I was a kid again, driving in our station wagon or minivan while she told me how she suffered, and I told her he would never change, and I felt her pain in my body until I no longer questioned if it was mine.
“I married another asshole.”
I wanted to punch her in the face, hold her in my arms—scream, weep, and run. I wanted to wrap her in protection I didn’t have. I wanted to leave and never see her again. I wanted to hold her in arms too weak to support anything. She never listens. Why can’t she see? These stories. Her pain. I’ll kill him. Another man not nice to her.
But I watched her marry him. I was in the damn wedding, wearing purple chiffon and smiling. I watched how weird he was and she married him anyway. I suspected she didn’t want to be alone.
I hated her for doing it again.
I hated myself more for my inability to change it.
• • •
Driving home from Mendocino the next morning, I rolled the windows down as I passed beneath the redwoods and through the meadows from Fort Bragg to Willits. I opened the sunroof to see the tops of the trees and turned the heater up. The air warmed as I drove farther inland, and as I had a smoke, or five, and listened to the Dead sing of the four winds blowing you safely home, I heard her words again. I heard her call my name, the lilt and appeal and plea, and I saw my blonde head, eight or nine years old and lying in a bed, or sitting in a chair, devastated. She never listens, but she promises, and I’m sure she’ll be okay this time. God, please just let her be okay.
But she was not, again.
I screamed and couldn’t stop screaming. I screamed as loud and hard as my voice would let me. I screamed the scream of a kid who wanted her mother to not suffer anymore. It was the scream of defeat. It was the scream of surrender and a fight abandoned. The scream of finish.
I heard the noise coming out of me and it was strange, but I didn’t stop. I let my face contort, and my eyes squint, and I just drove and screamed and hated her. No, I hated powerlessness. It felt the same as it had all my life.
I screamed until I thought my voice would die, but maybe it was already dead. Had been for years. Old air passing through the Mendocino redwoods and Camel Light smoke drifting to the sweet tune of Jerry. There was never a word for her to hear. Never a word worth speaking. I knew it in the freedom of shade and sunlight as I rolled on.
• • •
Two years later, I woke to Albert’s voice one summer morning as he stood in the doorway of the room in their home where I was staying for the summer before heading to Spain. “You need to go get your mother. She took the gun down to the beach, and she said she’s going to kill herself.”
Without a word I rolled out of bed and walked barefoot down the trail to the sand on the Mendocino coastline, and without a thought my feet trod methodically, numbly, my heart beating blood of rage and clarity into my green-blue eyes that look like hers. When I saw her standing by the water with a .45 in her hand, I walked straight up to her and looked in those eyes that held oceans for me and said, “Just fucking do it, Mom, if you’re going to do it. DO IT,” I yelled, and I meant it, unable to face one more attempt to keep her safe or sound.
I turned and walked away, and I held my breath waiting for the boom I knew would shatter both our lives, but I could not scream.
It had all been said.
• • •
The blast never came, but many years later I still felt the metal in her hands. I used to tell Jack about it, and that therapist I saw about my raging, about how it felt to walk in slow motion away from her, each step a long drag through terror. What would I have done if she had pulled the trigger? The therapist led me in circles through and in and around it all, to deconstruct and analyze my pain, to heal the young woman who snapped that day, but I always seemed to end up where I had begun. Jack spoke words I had never heard before.
“Your mother, you know, was doing the best she could with what she had at the time.” He took a deep drag of his Marlboro and looked at me from behind his glasses, his bright blue eyes terminally serious.
“But what she did was wrong, Jack.”
“Alright. But do you want to be right or do you want to be free?”
He had a way of unraveling in a single sentence knots I had spent my entire life tying. With every replaying of that scene, every therapeutic conversation about it, every Jungian analysis, I wove a thread back through the center. I was wronged. She failed me. And maybe that was true. Jack wasn’t arguing otherwise, but something about the way he said those words in that moment transformed my mother into a human. I never saw her before Jack spoke those words.
How many years had I spent blaming my failure on my parents? Blaming my brokenness on theirs? Were their sins even about me? Were they ever mine to hold? Everybody wants to blame alcoholics like me on “broken childhoods and bad parenting,” but Jack said, “There’s no power there, Janelle. There’s no power in being angry over the past. You weren’t responsible for what happened, but you’re responsible for what you do with it now.”
My parents were broke-down humans just like me. My mother wanted to not mess up her kids the way her parents messed her up, and she wanted to grow into a better version of herself, too, thinking surely love will be enough. She wanted to shove twenty or thirty years of life and disorder into a reliable and shapely parental version of herself, to not be the woman on the beach with a .45, or the loser on the balcony.
I didn’t want it to be true either—that what we bring to this newborn is nothing beyond the years of mistakes we’ve got stacked in our souls, and that what we’ll teach is not much more than the lessons we’ve learned through years of things we probably should have already known, and even love isn’t enough to polish us up into something more presentable. Even love isn’t enough to make us good enough for the tiny creature in the fuzzy pink bear suit, sleeping on the chest of a mama who’s read all the books, nurses with devotion, checks her breathing five times an hour, and asks only once, a bit too seriously, if beer is allowed in birthing centers.
They were doing the best they could with what they had at the time. And so was I. We are the goddamn same.
That was when I knew. You can build a life on rosemary carrots. You can head out without a plan. You can remember an outline, and it may be enough to bring the most hideous, wilted pine into glittering life.
• • •
We didn’t find our own campsite that night in Yosemite. We circled all the campgrounds, and as I had predicted, each site was reserved. We ended up in the overflow area, where, much to my horror, you walk in, choose a spot, and share it with strangers.
The men at our site were mountain climbers from Germany, and that night around the campfire, I watched firelight swirl around their faces while they described nailing their cots into the granite face of Half Dome and sleeping perpendicular to it, suspended, hovering in the cosmos.
“But what if you roll over?” I asked, aghast.
“Well, you don’t!” They guffawed, and I thought, Well, that sounds like a plan my mother would come up with. They prepared their food like that, too, floating over death, peeing and pooping into cans, and as I sat there, I realized I was meeting the most insane and gorgeous human beings I had ever seen in my life.
“Kid, do have any idea what the stars look like from the face of Half Dome?” The taller hiker looked right at me when he said it, but I couldn’t speak, so I handed him another hot dog. He did not throw it at my head.
They explained that after some hiking the next day, they planned on hitchhiking up the coast of California and Oregon. I looked at my mother and smiled, thinking, God, I hope we pick them up someday.
Twenty years later, sitting next to Jack after telling him my childhood story, I realized I had never stopped looking for the hitchhikers who climbed the face of Half Dome. Even though there was no chance of happening upon them, I believed they were out there, if I kept searching. Even when I could barely open my eyes, I knew they were out there, and I wanted to meet them.
I wanted to find them again—beautiful humanity met by happy accident, to show me what the world looks like beneath the Yosemite stars, from the face of a granite rock I could never scale myself.
My mother kept me looking. Her wild brokenness somehow forced me to remember humanity is mine, and I will find it, even if there is no plan, no reason to believe, and all the signs say “occupied.”
15
What the Hell Is “Soul Work”?
If I thought I would be gentler after getting sober, I really thought I would round the bend into sainthood after overcoming my childhood issues. I thought the intermittent, insidious boredom and confusion of my inner life would disappear like hangovers. I thought the parts of my personality that repelled and repulsed would fade like chain-smoked cigarettes. I thought meaning would beckon at every turn.
And yet, I still raged, fell into caverns of malaise—a sense of godless vacuity—that seemed to live in my blood. Even when it was all “perfect.” Even alongside all that fucking gratitude. It almost made it worse. Here I am sober—a new lease on life!—and I just spent twenty minutes staring at a wall wondering if this is really all there is.
I wanted to discuss Edward Said and do a Marxist reading of nineteenth-century American literature. I wanted to deconstruct dime novels and other “lowbrow” cultural products to study emergent art as resistance. I wanted to set my cubicle on fire. I wanted to get out of my house to hear myself think. I wanted a PhD. I wanted to write. I wanted to read Zizek and Gramsci and Butler and wonder what the hell they were talking about.
I wanted one to three more children. I wanted newborn breath. I wanted midwives to take care of me with their weathered hands. I wanted the moment the baby is placed on my chest. I wanted my milk trickling out of pink petal mouths. I wanted baby thighs and toddler mispronunciations.
While I wanted, I changed diapers and got myself dressed and the kids dressed, and cleaned and studied and drove and drove and drove. Everywhere and nowhere. I woke and did it again. We were down to nickels before every payday, and Mac worked two hours away in San Francisco as an ironworker. My life became five days a week of career work and two days a week of all the housework I didn’t do because of the career work. In between, I went to grad school.
I went to grad school and felt embarrassed by my home life, wrestling always with some peculiar shame. If I were a real intellectual I’d stop housing babies in my womb. I went to mom groups and felt embarrassed by my career. If I were a real mother I wouldn’t drop my baby at daycare every day.
• • •
On one particularly dark day, when I must have been channeling my mother’s optimism, I admitted to some other mothers how my life felt monotonous and seemed to make me dumber by the day, and how I was having a bit of trouble finding meaning in the endless beats of working motherhood. One of the mothers suggested I read the latest feel-good story involving an existentially lost white woman “finding” herself. “Changed my life!” the mother said, and all the women cooed in agreement, glancing at me as we stood around the play structure waiting for our children to get out of class.
I smiled vaguely, thinking, How? How the fuck did it change your life?
“Oh, it’s amazing,” she continued. “She loses everything and cannot find herself—you know, who she is as a woman—so she starts traveling. Total spiritual quest. Can you imagine her bravery?”
“She was probably paid a fat book advance to do that,” I said, regretting it immediately and thinking, This is why nobody likes you, Janelle.
“Well, still. It’s really inspiring, and it sounds like you need some inspiration!” Her tone reminded me of my uncle patting me on the head at Christmas while saying, “You’re doing great, kid!”
It was a familiar feeling—standing in a group of women wondering what the hell was wrong with me. I have always been plagued by the suspicion that I am defective because I don’t like things I am supposed to like, that everyone else seems to like, that I would probably like were I a better American. For example: joyful white women telling me how to improve myself.
If I had been ready to face full banishment, I would have told the women around me how I really feel about the self-help soul-journeying brigade. I would have explained my full-blown disdain on a visceral level. But then they would have asked me why, and I would have struggled to articulate what, exactly, is so revolting about put-together, well-meaning women armed with expressions like “soul work.”
All I can think when I hear that is, What the hell is “soul work”?
These women are adorable, and they say adorable heartfelt things, but when I listen to them, my face contorts in pain. Still, after the world is done acclaiming the latest disaster-to-inspiration miracle story, I give it a listen or read, to join the party, or at least discover what everybody is so enamored with. But after experiencing it, I usually think:
What is this shit?
How do people like this?
What is wrong with humanity?
I hate everything.
I shall move to a yurt on a New Mexican hillside. No. One of those off-grid houses in the Mojave made out of tires. Wait. The Mojave? Fuck deserts.
Where’s my James Baldwin?
Okay, but maybe there’s something wrong with you, Janelle. DO YOU HAVE NO SOUL?
Maybe. But we have to turn this crap off.
Oh, their stories of recovery after divorce, after drug addiction, after hitting that arctic ontological bottom.
That’s my story, too!
Except it isn’t. Because they say they were hopelessly lost in addiction but got sober the day they gazed at those sweet newborn toes. They say they beat their addiction by hiking through pine trees on ancestral trails. They overcame their soul-sucking cubicle death job by joining an ashram. They say they were hopeless addicts but still earned PhDs.
I shit in a bag and kept it. Nobody’s talking about shitting in bags on Oprah. I was at the bottom too—I feel ya there, ladies!—but I didn’t get a PhD. I got Ancient Age whiskey, laid off, and seven years between the day I enrolled in a two-year MA program and the day I held the actual degree.
And then, most disturbing of all, I got sober and realized I was still an asshole. I got sober and realized I still hurt people. I even resolved my childhood issues, and I’m still fucking bored.
Wake up. Hurry. Kiss kids. Step on Legos. Regret life. Say goodbye. Coffee. Car. Cubicle. Censor mouth. Suppress true self. Get paid. Watch it all go to mortgage and pressboard Ikea furniture and student loans. Come home. Yell. Clean. Fight. Laugh. Cuddle. Read inspirational soul travels. Throw book. Sleep. Do it again.
They say “find your passion” and “find the treasure within.” And I loved that idea when I got sober, but mostly I hated the way when I lay down, my belly rested on the bed like a bag full of water because I couldn’t stop eating sugar.
Even if everything they said was true, and I was simply a walking bad attitude, their polished words ultimately felt like lies. They felt like a well-choreographed dance around the truth. It made me uneasy because it was almost believable, all that gentle talk. It almost felt real. But my bullshit detectors blared whenever I read their words, and they wouldn’t shut off until I got back to words that grapple in the center, where the ambiguity lies—where a lack of answers is the endpoint.
I wondered why we couldn’t be real with ourselves: “We are going to die someday. We are going to rot in a coffin with motherfucking maggots. Isn’t it insane that we waste our time staring at smartphones and working at desk jobs we hate while accumulating shit we can’t take with us? Isn’t it ridiculous that we’ve created this material fortress of meaning in our lives when we’re all just mindless mechanics working for a giant capitalist daddy?”
Now leave me alone while I check my newsfeed.
And yet, the years mocked me with their passing. Sometimes I would imagine myself on my deathbed, looking back on my life, and I would feel—I mean really feel—that this life is all we get. These years, one
shot, ninety years if we’re lucky. And I’d grow so terrified of just not doing anything that I would grow almost frantic.
And yes, standing among those women, I was searching for meaning, even when nobody was looking—for connection, purpose, color—some taste of recklessness in a neighborhood of neutral tones. I’ve always been looking for Barcelona. Perhaps I should eat, pray, and love it into existence?
• • •
When I was three months sober, I sat in a conference room waiting for my first performance review since I’d cleaned up my act. I had shown up every day for ninety full days, clear-headed and ready to work, engaged in my job and no longer saying “cunt” at random. I had no doubt my bosses would offer nothing but praise for my dazzling performance.
Instead, they drew line by line the full picture of my mediocrity. I do not remember their specific concerns, but there were many. I only remember how we were sitting at the table and how it felt. They spoke clearly, professionally, and correctly.
I was decidedly standard. Even sober.
The shock drove tears from my eyes, and I did not try to stop them. They were pouring, and no amount of tough-broad bravado would have saved me. The horror was not failing to earn a glowing review. It was that I had been so sure of myself. These same bosses had once laid me off for talking to myself incoherently in a hallway. I had come so fucking far.
I thought they looked at me with pity. I could have sworn it was pity. It probably was. How could they not? When the review was over, I walked straight to the top floor of the parking garage to hide and smoke a cigarette and call Good News Jack. I told him all of it. I wasn’t angry. I was devastated.
“I just feel pathetic, Jack. I was sitting there like a motherfucking loser, and I just feel pathetic.”
Against all evidence of my time working with him, I still expected words of encouragement, words like, “Oh you’re not pathetic. Look at all you’ve done, Janelle! You’re a shining star!”
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