Nobody Cares

by Anne T. Donahue

  But I didn’t award my mom the same level of understanding. The thing about having a personal revelation is that, when you’re high on the momentum of figuring your shit out, it’s easy to decide that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. And the thing about that is that it’s the best way to become the most insufferable version of yourself, morphing into a brand of “Well, you’ve probably never even heard of that band.” For years after I stopped going to church, I made it my personal mission to make my mom feel terrible about her involvement with it. I lectured her about Catholic Church scandals, yelled about the dangers of a boys’ club, and asked how she could consider herself a feminist while subscribing to a religion that governs the bodies of women.

  At no point did I pause to hear her answers, her explanations, or her own experiences. To me, her religion, her allegiance to an institution that hurt people — including her own daughter, her own flesh and blood — made her into a two-dimensional caricature, and I didn’t give a fuck. To me, she was one of the congregation sheep, blindly believing everything a guy in a robe said. I never listened when she’d tell me her devotion wasn’t about the business of the Church or the Vatican, or that she was spiritual, or that you can challenge norms from the inside. She told me she saw the same problems I did, but that singing at church — which she did every Sunday — brought her joy. I made her cry a lot, wanting her to feel as frustrated and angry with the institution as I did. I wanted her to be angry at the Church’s misogyny, at its homophobia, at its abuse of power, and at the individuals who gave an entire religion a bad name. I railed against the Church’s intolerance, failing to see my own as I shamed my mother for being true to herself.

  ~

  Around the same time that Catholicism first began to lose its shine for me, I started reading tarot cards. My friend Alana and I would hang out at her house, teaching ourselves the Celtic Cross spread and asking a million different questions about whether or not we were destined to be with the guys we liked (we were not) before finding new, roundabout ways of asking the same questions all over again. We called it “playing tarot” and basked in the ritual of snack-eating and heart-to-hearts that came with hours spent dissecting what our cards meant, or why one came up so frequently.

  But that was just part of the appeal: where Catholicism was built on following a distinct set of rules (laid out by men), tarot left room for personal interpretation and self-exploration. Church was a place where I sat silently, being told what to do. Nights spent tarot reading with Alana led to conversations about our goals, our insecurities, and the patterns we fell into. It made me feel like I could be in control of my life and make sense of my own experience.

  I remember coming home and triumphantly telling my mom about tarot and seeing the mix of shock and confusion on her face. I pushed down the guilt that came with seeing her disappointment in me and smugly began dropping tarot references as a means of lording my newfound spirituality over her. The kid who’d once ratted out her friends for bringing a Wiccan book to school was now a 16-year-old heathen and loving it.

  Tarot nights were soon replaced by bars, clubs, and drunkenness. Actively believing in something like magic means you have to be vulnerable and, even scarier, be yourself. Instead, I’d chosen cynicism and hardness, that precious emotional armor. I became a character in my own story, as opposed to being who I really was.

  A few weeks before I turned 30, one of my best friends from university, Judith, was getting married. She’d reintroduced me to magic and spirituality when we’d first met, but I hadn’t then been ready to open up to it. The night before her wedding, her best friends got together in her hotel room: we ate pizza and watched Practical Magic and christened her new deck of tarot cards. Judith asked us each to take one. We were supposed to sleep with our card under our pillow and then the next day, explain to each other what the card meant to us. Pulling the card felt like going home. The ritual felt like a celebration, like action instead of passive observance. I didn’t feel like a dummy for subscribing to a belief or exposed by being vulnerable. I felt the opposite of what I used to feel when I was cooped up in church on a Sunday, wondering when the priest’s words would spark something in me. Within weeks, I’d ordered a deck of my own.

  About two years later, my mom and I had a heart-to-heart about Catholicism and tarot and crystals and intuition and spirits and all the things we couldn’t talk about until I’d finally begun to grow up, to shut up, and to confront so much of what was making me angry. To reexamine my definition of spirituality, my feelings about religion.

  After I stopped being Catholic, she never lectured me or yelled at me, nor did she try to force me back into the religion when she realized I was serious about leaving the faith. And eventually, she apologized for not reacting to the priest’s harassment the way I’d needed her to, explaining that she’d been just as shocked and surprised as I had and didn’t know what to do. She apologized for assuming church would mean to me what it meant to her, and I apologized for picking fights in a quest to assign blame to her after so many years spent being angry.

  That night, decked out in a sweat suit (me) and a matching PJ set (her), we sat on her bedroom floor, where she finally let me read her cards. With the room bright and cozy and my favorite crystals laid out around us, she sipped her nighttime tea as I pulled for her three cards: the Daughter of Cups, the Empress, and the Mother of Pentacles. To her, they represented the creativity she finds in church singing and the power it gives her, as well as her emotional strength and her ability to listen. And she didn’t argue with them, even though tarot intentionally leaves space to do so. She was taking the time to understand what I believed in, and the cards reminded me that I’d found my own spiritual path because of her.

  We apologized for years. Now I can yell about series like The Keepers, and she will agree with my points and remind me of what a character in Spotlight says about subscribing to the belief, not the institution — which, I’ve finally learned, my mom doesn’t represent. After everything, I finally saw that she and I were so much more alike than I’d ever realized.

  I still hate church. I’m still angry at Catholicism. I still want to set buildings ablaze whenever I think about the centuries of institutionalized bullshit that’s defined that religion — and continues today. I only go to mass for weddings and funerals, and I do not take communion. That is me, and those are my beliefs, and I’m not going to impose them on you. Even if I think pulling a few tarot cards will make you see things a bit more clearly.

  Instead, I just try to channel my mom, who taught me more about patience and understanding than the Catholic Church ever did.

  Near, Far, Wherever You Are

  I don’t remember where I was when I first saw him, but I remember when he became Him and not just some guy. I mean, sure, he’d been around. I knew his name. I knew his work, his friends, his social circle. I told myself I wasn’t interested, that I was better than everyone who looked his way, who complimented his eyes or the way his bangs fell into them. I was my own hero, the main character of my own story. I didn’t need to be rescued or die as proof of my devotion to my teen husband.

  Leonardo DiCaprio was a haircut and a smile. He was fancy slacks and David Blaine. He wished he could be the love of my life. And somehow, his wish came true.

  They say timing is everything. Too young to see Romeo + Juliet upon its release at 11, I considered myself old enough for Titanic at 12 — except that I wasn’t. Thanks to my parents’ penchant for rules, I was forbidden from seeing the PG-13 cinematic masterpiece until I turned that very age, so I spent the entirety of seventh grade pining.

  One moment I knew his name, and the next? His face, age, filmography, zodiac sign, hometown, hobbies, former girlfriends, current girlfriend, mentors, Academy Award nominations, proximity to Tobey Maguire, and that his friends called him “Noodle.” He seemed so hardworking and loyal to his mother, so seasoned, and yet, thanks to his complete lack of facial
hair, so approachable. The clips of Titanic I saw on television and in the “My Heart Will Go On” video also implied that he — like Jack Dawson — was sweet and sincere, willing to talk a woman out of a terrible relationship and draw her nude without trying anything inappropriate. So, clearly, he respected women. He loved women. And, being a man who’d yet to meet this specific woman (me), he had what every boy in my seventh- and eighth-grade classes didn’t: absolutely no idea how uncool I really was.

  When I finally saw Titanic, rented on VHS three days after my 13th birthday, I came to understand my soul mate on a deeper level: the way he flicked the hair from his brow, the way he ditched Fabrizio for a woman he’d met four times. I noticed how willing he was to give up his place on that wardrobe door, and I appreciated how clearly sex was meaningful and emotional for him. I may have not yet understood the technicalities of what exactly was happening between Jack and Rose in the back of that Rolls Royce (or whose hand it was slamming against the window), but I knew no one could possibly act that well: when it came to dramatizing the throes of passion, the boy had me shook. And that was so much more appealing than the guys in my class whose go-to jokes were about jerking off on the bus.

  But I still wasn’t completely delusional. I knew I’d have to wait years to meet and begin dating Leo. I knew that for us to meet as working actors (an important life goal), I still had to be discovered at the mall or looking mysterious while waiting for my parents to pick me up outside the movie theater. I knew that our road to love would be long and storied, and while he’d be refreshed by my Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet–like naïveté, he still had to date the string of women he’d eventually leave for me, the love of his life. I knew the best love stories had plot twists because that’s how movies worked.

  It helped that a boy in my class had Leo’s haircut and that he was tall, misunderstood, and rebellious enough that he also wouldn’t have fit in at a first-class dinner party. The year before, he’d burned down a townhouse, and in eighth grade, he’d thrown a desk across the classroom when our teacher had caught him taking too much Ritalin. In short, he was perfect. And, unlike Leo, he knew who I was. He’d be my stand-in, my practice round. He’d be the first of many men I’d horrify my parents with, which would hopefully encourage my mom to forbid me from seeing him, the way Rose’s mom forbade her from seeing Jack anymore. (I just needed to find a corset she could lace up for me while she did it.) So, I began speaking to him regularly. And, because our class was small and most people got along, he began speaking to me back. So I assumed that we were days from recreating Rose and Jack’s iconic sex scene, and that someone’s hand would eventually come to imply . . . whatever it was implying. I began to wonder if in his spare time he drew nude women, or if there was a chance our class would go on a boat trip that would end in disaster (although I, of course, would survive). I knew for a fact that his and Leo’s names both starting with an “L” was a sign.

  But the more I talked to Leo 2.0, the more I began to like him, less because of his DiCaprio-esque qualities and more because I really liked him. He thought I was funny. He told me how frustrating his dad could be. He looked at me when I was speaking to him. Between the winter and spring, our friend groups began to merge, and he and I began talking on the phone almost every night. And while there was a small smudge on our record — when he asked out my best friend and they dated for three weeks (prompting me to listen to “On My Own” from Les Misérables on repeat, usually while crying) — he told me he liked me despite this fact, and our conversations continued. By May, I’d even begun to wonder whether Leo really would be jealous, like I’d been telling myself he’d be. By June, I’d begun planning how I’d describe this tragic love story to Leo.

  The rest of my teen years were defined by young men who weren’t Leo. Because his Man in the Iron Mask wig embarrassed me. And as cute as he looked in Catch Me If You Can, Gangs of New York was a real downer and caused tension between me and my friends when I wouldn’t let them talk through it. Like so many young loves, Leo and I had clearly grown up and grown apart. He was a serious actor. And I was serious about having no interest in seeing Blood Diamond.

  They say that when you stop showing interest in someone, they know. That when you’ve forged your own path and created a life without them, they emerge from wherever they were hiding to try to lure you back. The afternoon I saw The Great Gatsby, I was overtired, PMSing, and had a headache. I retreated to the darkness of the movie theatre as a means of escaping my phone and parents and responsibilities for a blessed two hours, and I looked forward to losing myself in twenties-era costumes and that Lana Del Rey song about youth and beauty. Then I saw him.

  By 2013, I was old enough to understand how similar Leo and I were not. I knew he loved models, loved being spotted with models, and loved introducing models to his vast collection of cargo pants and newsboy hats. At some point, I’d realized he was kind of The Worst. Sure, he wanted to save the environment, but he also used to call his friends the Pussy Posse. Frankly, I reminded myself, we’d have more in common if he’d burned down a townhouse.

  But, like the green light in Gatsby, his eyes begged me to return to him. And as the movie went on (and on, and on — it wasn’t good), he channeled the manic pixie dream boy magic of Jack Dawson and seemed free of the onus he’d put on himself over the last decade to prove to us he was a Master Thespian. He seemed — as if he were attending a party in third class — like he was having fun.

  Which I can only assume was because he knew I’d be sitting there watching him. Yes, years had passed since the universe had brought us together, but true love transcends time and reason. It cancels out Oscar-baiting, erases a legacy of disappointments and heartbreak and ill-advised headwear, and brings you back to the moment your eyes met and he said those fateful words to you: “I’m the king of the world!”

  I hate that line, but if I can love him while he’s saying it, that means it’s real. And while we haven’t met face-to-face yet, and by his standards I’m too old to date him, repeated screenings of Titanic have taught me that none of that matters. True love doesn’t reason; real love doesn’t make sense. When two people are meant to be, life and love will find a way.

  At least they will if he follows me back on Twitter. And stops wearing cargo shorts.

  Work, Bitch

  In 1992, in celebration of both my seventh birthday and the new bank within walking distance of our house, my parents helped me open my first bank account and agreed to give me two dollars a week to tidy my room and “learn to save.”

  Three months later, I’d saved up enough for my first Barbie, and on a drizzly Saturday, we made our way to Kmart and invested in her Hawaiian Fun™ self. Girlfriend wore a two-piece bathing suit and came with pineapple-flavored lip balm, and everything else I owned was immediately trash in comparison.

  Barbie (constantly renamed depending on what TV or movie character I liked best) quickly became my best friend. I prized her, I outfitted her, and — as all true blues do — soon realized she needed more than just me as a pal to live a full life. So I began to save again. My doll needed someone she could trade clothes with and discuss the politics of life in plastic (it’s fantastic). And I wanted a Barbie with brown hair. The point of saving was clearly to spend.

  But over time, my needs evolved: from Barbie dolls to Beanie Babies to cassettes to CDs to the entirety of the Lip Smackers cosmetic collection. My $10/week allowance (shout-out to inflation) was holding me back from living like Cher Horowitz. I needed some real income, and I needed it fast.

  Money was freedom. My family didn’t have a lot of it, which made me want it even more. Fortunately for me, I was of the last generation adults entrusted their children to, a phenomenon known as “babysitting.” While I wasn’t nearly popular enough to found my own club, I still managed to book myself solid every weekend.

  A million nights of my pre-and-early-teen life were spent lounging on near-strangers’ couche
s, eating their chips while ensuring their children were also safe and breathing upstairs, all in exchange for enough money to buy a new, discounted camouflage-print top. For years, I rotated amongst families, a weekend fixture at many houses whose pantries I either respected or resented. While most of my classmates’ weekends were spent doing “cool” things, mine were even cooler thanks to Blockbuster rentals, unlimited soft drinks, and the $5/hour that competed with actual minimum wage.

  But if from ages 12 to 14 responsibility reigned, 15 ushered in a brand new era. Work existed only to fund weekends of drinking, buying going-out clothes, and drinking too much while wearing our going-out clothes. The busier I got, the less I wanted to work “so hard” for $5/hour. So I began looking for work that paid more.

  And so I began working in fast food.

  The McDonald’s I worked at was across the street from where I lived, directly beside the parking lot where most of my friends and I hung out. A few days before Christmas, I filled out an application on a whim and, despite having no customer service experience, I found myself working alongside girls from my first high school, a guy I had a crush on, and a slew of fellow youths who liked making as many inappropriate jokes as I did. For $6.40/hour, I was in heaven.

  And for a few precious months, it stayed that way. I loved my 3.5 hour shifts, I loved working my way up to the drive-thru window, and I loved the way our 50% store discount allowed me to create my own meals in which I combined burger sauce and mayonnaise as chicken nugget dip. But then the novelty began wearing off.