.’” He took a drag of his Marlboro Red while I visualized myself in all those rehabs—the throw blanket, the Nikes, the promises to my children—whistling how I was “fine,” pretending, posturing, but truly believing my own lies. I was in the graveyard setting up a Buddha statue and judging tweakers.
“So what do we do?” I was on the edge of my damn seat.
“Recognize that you, you are the problem. You! You’re the problem! You’ve always been the fucking problem! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“I have never heard anything more wonderful, Jack,” I said flatly, rolling my eyes.
“Because there is power there, you fool. Power. That’s what you need, what you’ve always needed, right? You aren’t a victim! You try to arrange your life and control everyone to fix your inner self. It never works. You try harder. People hate you more. All the while you’re looking at the damn problem!” He laughed again.
When he spoke words like this, it sounded like a symphony, as if every word was a note falling one by one into a song so painfully beautiful I would sometimes sit silently across from him with tears falling down my face. I couldn’t explain it—what his words meant, how they pulled the truth from me, or how they cracked open the catacombs of my soul. They seemed to send bright light into my most hideous corners of shame and deceit. He was right. It felt like hope.
“You never said what we do,” I said.
“Get the fuck out of yourself, Janelle. That’s what we do.”
In therapy, it had always been about me—my childhood, my parents, my thoughts, my goals. But when I told Jack my perception of things, he’d say, “You know, Janelle, you could just jump off the crazy train rather than riding it all the way to the bitter end.” And then he would say that thing about the ducks and fire hydrant and tell me again to think of others, which was another shoddy plan as far as I was concerned.
One day, when the gleeful dust of new sobriety had settled, I was trying to make Ava and Rocket sandwiches but was somehow failing. I stood in my mother’s kitchen behind a cutting board, staring at bread and turkey, feeling like I might explode from restlessness. I told the kids I’d be right back and went outside to call Good News Jack.
“I just feel like shit, Jack. I do not feel ‘good’ at all.” I was angry and accusatory, as if his sobriety plan had already let me down.
Without hesitation, he answered, “I never promised you’d feel good. I promised you’d never have to drink again.” I thought about that, about not feeling good and simply dealing with it, about diminishing the importance of “feelings”—as in, sometimes you feel like trash, and you carry on without fixing it. He was a well of revolutionary information.
“What the hell are you doing right now anyway?” he asked.
“I was supposed to make the kids lunch, but I freaked out.”
“Go fucking make them lunch and stop thinking about yourself.” Then he hung up on me. He had a way that really made me feel loved.
Over time, I realized Jack had given me a job: be in the world, try to be of service to others, and clean up the damage of my past. When I hung out there, I lived in the sunshine. I lived in the knowing that I had been rearranged, and the booze obsession had left me, and I was free to go about the world, to live like any other semi-functioning whacko on the planet.
• • •
“So, did your daughter get into G.A.T.E.?” she asked, stopping me in the hallway as I headed to Ava’s second grade classroom.
I had recently learned that standard behavior around Ava’s school was to move from the fancy private school to a fancy public school when the child reached third grade, to take advantage of “Gifted and Talented Education,” which was where all the superior kids were headed. The woman standing before me was their captain. She had adopted her children from another country, which also made her captain of the white liberals. She was around fifty, with black, gray-streaked hair, and owned an impressive array of Tevas. She had dark brown eyes and a brow that threatened to destroy me if I said something out of line. Sadly for me, I rarely knew where that line was.
“No, she didn’t,” I said, shrugging.
She jolted, tilting slightly forward and raising her eyebrows in shock, as if I had just told her my dog was bleeding to death in my car. After the initial blow wore off, her face registered thinly veiled disgust, but it wasn’t until the pity settled into her eyes that I felt her derision, and thought with a stab that maybe my daughter wasn’t as smart as I thought she was. I recalled the day my mother took her to the exam, and how I didn’t go with her, and I wondered if I should have. I considered having her retake it, and then remembered I didn’t care.
My kid is fine. I am fine. She’s smart, and I’m sort of smart. For whatever reason, she didn’t pass the test. I looked up and shrugged again.
“Oh, well. That’s too bad,” the lady stammered, straightening her North Face vest.
“Is it too bad?” I answered, smiling, before I turned and walked away.
I signed my daughter out, chatted with the receptionist, held my girl’s hand on our way to the car to make sure she was safe, and all these actions felt like tiny miracles. I gave a death glare to the woman when I saw her in the parking lot, because I was sober, not Jesus.
On my way home, I realized with a sort of stunned despondency that the only purpose of that exchange was for Captain Gifted to determine if I was as respectable a mother as she was. I had temporarily forgotten adults acted like that, although I should have recognized it immediately as the “healthy person” version of “Who’s the sickest in the room?”
After that day, I began to notice that mothers were an extremely strange bunch, and for my own amusement, I began categorizing them based on money, parenting choices, and politics. Captain Gifted was Type I: The Put-Together Enlightened Mother Who Is Definitely Better Than Me. This type of mother is a living spreadsheet. She’s read all essential theories of parenting, her spice cabinet is alphabetized, and her bottom sheets are folded in the linen closet. She probably has a PhD and drives a Prius. She definitely composts and wears a lot of fleece purchased from REI. She looks at motherhood as a complex responsibility to be calculated and controlled to achieve optimum outcomes. If I were as proficient as she is, my outcomes would also shine like beacons of hope in a dark forest. She will remind me of this frequently, but not directly, through earnest and heartfelt “suggestions,” which she will view as charitable and I will view as a direct assault on all that is good in the world.
Then there is Type II: The Why Is Everybody Making a Big Deal Out of This Mother, who stays at home with her two (possibly three) children and has any situation handled in her skinny jeans, strategically undone hair, and never-chipped pedicures. She met her husband while living abroad and posts a lot of photos of herself drinking red wine on a patio. She says things like “I make my own cashew butter” and “I never stop eating,” which is confusing, because I wasn’t as skinny as her during the skinny days I reflect upon with great yearning. One imagines this is made possible by her deeply spiritual attachment to yoga combined with a diet of kale smoothies drunk out of mason jars and vegan gluten-free zucchini bread—which she brings to our playdate at the park, where we sit on a handmade vintage quilt while she coos gentle directions to her children in one of the Romance languages.
I'm Just Happy to Be Here Page 17