I was thinking about the discussions we have been having in Community Stories about bodies. And I thought I might post this. I have not re-read this or edited it for public viewing. So here's to bravery!!! (Thanks Lara).
She won’t catch me
I am two years old and my mom is standing at one end of the hall way while I stand at the other. She call to me, “April come here.” She is eight months pregnant with my sister. I grin and run the other direction, knowing I’m too fast.
What my mother said
My mother tells me this story least once a year while I’m growing up: “and Sheri looked down at you and said, ‘that girl knows what she knows, and she does too’.”
She also says, “this too shall pass.”
I will never wear real clothes as long as there are bathing
Between the ages of two and twelve, I spent every summer, and as many moments as possible in between, in my bathing suit and the swimming pool. And if not a bathing suit, then my pink leotard with the arm-hole ruffles. I felt it essential to always be prepared to run or dance.
I can do anything I want, if only I knew what that was
Growing up my parents always said that I could do anything I wanted or put my mind to. “If you had all the money in the world, no limits, what would you be doing,” my parents would ask? But I never really came up with an answer.
The Stranger in a Strange Land should have warned me
My high school boyfriend went on and on about the guiding principles of Robert A. Heinlein and his sexually free character Valentine Michael Smith. I hated that book which somehow I forgot when both he and my best friend separately embraced a polyamourous lifestyle; which sometimes was code for “cheating isn’t cheating, it’s a natural part of life.” Smith dies at the end of that book! What on earth was I thinking being friends with people like that?
I choose to face my biggest fear because you both don’t want me to do what I want
When I was nineteen, I sat my mother down and told her I had started having sex and had missed my period. I was terrified of having a baby. My mother revealed the thing my father always referred to as, “I’ll tell you more about the divorce when you’re older.” My father didn’t want to have a huge family and my mother wanted ten kids. So I had a second sister that had not been born and now that soul was growing inside me (my mother thought) and had come back for my mother. My pro-life boyfriend wanted us to keep her, but consented to giving her to my mom, since I didn’t want to be a parent. By choosing to keep the baby, I intentionally decided to give up myself and my wants for the two people I loved most, my mom and my boyfriend. And for the next ten years, I did what I thought other people wanted me to do.
I left him eventually
I fly to England and live in London for my entire second trimester. My best friend is there and when I tell her I’m pregnant, she grins and says, “Congratulations!” She is the first person to express happiness for me and I am grateful. We spend the summer playing around the country together. She comforts me when I call her hysterically crying, after my boyfriend tells me he has just slept with another woman (he’s still in her bed when I call), and that I don’t know what to do, and that I’m carrying this baby because he wanted me to, and that I’m a complete mess. I wish she had said, “you should leave him now,” because I eventually did and sooner would have made me feel better, sooner.
I think Chuck Palahniuk is right
I moved to Portland after Lachen, my daughter/my mom’s daughter, died of congestive heart failure. I felt extraordinary grief and a sense of relief at her death; grief for my own lost identity and the sense that while everything in life immensely important at the same time so many things simply don’t matter. My best friends told me to move to Portland, which turned out to be just exactly like the Palahniuk’s book said (or so people have told me, since I have not actually read Rejects & Refugees), a place for me to take refuge from the trauma of the world. In Portland, I recovered and learned to function in the world again.
People are stupid and life copies itself
My best buddy from high school comes to visit and his wife calls his cell phone, from Texas, every fifteen minutes, because she’s convinced that we’re having an affair. I have only met her once: at their wedding, where I brought my boyfriend of five years, where her husband and his father both kissed me on the mouth at the reception, and where I slapped the former but not the latter.
I write the wife a e-mail when I get home and tell her about how my high school boyfriend had cheated on me while I was pregnant, and he had thought it was ok to bring that girl to our baby shower, and so a) I would never ever do that do another woman (i.e. her), b) because of these very painful experiences I would never dream of cheating with her husband, and c) that her husband was my like my brother and EWWWWW . . . I would never EVER want to kiss him (and there was a reason he and I had never dated).
I list these reasons to him, a year later, when I fly out to visit and he introduces me to the fun of shots. After five shots and two mixed drinks I am dancing with his sister, and he repeats his feelings of undying love to me, at which point I try to tactfully explain I’d rather eat rotting snot slugs (I thank my ten year old brother for that description) than have him touch me in any sexual manner. WTF is he thinking!!! Does everyone want what they can’t have? Don’t people know cheating hurts people and is therefore wrong? I am baffled.
Norah Ephron’s mother says, “Everything is copy.”
I should thank the blond vegan
After four years of working in a massage therapy clinic with people who drive me crazy with their lack of boundaries, but teach me about sports massage and the importance of teamwork, I decide to run my own business. I make this decision the week after the man I had been living with for five years, and known for twelve, left me for a blond vegan (even though he had made excessive fun of my own vegan-ness and expressed great pride at turning me back to the meat, and I was furious about this for years). But two weeks later I decide to go back to school and get my undergraduate degree, and two years after that I meet the man of my dreams. How lucky am I that a blond vegan tempted my boyfriend away?!!
I am going to be a college student at last
I choose Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, which is thirty minutes outside of Portland; “the ends of the earth” a city friends tells me, but it’s still fifteen minutes closer than my college was at home in Spokane. I am trained to look at the world objectively, ask lots of questions, do research and not jump to conclusions, and being asked to perform to my best at all times; this has made me more critical of others who make assumptions without asking questions and less sensitive to my mother’s emotions. But I’m a better dresser and good at balancing my finances and running a business, and has greatly improved my relationship with my father. So far, I’m ok with the trade off.
I had forgotten I had become a different person
My lovely boyfriend said to me yesterday, “You’re the one who has changed. Your parents are just exactly who they always were. Cut them some slack, they’re doing the best they can.”
Everything is copy
My college best friend just told me that her husband is in love with a co-worker (she too is married). She tell me this at her husband birthday party, which the co-worker is attending, and while we’re both three or more whiskeys into the night. She says that she’s known for six months and has been dying to tell me because I’m her best friend, but didn’t because of my past experiences. I can’t figure out if I should, a) tell the blond co-worker that she had better back off because she does NOT want to mess me with, b) kick the ass of the birthday boy, who is also my friend, or c) sit down with my best girlfriend and inquire why she didn’t tell me sooner. I am also amazed to be on the outside of this experience, as she rationally explains that her husband doesn’t want to leave her and that she thinks he should just go ahead and have this experience if he needs it. I think, when did I grow up and not be willing to put up with this kind of shit?
