Approval Junkie

by Faith Salie

  Pretend It’s Bedtime

  Remember when you were a kid and you were being tucked in at night? The best thing to say if you didn’t want your mom to leave you was, “Tell me a story.”*1 When it comes down to it, we all just want to hear stories. Think of everyone as someone with a story (or a hundred stories). Craft your questions to learn where she came from, what she remembers, what happened to her, what was her nadir, her epiphanous moment. And get specific. For example, instead of asking Gary Oldman a kind of broad, “What’s it like to be famous?” question, I asked, “What is the strangest encounter with a fan you’ve ever had?” This led to a bizarre story about a young woman who came to his door to show him a tattoo sketch of him she was about to get on her breast. She wanted his signature right below her nipple. And he was gentlemanly enough to sign it. No need to swaddle a question in sophistication if saying, “Tell me a story about that…” will do.

  Silence Is…Platinum

  When your goal is to connect with someone, silence is a sound you can harness, even invite. When you’re having a real conversation, silence is better than golden. Resist the urge to fill the void. This one is so very hard to do, but, just as an exercise, try to spell “A-W-K-W-A-R-D” at a measured pace in your head before saying anything the next time there’s a pause in a conversation. People hate silence, and when they will do anything to avoid it, they sometimes become very vulnerable. Instead of thinking of yourself as a hostess at a dinner party who needs to keep the conversation going, imagine you’re a midwife to a story. When I allowed a moment to suspend (and this could feel like an eternity), I would often be amazed at what an artist will reveal. The same holds true for your mother-in-law. Listen through the silence.

  I was doing a story on what it’s like to be a “first gentleman”—a man married to a lady governor. As planned, I’d been talking to a former first gentleman about his experience as a political spouse, but when I veered from “the script” and I asked him simply, “Are you proud of your wife?,” he surprised me by starting to cry. He surprised himself, too—for all his emotional maturity, he was still a dude, and he didn’t want to cry. There was a long pause as he stopped talking, which he thought would stop his tears. My first instinct was to save him and pop the tension by making a joke or apologizing for getting too personal. I wondered if I was being disrespectful by allowing him to feel his feelings in front of me. But against all my “Make things better!” urges, I waited. I watched him struggle to express his love for his wife and his embarrassment over it.

  He ended with, “Wow. You got me. I didn’t see that coming. I am. So very proud of her….” And then he shook his head because he couldn’t get any more words out.

  Sometimes people learn something about themselves when we unlock them with a question. Sometimes we learn that it’s not the person experiencing strong feelings who’s made uncomfortable by them—it’s we who feel uncomfortable in the presence of their emotions.

  Either way, the learning is a gift.

  Be Daring

  Here’s a huge secret: almost everyone will tell you almost anything if you just ask.

  I asked Michael Keaton if he ever thinks he sucks. I asked Bill Bradley if he’d ever been in therapy. I asked Joan Rivers if she’d ever think she was pretty enough. They answered. (Yes, yes, and no.) I wasn’t sure if I should ask Zach Galifianakis why he used the word faggot repeatedly in a live show I saw him perform while he was dressed in an Orphan Annie costume. I truly didn’t think he was homophobic, and he’s so wry, he could have responded in a way that made me look like a humorless, literal liberal who didn’t get his irony. But I had to ask. It basically went like this:

  “So, um, let’s talk about the F word you used in your show.”

  “You mean ‘faggot’?” He cut to the chase.

  “Oooh, yes. That’s the one. You said it a lot. Why?”

  He didn’t skip a beat. “Oh God, because it’s so stupid. How stupid to say that word. How stupid to care if someone’s gay. I look stupid—I mean I’m this fat guy in an Annie suit being stupid and only stupid people are going to use such a dumb word, you know?”

  Having gotten that out of the way, he told a really interesting story about growing up Greek among some xenophobes in North Carolina.

  Now, being daring doesn’t mean being audacious enough to ask anything—because then it kind of becomes about you again, as in, “Can you believe she asked that?!” I found the only time my questions yielded little was when they were glib: Joy Behar seemed offended when I asked if the chair she used to guest host Larry King’s show had old man smell. Elizabeth Edwards didn’t cotton to my query (with a nod to Bill Clinton’s “boxers or briefs” moment) about what kind of PJs her husband wore. (In my defense, this was before the National Enquirer introduced us to Rielle Hunter.)

  Sometimes we are least daring with those who are closest to us. For all my interviewing experience, I’m afraid to ask my father about my mother. Our exchanges don’t always go well. My father is an honors graduate of the School of Hey, Not Talking About Things Will Make Them Less Painful, which is a school I would flunk. I want to know what Mom was like as a young mother and what did she do after we fell asleep and did she ever start menopause? He gets very quiet and sometimes seems almost angry when I ask about her. I know he’s not really angry; he’s sad, still sad, and annoyed at me for asking him to remember. Here’s a phone call during my third trimester:

  ME: Hi Dad, I have a question for you: did Mom have an epidural?

  DAD: [labored sigh] I don’t know, I don’t think so.

  ME: You don’t know??

  DAD: It wasn’t really important for me to know. Maybe. She told me the nurses made fun of her for screaming that it hurt.

  We ended the call quickly. I felt like screaming, not only at those nurses, but at my father. How does a man not know if his wife went through that kind of life-changing pain, even if the ’70s sequestered him to the waiting room? I want him to help me understand my mother, which would help me understand myself. I’m disappointed he can’t deliver me information that’s gone forever.*2 I feel frustrated that I can’t listen to what I want to hear, but I guess it’s all too close with my dad.

  Recently, while hosting a new podcast, I was asked by the producers if I’d interview John about becoming a father in his forties. We sat in a tiny booth, and I asked him simple questions, which he answered quietly. Sometimes he paused for a long time while he found his words. I didn’t try to “help” by finishing his sentences for him. It might be my all-time favorite interview. Not because he told me that meeting me had inspired him to become a father years after he’d thought that ship had sailed. Not because he teared up when he remembered how old his own father had seemed in middle age. But because, in that moment, I was all his, and he was all mine in a way we forget to be, with no pressure of somewhere else to go or family business to sort or babysitter to be relieved.

  I thought, if only life could be like this all the time, or at least more often. If only John and I could connect—intimately, honestly, and respectfully, but without earphones and a soundproof room. How many things do I not hear because of the frenzied pace of our lives? What can I learn when I make the time to listen?

  * * *

  *1 If “tell me a story” didn’t work, you could then try my son’s ace in the hole when I’m tiptoeing out of my kids’ room, “Mommy, wipe my tears away.” What an adorable evil genius.

  *2 Strangely, however, he claims to remember the moment all his children were conceived: he once told me that he recalls bumping my mother’s cervix three times in their evidently gymnastic sex life, and each time resulted in a child. The real question here is not why my father thinks that a good cervical bang makes a baby; the real question is why he shared this with me, this one unhelpful, gag-inducing memory I can never unknow.

  Tina the therapist and I had been working on my anger problem. The problem was, according to Tina, I didn’t have enough anger. I needed to stop beating my
self up for how my marriage went down. My therapist was telling me to stop taking so much responsibility. So I was trying to get bull tinky, which had been my mother’s word for “mad.”

  I’ve always tried to impress my therapists. It’s a challenge: When you first meet a therapist—as when you first meet anyone—you kind of want her to think you have your shit together. But then if you had your shit together, why would you be there? The way I solve this psycho-nundrum is to be so forthcoming and nondefensive about not having my shit together that I feel unassailable. I try to wow with perspicacity about my shortcomings. I enter a therapist’s office like a self-aware Wild West psychological gunfighter with my hands up in the air. “Here are my problem areas, pardner.” I want to surrender all my flaws before they can shoot me down with some keen observation of something unexpected that “we have to work on.”

  Tina was tough. I traveled downtown to see her for the better part of the year I finally got divorced. I usually like to laugh with the people in whom I confide my saddest stories, but Tina wasn’t like that. She was serious and blunt and didn’t engage in small talk. I pegged her for a no-nonsense lesbian until she once mentioned her husband in an uncharacteristically forthcoming moment. I wouldn’t have chosen her for a friend, but I respected her.

  Tina suggested to me that my wasband displayed characteristics of a specific personality disorder. Of course, I delved into research of this disorder. When I scanned the checklist of traits, I burst into tears of relief. It’s probably what people with advanced but undiagnosed Lyme disease feel like when they finally learn that a fucking tick ruined their health: there’s a name for this. Vastly more enlightening was the description of what it’s like to be in a relationship with one of these special people. There I was, summarized in a few bullet points.

  • Your involvement is characterized by an ever-increasing effort to gain approval.

  • You have come to believe you are the only one with the problem.

  • You continually doubt yourself since you rarely receive outside validation of what you are going through.

  • The common feelings that…emerge for you are frustration, confusion, fear of confrontation, exhaustion, uncertainty of where you stand with him or her, inadequacy, neglect, disempowerment, alienation from family and friends.

  I understood myself a lot more. I could begin to forgive myself.

  During a window in our separation when my wasband decided he wanted me back, I had an appointment with Tina. “Look, he’s a scorpion,” she explained, as I wondered why she was suddenly referencing astrological signs. Before I could tell her he was a Capricorn, she continued: “Scorpions sting; it’s their nature. You can’t blame a scorpion for being a scorpion.”

  “Okaaaaaaay…?” I said.

  “If you want to stay married to him, I can teach you how to be a scorpion tamer,” she said.

  I really didn’t want to be a scorpion tamer.

  Tina was the first and only person in my life to tell me I ought to be good and mad. I gave her lots of reasons why I shouldn’t be, what role I played in my toxic dynamic with my wasband, how I should be grateful for all I learned about myself. She wouldn’t have it. “You’re allowed to be angry. You deserve to be angry. You’ve been mistreated, and a healthy response to that is to be angry at someone other than yourself. Are you afraid of being angry?”

  It had never occurred to me. My mother had never shown me how to be a rationally angry woman. Maybe that wasn’t her responsibility, but it would have been helpful to have witnessed her getting mad at my father and hearing how a marital argument might play out and resolve. If my parents fought, they never did it in front of us. But surely she had to have gotten pissed at him, if only for all the secondhand smoke he blew into her life? On the rare occasion she would announce she was bull tinky, she never wanted to release her anger, because it threatened to burst forth as tears. Or she’d get really angry at herself for taking a wrong turn and making me late for an audition or overbaking some cookies and possibly emit a “Shit Mariah!” that would send her to confession.

  My father could have helped me out, too. I certainly watched him get mad. There was the quiet mad, when he’d speak in deliberate, low tones, at night in the dark living room, punctuating his remarks by bobbing the small orange circle of the lit cigarette he was holding. There was the loud mad, when he’d raise both his voice and finger and waggle the latter dramatically. He didn’t yell much, which is probably why I hated it when he did. But I was not encouraged to display such a spectrum of emotion. On the contrary, if I began to fume or cry, he’d say, “Stop acting.” I knew I wasn’t acting, but I also knew I didn’t want to make him madder. I didn’t act out; I acted in, sliding down in a car seat to pout, as I shut down tears. It became my habit to save my noisy moments for the stage, where I was allowed to be a drama queen.

  I was always afraid of getting angry at my wasband. Actually, the anger was always there; I was really afraid of expressing it to him. I resented him for big things, like not wanting to marry me. I resented him for littler things, like inviting his mother on our vacations. When the dam of my pent-up anger would inexorably burst forth, he would achieve preternatural calm. The more upset I got, the quieter and steelier he became, reminding me that I was the hysterical one. I hit him once. I was so short and he was so tall; I was so upset and he was so cool—I made a fist and pounded his chest. To his credit and not to his credit, he remained unmoved. He actually smiled. After I’d get angry, he’d go away from me—physically and emotionally. Our fights never brought us closer, because every outburst eroded us. He’d placidly warn me that I would regret this someday.

  And so I did. Once we were separated, I regretted it all. I thought if I’d never been angry, if I’d only been transcendent in my love, if I’d only been grateful for all that I had rather than resentful about all that I had not, then I would have been lovable. My anger turned inward.

  I’d been congratulating myself on recognizing all my missteps and bad choices. Could Tina be right—could healing be as simple as being righteously, outwardly angry?

  I gave it a shot. I got pretty good at it. I stopped returning bellicose e-mails from the wasband and let my lawyer take over. When he threatened to sue me if I mentioned him to our mutual friends, I ignored him. I stayed away from the scorpion.

  Anger can be galvanizing. It helped me to stop focusing on my past, wallowing. Instead of looking backward, I decided to look down, in the direction of my baby-making area. I was going to become a mother no matter who wasn’t in my life.

  I decided to get everything checked out, tests run, ovaries lubed, the works. I learned that I possessed an unusual uterus. A gigantic fibrous septum ran down the middle of it, creating an impossible environment to sustain a pregnancy. If my uterus were on TripAdvisor.com, the reviews from a blastocyst would have been bad:

  ZERO STARS—cramped, inhospitable!!

  Worse than a hostel—totally HOSTILE!! Also no Wi-Fi.

  I had surgery to correct it. And then I started bleeding. No, not from there, you guys—that’s too obvious. From there. Blood was coming out of my butt. I was in so much pain that I could only get off the toilet long enough to call my friend Hubert. It was Memorial Day weekend, but I knew he’d save me. Hubert is the clutchiest of friends. Hubert is a straight man of Taiwanese extraction who regularly encouraged me to see the Broadway musical Mamma Mia! He can recite pi out to fifty-one digits. Ice Hube came right over, got me in a taxi, and didn’t bat an eye when I explained the situation in between gut-grabbing groans.

  Turned out I had hemorrhagic colitis caused by antibiotics. My colon had managed to get extremely angry. I spent the entire holiday weekend in the ER in my own room, because my friend Alexis happened to be the attending doctor, and she wanted to keep an eye on me. The whole thing was serendipitous, except for the hemorrahaging part, because I’d long wanted to introduce Alexis and Hubert. It was a meet cute, sponsored by my colon. Unfortunately, there was no spark. I was
sad about this, since I had a fantasy of toasting them at their wedding with, “I’m the asshole who brought these two together.” But Alexis and I became even closer, probably because she had to put a gloved finger up my anus a few times.

  Never one to shirk commitments even during an ER stay, I called Tina to let her know I was in the hospital, and I’d have to miss our scheduled appointment. I was giving her forty-eight hours’ notice. She called me back and left a message letting me know that she had a paid cancellation policy, no exceptions. Feeling exceptional, I called her back. Clearly she misunderstood the situation. My colon is bleeding, I reminded her voice mail. She left me another voice mail, reiterating her policy. Unlike my bowels, Tina remained unmoved.

  If I had to pay her, I decided I was going to show up for the session.

  I recalled the family lore that my mother once put my brother Doug outside in the snow when he was eighteen months old, because she was furious at him. She made sure he was wearing a snowsuit, and she watched him through the window for a couple of minutes before bringing him inside. There were no witnesses, because my father was at work, and my brother David and I were just-born and not-yet-born, respectively. But Mom told us this story unapologetically, looking proud of her ability to have been angry and calm.

  The day after I got discharged from the hospital, I dragged myself downtown. I sat in her compact, dark office, on top of the postsurgery sanitary napkin, on top of her sofa. She reiterated her no-cancellation policy, citing the fact that everyone thinks his or her reason for canceling is valid, and she didn’t want to have to make value judgments about validity. She asked me how I was feeling.

  I told her I was feeling lousy and exhausted. I told her I was surprised that she didn’t demonstrate any flexibility in her cancellation policy and that I wouldn’t mind if she made a value judgment about bleeding from the butt.