by Laura June
I don’t know if I can regret that it was this way because I’m not sure we could have managed any other way. I remember an argument we had late one night, when Zelda was asleep. We were arguing because Josh had come home very late. So late that I was struggling to stay awake and was ready for bed by the time he walked through the door. I stayed awake because I wanted to see him and because I knew he hated to come home to a house where everyone was sleeping; but I was angry to have to do it, because I was so tired. It was a very typical argument of the period.
“You don’t know what it’s like here, all day alone with her. I’m exhausted,” I’d say, trying to work out why I was mad at him and at least partly resentful that he got to physically leave the premises for hours every day. But I was also tired and ready for bed and trying to stay up. I resented a lot those days, and though I didn’t say it, I’m sure he felt it just the same.
“You don’t know what it’s like for me,” he’d say. “I have to leave the house, be presentable, very early, and I don’t get to see you or Zelda all day, and then I come home and everyone is asleep, and I do that for five days a week.”
Both of us were right. For us, being parents at first meant constant competition about the very different levels of the other’s burden and the incapacity for the other to understand that. It is, in hindsight, almost funny.
But that particular night the argument escalated and reached, unlike many previous arguments in the genre that had resulted in annoyance and stalemate, a revelation, at least for me.
“You can accept this or not: this is reality for now,” he said, I thought a little harshly. I was prepared to bite back, thinking of how to respond, but he went on: “You will always have spent more time with her than me when this part of our lives is over. Nobody can change that. You can resent me for it, but you should also know that I will always be jealous, even if it’s nice for me to get to leave. I can’t get this time back, and neither can you.” I wasn’t sure whether he was actually jealous of me, but I took that night as a win.
It’s not good to feel better about yourself because your partner expresses pain. But sometimes you have to accept realities. Sometimes you make the best of what you have on offer. I wouldn’t change it, I guess.
Josh taught me the value of a good old-fashioned, out-loud fight. He taught me that early in our relationship; it was one of the things I liked about him. I came from a family where many things, from the small and relatively unimportant to the giant and possibly tragic, were often not engaged with openly. We didn’t have huge fights in our family growing up. We kept our thoughts mostly to ourselves. There wasn’t dishonesty: my parents taught me that lying was wrong, and I am still a terrible liar in the very few times I’ve attempted it. But there is a way to be dishonest without lying actively: choosing to say nothing is about the same as an open lie a lot of the time.
Josh came from a family where nothing was off-limits and everything was open to discussion. I was taken aback by their propensity for yelling openly at one another, even in front of interlopers like myself. Back in the earliest days of our relationship, when I was barely a known entity to Josh’s brother and parents, I felt uncomfortable but energized by their ability to make decisions quickly, where my family, especially once my mother was dead, sometimes took hours to decide what to have for dinner simply because everyone failed to speak their mind in a timely fashion.
Every family operates differently. “You’re all like your father!” my mother used to say in exasperation, years after my parents divorced. What she meant was that my brothers and me are sometimes stubbornly silent. And we are. I still feel that well inside of me when I am asked even simple, direct questions: a deep desire to simply say nothing, to refuse. To stay inside of myself. I am deeply solitary in a way that my mother never was.
My mother was, while my parents were still married and we were all living at home together, the decider. She was the one who moved us up and out of the house, who kept the gears oiled and the machinery working. “Time to go!” she’d yodel through the house while the rest of us spun our wheels getting ready. I think my parents were both naturally punctual, but my mother could get a group going far easier.
My parents almost never openly fought in front of us. And though I know that doesn’t mean fights didn’t happen, I felt that Josh and I also owed it to Zelda to not fight in front of her.
When Josh and I became parents, it exposed a deep weakness in our relationship. It probably does in everyone’s, really, because a child presents a couple with the first true test of their ability to negotiate, to compromise, to make daily decisions, and to relent and to give in to another person sometimes. Buying a house and managing your way through a hair-raising mortgage process is nothing in comparison. Though Josh and I had taken on his personal characteristic of openly and sometimes hostilely attacking each other over, say, how good the films of Paul Thomas Anderson are, the stakes of so many of the arguments we’d had over the years before Zelda were extremely low.
The thing is that parenting is actually easier when you’re on your own, without someone there to question the choices you’re making. And since I was often the one alone with Zelda, I made many of the decisions myself.
To be clear, Josh wasn’t an absentee father; he was simply a parent who worked a lot. There were plenty of times, thousands of hours, where it was the two of us together. And it was then that we fought for the first time over things that seemed to really matter. I found that I couldn’t remain silent. I would correct his parenting or simply take over entirely. I found myself disagreeing openly with even small decisions he made.
He was not fond of this emerging tendency in me. I’ve always been a know-it-all corrector. This is not an attractive or good quality, and I sometimes try very hard to keep my thoughts to myself. But as I’d lay in bed at night with the baby monitor humming beside me, being hard on myself for the way I’d treated him during that day, for saying, “Don’t make a big deal if she cries,” or, “Don’t turn the heat on now, it will wake her,” I’d often come back around to the other side in my internal dialogue. “Wait a minute,” I’d say. “He’s the whole reason I’m so disagreeable to begin with! He’s the one who showed me that speaking my mind was the best policy.”
We had this argument out loud occasionally, too. “You’re the reason I am this way now. I was much easier before,” I’d say unhelpfully. If there was a shred of truth to it, what good did it do me to say it aloud? And so, the circular way of thinking completed itself and began anew.
We agreed on most things. We were politically aligned. We usually liked the same TV shows. Our temperaments worked well together. But parenting is a crazy test of a relationship. I can’t say we did better than other people. But we didn’t judge ourselves too harshly, and, ultimately, we sort of came to an agreement.
I won most of the arguments. We basically did and still do most of the parenting the way that I want to. That doesn’t mean I’m always right. I’m wrong sometimes even if it’s hard for me to admit. And though Josh is naturally disagreeable, he is not a grudge keeper. In that first year or so of Zelda’s life, he extended to me a great charity in not holding too much against me.
At home, my mother was the “cool parent.” I wanted to emulate that much of her. I wanted to be cool. I think of myself as a cool person with good ideas. I know that’s a funny way to want to be perceived, but it’s true. I wanted Zelda to think of me as a cool mother. My father was firmer and in some ways more fear-inducing to me. If he said, “Go clean up your room,” I did. With my mother, I could often negotiate. “Come help me?” I’d ask. She didn’t always say yes, but I at least felt comfortable, and entitled, to ask.
But I was soon taken aback by the realization that Josh was the cool parent in Zelda’s life, especially once she began to talk. “Daddy,” she’d say when I asked who she wanted to read her stories at night. It didn’t matter that she seemed to prefer him
sometimes simply because he was easier to manipulate. I’d leave the room, letting him read, and then stand in the kitchen seething as I heard her stretch bedtime by another twenty minutes. “I need to go potty,” she’d say. “I’m thirsty,” she’d say. “I need a tissue,” she’d say, and he’d fall for it every time.
I wasn’t angry with him over these things. Well, I was at first. But I’ve grown to accept this dynamic. I am the decider, like my mother was before me, but in that role I’m also unequivocally the boss. Zelda knows she can’t fuck with me. She doesn’t fear me; I’ve tried so hard to ensure that she doesn’t fear me, and there are no signs that she does. But she does not disobey me very often. These days she simply says, “Okay, Mommy, two minutes more,” when I tell her how long there is until dinner.
I respect and accept this. I don’t need to be everything to Zelda. I don’t need to be the cool parent. She has Josh for that.
When my parents separated, when I was getting ready to enter tenth grade, I was relieved. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I hoped that their separation would lead to my mother drinking less. That hope turned out to be, like many others, unfulfilled. At the time of the separation, with my oldest brother, David, already at college, we decided that my brothers and I would stay with my mother. We wanted to stay with our mother too, because, well, she was the cool parent. Over the years, and with her increased drinking, we knew we could slide under her radar easier than we could my father’s. I remember once telling my dad I was going to the bus stop (which was at the end of our driveway and visible from any of the many windows at the front of our house) and then tried to sneak around the back of the house and through the backyard. The truth was that I had no intention of going to school that day: I was headed to Emily’s. I don’t know why my father was late going to work that morning; usually he left before I had to get on the bus. Either way, he was waiting at the back door for me as I tried to slip into the yard.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I missed the bus,” I lied, poorly. “I’m walking to school now.”
“I watched you watch the bus go by,” he said. “Get in the car, I’ll drive you to school.”
You couldn’t get shit past my dad. I realize now that that’s how I am as a mother. But I will be the first to admit that I am uncool as a mother. I’m in charge. As Zelda says, “You’re da boss.”
If we’d never had children, I believe Josh and I would probably never have been truly confronted with this need to learn how to make decisions together, how to relent or come to an agreement even if disagreement remains. You can’t simply keep arguing forever when another person, the child, needs your answer now: someone either needs to come around or they need to allow the other person to win.
And I learned something else: my fear, based on my own experience, of Josh and me fighting in front of Zelda, was somewhat useless. Of course we argue in front of her. We don’t yell at each other violently, but we are, I have accepted, disagreeable people. My fear of open confrontation has died very hard, and my fear of hurting my daughter has been washed away like sand on a beach, slowly over time: she’s absorbed so easily into this little family of ours, Band-Aids and all. We are who we are. She chimes in when we argue with her own opinion more often than not. And it’s so obvious she knows and is secure in how much we love her.
CHAPTER 8
◆ ◆ ◆
My mother was raised by a very opinionated woman of the Great Depression. Raised by an alcoholic herself, my grandma Peg was in some ways an amazing woman. She was a working mother in the 1950s, an interior decorator and then, with my grandfather, the bookkeeper at their framing business. But as a mother and then as a grandmother, she was exacting, especially in matters of dress. For her, appearances mattered almost to the exclusion of everything else. Though my mother knew a lot of this was bullshit, she spent most of her life, as far as I can tell, trying to please her own mother and inevitably failing. I remember hearing my grandmother tell her she should lose a “few pounds” or that her hair color needed to be touched up at the roots. I’d hear her quiet, tsk-tsk voice: “Kathy, is that what you’re wearing?”
I know what it’s like to live with your mother’s baggage. I don’t know where my grandmother’s baggage came from, and I do not blame her for my mother’s alcoholism, but I do think that my mother tried to course correct her relationship with me based on what she probably saw as the shortcomings of her own mom. Don’t we all? That manifested itself as an open and pretty honest relationship with me. We talked freely about sex and drugs, and she told me wonderful stories about her teenage years. One of her favorite things to talk about was how when she went to see the Doors and Jim Morrison touched her face. She was seventeen years old, and it was her first concert. I wasn’t afraid of my mother the way that I think she was afraid of her own. My mother made me strong enough and smart enough to tell her when I found out that I was pregnant, and she was open enough to be able to listen to it. If that situation was difficult for her, as I’ve come to realize as a mother myself that it must have been, she herself never complained to me. And I think she certainly wanted to be better than her mother in this way. I never really felt that my mother had expectations of me that I would never be able to meet. Except for one thing.
With a baby and a little kid, it’s easy to dress them. They wear what you put on them or, later, what you buy. I never thought about what was in my closet and my drawers very much, not for the first ten or twelve years of my life. So the fact that my three-and-a-half-year-old already has decidedly strong opinions about what she wants to wear shocked me, and it exposes her genetic predisposition to care.
I didn’t care what I looked like, never felt put together right. I felt uncomfortable in my body and so, to counteract that, I eventually stopped caring completely. This irritated my mother, who had spent my childhood braiding my hair carefully and planning outfits for me. She prided herself on her own appearance and, by some extension, on mine. I hated shopping, though I loved that it was one of the few times my mother and I were out alone.
I grew up acutely aware that one of the major ways my mother showed the world that she cared for me was in dressing me very well. Appearances mattered. She could break free from her mother and raise her daughter to be truthful and comfortable talking to her about the things that did matter, but she couldn’t temper or hide her disappointment at the ever-increasingly apparent truth, which was that I was slovenly and what was still in the ’90s called a “tomboy.” She wasn’t superficial, but despite her best intentions, she had internalized her mother’s attitudes that appearances mattered.
When I was a child, my long hair was always clean and shiny and tangle-free. I never, ever wore pants as a baby. Even in toddlerhood, I remember going to bed with my hair in curlers and wearing tights and itchy, formal dresses with patent leather shoes to all occasions. To this day, family members still comment on how lovely I was dressed as a baby and child. I didn’t mind her dressing me as she pleased. Until I did.
Nothing came between my mother and me fast approaching my teen years more than these same issues: what to wear, makeup, hair, shoes. It started, as most problems probably do for parents, around the end of middle school. And it did start out in a predictable direction: I decided first that I wanted to wear heavy makeup—black eyeliner, dark red lipstick, and black clothing. It was a Goth phase. My mother was a good old Catholic schoolgirl, so she understood my need to rebel to some extent. I think she thought of it as a Madonna-inspired expression of my inner rage, and she was right.
But in middle school I couldn’t find any evidence that there were cool things outside of whatever shit was on TV and in magazines. To me, alternative music was, like, the Smiths or the Cure, and even that stuff was on MTV, if late at night. My mom stayed up with me on Sundays to watch 120 Minutes, so, I reasoned, how weird could it possibly be? My mother watched it.
She was very tolerant even of my eme
rging desire to wear Revlon Red lipstick in ninth grade, when there were very few high schoolers doing such a thing. Though I’d had my ears pierced the first time with my grandma Peg at the mall on my fifth birthday, the next rounds were carried out by my mom in the basement of our house while watching MTV late on a Sunday night. She iced my ears and did it with a needle and a thread and a potato, like they did back when she was a teenager, she said. She was sometimes really cool.
But by the time I was in high school, my ideas changed quickly about what was attractive, about what I wanted to look like, and about what I wanted to wear. My mother indulged me when I requested to have my waist-length hair cut off. She allowed me to go to a barber on my own after school, with a picture I’d found in a magazine of a woman with short hair. I think it might have been Demi Moore. Girls with very short hair weren’t that common then; this was years before the mainstreaming of the pixie cut. No one I went to school with had short hair. My mother gave me the money to pay for the haircut. And to her credit, she did not freak out about it, although it was much shorter than she had expected. I told the barber, “Keep cutting,” over and over until the hair looked as though I wouldn’t need to fuck with it or style it anymore. And once I cut my hair, I never wanted it to grow long again. I dutifully went to get it cut every six to eight weeks, and she dutifully said nothing.
My mother also didn’t say much when I stopped wearing makeup and jewelry. She didn’t say much when I began to only wear black and white, mostly my grandfather’s old clothes that my grandma Elly had given me when she’d cleaned out his closets after he died.
But eventually, when confronted with my whole look, it proved to be a bit much for her, and she started to make little comments and suggestions that, needless to say, I didn’t take kindly to. My new aesthetic gave me something I’d never had before: confidence. I felt all right carrying myself, my body, around the halls of the high school. I felt, if not attractive to others, at least satisfied with myself.
