Good Apple

by Elizabeth Passarella

  The first round of Clomid failed. During the second one, we were heading to Florida to a wedding. It happened to be a year in which we were invited to fourteen weddings and went to twelve, so we were almost broke from buying plane tickets and gifts and, oh, that apartment. The woman getting married in Florida was an old friend of Michael’s who also lived in New York, and we knew her wedding was going to be fancy. We loved a fancy wedding. The location was just outside of Orlando, at a posh golf resort where her parents had a vacation house. Most of our friends were staying on the golf property in houses belonging to friends of the bride’s parents who weren’t using them and happily loaned them out to the wedding party. Michael and I were Tier II, staying a few miles down the road at a Holiday Inn. A couple of weeks before the wedding, our friend Josh called Michael to say that the house they’d been given had a spare bedroom in the garage, and we should totally just mooch off of them rather than schlep it on the Tier II bus back and forth to the hotel. We said yes to the free garage bedroom.

  All of the houses on this golf property were exactly what you’d expect: lots of rattan furniture and floral cushions and kitchen tiles with fruit on them. We were so grateful to be staying on site, and the wedding was beautiful—a ceremony under a tree on a grassy hill, an immensely fun reception with great food and music and glow necklaces before glow necklaces became the thing that everyone did. This was the year Rihanna’s “Umbrella” was a big hit. When that came on, my husband found a white golf umbrella in a closet, pushed it open, and proceeded to march around the dance floor like a disheveled Mary Poppins, singing the chorus—“Umb-uh-rella-ella-ella” as “Passa-rella-ella-ella.” I remember it being hilarious, but I was several cocktails in. We were going to have a baby soon! Time was limited! At some point, as the night was winding down, I stepped on a plastic cup and twisted my ankle, but of course I didn’t feel much as I wandered back to the house where we were staying and headed to the garage. Now, I need to paint a clear picture of the spare bedroom: It was two twin beds with kelly green, quilted chintz coverlets on them, sitting on a cement floor. There was a bathroom but no air conditioning. Still, it was close and free, and we fell asleep instantly in our separate twin beds.

  Around 5:00 a.m. I woke up to go to the bathroom, only to feel an intense, sharp pain in my ankle when I tried to walk. I screamed, woke Michael up, and started yelling that my ankle was broken. He was understandably confused—having slept for probably three or four hours max at that point—and told me that no, it wasn’t, and I should go back to bed. I demanded an ice pack. He explained that not only was it five in the morning, but we were staying in a stranger’s house in the garage with no kitchen where one might procure ice. I said I didn’t care and added something along the lines of, “If you love me, you will find me a bag of ice, you turd.” (I said something much, much worse.) He left the garage, was gone for about ten minutes, and came back, miraculously, with a bag of frozen succotash from the main house. I sat on my twin bed, sweating and cursing, with the succotash on my ankle, and looked at the time. “It’s been fifteen hours since I did the injection,” I said. Indeed, fifteen hours before, shortly before we’d gotten showered and dressed to go to the wedding ceremony, I had pulled the stubby little vial with the needle on top out of my Duane Reade bag and quickly jabbed it two inches below and to the left of my belly button. It was go time.

  I looked at Michael and tried to summon any feelings of desire and commitment but, as is so often the case in marriage, the only things that came to mind were all the tiny slights or hurts I’d filed away from the past twenty-four hours and wanted to ruminate on now. Hadn’t he left me during dinner to go talk to a bunch of college friends and stayed gone for an hour, while I was stuck talking to that crusty older man who kept insulting state schools? Was the umbrella stunt even funny, in hindsight, or just plain obnoxious? Couldn’t he simply take care of me instead of whining about finding an ice pack? Was he that immature? If he couldn’t take care of me, how would he take care of a baby?

  There’s a metaphor from the book of Matthew that I use with my kids all the time now, largely because I’ve seen its enduring relevance to my own life, where Jesus said, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” (7:4). I was a pro at calling out every speck I could find in Michael’s eye while ignoring the two-by-four in mine. My ankle was not broken. For all I know, my foot might have just been asleep, and I was too addled from gin and tonics to tell the difference. I felt nauseated and dehydrated, which was 100 percent my own fault, and I wanted to make it his. I wanted him to fix this crappy room with no air conditioning and all the frustrations I had about my chocolate chip cookies. I was nasty and hurtful and full-on lioness. Only because God is gracious—I mean, why did I happen to wake up exactly fifteen hours after that injection?—and gave me a husband who is probably a Golden Retriever, did we do what married couples who stay married do all the time: we sucked it up and kept going, even when the loving feelings weren’t there.

  When my daughter inevitably asks (or reads this book, God help me), I will say, truthfully, that her father and I flew home from Florida later that day, laughed about the absurdity of my broken ankle and the twin beds, made up, made out, and made a baby in the comfort of our own room in our two-bedroom apartment. Who’s to say what state that egg was fertilized in, Florida or New York?

  But we know her. She’s a lion. How could she not have been conceived in that fit of anger in the garage outside Orlando?

  . . .

  A lion raising a lion is tricky business. Remember: I was raised by a Golden Retriever. When I got frustrated—over a school project I couldn’t get right, an argument with my dad I couldn’t win, a hurt I couldn’t articulate—my mother listened, calmly, and tried to soothe. The worst she would stoop to was simply leaving the room (maybe to scream into a pillow, who knows, but she rarely screamed at me). I, on the other hand, go toe-to-toe, roar-to-roar, with my kid. I am not proud of this. But that’s the thing with lions, we stand our ground. We have two more children now, both boys, and though one is a baby and therefore a mystery, my middle child, when yelled at (again, NOT PROUD), gets reliably upset. My daughter, however, will deliberately disobey me, lie about it, and when I lose my ever-loving mind, will stare me down, with absolutely zero emotion, much less tears of contrition, and very coolly say, “I need you to call Daddy and ask how long until he gets home.” The Golden Retriever! When’s that guy coming around to lick everyone’s faces and smooth things over? She is tough, and it’s so easy for me to forget that she’s a child. I yell at her like she’s an equal, not a nine-year-old. I sometimes want to say, “Hey, I could never yell at your brothers this way! You can take it! Good for you!” Okay, I have said that to her. But I know that’s terrible and no excuse.

  There is something we Christians talk about called sanctification. It is the process of becoming holy, becoming more what God intended us to be, becoming more like Jesus. Because we are sinful people who yell at their nine-year-olds, though, we can’t do it by ourselves. God sanctifies us, sharpens us, refines us through trials, through the painful conflicts with siblings, parents, friends, spouses, and children. And he gives us the Holy Spirit to help us figure out how to handle them. Having children has been the most sanctifying work in my life—more than learning to compromise in marriage and more than learning to withhold judgment of fellow parents. (Ha. I have not learned this.) Maybe this first child being so much like me is what makes it hard to learn the lessons. There are times when she is trying to, say, wrap a birthday gift for a friend. Only it’s a package that is some irregular trapezoid that defies logic and right angles and, for that reason, should be shoved in a gift bag with a piece of tissue paper. I will suggest this. She will say no, and anyway, she is going to wrap it herself. I’ll explain that we need to leave for the party in ten minutes and can I please, for the love of Pete, just put it in a bag, and no, no, no. She wrestles with
the trapezoid for a while, with limited success, and suddenly it’s fuming and tape throwing and gnashing of teeth. Only, instead of being like Jesus, who would recognize that, in her heart, my daughter knows she needs help, and that a loving parent should overlook the gnashing of teeth and meet that need, I will scream, “I told you so!” And then, because we are now late, and I am petty, I might leave the apartment without her or at the very least say, “AND YOUR HAIR LOOKS RATTY” but not offer to fix it for her. I do all of this even though, when she’s wrestling with the paper and the tape and getting more and more worked up, I can feel, in my gut, exactly what’s happening in hers.

  One summer when I was in elementary school, my sister and I and a bunch of kids from our neighborhood tried to stage an amusement park in our friend Polly’s enormous backyard, complete with rides. Rides! I spent hours and hours nailing scraps of wood I found in our garage into a small chair that I thought we could suspend from a zip line between two trees, charging kids money to strap themselves into this chair that probably weighed fifty pounds and was somehow going to whiz safely from one pine tree to another, thirty feet off the ground. I mean, the concept was so ridiculous, and yet I was so stubborn, I sat in that garage hammering away no matter what anyone said to me. When I inevitably realized it wasn’t going to work, I felt a mix of embarrassment and defeat. But I’m sure that presented itself in bratty hysterics and me blaming my parents, my sister, trees. I can still feel that anger when my daughter starts her own low, back-of-the-throat growl that turns into a clenched-teeth scream as something doesn’t go the way she wants it to or her will is being unjustly thwarted. I am not my mother, looking on in bewilderment, getting on my knees to ask God what to do because it is so unlike anything I have experienced. I am vibrating with a twin rage. Like we are piano cables, and even though someone is only banging away at the top half of the keyboard, the thicker, gnarlier metal ropes on the opposite end are ever-so-slightly humming. So why can’t I muster sympathy? The sanctification lever is stuck.

  Part of my problem is that being angry, to me, feels good. Not forever. But just as some people sit comfortably in self-doubt or fear, I shimmy into anger like it’s my favorite pair of pajama pants. I’ve learned, at the very least, to occasionally confess to my husband or child, “I’m really happy being angry right now, and I’m not ready to apologize.” Another part of the problem is that the current world lifts up anger—specifically from women—as righteous. I’m supposed to be angry that women’s voices have been stifled. I’m supposed to be angry at men or angry that I haven’t been allowed to be angry. I’m not supposed to feel bad for raising my voice. But then there’s the Bible telling me, “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry” (James 1:19). We are meant to be angry about what Jesus would be angry about: injustice, corruption, death. But Jesus spent a lot more time eating dinner with sinners than turning over tables in the courtyard of the temple, a one-time thing. Anger loses any righteous power when it becomes your default mode.

  If there’s any sanctification at all in my nine years of parenting, it’s that I’ve become better at apologizing and asking for forgiveness. I have to start at the beginning of the domino line though. God forgives me. Over and over, every time I ask, even though it’s for the same thing. I am the bratty nine-year-old in his eyes. And because he forgives me, I can forgive my child for being a child. And because I can look at both of us—me and that unholy mess of a kid I made—as sinners equally horrible and equally loved, I can be humble enough to say, “I’m sorry.” Most of the time, one of us has to leave the house for an hour, or I have to take to my bed and listen to a podcast first. Occasionally, I have sat on the floor in my children’s room and lost it, crying out of exhaustion and an embarrassing lack of shame that makes my children uncomfortable. I will say, “I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I’m a terrible mother.” Or, on better days, “I’m so sorry I got angry. I know I do it all the time, but that’s the annoying thing about sin and the wonderful thing about Jesus. He still forgives us. Do you forgive me?” Sometimes I’ll tell them that I’m not a perfect parent, but that’s okay, because they already have a perfect parent, a perfect Father in heaven. This completely freaks them out, and then I have to spend forty-five more minutes before bedtime responding to things like, “How is he a parent to every person in the world at the same time?” and “But I can’t touch him or hear him talking to me, so it doesn’t count.” I’m hoping that eventually it sinks to the bottom of their hearts and settles in, a little sediment that anchors them, even subconsciously, when their earthly mother is coming unglued.

  Anne Lamott wrote in a 2014 article for Salon.com about her book Small Victories: “The victory is forgiveness—it’s the hardest thing we do. Half of the stories, which took so long for me to write and get right, are about that predicament of that clenched, clutched feeling when we don’t forgive. And then that miracle of grace, like a spiritual WD-40, that gets into the very stuck, grinding places inside of us.” She also said: “The tradition of letting your children watch you ask for forgiveness is beautiful.”

  It is. It is beautiful. And hard. But it’s getting easier every time.

  SEVEN

  HOW I BECAME A DEMOCRAT: PART 2

  I WOULD REALLY PREFER NOT TO have to talk about this.

  If left to my own devices, I’d keep my politics to myself—better yet, I’d keep them away from myself entirely, opting out of even making the difficult decisions, letting everyone in my life assume what they want. My New York family and friends would, naturally, assume I am a Democrat. I emit the right signals: my kids go to a progressive public school; I compost. Living in Manhattan is almost proof enough. Many of my Southern friends would assume that all of those things were forced upon me, and still, deep in my heart, I am a Republican. My mother would assume the former, but that I’m only doing it to lower her life expectancy.

  A few months ago, my sister was trying to remember the name of a restaurant on the Upper East Side that we’d eaten at together a couple of years before.

  “You know, when we were all in New York for Thanksgiving that year. It was Italian. We left the kids with a babysitter. We sat at a round table in a side room,” she said.

  There are a couple of restaurants—and people—whose names fall into a black hole in my brain, and no matter how many times I fish them out, I lose them again, five minutes after remembering. Anything that starts with an L and then an apostrophe is a goner. People whose faces don’t fit their names, in my head. (I once knew a woman, a friend of my roommate, who looked like a Betsy to me, so that’s what I called her. Her real name was Mary, but it just took me two days to come up with that.)

  “On the Upper East Side, you said? Italian?” I asked.

  “Yes! Italian! Remember? It was the night you got in a fight with Mom about politics and screamed that Jesus was a Democrat.”

  Oh. That place. It’s called Sfoglia.

  Jesus is not a Democrat. I know this. That’s like saying Julius Caesar was a Mets fan. You’re going through a wormhole to make your point. Jesus is Jesus. However, that doesn’t stop Christians from using specific passages in the Bible to try to claim him for their political side. I remember opening our mailbox in high school and finding voter guides from churches, urging us to vote Republican down the ballot. This is the problem for me—the way Republicans have gotten very grabby with Christianity, convincing people of faith that the only moral choice is theirs. Jesus is above this.

  So, if I know that, why was I yelling at my mother in Sfoglia? My family would probably say that I moved to the city, married a liberal New Yorker, built a nice life here, and now thought I was more worldly and cultured than the yokels I came from, and wanted to lord it over them. They might be right. I have an ugly tendency, at times, to think I’m superior for having stuck it out here. (All New Yorkers do.) But it’s important to note that I spend a not insignificant amount of energy throwing my Southerness in people’s faces too. I get indig
nant when people mention that I don’t have much of a Southern accent and will fly into a rage when some Northeasterner badmouths a dish or town or state university that I hold dear. When my children were born, I dressed them in over-the-top Southern clothes. Newborns wear day gowns, which are long, thin cotton dresses, smocked along the yoke or embroidered with a tiny frog reaching his tiny tongue out toward two black backstitches on the opposite lapel, indicating a tiny fly. Once they can walk, they wear bubbles, apple-shaped onesies that balloon over the elastic leg holes that are squeezing their thighs into sausage links. My two boys have been called girls a thousand times. My oldest son, James, when strangers refer to his brother, Sam, as “she,” now says, “He’s a boy. But my mom is Southern, so he’s dressed funny.” For a woman who thinks of herself as a New Yorker at this point, I buy a lot of clothes from companies named things like Shrimp & Grits. Why? Because identity is complicated. We can be proud of where we came from and desperate to escape it at the same time. We can be lemmings one minute and want to swim hard upstream with the salmon the next.