“Well, Jack, what do I do about it?” I was actually spellbound at this point.
“Pray for help. Figure out why you love anger.” So I tried what he said, meditating and praying in the morning, but mostly, I returned to therapy.
• • •
“I’m sober and still raging,” I said, sitting on the wicker chair next to the window and a sprawling ficus tree. The therapist paused and asked, “What do you mean, ‘raging’?”
“Anger. Raging in anger. I feel borderline again, only without the other fifteen symptoms, which I guess makes me no longer borderline. Is that possible? Can people become un-borderline? Maybe within the borders?” I was speaking like a fool because I was nervous, and it was hard to explain that my rage was like a rotten old friend I couldn’t imagine my life without, or a sibling I bickered with constantly but missed as soon as she was gone.
“What are you getting from your anger?” the therapist asked, and I thought, Holy mother of God, they’re all in cahoots with one another.
“You know that’s the same thing the ex-refrigerator-box dweller asked me?” She looked confused, so I explained he was a friend, a sort of crank spiritual guide.
“When did you start raging?” She had her pen at the ready.
I contemplated not going down the whole road of my past with her, but I did. I told the truth. The alternative was too exhausting. I had lied and polished the truth for too long. Jack used to tell me I spent my life “polishing the same old turd and selling it like it was new.” I didn’t want to tell better-polished lies. I wanted turd truth.
But I knew that once I started she would look at me with eyes that said, “Wow, you really made it!” and I’d feel like a fraud again, because she was praising my stunning turnaround, and I knew I looked so “fine,” like a good and loving mother. When I shared my ideas about parenting, she’d say, “Yes, that’s right!” because I talk well, and she would be impressed with my devotion to family, especially after “such a past!” But what would she think if she saw our house when nobody was there but us?
What would she think if she heard the things I say?
I am a fraud. I will be found out.
We had purchased a house. I re-enrolled in the English master’s program I had quit. I shared pictures of my family on Facebook, and friends rejoiced at our little family—how far we had come. We should be so proud. We are goddamn miracles.
But what if they knew? I wondered, fully and finally, if I would ever change. If I would ever be worthy of the glittering life around me.
I should not have been surprised to find my inner life unmanageable. Good News Jack always said, “Alcohol was never your problem, it was your solution.
“If alcohol were the problem,” he’d say, “rehab would be churning out winners. And yet, people like us always drink again. Every relapse starts with a sober brain. So where’s your problem? In sobriety.” It was tough to argue with logic like that, but still I maintained a small, buried belief that once alcohol was gone, I would become the most benign version of myself. Perhaps some sort of B-level saint.
But after getting sober, I realized I was still an asshole.
In softer moments, when feeling generous, Jack would tell me, “You are a human, Janelle. What’s fucking with you is that you’re human.”
This seemed insufficient. This seemed profoundly oversimplified. So, that’s it? We harm people because we’re human? Do other mothers do this? If so, why aren’t they talking about it? And why, if this is how it is, if we are flawed and broken and somehow unsuccessful at snapping ourselves out of it even when kids are involved, why do we write things like, “You become the voice in your children’s heads”? Do they bestow this responsibility on the heads of fathers? Why is it my job to become my kid’s inner voice? Because the kid came out of my vagina? Those seem unrelated.
“You are only human,” he said, and yet it feels infinitely not enough. If this is human, if this is my best shot at life, I am not enough. Do I make peace with that now? I am not failing in cute ways. I am failing in big, big ways.
But then I would think of the inhumanity of my former life, of the morning I woke up and realized I could not exist among humankind, of the day I couldn’t use a restroom properly, of the day I woke up alone in a hospital bed, and the day I spoke in the cracked dialects of the wholly insane, and then I’d think, I am only human, and that is precisely the miracle.
14
The Childhood I Could No Longer Blame
When I was a kid and circumstances turned questionable, my mother would take us to the beach. We would walk in the front door, and she would announce, “Change your clothes, kids. I have to get to the ocean!” We’d pack sweatshirts and a Smokey Joe barbeque into the back of our white Ford Taurus station wagon and head to Morro Bay or Pismo Beach. My mother would cook hot dogs in the warm blanket fog while my brother boogie-boarded and I hid in little caves and forts under the cypress trees, talking to myself in imagined worlds. I’d roll up my pant legs and flip the clean sand around my toes, chasing waves and tumbling down dunes as the sun fell into the roaring blue.
On our way home, with salt still clinging to the ringlets around my face and my pants wet and itchy, my mother and I would analyze whatever worry had nudged her to the beach. Usually it was a lack of funds, or another disappointment involving my stepfather, Keith.
When things got really bad, we’d head out on a road trip somewhere without any particular money or plan, sometimes traveling all the way to British Columbia. On these trips, in the late afternoon when it became apparent we needed to sleep somewhere, my brother and I would start looking for camping spots on a huge Rand McNally map we kept wadded up under the front seat.
One summer afternoon when I was ten, my brother and I walked in the door after playing outside to find our mother stacking food and towels and sleeping bags in the living room. “What’s going on, Mom?” I asked.
She grinned. “We’re going to Yosemite!”
We jumped up and down. Wheeee! A random adventure! It was summer, so the plan to “leave today” made more sense than her usual announcements on school nights that we were going to “see the redwoods” or “hang out at the stock car races in Laguna Seca.” If I protested, she’d say, “You’ll learn way more camping than you ever will at school.” This, of course, was unequivocally true.
But my jumping ceased when I remembered my mother was in charge.
“Do we have a campsite reservation, Mom?” I raised my eyebrows as she folded a giant tarp she referred to as “the blue deal.” She wore stonewashed tapered jeans and a purple T-shirt that said Yosemite on it, which was quite possibly the impetus for the entire trip. Perhaps she had seen it that morning, sitting in the drawer, and thought, I had better get to Bridal Veil Falls.
“Of course not,” she answered slyly. “How could I? I just decided to go! We’ll find something.”
“What do you mean, ‘We’ll find something’? We will not. It’s summer. It’s been booked for three years.” I was ten, but I knew these things because I was a tiny Republican who loved rules.
“Go pack!” She was grabbing pillows from around the house and stacking them by the front door.
“What about money, Mom? Do we have any?” I hadn’t budged from my platform of inquiry. There were questions that needed answering, people.
“We have enough. I sold some new advertising.” She yelled to my brother to get ready. I wanted to yell, “Let’s slow down and assess the particulars of the situation!”
“What about the electricity bill?” I dropped one hip and put a hand out, as if to say, Did ya think of that one, Mother?
“It just came. We’re fine, Janelle. We are fine.”
“How much money do we have exactly?” I wanted data. Numbers. I wanted to know if we were spending the last of it.
Our money came and went so quickly. A tax return arrived and we were flush. The heater broke and we were broke. But when the money was gone, my mother’s spirit went
with it. We went to the beach and she drove along, defeated, and I thought for sure we’d never be flush again. I wanted to save us both from that moment.
“Janelle, go pack!” She was laughing, and I couldn’t fight it anymore. The sound of her excitement—the tune of carefree—was sweet mountain air. I breathed it in and I was with her. Let’s go, Mom. Let’s go adventuring.
I walked to my room thinking of waterfalls and Ansel Adams, glaciers and granite and bears. I packed, and we piled into our wagon and drove.
An hour later, I was sent into a Carl’s Jr. to gather some mayonnaise packets (we had forgotten the mayonnaise) so we could stop in the parking lot of a liquor store to eat lunch.
I was sitting on the back of our car and swinging my legs under the hatchback, while my mother made tuna sandwiches and apparently spotted a homeless woman sitting in front of the liquor store.
“Janelle, go give that lady a sandwich,” my mother said, extending a sandwich my way.
“What? No.” I widened my eyes and pulled my body back from the sandwich, repelled by its very association with her idea. “Absolutely not.”
“Give her some chips, too,” she said, packing Doritos into a baggie.
“No. Why, Mom?” I was already desperate.
“Because maybe she’s hungry.” I flinched in restrained rage at my mother’s incessant weirdness. Where does she come up with these ideas? Why can’t we just fade back into our Ford like normal people? I already stole mayo packets from Carl’s Jr. Is that not enough for one day?
I whined, “No way,” as if that had ever worked once with my mother, but I soon gave up the battle I knew I’d lose, grabbed the food, and walked across the infinite lot, cursing my mother under my breath in Mormon-approved swear words. I approached the woman and sheepishly held out the food as she squinted at me through sun-cracked skin and watery eyes. She accepted it silently as I smiled and mumbled, “Hi. Here. Okay, bye. Thanks.” I walked immediately away.
Crouched in the sunshine under a pile of evidently unnecessary clothing, she had not looked at me like I was Jesus, as I had assumed she would, but rather as if I were a cow invading her afternoon—and not even a cute cow. Still, I was impressed with myself—quite a Good Samaritan, you’ll notice—and saw my mother watching me with equal pride in her eyes as I strolled back to the car. When I was about halfway across the parking lot, the lady chucked the tuna sandwich at me, skimming the side of my head and distributing tuna and mayonnaise across my scalp. I dared not look back at her, but the shock spun through my legs as I ran to my mother, my eyes locked with hers, burning in humiliation, screaming, What the frick were you thinking, Mom?
“Why did you make me do that?” I was furious with the betrayal.
“I had no idea she’d throw it at you, honey,” she said calmly as she pulled the tuna out of my hair with paper towels.
“This is not the first time this has happened! Remember when we picked up that hitchhiker and she pulled a knife on you? What about that?” We now had evidence of two crazy homeless people in our lives, which I figured was plenty of data to swear off homeless people forever.
“She was mentally ill, Janelle.”
My eyes widened. “Then why was she in our car?”
“She needed a ride,” she said, packing the remains of our lunch in the ice chest.
“Mom! That is not an answer!”
“Well I didn’t know she was mentally ill. You can’t tell by looking at somebody, you know? We always end up alright.” She laughed again.
“Oh, you mean like when our car broke down in Las Vegas and we survived for two days playing nickel slot machines and sneaking into buffets?” Plus, I thought, you can kind of tell by looking at somebody, Mother.
“Keith should have sent us some money to pay for the car. That was a terrible thing he did, leaving us like that.” My mother shook her head in disbelief as she reflected on Keith’s bad choices.
“Mom, we went to Vegas to see the Hoover Dam with two hundred dollars and a nearly broken car. That is not how people do things!”
“This is a great car! And I got us a VIP tour of the dam, didn’t I? Remember that? We met that security guy just when they were closing. That was the opportunity of a lifetime.” She was growing tired of my inability to recognize educational opportunities.
“We also got kicked out of a buffet by a different security guy.” I hated that moment. I had to leave half a Las Vegas casino buffet shrimp plate.
“And yet, here we are!” She threw her hands up. “Still okay!”
“And now we’re going to Yosemite in June without a reservation. There will not be a spot, Mom. I do not want to go without a spot.” I was afraid again.
“We’ll get a spot.”
“But how do you know?”
She leaned toward me. “You have to think good thoughts. You just have to know you’re going to get a spot. Just believe it. Assume there is no other option. It’s how I always get great parking spots right in the front. I drive right to the front knowing I’ll get a spot, and I always do.”
“You do not always. That is a lie.”
“Well, I usually do.” That was true.
My mother’s life plan was: “We’ll figure it out.” And the method to carry out the plan was: “Think positively.”
I hated that philosophy. I would think positively when I was looking at my damn campsite reservation. Why couldn’t we call ahead? Why couldn’t my mother believe the “No Vacancy” signs when we were on the prowl for a motel room? She invariably stopped the car to check anyway. “Oh, they always have extra rooms. They just put that sign out to deter people.” Occasionally, she’d walk triumphantly out of the motel office with a key in her hand, announcing, “I even got us a free upgrade!”
Her eyes would say, “See, Janelle? I told you.” And I would smile, because she really did pull some shit off.
• • •
Back in “Mudhole,” which is the translation of Atascadero, our town in Central California, we pulled into the driveway of Keith’s house, and I felt the weight of our lives return.
By the time we walked into the living room, my mother had already disappeared. Not in body—she was right there—but the woman I knew, the one who suggested I break into the ranger station to pilfer a reservation form, was gone. She was busy watching her husband now, with eager eyes, anticipating his needs, dangling from every barely perceptible shift in his mood, shuffling around to repair and preserve his desires. I sighed and went into my room to unpack and try to finish that Steinbeck chapter about the turtle.
We had been in Atascadero since I was seven, moving there after a dreamy stint in Calistoga, an adorable little town full of wine and wildflowers. We lived in a trailer park across the street from a hot springs pool. My brother, mother, and I had moved there after my parents divorced. My brother and I swam so often my hair turned white from the sun and green from the minerals. We rinsed it in lemon juice. It turned whiter and greener.
We had moved to Calistoga from Clearlake, where my father grew up, and where my whole family lived when it was together. The wine country town was only twenty-six miles from Clearlake, but it felt like a new country. Clearlake was in Lake County, an impoverished, rural swath of land boasting the highest number of multigenerational welfare recipients of any county in the state (according to family lore), a raging meth problem, and a lake named “Clearlake” even though it was often rimmed by a twenty-foot wall of algae one could avoid only by boat or dock. Grandma Bonny lived in Lower Lake. Grandma Joan and Grandpa Bob lived in Lakeport. And scattered between them were my aunts, uncles, and cousins.
But my mother needed a new life, and Keith, a high school friend of my father’s, offered to lease her some office space. So we sold the motor home and drove a few hours south in the Ford wagon to Atascadero, every mile carrying us farther away from the unclear lake. When we arrived, we rented a tiny pink house with red shag carpet as a temporary pad until my mother’s new business took off.
<
br /> Her plan was to start a tourist magazine, and around the dinner table she would talk of her vision, the well-connected person she met, the special information she had that nobody else had—a unique opportunity, no other travel magazines, all very promising! For eighteen years, she helped my grandparents and father (and aunts and uncle) publish the weekly newspaper in Clearlake, which Grandma Bonny owned, so she knew weeklies. This would be a monthly, and it would be hugely successful because there was nothing like it, even though we were in the world-renowned, tourist-packed Central California coast.
I loved imagining with her all the ways we would spend the money, the house we would live in, the places we’d visit, the way our problems would pass into nothing. We would get a big house. We would buy a new van. At seven and eight and nine and ten, I believed these schemes and plans and dreams. With all my heart, actually. This one is going to work.
So let’s go, Mom. Let’s go to Mudhole and do amazing things.
• • •
In the bathroom of the pink house is where I first remember clinging to my mother’s legs and begging her not to leave. I slid on the floor, gripping her calf pathetically, pleading with her to stay—bartering, discussing details I thought might be up for negotiation—staring at the brown cabinets and gold handles at my eye level while she sprayed her 1986 perm with Aquanet and assured me she was “only going out for a couple of hours.”
This, I knew, was a lie, because she was going to die. So I’d deeply inhale the scent of her Jergens lotion and hairspray, thinking, This is it. This is the last time I’ll smell my mother.
My brother, immune to the horrors of the world, would play Tetris on Nintendo and then go to bed as if our mother were not going to die, while I kept watch on the couch, rocking back and forth and crying at the M*A*S*H theme song (my mother’s favorite) and waiting for the phone to ring. It would be the police and they would say, “Super sorry, but your mother veered into a telephone pole.” I would imagine my screams upon hearing the news, my flailing on the floor, visualizing the body viewing and every word I’d say at her funeral. I saw myself crying out like they do in the movies, and my couch-crying would turn into numb shaking as I thought of the heartfelt things I’d say behind the funeral podium.
I'm Just Happy to Be Here Page 20