Now My Heart Is Full

by Laura June

  And with my father, who is also bent toward silence, it meant that we didn’t have much to talk about for a very long time. And honestly, that was okay: as I said, in order for me to become an adult, one who functioned and was in any way successful, I found that I had to collapse in on myself and be selfish for a very long time. And in those years, my family waited patiently, never pushing for more than I could give, never trying to plug the hole my mother had left with meaningless chatter.

  But remaking your family when it’s split into two parts is very hard, of course. We—my brothers and our various partners at various stages—would traipse to our mother’s apartment at holidays when necessary. She got a boyfriend who quickly moved in just about a year after I moved out, and he stayed for the rest of her life. He was also an alcoholic, also divorced, also with growing children on their own. My feelings about him changed over the years, starting with blame and cold distance before finally landing on a kind of sympathy and thankfulness that my mother wasn’t alone in the world in the last years of her life.

  And we’d spend time with our father and his family, reimagining ourselves now without my mother in the mix, even though she was still very much alive. We talked around her a lot then, because often there was nothing to say that wasn’t painful or worrisome.

  And then, when I met Josh and encountered his very different family, one where his parents were still happily married, where family holidays were loud and boisterous but not ever filled with fears that someone might get too drunk or leave in anger, I slowly tried to eke out a place among them, too.

  Having Zelda brought us to a different place. Suddenly, there was something to talk about that wasn’t superficial; we all had something in common. Something to focus on. Someone we all loved completely. I came to motherhood motherless and found that my daughter repaired bonds all over my life. She enabled me to open myself to a new place of honesty with my parents (my father, my stepmother) and with Josh’s. I took less shit from people, I responded faster and with a shorter temper to unwanted tips on parenting, but I also found that I felt much closer to the family that I had.

  It’s an odd flipping of roles, to become a parent as your own parent watches. To see them fill their place as grandparents and to appreciate them in a new light. To watch that occur seamlessly, because it is a natural life transition, heals a lot of whatever has happened in the past to make you question how you feel about those closest to you. I never had outright rifts with people in my family, or my in-laws, mostly because I didn’t bother arguing if something came up that I disagreed with. That changed once Zelda was around. My openness meant a new fire lit within me that made me louder and more self-assured, but it also meant a true, actual appreciation for my family.

  It is strange, as a daughter, to see your father in a different light as a grandfather. When I was little, my father would sometimes sit silently at the kitchen table for easily two hours, petting our cat as she purred. I marveled then at the patience, and only when I became a mother to Zelda did I see that ability appear in myself. Only then, when my dad came to visit and held the sleeping newborn for hours so that I could eat or take a shower, did I see what all that quiet, stubborn kind of stillness could be worth.

  The relationship that needed the most repairing, the one that I had with my mother, was more or less firmly in the past. Whatever changes would come to that would be internal: I’d “make peace” with her where I could, as if peace were possible. But Zelda’s existence has seeped into all of us, her personality rolling over small slights or perceived ills as if they were nothing at all.

  It’s an overstatement to say that when a child arrives, healing follows. It’s an overstatement of who I am to say that her mere existence brought me closer to my family. And yet it’s at least partly true, at least part of the time. In simple terms, it’s meant a greater effort on my part, to update and to spend holidays and extra time with my family and with Josh’s. Proximity is stressful. But I’ve found it’s also meaningful. And in that space, if I haven’t exactly learned to feel okay with what came before, well, I’ve at least tried to accept it.

  CHAPTER 15

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  My grandma Elly had a bit of dementia in her old age, so by the time I was nearing thirty, she often returned, when I visited her, to the same stories over and over. She’d always been a great storyteller, and I, like my mother before me, took great pleasure in talking to her for hours when I could. One of the things she remarked on for years and years was how when I was little, maybe only ten or eleven, I once told her that when I grew up I was going to move to New York and become a writer. I used to feel annoyance at my grandmother when she brought this up, not simply because it hadn’t happened yet, but also because I didn’t remember ever saying it. But once when she said it, I asked her: “What did you think of that?”

  My grandmother was still alive when I did finally move to New York, and she was one of just two people who were happy about my decision. The other person was my mother.

  In May of 2005, I finished a master’s degree in English literature at Carnegie Mellon. Like most of my education, I had done all right but not outstanding. I was working full time throughout and pressed for time to study and manage the tendrils of my life effectively. I still had money concerns and was borrowing a lot just to go to school. When I finished that May, I didn’t know what I was going to do next.

  I started a band on a whim with three other women I barely knew at all, cobbled them together from friends of friends. All the men I knew at the time were in bands; my brother and my boyfriend Patrick were in the same band together. I’d been dating Patrick on and off for years. We’d lived together for part of my college career, then broken up at my request and I’d moved to a place of my own for a while, but we’d recently gotten back together while I was in graduate school. Patrick had gone to high school with me, and all his friends were my friends. He knew my family very well, and I knew his.

  I was happy in the band for the months that I was in it. Applying myself to something like that, to writing songs and playing shows in a group of people, was very different than anything I’d ever done before, but like when I was at school, I didn’t worry too much about where it was leading, didn’t think of it in terms of the future, but tried to focus very much on what was right in front of my face. These girls made up a new set of friends for me, and at that point I was distanced from Emily, Vanessa, and Ellen. Emily had finished college and bought a house in a suburb near where we’d grown up. She was the most obviously successful of the four of us. Ellen had lived out west for years while we were all in college and then returned around the time I was applying to graduate school. She had a son and for a long time seemed happy with her husband and baby and new life. But I worried about her a lot already, from a distance. Anytime I’d seen her over the past few years, she almost always drank to incoherence, not remembering whatever had happened the following day. My band played a show once at the bar she owned with her husband, and she was drunk before we went on. I didn’t judge her, but the sense that she was drifting out of control nagged at the back of my mind. Vanessa had married when we were just about nineteen years old and had a beautiful daughter. She moved to San Francisco and divorced, raising her daughter with her ex-husband cordially and successfully. She went back to school and started to build her own career and life, and from afar I was happy for her. None of us had any falling-out, but we were each on our own little path.

  I think the girls in the band were closer with one another than they were with me, though they never complained to me when I declined to hang out with them in our spare time. We practiced three times a week and played shows most weekends, so that was enough socializing for me.

  And then I met someone else.

  In the summer of 2005, my brother and my boyfriend’s band went to Brooklyn to record an album with Josh and his brother, Eric, who had built a recording studio in their apartment building. Josh
and Eric were from Pittsburgh too, and my high school boyfriend Nick had met them going to raves in the 1990s when Josh was a DJ.

  Sometime in July of that summer, Josh and Eric came home to go to the show my brother’s band was having to celebrate the release of the album, and that’s when I met Josh. It’s hard to describe how I felt about him, a six-foot-four lanky guy who was loud and rude to me as I wandered around the after-party, but I sensed more than anything some kind of danger. Josh was complaining the entire party about his girlfriend, who had driven to Pittsburgh to meet him for the party and then dumped him and gone straight back home. I didn’t know anyone like him. He was forceful and almost obnoxious but refreshing, because all my friends were very much like me, bottled up and awkward, never coming out and simply saying what was on their minds. To describe Josh as having no filter would be a real understatement, and though I barely knew him, I felt attracted to him and wanted to be near him. More than anything I wanted to just spend my entire night talking to him. About anything.

  Which I did. And it did not go unnoticed. Though no one—not my boyfriend, my brother, or the other girls in my band, who were at the party and definitely witnessed me flirting—said anything to me, I felt almost immediately a divide come between me and all the friends I had in Pittsburgh.

  And so by the time he came back to Pittsburgh for a holiday, maybe a month and a half later, I knew that I wanted to see him again. I found out by chance that he was in town; someone mentioned it casually: “Josh is here. He’s DJing at a rave tonight,” and I decided to find a way to go. A small group of us drove there: Josh, his friend Lenny, the drummer in my band, who was also named Laura, and me.

  I hated raves, but I didn’t really care. I just wanted to talk to Josh, and I think all the people we were with sensed it. I didn’t care about that, either. The rave was, fittingly, at an old, abandoned roller-skating rink, huge and dark, the disco ball still hanging from the ceiling, and Josh lost his keys in the middle of it. They fell out of his pocket, and he showed me, for the first time, what I came to learn was a very classic Josh-style freak-out. He was yelling and wandering around, talking about how he was screwed, that he’d never find the keys. I wanted him to be calm, I told him we could find them, but he wouldn’t listen.

  So I wandered off on my own, cursing my horrible eyesight, as I silently pored over the floor for his keys. I found them in about two minutes, picked them up, walked over, and handed them to him. He hugged me and laughed and looked at me and said, “You’re amazing.”

  I honestly don’t know what the fuck I thought I was doing. I wasn’t a great girlfriend, but I also didn’t really openly lie to or cheat on people. I don’t think I had ever encountered someone who I just felt compelled to pursue regardless of the consequences. And so, for the time, I didn’t think of them at all. I simply went about my business, with my job and my band and my boyfriend, while at night, alone, I thought endlessly about Josh.

  I lived divided, as I pursued long-distance my connection to Josh. I emailed with him and then later texted him, and finally we started to talk on the phone late at night, when I’d worked all day and was tired from band practice. I’d fall asleep listening to him talk a lot of the time, as though he’d replaced the radio shows I often listened to.

  Josh and I left no air space between us from the moment I met him. Instead of feeling pressed to perform in a conversation, there was suddenly a person I just wanted to tell everything to. He was almost completely disconnected from my entire circle of acquaintance, most of whom I’d known since I was a child. Because I’d lived on my own through college and graduate school rather than in a dorm or a shared house, I’d never been thrown by circumstance into a new group of people. I’d gone through all of school without making any friends who stuck around beyond a certain class or semester. Josh was a wholly new person, and I felt drawn to narrate my whole life to him, in a way that had never really been necessary before, because I so rarely encountered new people who wanted to know more than bits and pieces.

  And though he was first and foremost a great talker, he was also a real listener; he listened and interjected his thoughts better than anyone I’d ever met.

  In the end of October of that year, I decided to go and visit Josh for the weekend. I left straight from work on a Friday afternoon, expecting to come home on Sunday. I lied to everyone and told them I was going to New York with a friend from work. In the preceding weeks I had, in some cowardly fashion, tried to begin a slow and arduous process of breaking up with my boyfriend, but I felt so guilty and was so bad about doing it that I simply gave up and said nothing. He suspected I was lying to him but didn’t say much. And instead of coming home that Sunday, I stayed with Josh until Tuesday or Wednesday, calling out of work and band practice, sitting around his place while he recorded a band and hanging out with him at night.

  Two nights after I got home, he asked me to move to Brooklyn, and although I barely knew him and would have to leave everything that I knew behind, I said yes.

  I quickly began to attack the process of telling everyone that I knew I was leaving to move in with someone they didn’t even know I’d been talking to. I told my brother John and my boyfriend first. They were not happy. I called my father, who clearly thought I was crazy and who suggested I wait it out a bit to be sure. I was obstinate and one-tracked; I didn’t care what anyone thought. I’d made up my mind and was leaving. I told the girls in my band and the rest of my friends.

  I quit my job. I quit everything and told my landlord I was leaving. And then I left. I took very little with me, packed it into a truck that Josh drove to Brooklyn the day before I left in my car, with my dog Sal.

  Almost no one was happy I was leaving. Everyone, I daresay, thought I was insane. My father, my brothers, and my friends all seemed to think that I would be back in defeat, that my relationship, which was so very new, wouldn’t make it and that I would find that I’d quit everything to no end. Only my mother said, “Good for you.” I called her when I was already on my way, driving from Pittsburgh to New York in the snow. I don’t know why I called her on my way, but I was glad that I did. It was early afternoon, and she’d been drinking, but not so much that I couldn’t hold down a conversation with her.

  “I met someone, and I’m moving to New York, to Brooklyn,” I said to her. I didn’t ask her to come visit because I knew that she never would.

  “I’m glad,” she said, and she sounded so overwhelmingly happy for me.

  “Everybody thinks I’m making a mistake,” I said.

  “Everybody is wrong most of the time,” she said.

  “I’m not coming back,” I said.

  “I know that. You’ve always done what you said you were going to do,” she said.

  That was the last time I ever talked to my mother.

  The fact that Josh and I are still together ten years later probably speaks in my favor: I made the right decision. But at the time, even once I got to New York and made new friends slowly and looked for a job, I felt as though everyone back home hated me and was unhappy about what I was doing. There I was, reaching for a new start on every level, and feeling judged and defeated by all the people I cared about, who I had worked very hard in the preceding years to build some foundational relationships with that were distinct from the mess my mother had made.

  Josh and I got along bumpily from the start. We didn’t know each other well and were suddenly living together in a (to be fair, very large) one-bedroom apartment. But the connection that I felt to him was not something that ever flagged, and every time he told me I should move out, that he hated me, and later, that we should get divorced, I dug in my heels and stared at him, waiting it out.

  “You didn’t leave,” he said to me once, coming out of our room, as I sat on a high stool, smoking out the window and writing in my journal. “I’m never going to,” I said.

  Josh and I were temperamentally matched very well,
and here again I am somewhat thankful for how I was raised. I am persistent in my belief that I can outlast his anger or his annoyance and can see through to the other side of it, to where he forgets he is mad at me and is resolved again to be happy. I am this way precisely because I have had to outlast others before, my mother mostly, who was, to be clear, far less deserving of my persistence than Josh was.

  In hindsight, it’s quite obvious why my mother was supportive of me in my decision to move to New York: she wasn’t a part of my daily life, she was several steps removed from it, and so it didn’t pain her the way it pained those closest to me. She didn’t see that I was hurting people in the process, even though I told her on the phone that everyone was angry, mostly because I was being so terrible to my boyfriend, who everyone loved aggressively. But I think too that she saw my definitive breakaway, geographically and emotionally, as in some ways inevitable. Like my grandmother, my mother had been privy to my private thought process for most of my life. Some people want to stay near their family and those they love for their whole lives. Some do not. My mother knew very well that I was in the latter category. I like to think that she was proud of me from afar for following my instincts and for striking out truly on my own. But of course, I’m not sure.

  CHAPTER 16

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  All I have ever heard for my entire life is, “You look just like your mother.” This truth, that I look “just like” my mother, followed me around when she was living and continues to do so now that she’s dead. It has flagged only in the years since Zelda was born, replaced by, “She looks just like you.” These are truths, and they’re also not the whole truth.