by Dana Bowman
I really did love him, even though I was so young. My life seemed tethered to him somehow. I walked through my days at high school with my Trapper Keeper clutched to my chest and my poofy bangs, and I always knew where he was. I always knew if he could see me. I would so often position myself in a way that he could see me. He had to see me.
If he didn’t, I might disappear or float away. The grip of his hand kept me safe.
You better believe, if Jerry Maguire had been around back then, I would have written “You complete me” in gel markers all over my notebooks. It would have been my battle cry for making it through high school. It would have been the best I could do at the time. Instead, I had The Princess Bride and John Hughes and Depeche Mode crooning about wanting to share the rest of my life with somebody. My whole life seemed to be a lean in toward this boy. He was the rest of my life.
But he was just a boy. He had no idea he had such status. He was royalty. Poor kid.
And yes, it wasn’t healthy and it wasn’t balanced. But what I heard in contrast was, “Be practical, Dana. Do the right thing, Dana. Be less passionate, Dana.” And those words seemed like death to me. They seemed sane, balanced, and boring.
So, one night we were out, driving through the summer warmth and listening to Echo and the Bunnymen. We were searching for a park, someplace to hold hands and walk and probably make out until our lips were swollen. We found a park and a path and headed off into the dusk.
And that’s when magic happened. We turned a corner, and there it was: a field of fireflies, all in concert, hovering above the grass and below the overhang of the trees. There were so many of them, it looked like God had strewn diamonds down upon us. And I stood there. I let go of my boyfriend’s hand and just looked. I said, “Just look at it.” And we obeyed.
It was romantic, but it had nothing to do with my boyfriend. I forgot he was there, just for a moment; it was lovely to stand there alone, filled up by this love note from God. It’s nearly thirty years later, and I remember that field and those fireflies as if it were yesterday. As we stood on that path in the still heat of a summer night, God spoke. He said, “It will take you a long time to let go of those things you cling to so tightly. Until then, remember this night. It’s a calling card. One day, you are going to realize I am more magical than that boy by your side.”
And that moment and those fireflies? They completed me.
There was still hope for me.
Magical Things
1.Children sleeping.
2.Casablanca.
3.The Grand Canyon.
4.Annie Lennox.
5.When my cat folds his paws under him and sits like a furry meatloaf.
6.Biblical comprehension.
7.Fire pits and s’mores.
8.Love, when it’s done right.
9.Life, when it’s really valued.
10.Loss, because it helps us realize how strong we really are.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HOW TO
fire
YOUR
inner bartender
I used to visit my inner bartender from time to time, when I could grab a moment alone. This meant, for the most part, that my bartender and I would meet up in my bathroom.
Often this meeting occurred around 4:00 p.m. Something happens to small children at four in the afternoon. Some sort of virus sets them off, and they start lurching around, out for blood. By the time the credits roll—around 8:00 p.m., at bedtime—windows have been boarded up, and there is a lot of screaming.
The pathetic truth is that about the only time I don’t multitask is when I am in the bathroom. I know, it’s rather graphic; but it’s true. If I could figure out a way to clean the bathroom while sitting in the bathroom, I would attempt it. That is how moms do things. Statistics show that moms, on the average, are enmeshed in forty-seven different activities at the same time. Twelve of those involve bleach. It’s possible I don’t have the exact numbers on this because I’ve been too busy doing forty-six other things to check. But I’ll get to it.
The bathroom is quiet. It has a door and a lock, and when I go in there I am completely still. I kind of have to be, or I’ll have to add “reclean the bathroom” to my list of forty-seven things. I find this time alone to be wonderful and peaceful and lovely—for about five seconds. Then, I find it alarming. As I start thinking for a few minutes in the quiet, my mind becomes a roulette wheel, slowly ticking past and landing on unpleasant moments, such as burning the dinner the previous night, Brian seeming distant, and the cat puking on the carpet again.
I know. I should not sit still. Perhaps this is why men are known for being less “thinky” about things. They don’t slump on the toilet and have an existential crisis all at the same time. I once tried to explain all my existential drama while sitting still to Brian, and he got that weird look on his face that happens when I try to describe why sunsets make me sad.
“Why? Why would they make you sad, Dana? They’re beautiful. Beautiful is good, right?” He blinked at me and spoke slowly.
I responded, just as slowly, “I know. And that makes me sad, okay? It’s just too much.”
“Too much? The pinkness? And clouds? The birds?”
I nodded solemnly.
He blinked again and said, “I gotta go to the bathroom.” Then he left. The man is a cretin.
My emotional relationship with my bathroom is weird, maybe. But this happens also when we “thinky” people get into bed. I seldom find myself tucked in without at least two books, my iPad, and music. If I just lie there, eyes open and staring at the ceiling, that’s when I decide we need to install a rain barrel because we are wasting water and killing the planet. Yet, if we do so, we might have more mosquitos, and we’ll get the West Nile virus. Which means I need to start researching repellant that won’t give us cancer. So, in sum, we need to overhaul the entire backyard and put in a compost bin while we’re at it because that’s what good people do.
If I stop to really think about it, I realize that I am not so much a good person. I don’t turn off lights when I leave the room. I keep forgetting to tithe. I feel really sorry for homeless cats, but if somebody asks me to donate to something that is not cute or furry, I hesitate. The other day my kid walked right into a wall, and I snickered.
Also, don’t get me started on the state of my kitchen floor way back in the corners. Reprehensible.
Silence is a trigger. So is stillness.
And triggers are a problem.
I have fired a gun only once in my life. In my twenties, I had a friend who loved to hunt. He took me out one afternoon to his father’s farm, and we set up a shooting range. It was a fence with a tin can, and it was all very Gunsmoke but with way worse aim. When my friend brought the gun to me, I was surprised by its heft. It felt like an oily weight in my hand.
“When you lift and aim, that’s when you place your finger on the trigger,” he instructed. “It’s very important that you don’t touch it otherwise.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“Obviously. Now, just lift up the gun, aim, and breathe. And then, squeeze.”
I did as he told me and wondered if I had the hidden talents of a gunslinger—if somehow I would become Dirty Harry with one gunshot. I lifted the gun, aimed, and breathed. And then, I squeezed.
Turns out, shooting a gun is not my thing. It scared the crap out of me. I did manage to decimate a tuft of grass. Plus, the gun made my wrist hurt. My friend looked at me expectantly as though this shooting thing was transformative.
Yoga is transformative. A good massage is transformative. A really hot cup of coffee at 7:00 a.m. can set me right again. But guns? Not so much. However, I do acknowledge that when I was squeezing that trigger, I felt the weight behind it. There is a lot of power in a single movement that is enough to kill a living thing. It’s a burden. The trigger, the target, and the gun are all burdens.
A trigger can be the silence of a room—after you have spent the entire day in the noisy bounce hous
e that is parenting.
My inner bartender is tall and looks a lot like Tom Selleck circa his Magnum, P.I. days. His mustache precedes him. He has eyes that twinkle at me and are full of promise. I can see every one of the bottles glowing on the shelves behind him—hues of amber and rose and gold—and they seem to be lit from within.
Always leaning on the bar, my inner bartender asks, “What’ll it be?”
It’s not impossible to have a bartender in your bathroom. He resides in the quiet places. Sometimes he meets me on my back stoop, but the birds distract him and I often find myself getting up and weeding the garden, or picking the last of the summer tomatoes.
We all have an inner bartender.
Some of them wave Visa cards at us. Others smile at us from behind a large display of baked goods. Others just talk to us and tell us what we want to hear. They are thoughtful because they reside, deeply, in our thoughts. They know us so well. It’s a comfortable relationship. My inner bartender shows up when my triggers present themselves, and he beckons me, for a moment, to contemplate a heavy-rocks glass of brown liquid.
The other day, I tried to wedge in some writing time while my boys were at the pool. We were all enjoying the last days of summer, but I found myself increasingly stressed about finding time to write under a deadline while two very tan and squirrelly children pranced around me. The pool was a lovely solution. The water was soothing, and I could sit at my little plastic concession-stand table and madly type away while my boys pranced around, but over there, in the water. I was here, and they were over there. Occasionally, one would come over and ask for a snack and I would hand him some cash. It was perfect. So, I spread out my towel on the tippy plastic chair and opened my computer with a sigh of relief. And then, a little kid showed up.
He was not my kid. I don’t know who he was. But he had no problem with personal space because, soaking wet, he came over to my table and rested his chin on his hand, staring at my screen.
“That’s a comPUTER,” he said.
“Yes.” I kept typing.
“We have one of THOSE. MY BROTHER USETED IT.”
This was a kid with a rather wobbly grasp on social norms and volume. He was dripping on my screen. I moved the computer over.
“I SEE YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING. WHATCHA DOING? WHAT IS THAT?”
I started looking around for his mom. Ah, there she was. She was smiling at me because this was a cute moment. Her son was socializing with the nice lady.
“Beat it, kid. I need to work.”
I wanted to say that. I did. He was all up in my business, this little kid, and he was wet and started picking his nose. Then, his interrogation continued.
“IS IT A STORY? WHAT’S IT ABOUT? WHAT IS IT?”
And I was done. Nothing ticks me off more than redundant word usage.
This type of behavior is a trigger for me. Mild annoyance scratches at my brain. Triggers are not big, bad, obvious things such as the war in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan is horrible, but we can deal with horrible. Likewise, cancer isn’t a trigger. It is a total asshole, but it’s not a trigger. However, I have a friend in recovery who also has breast cancer, and the onslaught of books her aunt sends about beating cancer triggers her.
“I know she means well. And I know the books are probably great.” She looks out at the distance and then back at me. “But damn. I just want to feel normal for five minutes. If I get another Amazon package, or a link in an email, or a Facebook post about this book or that . . . Did you know I have a stack of those books next to my bed? I can’t give them away. I keep them. Because they are good, right?”
I told her to give them away. Maybe that was bad advice, but the stack of books can be rebought. Her sanity might need her to even take all the books out to the trash and dump them. If not, they might make her want to drink, and breast cancer was never cured by alcoholism.
That’s what triggers do; they can make us act crazy.
They can make us talk to bartenders in the bathroom.
And they have no manners or sense of time. That little boy at the pool? He had me triggered at hello. And no, it’s not like I was going to upend the tables and head out for the nearest bar. I have been in recovery too long for a trigger to ever make me drink at someone—at least not immediately. My triggers like to sit a little and percolate. They squirm and itch at me and make me long for space and a deep breath. They make me feel indignant: “Here I am, just trying to get some work done, and this is an IMPOSITION.” I start upping my volume on choice words too, similar to my short table guest: “I don’t DESERVE this. I need to get away. I need a break. I need . . .” and then the looking around starts.
I bang myself up against a whole list of things to soothe. I become a pinball in search of the lever that will divert the discomfort.
Triggers happen, and I still experience them. This is because it’s a cold, cruel world with people who still don’t know how to use the passing lane on the highway. It’s a proven fact.
Brian and I travel home a lot to visit our parents and experience five minutes of nostalgia for the suburb that has a Bed Bath & Beyond every four hundred feet. When we do this, we often visit Fritz’s, a restaurant that our boys love because we are good parents like that. It’s a train restaurant where you dial up your order on a phone, and then a train comes and delivers it to you. It’s magical when you are five. It’s still cool when you are seven or eight, plus there is always ice cream. And when you’re forty-six? Not so much. It’s really loud. Those trains don’t know how to deliver the food without making a whole bunch of racket, as trains do, and I find it rather distressing at times.
Parenting is really just an endless flowchart of decisions. Do you buy them the Pokémon backpack that costs crackamillion dollars, or no? Do you allow sleepovers when they rarely sleep, at all? Do you give in and let them watch a Star Wars prequel? In the grand scheme of things, this whole train restaurant thing seems like a harmless decision. It’s loud, yes, but the chili cheese dogs are really tasty.
But one afternoon, after a long visit with family, we packed up and started to head out of town and decided to stop at Fritz’s to buy our children’s affection with chili fries. We arrived at lunchtime, all hungry and ready for the fun, and crammed ourselves into a red vinyl booth.
And that’s when the restaurant decided to get mad at me.
It started with the chili cheese dog. It arrived cold and sad, an emasculated version of its former self. As I am an ex-waitress, I have it written in my moral code to never, ever complain about food, so I pushed it around my plate and felt sorry for myself. Also, my children hadn’t had a decent night’s rest in four nights, so their little brains were misfiring all over the place, and they were nutballs. For some godawful reason the restaurant also had a television positioned up by the grill, and, of course, it was playing SpongeBob because the children in this facility were not stimulated enough. My husband was really interested in something on his phone. The child in the booth behind us decided to kick his enthusiasm about the trains onto the back of my seat. And all the while, the trains chugged and clattered by at full volume. In fact, they exceeded the maximum.
These trains go to eleven.
I unstuck myself from the vinyl seating, gave the kicky kid behind me a death glare, and headed to the bathroom. As soon as the door swung shut, I pondered my reflection. It was quiet. No piped-in music, no SpongeBob, no trains from hell. It was just me, the mirror, and a bunch of buzzy thoughts in my head. It was perfect timing for my bartender to arrive.
“What’ll it be?” he asked, smiling. “Something to knock you out? Lift you up? Take you away? Make parenting, trains, and life in general fade softly into the background? Want something in a glass that will make you, I kid you not, feel like you are in a Bob Ross painting? Want puppies and kittens in a clear liquid? Want something with olives in it so you feel sophisticated? Or how about something with amaretto, so sweet it’s like drinking a jolly rancher, so you can relive your freshman
year? Want to remember an old boyfriend? Here’s some red wine. Want to forget? I’ve got something for that, too. Want something brown and substantial? You can pretend you’re Irish. Or how about you just go for some gin, and you’re in a pine forest? I’ve got people and destinations and feelings here for you, lady. All. In. One. Little. Glass.”
That’s when I realized my inner bartender talked too much.
So, I fired him.
I don’t need a bartender anymore. Triggers happen because they have a pack mentality, and life is full of people, places, and things that are scratchy and awful. We can’t live in a bubble all the time. Often, I can, but only after 9:00 p.m., when I can finally, finally, take off my bra and get into bed with a box of vanilla wafers and Netflix.
Prior to that, life was all “Here, hold this problem for me.” Life is annoying like that.
I used to meet with my inner bartender because I couldn’t understand why my triggers kept happening. And I couldn’t understand how to handle them when they did. My bartender often said things such as “You can’t control your children. And maybe you need to lose twenty pounds before you go on vacation,” or “Where are the kitchen shears? What kind of person loses the kitchen shears?” And he smiled all the while, placed his hands on the bar, and waited.
He was a terrible bartender and a total jerk.
I wish I’d fired him long ago.
Triggers keep happening because I cannot control the crap out of my life. And then I get mad that triggers keep happening, which triggers me.
And don’t even get me started on hormones. Hormones are the carnival workers of humanity. They are mysterious to me. How did they end up all up working in my body? They are completely disinterested in whether you have an enjoyable experience on your ride or not. They just strap you in, telling you to keep your head low, and set you spinning. And then, within minutes, you are crying, laughing, or nauseated. Carnie hormones.