But after a pause, he asked, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could be okay with being pathetic?”
His question entered my consciousness one word at a time in neon lights. I stared at the cars around me, all lined up, the sun hitting them from the side, casting deep four-o’clock shadows. I took a drag of my smoke.
Well I’ll be damned, I thought. The problem is not that I’m pathetic, the problem is I think I shouldn’t be pathetic. What if I am? What if I let that be?
I smiled. I’m pathetic. I got sober and managed to have the worst performance review I’d ever had. What now, Janelle?
“Ah, shit, Jack.” I couldn’t think of more to say. I hung up, and pathetic settled into my bones. It ran to my skin and brain and toes. Through my whole heart.
What now? I looked around again.
I’m still here.
I dropped my cigarette onto the concrete and crushed it before picking it up and throwing it away (because I don’t litter). Then I walked back into the building.
Back in my cubicle, I remembered what Jack had told me in my earliest days of sobriety: “If you’re sitting in the living room but want to be in the kitchen, the first thing you have to do is realize you’re in the fucking living room.” Oh God, I thought. Good News Jack is speaking in metaphor again. I nodded, following the concept thus far.
“Otherwise,” he said, “you’ll never know to get up and walk into the kitchen.”
I stared at him with my mouth open. We can’t get someplace new until we’re honest about where we are.
I had spent so much time gazing at the kitchen, longing for the kitchen, crafting visions of what it would be like to be in the kitchen, that I never took the time to look down, right there, at my ass on the couch. I was so busy yearning for Spanish cobblestone, I missed the concrete beneath my own damn feet.
Not a single thing changed about my life after that day. I was still a butler and reluctant homemaker and administrative assistant craving one iota of critical thinking. And I still often hated it. I simply stopped fighting that I hated it. It felt like a pause, a deep breath, a long inhale of the facts. Okay, I thought. So this is my life.
I’m the motherfucking butler. What now?
And I got back to work. Because from there, there’s nothing left to do.
• • •
Maybe if I had listened to the inspiration brigade—maybe if I were a different person with a different past and a more positive, reasonable outlook—writing would have been gentle, a sweet release, instead of a roaring beast that snatched me for hours after the kids went to bed, and took me away on Saturday afternoons, and locked me in my bedroom after telling my children, “If you knock on my door and you aren’t bleeding, I will ruin you.”
Maybe I would have continued folding the laundry and placing it in drawers rather than depositing baskets of unfolded clean clothes in front of each kid’s dresser. Surely I would have written fewer expletives had I been swimming laps every day instead of fortifying myself with 70 percent cacao bars, coffee, and sarcasm.
But I didn’t, and I’m not somebody else, and I didn’t start writing to change lives or make money or even “fulfill” myself. I started writing because nobody was writing the life I was living. Nobody was saying a damn word about what I saw each day. And yet, I exist. Don’t I? Nearly two years later, I was still looking around at the “categories” of mothers and realizing I fit nowhere. Meanwhile, the world told me to “explore creative endeavors like a hummingbird.”
I would look around at the disorder of my life, the chaos and ambiguity—emptiness and servitude alongside exquisite beauty—and I’d think, Somebody else must feel this way too. Because I knew I was grateful. I knew I was so happy to be here I sometimes felt the hand of God himself had spread across my broken shoulders. And yet, maybe I hate motherhood.
“Why can’t both exist, Mac? Why can’t it be this good and this bad?
“I don’t know, Janelle. Why don’t you stop reading that crap?” he’d say.
I’d continue blathering on about whatever “sleep training” article I had read, or yet another “women should cover up when they nurse” manifesto. I’d read one more handy guide about how to “balance” your forty-hour workweek, spice up your sex life, speak in gentle tones to our butterfly babies, and lose twenty pounds—in a month! Everybody seemed to agree on a few basic tenets of motherhood—that it was precious and sacred, and that saying otherwise was Satanic.
I’d squint and curse under my breath and read more books and magazines and blogs. I’d read Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. The more I read, the more alienated I felt until I simply had to know: Is the rest of the mothering world crazy, or am I?
The thought fuck these people drove me to the keyboard. One of us was definitely lying. Words flooded my brain while I showered or drove. I’d miss the exit on my way to work and not realize it for a full five minutes. My kids’ voices became white noise behind the deafening cadence of sentences I had not yet written. When I couldn’t stand the beating any more, I sat down one day in my cubicle, signed up for a free blog, named it "Renegade Mothering," and wrote eight hundred words in fifteen minutes. The last of them said this:
What about those of us who love our children as much as the well-adjusted knowledgeable stable enlightened types but just can’t seem to get it right? What about those of us who just aren’t cut out for this shit but are doing it anyway?
I am proof that not every woman enters motherhood in some gentle, planned, ribbon-and-ruffles way. Not every woman likes this crap. Not every woman fits neatly into the mold created and reinforced by irrelevant books like “What to Expect…”
I usually look around the child-rearing world and see a bunch of crap I don’t need, hear a bunch of advice I can’t use—encounter a bunch of people I only partially understand. I go home and I see a thrashed house with kids everywhere and overgrown lawns, dirty cloth diapers and books I want to read but don’t and toys and dishes and sometimes I demand that my kids just sit down be quiet and watch Netflix because I can’t stand one more moment of noise or movement. And if one more person says “Mama” I am going to take a bat to the windows.
And a few hours later I walk into her room after she’s gone to sleep and I see my firstborn baby, nine years old. I stroke her frizzy unkempt hair and listen to her soft snores. I touch her cheek and my eyes burn in palpable adoration. I feel it surge up my body from my toes into my fingers—thick, fierce infinite expanding mama love. And I beg the universe in that moment to give her everything she will ever need and please God keep her safe and how is it that I am so lucky to have this child, right here. The one who robbed me of my great ass and flat belly and turned me into the mother I wasn’t ready to become.
I lie down exhausted and think of all the ways I could be a better mom. Of the days I’ve missed through my own selfishness. Of the years racing by, teasing me with the illusion that this will never end, that they’ll always be little. And I wish I didn’t yell so much.
And so it goes on like this. Back and forth. All the time. Here’s to the trip.
Someday I shall write my own book called: “What to Expect When You’re [a Jackass and] Expecting.” Until then, I’ll write this blog.
• • •
It was a small, silly act. A dumb nudge in a great void. A “mommy blog?” Bah!
“Nobody will read you, Janelle. Nobody cares,” my brain told me.
“That’s okay,” I answered back. “I’m okay with being pathetic.”
I had forty readers, and twenty of them were my cousins. After I wrote a post—usually when I was supposed to be working—I would wait seven minutes and call my mother. “Did you read it?” I’d ask.
“Yes!” she’d say, and tell me she was crying or that I was “hilarious.” And I’d think, Nice. My mom thinks I’m funny. Then I’d go back to my soulless work.
When I got home, I’d ask Mac if he had read it, and he’d say, “You’re such a good writer, Janelle.” I
didn’t believe him, but kept writing anyway because I’d remember the duck and the fire hydrant.
• • •
Two years later, three years sober, I sat in my advising professor’s office and told her I had changed my mind about pursuing a PhD, so we need not continue drafting our article together. “Because, you see, Professor, I’ve had a few posts get kind of big—and I know it’s stupid—blogging? How pathetic, right? But I have to try. I have to see if I can write.”
“Janelle,” she said. “For God’s sake, do that. We will always be here.”
And when I finished graduate school armed with a credential “proving” I could write, I asked Bea at the law firm to expand my responsibilities beyond pushing paper around for a dull, misogynistic new guy who demonstrated what truly unfortunate bosses act like. (I would never, ever complain about Brian and his color coding again.)
She answered, “We continue to look for opportunities to use your talents and skills in the firm.”
I smiled, thanked her, and walked out of her office knowing the next time we spoke, I would be handing her my resignation. It had been nine years, an excellent run. I wasn’t resentful. I was indebted. They had kept me around through the roughest years of my life, helped me fail, helped me get sober. But I didn’t belong there anymore.
Possibly, I never had.
When I quit, it merely felt correct. It felt true. I did not have a plan in mind beyond “get some gig at a junior college teaching composition and keep writing,” nor did I have money if my plan fell through, but I knew in my guts it was time to go. I knew it was time to take a step toward the kitchen. My ten-year-old self would have been appalled at my lack of planning.
• • •
And one day, a few years later, I found myself writing, and teaching some college classes, but with four children now. My days had not changed. They were frantic and they were uninspired—monotonous and heavy and rather butler-like—kid chatter and nursing and back pain and the mess. My God, the mess. Laundry and dishes and parent-teacher conferences and I still didn’t read past email number nine.
They erase me, I’d think, until night, after they went to bed, and I’d sit down at the computer and write some words to some strangers, some other mothers. To say something that was mine. I defended that time. I blocked everyone who tried to enter it. You can have everything, kids, but you can’t have this.
At work, I served my employer. At home, my kids. But there, on that page, I served nobody. I was in the kitchen, but not that of my grandmothers, or even my mother, but mine—my own place, if only for a few hours a week. When I got there, people asked, “My God, how brave of you to just get up and do it! I wish I could. How did you do it?” But I didn’t know how to respond, because the only thing I did was get really tired of myself, look down, and take a few steps. Then I was in the kitchen, kinda eyein’ the bedroom, thinking, It will all be amazing if I could only get there.
It’s okay, though. I see now it keeps me moving.
I didn’t overcome my fear. My fear lives always like a low hum in the back of my mind. I simply lost faith in it. Okay, fear, hi. Maybe the man under the bed is still there. Maybe I should check the closets. But if all that searching and scrambling for safety results in nothing but the same old fear, what’s the point of wasting my time? What’s the point of remaining silent? The maggots are going to come either way.
I had nothing to prove when I sat down to write that first post. Nothing left to defend. What was the Internet going to say to me? “You are a bad mother?” Oh! You think? I had no idea.
There was nothing the world could throw at me I hadn’t already caught, no place they could illuminate in the recesses of my being that would surprise me. I had walked them all, visited each one with my whole body and bones and blood. Two inches from my eyes I studied each line, every letter my baby sent me to come home, and every time I didn’t, and everything I missed, and every tear my mama shed, and every rush of hope when I seemed to really be coming around this time.
I guess I found my soul work, but I found it at the bottom, right there with the kid who chased with knives, the woman on her unmade bed, stepping on Legos, washing jam off the linoleum. I found it in the mess I was running from, in the life I deemed lacking, in the fingers never blessed enough.
• • •
I suppose some of us don’t have the luxury of neatly wrapped truth, of affirmations that rest on our tongues like peppermints. Some of us need to be doused in gasoline and set aflame, until the truth consumes us, and we have no choice but to recreate ourselves. A collision, as Baldwin says, when one must choose to live or die.
I didn’t want to feel better. I wanted to live.
I didn’t want the pain gone. I wanted it to mean something.
When I found my voice, I didn’t find answers—I found a purpose for every moment I had lived. I found power in every blackened room in my mind, every fear, every sad parent, every futile word and nightmare memory.
Because it led me to you, to the place where we are the same, to the place where words draw a line from my bones to yours, and you look at me and say, “I know,” and I look back at you, thinking, Well I’ll be damned. I guess we’ve been here together all along.
16
In the Blood of Our Mothers
My Grandma Bonny was a writer, too, though I barely noticed when she was alive. From age fourteen to eighteen, I pulled away from my church, father, and mother, but stayed near Grandma Bonny, and I was never sure why. Nobody in my family was interesting or smart enough for my teenaged standards, and she wasn’t either, really, but I was drawn to her anyway. I admired her intellect, her power. She was deeply flawed, too—a little cold, a little prone to rage, a little irrational when it came to, say, healthcare for her five children. That was the Mary Baker Eddy in her.
By the time I was in high school, and she was in her seventies, she had been a widow for ten years but continued living as she always had, rising early each morning and putting on a pantsuit, a brooch, and heading to “the shop,” where she would write at a big wooden desk in the back of the office behind a nameplate from the 1960s that said Bonny Jean Hanchett: Editor.
She always, for as long as I can remember, drove a Ford Taurus, along with nearly my entire family, because my father’s cousin worked at the local Ford dealership. Every two or three years, she’d get a new Taurus, and every Wednesday she’d pick me up from school. I loved the smell of her car. The air that came out of the vents was musty and clean, just the same as when she’d drive me around Clearlake and to her church when I was a little girl. It smelled like Grandma Bonny.
She would wear her pantsuit even in the dead of summer, with her smooth white hair in a bob, and she’d accessorize with gold and diamond rings. Her nails were always neatly manicured, sometimes polished a sensible pink. While we drove to her town of Cloverdale, which was about thirty minutes from my high school, I would ask her astute questions like “Why is there no ‘white club’ at school if there’s a Mexican club?” (I had a long way to go before learning of my ignorance.) But I don’t remember her answers, because I was more interested in my own voice prattling on about so-and-so at school and how he was teaching a faulty curriculum.
She’d often turn on political talk radio while I stared out the window and counted trees. Even if I tried to listen, I couldn’t follow for more than a few seconds because the radio hosts sounded drab and monotone, discussing topics that didn’t matter to me at all, like California legislation or international diplomacy.
Occasionally, she’d yell back at the radio, which I took as a desire to engage me. So I would ask a question, but again didn’t absorb her answers, because I knew nothing of international politics—or politics at all. But she talked as if I should know, so I didn’t ask. I pretended to understand so she would think I was an informed and intellectually advanced teenager.
In hindsight I realize she did not expect me to know about these things. She was simply refusing to talk down t
o me. She talked down to nobody, except any waiter who made a mistake on our order. God help you then, kid.
When we’d arrive at “the shop,” I’d drop my Jansport backpack at one of the empty desks and kill time by spinning around in an empty office chair. My aunts would come over to say hello and ask me how my mother was and how school was going, usually with X-acto knives in their hands, but my grandmother went immediately to her desk, and I knew not to disturb her. She would ruin me.
When I was a little girl in the shop, I would draw pictures or play school, make books out of paper and ad scraps, and write notes to my father. Twenty years later, when my father and aunts sold the newspaper, the notes were still hanging on the wall, although they belonged in the trash. They had faded into little wisps of orange or purple or red. Norfy, though, the massive pine, still occupied the entire front office with its sci-fi branches.
When she finished her work, Grandma Bonny and I would head back to her house, and she would make me a dinner that somehow always incorporated mayonnaise or the microwave. While she cooked, I would walk around and look at all the Madame Alexander dolls, Beatrix Potter figurines, plates with kittens, and books I had examined since I was a toddler. I wondered why she lived in a mobile home. She could afford more, but after my grandfather died, and she sold the newspaper they had run for thirty years in Clearlake and bought this one, she insisted on living in a mobile home in the little retirement park. I loved how everything had a place in it, though. I loved how I had a place, with her, in all that history.
When I was old enough to drive myself to her house on Wednesdays, I would walk in and she’d be reading Democracy in America or Proust or Dickens, or embroidering while hollering at politicians on TV. I’d scour the freezer for ice cream without a layer of crystals, and instead find Bon Bons. I’d eat the whole package while she made me a chicken sandwich with canned chicken, mayonnaise, and walnuts.
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