If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

by Julia Sweeney

  Off leash, dogs usually work out their dominance hierarchies pretty quickly. On leash, dogs know they are restrained. (Michael says that if Arden were a person he would be a policeman: Arden is always barking at other dogs as if to say, “No running!”)

  The woman with the off-leash dog came up to me.

  “Hi!” she said.

  “Hi!” I said.

  “I think you’re supposed to have your dog on a leash,” I said, trying to be casual about it.

  “They’ll work it out,” she said.

  “I know they will,” I said, smiling, trying to be light as air. “But my dog’s aggressive, and so if your dog’s off leash, it means I have to take my dog off his leash or he will bite your dog. Because he’ll feel restrained.” When I said the word restrained I could feel the tendons in my neck lifting up.

  “Hey, lighten up, lady,” the woman said. “It’s a beautiful day.” She swept her arm to the side to indicate the sun and water.

  I flushed red. We stared at each other for a split second.

  Then I turned and Arden followed me. At the end of the sandy area and the beginning of the park proper, I put his leash back on and we walked home. While I walked I tried very hard to enjoy the beautiful day, but couldn’t. I came back again and again to her outswept hand indicating the beautiful day. It was true, it was a beautiful day.

  Also, I hated her, I just hated her.

  Months went by. Then one day, on my walk home, I saw her. She was driving up to her house and going in. That’s how I came to know where she lived.

  Another day, I saw her talking to some workmen out front about some gardening. I imagined the gardener was saying, “You can’t plant that here.” I imagined she responded with “Hey, lighten up, buddy. It’s a beautiful day.” Sweeping her arm grandly to indicate her entire front yard. (Her hair was in a ponytail, her type of blond: honey.)

  One day as I was walking home, a few months later, I noticed a political placard in my Nemesis’s front yard. It was for the Republican congressional candidate from our district. I thought, I knew it. I immediately went home, and made some calls, and offered to volunteer for the Democratic candidate. I gave him money. I befriended him. I worked for two days in a little cramped office, making calls for the Democratic candidate. However, he lost the election.

  My Nemesis kept her placard up for a week after the election. Just to stick it to me, I thought.

  One day I went to yoga class, and there were a lot of people. Mats were very close together. In plank pose I looked to my left, and there was my Nemesis, our elbows not a foot away from each other. I broke into a sweat; my heart raced. When we did side angle pose I thought I might topple into her. We turned and did a forward bend and my head was practically up her ass. Something must be done! I thought. But what? There was nothing that could be done.

  Then one day I was walking back from the beach down her street. I was on the other side of the street from her house. She was standing outside. Then I noticed that her dog was on our side of the street, and, obviously, not on a leash. As I got about ten feet from her dog, she yelled to me: “Can you do me a favor?”

  “What?” I yelled back, my heart racing.

  “Could you stand for a couple of moments right where you are? I’m training him and this will make a good test.”

  “Ah . . . okay,” I said. Arden was straining on his leash, and barking, and you could tell her dog really wanted to respond. He would glance at Arden, and then look at his master across the street. He was holding himself together impressively, and it was a remarkable display of restraint by both the owner and dog. After a few seconds, my Nemesis gave a little nod with her head, and the dog ran across the street. She really did have a lot of control over her dog. In the meantime, Arden was straining at his leash, trying to run after a squirrel, which caused him to almost run into a bicyclist in the street.

  As I walked home, I considered whether I should run for Congress from my home district as a Democrat. Why not? Al Franken is a senator; why couldn’t I be in Congress? I wondered if anything short of becoming a congressperson would quell the desire for revenge that I now harbored for my Nemesis.

  Two weeks later, new districts were drawn and our home was suddenly in another congressional district, and represented by a Democrat whom I really liked. Curses! Foiled again!

  I kept Michael and Mulan up on my travails with my Nemesis. Sometimes when I’d walk in the door with Arden, Mulan would ask, “Did you see your Nemesis today?” My Nemesis actually became instructional, because we looked up the word nemesis in the dictionary and discussed its mythological roots.

  And now here she was, right in front of me! While I waited behind her as she prepared her parcel, I wondered if I should write on the outside of the package I was sending to Mulan, “My Nemesis is standing right in front of me at the post office!” As I looked around for a pen, my Nemesis turned toward me.

  “I think I know you,” she said.

  “I think you do,” I said pointedly. I figured our moment of confrontation had arrived. I looked around; the area with the postal machine was empty. This was good, I thought, in case things got ugly.

  “You look very familiar,” she said, her eyes narrowing. Suddenly I was struck by the possibility that she might recognize me from television! This would be terrible. I am a little bit famous in the worst way, in that I am vaguely familiar to people. They don’t know if they’ve seen me on television or if I am in their cousin’s ride share or if I’m the lunch lady at school. (Actually in the coming year, I am going to be the lunch lady at school on Fridays, so now my vague familiarity may cause true confusion.)

  “Do you have a kid on the swim team?” she asked.

  “I do not,” I replied. I accentuated the “t” sound at the end of the word not. I was John Wayne.

  “Oh, I thought you looked familiar.”

  “Huh,” I said, trying to sound tough. My chin inched upward, as in “What about it, lady?” I tried to make my smile slightly creepy, edging on scary. There was a crack of thunder outside. Perfect timing. I wanted to put fear into her heart.

  But my Nemesis did not respond the way I wished. She smiled, shrugged, and then left.

  Argh! She defeats me at every turn!

  I looked down at my package to Mulan. I didn’t write, “My Nemesis was standing in front of me as I mailed this,” on it because I became aware that I was behaving toward this woman in “an extreme” manner instead of “a reasonable” manner—a distinction that I often bring up with Mulan.

  Unexpectedly, the fact of Mulan’s absence from our house tore into my chest like a knife. I missed her terribly. I could hardly stand it. I wanted to walk in the house and tell her about my encounter with my Nemesis and we would surely laugh together. Mulan would probably tease me and I would pretend to be annoyed. This would allow me to tease her about something she was obsessing about. I missed our daily interaction. How should she wear her hair? I even miss nudging her to get her piano practice finished for the day. My exasperation at her inability to simply close her dresser drawers after getting something out of them, and pick up her friggin’ underwear off the floor, seems quaint and sweet.

  How did she go away for a month? What kind of parent would allow such a thing? How will I stand it when she goes to college? What arrogance did I have, feeling so superior, thinking how I needed to be alone, as if I didn’t need anyone. Even implying that everyone needed me so much! That is such bullshit. I have to take that out of this book. I’m so bored with myself I could scream.

  And what about Michael? Where is my husband? I’m tired of eating alone, and where is his familiar focused hunch over The New York Times every morning? His glasses up on his forehead as he peers into the face of his iPhone reading me the best tweets of the day? I long for him to come through the back door with his basket of vegetables from the garden, even though I am usually irritated by this because it means having to figure out what the hell to do with all those vegetables, vegetables
that he refuses to put in the refrigerator because he feels it ruins their freshness! Which in reality means that many of them will start rotting on the kitchen counter. I even miss the whir of his apnea machine at night. He is my handsome masked man, sleeping next to me in bed. Where is he?

  I long for the fall, when school starts and everything is routine. How am I going to get through this last week? This whole idea that I was going to figure out something important about myself during this time is so pretentious! There’s nothing wrong. I’m just irritated and annoyed like everybody is. There’s no big secret revelation. I just needed a little break.

  After I mailed my package I went home and the house seemed empty and dark. It felt like a stage, set for a show about a family home, only it was not a shooting day. Everything seemed especially inert and lifeless.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A Proposal at Starbucks

  It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

  —Rita Rudner

  Last spring, Mulan was giving me advice about how I should behave when I came to the school and looked at the science fair projects. Mulan did not want me to talk to any of the other kids—and she especially did not want me to tell any student that I was her mother. She was worried I would ask too many questions or stick out among the throng. The bottom line is that she was embarrassed by me. She thought that at the fifth-grade science fair I had laughed too loudly and made too many sounds of joy that were too audible when I encountered projects I liked.

  Okay, fine. I accept that. I was embarrassed by my own mother, too, starting around this age. I wanted to remind Mulan that she hadn’t always felt this way about me. In fact, there was a time when she even wanted us to get married.

  When Mulan and I first met Michael it was very exciting—we had this new person in our lives. I had read some advice about how to help a kid deal with a mother’s dating. The advice was that you shouldn’t even introduce the new man (or woman) to the children until you’ve been dating for six to nine months! But our situation didn’t allow for that. (Frankly I can’t imagine a situation that would.) Michael, Mulan, and I met each other at the same moment. After the initial visit, Michael stayed with us when he came to town. This was common for Mulan and me, anyway. We had a lot of guests. In particular, my two closest friends; Jim (who came with me to China) and Gino (who lives in Milwaukee but who often works in Los Angeles) were regular houseguests. They were like family. The only difference was that Michael stayed in my bedroom. Mulan barely seemed to register that as different from Jim and Gino.

  Then she had this terrible realization, and I could see it cross her face. Michael wasn’t going. He was staying. He was giving attention to her, but he was taking attention away from her mother. This was not a good development.

  I realize now, in retrospect, that Mulan thought she and I were a couple. Here’s an example. Friends of ours, a couple, invited Mulan and me over for an early dinner with some other couples. She was around age five or six at this time. I think they invited Mulan because they’d just adopted a baby themselves, who was only a few weeks old. When we got there, their big long dining room table was set. Ten place settings along a long wooden table, five couples. All of them married or partners. But my partner was Mulan. She was the only child besides the infant, who was sleeping off to the side of the dining room table in a bassinette.

  Toward the end of the meal, around eight o’clock, Mulan yawned with her arms outstretched, in a confident, languorous manner, leaning back in her chair. Her arm landed on my far shoulder, familiarly, proprietary. Like a spouse’s would. Then, with startling confidence, she leaned in to the table, her arm still around my shoulders, and said to the group, “I think we should get going. I have to get up early tomorrow.” She turned toward me and said, “And I think you do, too, right?”

  Everyone at the table laughed. Mulan asked me on the way home, “Why was everyone laughing?” “Oh,” I said, “it’s just, you’re getting to be so grown-up.” But really—to Mulan we were a couple.

  After Michael made us into a threesome, and this idea registered in her head, she rebelled. A few times when Michael and I were holding hands, she would come up and pull them apart, and forcefully put her hand in mine. Once she put her little face a few inches from Michael’s and said somberly, with a Clint Eastwood–like simmer, “Get. Out. Of. Our. Lives.”

  She began to have major fits, melting down more often than usual. She became defiant. I could not bend her will, or cleverly work around her when her behavior became obstinate. To make matters worse, Michael began to think of Mulan as an unruly and difficult child. I was at a loss in dealing with her tantrums at first. This was a new behavior and I hadn’t developed a strategy for it yet. Telling Michael this seemed like a lame excuse. “She’s perfect when you’re not around!” Right.

  I lurched around, trying out new ways to deal with the outbursts. Simultaneously, Michael and I were really falling in love. It was incredibly difficult to hide it, although I did try as best I could. Mulan began to break into my bedroom more and more often. Suddenly she wanted to sleep with me all the time. We would all have a good evening together, and Mulan would get into her pajamas and into my bed, announcing, “This is where I sleep now.” I think Michael was thinking, Is this normal or do they have some deeply disturbing relationship? I was actually wondering the same thing.

  Looking back, I am amazed I lived through this time. It was traumatic.

  One day, Mulan and I were sitting in Starbucks, me with my coffee and her with her hot chocolate. “Why don’t we get married?” she asked me.

  “Oh, honey,” I said, floundering, “two women can’t get married.” (That was lame, I know, but I was scrambling.)

  “Yes they can,” Mulan replied.

  “Oh right. Yes they can,” I stammered, “But Mulan, I am your mother.”

  “So?” Mulan asked.

  “Well, mothers and daughters can’t get married.”

  “Why not?” Mulan asked.

  “Well, because they’re already mother and daughter.”

  “But why can’t we be mother and daughter and married, too?”

  “Because we’re so different in age,” I said. Again this was lame.

  “Why does that matter?” Mulan asked. I continued to fumble. “All our references will not be the same—our music, politics—it’s too big an age range.”

  “And why does that matter?”

  I regained my equilibrium. I began to think a little straighter. “Well, because the feeling of love that two people have for each other who are married is a different feeling than mothers and fathers and their children have.” Suddenly, images of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn burst into my mind. I almost said, “I’m not into young girls.” But I thought that Mulan would probably take that the wrong way. She’d think, Why did you adopt a daughter if you aren’t “into young girls”?

  My adult brain (or what passes for an adult brain) finally kicked in. I said, “It’s a distinctly different feeling they have for each other that you will not understand until you get older and go through puberty and feel a sexual attraction for another person. It’s love, but a different kind of love. Someday you will understand, but that’s the best explanation I can give you right now. We just cannot get married.”

  “Oh,” Mulan said, slumping in her chair.

  Now I have an almost thirteen-year-old child, who is not having tantrums anymore. She will, however, challenge the truth of this very chapter. It will become further evidence in her arsenal pointing to why I should never talk when anyone else is around. But to be honest, it’s much easier to be a weirdo in your child’s eyes than trapped in the psychodrama that shrouds the beginning of a major new relationship.

  Looking back, I think I met Michael at just the right moment. Mulan was in kindergarten. I think if it had been even one year later it would have been twice as difficult. I have several friends who are single mothers and after their childre
n were in first or second grade, they avoided any new romantic relationship. They figured it would just be easier to wait until their children were gone, after high school. I think I probably would have been like that. Although it’s easy to say that from here.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  An Education

  I never let my schooling interfere with my education.

  —Mark Twain

  Mulan’s first preschool was a very fancy, upscale type of place. The tuition was about the same that my nephew, Nick (Bill’s son), is currently paying for his university education. The mothers were so young and beautiful (and thin, God, so thin!) it was discombobulating. The ratio of teachers to students was like 1 to 3. The place was opulent. I said to my friend Jeff, who has three kids who all went through this fancy preschool, “Why are there so many incredibly beautiful women here? It’s like a beauty pageant.”

  He said, “A lot of women come to Hollywood because they are very beautiful. They come from all over America, in fact, all over the world. They come here because this is where you can really exploit your luck at being born gorgeous. Maybe they want to be actresses. Maybe the part of being an actress they like most is the part where people admire your beauty. Sometimes they make it in show business. Most, however, do not. Then, you have a lot of very successful men here in Hollywood. Many of them were overlooked in high school. They have a deep psychological need to be with a knockout. This need is a gasoline that powers their desire to dominate. The women decide that their best bet is to marry these men and seal the deal by having a couple of kids. They’re like anyone assessing their prospects in the face of their declining value because they’re getting older. Can you blame them? It’s a smart move. They came to be actresses, but end up being full-time mothers. And many of them do not work outside the home, and they have the time, and the desire, to hang out at the school, parading their beauty for all of us to enjoy.”