Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  She gave me a hug. Jeanne and I aren’t likely to go dancing anytime soon, but this magnanimous little pirouette with her gave me a jolt of joy.

  The world is full of far-off realities, which Jeanne Phillips, or I, or any advice-giver, should approach with as much tenderness as we can muster. When people write to me, they’re sending me a snapshot of their lives. It’s a generous gesture, because they are willingly sharing their weaknesses and secrets, and this sharing helps other people who will read their question and identify with what they are going through.

  My own children rarely come to me for advice, and I try very hard not to offer it, unsolicited. But I don’t think it is always easy to be my child, because of assumptions people make about what it’s like to be the child of a professional know-it-all. When Emily was in high school in Chicago, more than once, a parent at a school event would see us together and recognize for the first time that she was my daughter (we have different last names). “It must be awful to be her daughter, always telling you what to do!” they would say, gesturing toward me. I think this type of comment is a failed half-joke, but Emily was stung. “She’s my mom. I like being her daughter,” she would say softly.

  Peter Sagal, host of Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!, always tells me that I’m too nice. It’s sort of a running gag between us. As far as I can tell, my supposed niceness in answering requests for advice is his biggest problem with my work. Peter knows me pretty well, but he and I might have different goals for my column. I assume he wants my work to be popular and entertaining. I labor—and have, for almost fifteen years—under the sincere desire to coach and encourage people toward some understanding of their problems, mistakes, or foibles. Peter sometimes compares my work unfavorably to advice-giver Dan Savage’s column, which is very popular, edgy, and frequently snarky, mean-spirited, and very entertaining. But I don’t want to be like that. I want to be myself.

  In almost fifteen years of writing the “Ask Amy” column, two of my answers have gone viral. Both times I was answering letters that were so patently ridiculous and unkind that answering them was exceedingly easy. I just pushed back. I said what everybody else was thinking. One viral question was from a father worried about his gay son. I e-mailed back and forth with the letter writer several times before running the question in my column, asking additional questions in order to try to determine whether the letter was illegitimate or inflated. I determined that it was, sadly, sincere:

  DEAR AMY: I recently discovered that my son, who is 17, is a homosexual. We are part of a church group and I fear that if people in that group find out they will make fun of me for having a gay child.

  He won’t listen to reason, and he will not stop being gay. I feel as if he is doing this just to get back at me for forgetting his birthday for the past three years—I have a busy work schedule.

  Please help him make the right choice in life by not being gay. He won’t listen to me, so maybe he will listen to you.

  —Feeling Betrayed

  DEAR BETRAYED: You could teach your son an important lesson by changing your own sexuality to show him how easy it is. Try it for the next year or so: Stop being a heterosexual to demonstrate to your son that a person’s sexuality is a matter of choice—to be dictated by one’s parents, the parents’ church, and social pressure.

  I assume that my suggestion will evoke a reaction that your sexuality is at the core of who you are. The same is true for your son. He has a right to be accepted by his parents for being exactly who he is.

  When you “forget” a child’s birthday, you are basically negating him as a person. It is as if you are saying that you have forgotten his presence in the world. How very sad for him.

  Pressuring your son to change his sexuality is wrong. If you cannot learn to accept him as he is, it might be safest for him to live elsewhere. A group that could help you and your family figure out how to navigate this is PFLAG. This organization is founded for parents, families, friends, and allies of LGBT people and has helped countless families through this challenge. Please research and connect with a local chapter.

  This was not the first question I had ever run in my column from a parent wishing a child would stop being gay, but this was the first time I got angry enough to frame the obvious response in a way that revealed my own disgust quite so nakedly. This column hit on a Friday, and I was in an airport when it started going viral.

  The experience of seeing something I had written fly around the world to be shared and commented on literally thousands of times was surreal—and wonderful. I felt like Kathy Griffin on Oscar night. The column seemed to have a life of its own, and as I sat in the molded plastic chairs at the airport gate, I could watch as the column hit people’s newsfeeds as they checked their phones. One woman sitting across from me recognized me from the column and excitedly grabbed a selfie. She had her own story of being rejected and thrown out of the house as a teenager. She said she wanted to call her mom and share my answer with her. While I was encouraging her to dial the phone, the woman seated beside me held up her phone: “Look—I got it, too!” she said. George Takei, the openly gay actor and GLBT advocate, shared my column with his huge Facebook following of over 5 million people. Ashton Kutcher pushed the Q and A out to his 17 million Twitter followers. And Peter Sagal also tweeted it out, telling his large following, “I always tell Amy to be meaner.”

  For several weeks after the original column ran, I continued to hear from hundreds of people from around the world who were celebrating my smackdown and sharing it with their circles. They e-mailed me with their own stories of rejection and heartache, and they all said, “It’s about time.”

  I can lay down a line of snark when it’s called for, but that is not who I want to be.

  When I first started writing my advice column, I knew that I wanted to convey empathy to my readers. I wanted to write with the tone offered by my favorite advice-giver, the great Marguerite Kelly, whose column “Family Almanac” in the Washington Post was informative, compassionate, and helpful—and always kind and understanding. I wanted to be like my friend Gay, the seasoned nursery school teacher, whose knowledge and wisdom about parenting had been so influential, and my friend Nancy, who always makes the kindest assumptions about people, regardless of the shenanigans they pull. And of course my mother, Jane, who, when I was a newly single mother and Emily was a difficult toddler, pulled me aside and said to me quietly, “Remember, you are all she has.”

  In my earliest days of answering questions in my column, I wanted to act empathetic. And then, through time, helped along by my readers who trusted me so much and influenced by the course of my own life, I actually became empathetic.

  Here is what it is like to be me: I am lucky enough to throw on my ding-dong dress and sit at a dinner near the president and to thoroughly enjoy that moment—knowing that it is only a moment (and not even a defining one). But I will always find some of my most meaningful moments of connection closer to home. The times I feel the best about my own life are when I’ve listened instead of talked and when I think I’ve acted well, instead of acting out. The circumstances of my own life, and especially surviving my losses, have shown me that there is no one way to get this thing nailed down. I do not have all the answers, but I’m learning as I go.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Mother’s Day

  Stepmothers don’t like Mother’s Day. Some non-stepmothers also don’t like Mother’s Day, but all stepmothers face the day with dread and loathing. Mother’s Day is the annual day of reckoning, when children in blended families get anxiety rashes from trying to figure out how to celebrate all of their mothers, and stepmothers try to prepare for the moment when they will be reminded of their legendary status as fairy-tale villains and the not quite “real” mothers to the children they love.

  Mother’s Day is the day this mother and stepmother wants to spend at the movies. Alone. Fine, I think. Get me a card. Send me a text. Let’s just get through this day of awkward until we have to fac
e it again next year.

  This past Mother’s Day, I slipped out of the house early to sing in the choir at church. Emily had written me a note from Chicago, and as she was the one girl of our five with whom I shared DNA, I was both tickled and also relieved to be done with the Mother’s Day portion of Mother’s Day. Even though it was shaping up to be an unseasonably warm and beautiful day in May—perfect for gardening or reading on the porch—I was mapping out my movie schedule for the afternoon.

  Michaela sent me a text: Meet up at the Slope at Cornell for a picnic at noon. Okay. Very good. I freaking love picnics, especially if I don’t have to make the food or pack it, or in fact do anything; if I can just show up and sit on the ground somewhere and eat pie directly out of the pan with a plastic fork. I drove to Cornell’s campus—lush and greening and gorgeously blossom-struck on this hot spring day—and found the spot on a steep slope overlooking the spectacular blue-gray slash of Cayuga Lake and the vineyards and dairy farms on its opposite shore. I sat at the base of a large oak tree directly under Cornell’s iconic 175-foot-tall clock tower, where students played its famous carillon several times a day.

  Bruno was already there. Angela and my granddaughters Sparkle and Sprout, now six and three years old, clambered up the hillside to join us. Avila and Michaela showed up with a blanket and a bag of food from my favorite sandwich shop. Avila—now a senior in high school with a pocketful of college acceptances to choose from—pulled out a quart-sized container of coleslaw (my favorite food group) and a fork. She assured me that I wouldn’t have to share it.

  Day made.

  My little granddaughters flung themselves onto my lap. Then they leapt up and threw acorns, and then started to roll down the hill, hopping up halfway down, giggling and dizzy, crazy with the day. These two little girls had become my favorite sidekicks. We shared overnights and trips to the library. We erected tents in the living room and played flashlight tag in our old farmhouse. Over the years, we had all tried various nicknames for the little girls to call this once-reluctant grandmother, but none of them seemed to stick. They simply called me “Amy” and I loved it.

  Angela and Junior were both hardworking parents. I was proud of the lives they were making for themselves and their children. I had recently acknowledged my cranky and unkind reaction toward Angela when she was a teenager, going through such a tough time at home.

  Angela told me that my response to her second pregnancy was actually worse than for the first.

  “Oh no,” I replied ruefully.

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  Like the good mother I was still trying to become, I had asked this daughter to please forgive me. And like the good daughter she already was, Angela did me the great honor of granting forgiveness for my behavior during our early years together. Surely this was more than I deserved, and on this day of celebrating motherhood, I was impressed by her maturity and humbled by her forgiveness.

  There were sweet and sentimental cards and gifts from everyone. It was such a perfect coming together in one moment that I was simply awash with happiness and gratitude. I even forgot to worry about what might be coming next—what black dog might be limping around the corner, ready to fling itself onto our family’s path.

  The massive clock at the top of the tower clanged one o’clock: BONNNNNGGGG. And then the carillon started to play. Mmmm, nice. It was Gershwin, “Someone to Watch over Me.” The bells rang across the campus, and the sound swept down the slope and across the lake. I imagined the music entering the falling-down dairy barns and the farmhouses, running up wooden staircases, brushing over quilted beds and spilling out open windows before disappearing into the fields and forests beyond. I put my face in my hands because I didn’t want the girls to see me cry. The concert continued: “Embraceable You,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Close to You,” the theme from Star Wars. Quite simply, a musical sampling of everything I love.

  Michaela had set this up in advance with her friend Renee, who played the carillon through her four years at Cornell and who, postgraduation, still had keys to the clock tower. Renee was up in the tower playing her heart out, and the bells were tolling for me.

  We gathered up our things and our group entered the building and climbed the 161 steps to the top of the tower. We sat in folding chairs circling the large and complicated instrument, with its many wooden pedals and levers, pulleys and ding-donging bells suspended overhead. I felt the thrill of finally being inside a song.

  I thought of my mother—she who taught me to love music and who had bequeathed me the soundtrack of show tunes and pop songs to accompany my life story. I also thought of Emily, a natural-born harmonizer, who knew the same songs that I knew. How they would have loved this.

  The secret to a happy marriage is to marry someone who loves you and who believes in bringing the “better” through the “worse” of marriage. I have somehow managed to find that sweet and happy spot. My husband has taken me—broken, skeptical, complicated, and deeply flawed—and has never implied that I should be different. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that my Mr. Darcy loves me, just as I am.

  And these daughters of ours—all the girls who’d once danced in the kitchen? In my arrogance, I thought that all of the attention had been flowing one way, from parent to daughters. But they had been giving lavishly all along, by taking me in and by trusting me to become the parent they deserved to have. They had given me all they had, which was seven years of their lives. In the meantime, they had totally figured me out.

  There are a lot of ways to be in a family. But here is how to BE a family: You have to spend time together. You have to try to be honest so that people trust you. You have to forgive others their failings and disappointments and ask for forgiveness for your own. You have to let things happen, to surrender to events, and accept that no matter what you do, life unspools anyway—whether you are alone and crying in your car, or holding hands with your beloved. You have to embrace those fleeting moments when everyone is healthy and happy. And sometimes, you have to make a spectacular celebration, just because you can.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Mauro DiPreta and the team at Hachette Books. I am ever grateful to Mauro’s editorial guidance and infallible judgment.

  Thank you to Steve Mandell, my Ambassador of Quan. I am grateful for years of great advice and representation.

  Thank you to the readers of my advice column, “Ask Amy.” They have been generous with their own stories. They have trusted me, and have taught me so much.

  Thank you to my loving husband, Bruno, and to our five wonderful daughters. First, they let me live with them, and then they let me write about it. I am forever grateful.

  Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.

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