TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

This year, Thanksgiving is at your house. You thought that your first time hosting a holiday less drink-oriented than Halloween would feel momentous, like buying your first dishwasher or pledging to NPR, but you haven’t actually bought a dishwasher or donated to NPR. Rather, your parents are renovating their kitchen and your brother is with his wife’s family and your sister winters in Des Moines, so your parents come to you. They not only bring the entire contents of their refrigerator—including two heads of past-date lettuce and an unopened jar of mayonnaise—they also bring a full-size charcoal grill and several rolls of toilet paper in case you ran out and were planning on going through the coffee filters first.

Holidays are about getting drunk with people you love either because you want to or because you have to. Over-pouring the Pinot that your parents bought and confessing that it was you who broke the Victrola ten years ago, not the Guatemalan exchange student, is the highlight of any holiday. It is also something you don’t take part in because you don’t drink around your parents. The reason for your familial sobriety is because you made a grand mistake two years ago after your girlfriend found out you cheated on her more than once and more than twice and more even than three times. She was white-washed when she found out, shocked, like the person shared ice cream and washed the dishes with her was a mirage, a stranger, a non-person. You decided then that you are either a fundamentally bad person or an alcoholic. Alcoholism seemed easier to cure than a black soul, so you called your parents in the midst of a metaphysical hangover and told them that you are a drunk, and, not only that, you have been since you were eighteen or maybe twelve or maybe even when you were still a parasite in the mobile home of your mother’s womb.

There are a lot of things you can take back. I no longer love you, I want to move out, Give me back favorite hoodie—who hasn’t said or heard these words? But, I’m an alcoholic is the pinkie swear of confessions, the nickname you can’t seem to shake. And because you never actually stopped drinking, you pretend that you’re comfortably saddled to the wagon around your parents. Your dry liver is an obvious counterfeit when your parents look at your recycling bins when they come up for Thanksgiving, but you attribute the empties to your roommate and they believe you because they want to believe you. The only time your father overtly asks about your drinking is when you’re picking up last minute cranberry sauce at the grocery store and a bartender picking up last minute stuffing yells, Dude! You have to stop walking out on your tab! when he sees you. You tell your dad you drink soda water and eat bar nuts and sometimes forget to pay.

It’s a lie, those glasses of water and handfuls of nuts. You actually spend a lot of time at one bar, your neighborhood bar, an everybody-knows-your-name bar, a bar where wet hounds look up when the door opens, wondering who new people are. Is this sad? Sometimes. Sometimes not. You’ve had exceptionally fun nights at this bar: nights when the shots melt your faceplate and you dance around the pool table and pour beer your head and stumble home, a walk you won’t remember in the morning but you will still wake up happy to be a part of this drunken family. There are also touching moments, like when a rainbow arcs over the sky and everyone walks outside and stands and blinks at the colorful yawn above. Or maybe there’s a hail storm and everyone turns on their stools to look out the windows at the ice splitting windshield and pavement. Despite the occasional monkey barrel nights, however, bar culture is measles for certain aspects of you life, like, for instance, your bank account, which you’ve stopped paying attention to because the daily bar charges make you feel like what you’ve decided that you’re not: an alcoholic.

But can you decide you aren’t an alcoholic? Maybe not. Maybe as soon as those words exit your mouth, they are always and forever true. After your mistaken announcement to your parents, you started thinking about drinking all the time. That is the worst part of thinking you’re an addict: it’s boring. You are always aware of the hour when you would usually go to the bar but are not going to go to the bar, definitely not, unless this coin lands heads up, in which case you will take it as a sign that you should drink. You attended a couple of AA meetings after your mistaken announcement but hearing people talk about booze made you thirsty. Some people say that they aren’t into AA because of the Jesus thing and you agree that putting your problems and fate and your glass in the hands of an invisible man who lives on a cloud pillow makes no sense. Why make yourself feel powerless when getting sober takes power? But you mostly hated the meetings because you didn’t want to be one of the those people. You didn’t want to see yourself in their stories and their sadness and their sobriety. So you kept drinking and if you didn’t drink one night, you woke up elated, not because you were clear-headed and pain-free, but because a sober night deserved a party, and what better way to party than to party?

Recovery programs talk about addiction as a disease, but you know it’s less the flu and more your inability to recognize your own humanness, to recognize that you are a living being who will someday be a dying being and then someday be a non-being, just scattered cells and quiet atoms. This is what addicts don’t accept: their own unshakable death. This surprising considering that they see the symptoms of physical demise when they wake up cloudy and heavy. It’s not just their hands that shake, it’s their brains, a Parksonian tremor that slows after the first fifteen minutes of happy hour and stops when happy hour has past but they’re still at the bar. This is why you don’t drink in front of your parents. You don’t have that tremor but you can’t take it back.

Your Thanksgiving might have been small—just you and your parents, equal parts Perrier and Pinot—and the turkey might have been grilled, but you still said your blessings and recited your thanks. To good friends and good health and good luck. Afterward, you wonder if you will toast with sparkling grape juice at every Thanksgiving. Will you never again get drunk at a family reunion, one aunt passed out in a lawn chair, another dancing a little too sexy, a grandfather lost in his glass? Or will you someday know, really know, that is wasn’t true, that you were never an alcoholic, the tremors were imaginary, that it wasn’t a disease, it was a mistake. Maybe after you buy the dishwasher and donate to NPR, you will be able to tell your parents this, and maybe the next time Thanksgiving is at your house you will hold your glass in your hand, lift it to your mouth, and toast to friends and to health and to luck and to parents who bring their grill and their toilet paper and their belief in you.

I was nine years old when I found out that Santa Clause doesn’t exist.  I don’t know why my father chose the moment he did to drop the first real disillusionment bomb in his twin daughters’ lives, but he told Betsy and I on a summer day that was so hot and far removed from Christmas that the words coming out of his mouth hurt not just for the truth but for the shock.  Not quite to the part of the summer when malaise takes over and even the community pool offers refreshment but little else, we weren’t even thinking about Christmas yet, much less evaluating our behavior over the past twelve months to assess our chances of seeing matching black and neon green Rollerblades under the tree. There we were, fresh from fighting a battle in a neighborhood where alliances were as flexible and ever-changing as governments—one day you’re fighting alongside the Taliban/girl next door and the next you’re allied with Poland/the boy up the street—and in a single moment we entered the adult world of the disillusioned.  Our dad softened the blow, There’s no Santa, with the caveat, And there’s no Jesus! which we already knew.  A guy born in a barn to a woman so ashamed of her own sexuality that she tells her husband she got knocked up by a dude with a heavenly zip code?  Right.  Her baby daddy was part human and part celestial but obviously an above-average lover if he  impregnated her from the moon.  And Jesus’s step daddy was probably gay if he was willing to accept that Mary didn’t have a thing with the papyrus man but was actually knocked up by a wispy dude who lived on a cloud.  Not exactly plausible.  But Santa?  Now that was a shock.

My parents are not the churchy sort. The combination of two fairly traditional religious backgrounds—she was raised Catholic, he was raised Baptist—ensured that their children would have only a cursory awareness of religion. If not for the prevalence of religion in our conservative hometown—warnings of eternal damnation are broadcast from billboards on I-40 with statements like, What if she had aborted Jesus?—I suspect I would have started college wondering why so many people wear ts around their necks. As it was, however, our brother Adam, Betsy, and I could not be shielded from the Christians around us. I learned about baptism the same day I learned that I had a one-way ticket to Hell that could only be refunded if I let a preacher dunk me in a river in a white dress in front of people holding snakes and convulsing. As unappealing as dresses and getting water in my nose was, learning that Betsy and I would be the sole third graders to spend eternity in that underground hotbox was seriously depressing. I became convinced that my only way off the heathen cafeteria table was to be re-born, the mere idea of which was confusing because even if my mom wanted to go through childbirth again, there’s no way I could fit in her womb. When I approached my mom about my fear of forever sunburned isolation, she quietly told me that it was fine if someday I wanted to join the church, but there was plenty of time to think about it. She made salvation seem like drinking or sex—adult things that I was free to choose but shouldn’t until my gray matter stopped growing. I imagine my dad saying something like, “Don’t worry. There’s no such thing as hell.” but I suspect his response was more like, “The only reason to go to church is for gospel music and cornbread,” before reminding me about our family mascot, the HMS Beagle.

Our rejection of religion in a religious town made us different. My parents didn’t teach us the Golden Rule; they taught us Kant’s categorical imperative. When my dad and I took walks in the evening, we talked about the history of human evolution: australopithecine, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapien. I knew who that our short and furry ancestor Lucy was named after a Beatles’ song before I knew long division.

But even though our parents rejected religion in their own lives and never made it a part of our lives, they realized that banning us from attending church was not a battle they should invest a great deal of ammunition on. So their son wanted to go to youth group because all his friends did? Fine. At least that was be a couple of hours the local cops wouldn’t harass him for skateboarding. So Adam went to a church basement every Wednesday evening, surely less interested in Jesus than in the youth groupies. Adam’s Christian education included watching a film that claimed that rock ‘n roll music can boil an egg. The intention of broadcasting this dubious fact was supposed to scare impressionable youngsters that if the Rolling Stones can turn raw eggs into brunch, it can likely do the same to your brain. Adam saw through Christly claim, and decided to prove the invalidity of the movie through his eight grade science fair project, Can Rock Music Boil An Egg? Despite blowing out the stereo during the scientific process, our parents were proud when Adam not only disproved the Christian right but won bronze prize in the science fair.

Although we may have been self-conscious that our parents let us play silent shepherds in bathrobes in the Methodist Church Christmas pageant but only attended a single performance and didn’t stay for the actual preaching part, while the other parents went to each painful rehearsal during the weeks leading up to Jesus’s birthday (we waited outside the church after the play ended and the preaching began with the boys whose parents were followers of Meher Baba, a 20th century guru who inspired the Bobby McFarin song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy), their refusal to be part of an establishment so fundamentally silly was later a source of pride. When I was in tenth grade, my mom had Christian Heritage Week, five days in which the school principal or a member of one of the school’s multitude of Christian clubs read a prayer during morning announcements, canceled with a call to the ACLU. This defense of civil liberties was not surprising by a woman who dressed her second grade daughter as her hero, Harvey Gant, a black man running for North Carolina senate against the arch conservative Jesse Helms, for Halloween, and who encouraged her daughters to sing and dance to the Neville Brothers Sister Rosa at a fourth grade school talent show.

There was a brief time when religion was the cause of a mildly strange family dynamic. As a junior in high school, Betsy attended a protest at the School of the Americas, a Georgia military operation that trains Latin American soldiers and police to violate human rights in support of American interests. Betsy spent much of the protest with Jesuit priests and nuns who risked their lives working for justice in Latin America. They were married to God, yes, but they also fought the corrupt establishment. Betsy was inspired. When she returned home, she said she had something to tell us. I braced myself for her confession of lesbianism, sure that she was going to stop shaving her legs and start saying things like, fuck patriarchy before spitting on the sidewalk, but next words out of her mouth were far more shocking: I’ve found Jesus. No one knew how to respond to this. It was the ultimate rebellion. Indeed, years later, when I was gently prodded out of the closet, it was essentially a non-issue. When I asked my mom who told her, she said, “No one. Your father has gaydar.”

Betsy lost Jesus after a few days, but there were, of course, other acts of rebellion: staying out late, underage drinking, smoking weed out of homemade bongs after our parents were asleep. But one thing has never changed: we have never forsaken our parents’ values—their beliefs in freedom and equality, their respect of science and reason, their suspicion of authority, their interest in the world. My parents gave up the dogma they were raised with. My mom left Catholic school after she was kicked out of her senior prom for bringing a black date. My dad’s teenage involvement in the Baptist Church ended after a summer working in a kitchen at a Jesus camp. He talks more about the butter sculptures he built in the slow hours than then any religious element of his summer job. I have friends who have rejected the gods they were raised to believe in and others who found religion later in life. But I have nothing to rebel against. I agree so fundamentally with my parents on the things that comprise my sense of right and wrong that the rejection of the values instilled in me is as likely getting pregnant by my girlfriend. Why rebel against reason, against justice, against equality? They raised us differently, yes, but they raised us well.

This might not make any sense if we don’t share alleles, but I was at a family reunion last weekend and my grandmother commissioned me to write this, though I would have anyway.

———-
My family reunion is not like your family reunion.  It’s not an afternoon at a park where people wear name tags and talk genealogy.  There’s no mini golf or badminton.  If there are introductions, it is not to a distant cousin but to an aunt or a brother no one has seen in decades; to a grown nephew who sees more of himself in this family, his blood family, than in the one that raised him; to a quiet infant, content to chew her fist and watch these people who share her DNA , who will influence the course of her life through their presence or their absence.

This is not an annual event, nor semi-annual, nor even inevitable.  The last time my aunts and uncles were in the same room was exactly thirty-five years ago, the day my parents wed.  If we were your family, we might take out photo albums and talk abut how young everyone looked, about the fashions that have gone out of style and come back and faded again, about all that has changed.  But because we are not your family, because we are my family, no one remembered to bring a camera to that wedding thirty-five years ago.  The only surviving artifacts are one framed Instamatic photo and a drawing crayoned by the mother of the bride, the cartoon wedding cake the same size as her youngest son.  And the marriage.  The marriage survives.

The family has expanded.  There are so many grandchildren and cousins and nieces and nephews and husbands and wives that when I try to count the number of my relatives, moving in my head from the Northeast through the South and the Midwest, I lose track somewhere around Colorado.  The family has gotten smaller as well, through death, yes, but also through a gradual waning.  The missing aunt, the absent uncle, the sons and daughters who don’t call—all have lives and families somewhere else, not so distant in space, yet invisible.  But we are here now, some of us meeting for the first time.

It has been thirty-five years and we are together, full of food and blood and drink and stories.  It starts with a toast to the Pope, who prescribed our existence.  What would this family be if not for the Pope and his rules against contraceptive?  Smaller, surely, easier, quieter, with fewer disability, less tragedy.  But we would also be without the good, the flawed, the beautiful—the brother whose body failed him from the very beginning, but who didn’t complain, not ever, despite the pain and the transplants and the crutches and the wheelchair.  When the siblings rented out their lawn to visitors of the horse racing track down the street, this brother stood outside the nearby cerebral palsy center with free parking and waved drivers into the children’s costly lot, crutches aloft.  This brother exists now in the Atlantic and the Appalachians, in Yankee Stadium and on his sister’s bookshelf and everywhere people live with courage and dignity and humor.

Things have changed these thirty-five years.  The Pope, not just our maker, but their leader, is now their past.  Girls who once walked to school veiled in white, hands in prayer, hail Marys on their lips, left the church long ago, tired following rules imposed by an institution they didn’t trust.  To their children, my generation, the Pope is a just a man in a silly hat and a bulletproof box, the church just a building with pretty windows and closed doors.  Even our octogenarian matriarch—a woman who has settled into a graceful ease while remaining autonomous, a woman who went down South to work for Obama because that is where she needed to be—no longer has the patience for the distant figures who once ruled so much of her life, preferring instead to create her own sense of what is real and what is right.

Like her, the women of this family are strong, and independent, and willing to forgive.  For this one weekend, the sisters don’t hear family news through a conduit, from this sister telling that sister about another’s kids or troubles.  This weekend they tell each other about their lives and tell the rest of us about their past.  We are grown enough not to be shocked by hearing about our mothers smoking marijuana with our grandmother, who first said that she didn’t feel anything and then asked where she could buy a pack.  We are amused and grateful that this is who we come from.

This is our blood and we, the children and grandchildren, need little explanation for the little dramas and larger faults of our family, but you can see that we are exhausting and over-whelming and just plain too much through those who married into this family.  They have their own subtle methods of surviving.  One husband organizes, another rocks his child, another disappears to a makeshift kitchen, away from his wife’s people with our voices endlessly carrying over each other.  These men raised children who are strong and imperfect because they married women who are strong and imperfect, full of conflict and forgiveness.

Everyone is leaving soon, off to our different dots on the map.  If we were your family, we might make tee-shirts or mugs commemorating the occasion, say our goodbyes and promise to call.  We might trust that we will all be in the same room next Christmas or the one after that.  But we are not your family.  We are my family.  And although we may not see each other before there are more or fewer of us—at the next wedding or funeral, after the next divorce or birth—we will see each other again.  We will listen to the old stories and tell new ones and thank both our good luck and the Pope to have been born to this family.

My twin sister and I are similar like Miss California and Elton John are similar: we’re both flaming queens but only one of us is smart.  People are continually shocked to find out B—* and I slipped out of the same slide.  It’s not just in brain power and ambition that we differ: we look alike the way pets and their owners look alike.  A stranger once asked if my ex-girlfriend and I were twins while we were standing beside my actual twin.  Also, B— was born in the First World stir-ups of Memorial Mission Hospital and I was born in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant.  Because of this, I not only have a trace of brain damage, the top of my skull is also pancake flat.  My sister’s head, however, is round as a silicon teet.  I was also born with an extra middle finger.  And there is, of course, the obvious gay/not gay thing.  As the only girl in Little League, it was pretty clear that I’d never be the type to get high off the smell of Old Spice.  When my sister talks about dudes I’m like, “Um, you know dudes?  Will you ask one when its balls dropped?”  B—, however, lives in a town that is 80% broken chromosome.  And likes it.  I suspect that if she ever breeds, there will be no turkey baster involved.

The archives of various gChats between my twin and I reinforce that we have some serious interpersonal issues and also that she’s a huge bitch.  Take this example from five minutes ago:

me: can i have a loan?
B: no. dont mix twinz n loanz.
me: m i ur bst frin?
B: duh
me: wuld u like me if we wernt twinz?
i dont think we’d really be friends
cause the time differnce
plus i don’t think we would have ever met
cause you are younger than me
B: different generations
me: tru dat
B: ur too old to be my friend
me: tru dat
plus i dont join runing clubs
or book club
B: we would be facebook friends but that’s all

I recently decided to get “brunch” tattooed on the inside of my lip.  I told my sister this on our birthday and she said, “As my birthday present, can you not do something stupid today?  What if brunch goes out of fashion?  What if next year is all about the mid-morning snack???”  I understand her concern, but I figure I’ll get both and if eating in general goes out of style, I’ll just turn them into “munch” and “mid-morning snatch.”

*My sister insists that I call her “B—” on this because a.) she doesn’t want to be associated with me, and b.) she thinks it makes her seem like a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

During my semi-annual car bathing today, I balanced my wet Hooter’s tee shirt and short shorts with a little NPR.  Terry Gross was interviewing a novelist named Ayelet Waldman, who just published a memoir called Bad Mother, a title that refers to some pretty unchristian criticism she received after publishing an essay in the New York Times with the following statement:

If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

Whoa.  Lady Waldman may be the only mom since Mary-Mother-of-Jesus to admit that sort of Hallmark-kiling sacriledge, and she was married to God.  My mother, however, loves me more than anyone else in the world, which I know because she sends me texts like, i <3 u bestst 4 eva., so Lady Waldman’s discount mothering isn’t really something I can relate too, nor what I really want to talk about.

But Mz Waldman’s memoir isn’t just about hating her spawn.  It’s also about sex.  Specifically, the anticipation of her children reaching that parent-dreaded period of early sexuality.  At 14, her oldest daughter is precisely the same age the author was when she dropped her pimento.  Ignoring that slightly disturbing fact—disturbing, at least, to a late bloomer still waiting for those buds to bud—Mother Of The Year Waldman has a good 21st century attitude about sex and discussing it with her young’uns.  When relating the unfortunate tale of her unfortunate hymen-breakage to her daughter, her advice was to not go into a room with a 21-year-old Israeli soldier with a drinking problem and a boner, which seems like a good idea to me. (Apologies for the anti-semetic implications here.  I’m not anti-semetic but I do have a fear of the awkward hand gestures used to bridge language barriers.  And boners.)

After the interview ended and NPR returned to the usual communist/botanist/astronomist propaganda, I cleaned my cigarette lighter with a Q Tip and Windex and pondered that thorniest of horniest issues: sex and kiddie….

My parents told my sister and I about the whole bio-ween/vagine thing when we were relatively young.  And when I say “told,” I mean they gave us a book called Where Do I Come From? after B– said “stop sexing me” after our mom gave hugged her.  The book was cute.  Sperm were dapper in top hats and tuxes, eggs matronly and welcoming in aprons and bonnnets—the kind of cells you would want to catch lightning bugs with.  Where Do I Come From included such insight as, “If sex is so much fun, why don’t we do it all the time?  Well, because sex takes a lot of work.  Jumping rope is fun but you couldn’t do it all day, could you?”  This particular statement was proved problematic after I told my gym teacher that I didn’t want to jump rope because I was tired and you can’t have sex all day.

Sex wasn’t really something I discussed with anyone in my family, which is sort of surprising considering that my father taught Human Sexuality and regularly enlisted my siblings and I to help him grade quizzes on autoeroticism and self-flaggelation.  He is also the proud owner of a New Guinea penis sheath, a vibrator from the ’20s, and a penis pump once reportedly owned by Rodney Dangerfield.  Even though we are progressive folk, the kind of folk who are more likely to get a letter of recommendation from Sinead O’Connor than the Pope, sex in my younger years was only discussed when promient God-fearing d-bags got busted for some man-of-the-cloth/altar boy action in the confessional at the local diocese.

I haven’t gotten any more comfortable talking about sex with my folks, no matter my age.  I think it’s great that some mothers advise their daughters on keeping the maritial bed busy when the kids are asleep, but that will never be me.  At this very moment, for instance, I’m sitting in my parents’ living room while they’re watching Law & Order.  The victim of this particular drama is a high school sophomore who’s into sending photos of her naked self to her mans via cell phone.  And even though I’m 25 and I’m in graduate school and I live alone and I got my oil changed and my car inspected today, my mom just leaned over to ask if I’ve ever heard of “sexting,” and I am now fighting the urge to flee from the room as fast as a tween to a Jonas.  The mere acknowledgment that sex exists when I am in the same air space as my parents makes me feel like I’m ten years old and Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze are doing that thing with the clay and the wheel and I am so embarrassed that I would rather tell my third grade teacher Mrs. Sheapard that I love her (which I do) than sit here for another goddamn second.

Yes, I am perfectly happy to tell the Internet that I have only a vague idea of how many people I’ve slept with because my definition of sex changes to suit my needs at any given time, but the idea that my parents realize that I have been and may currently be a sexually active person induces the sort of panic other people feel when stuck between Rick Warren and a Twinkie.  Ignoring the things that make me uncomfortable (swine flu, for instance, and Ohio) is one of my more refined attributes, so it’s easy enough for me to maintain the illusion of my parents’ ignorance.  That is, until my mom discretely places a dozen Gardisil pamphlets in my bathroom.

But it’s not just talking about sex with ma and pa that makes me feel like a Mexican jumping bean.  It’s also the gay thing, and this is especially weird because the vast majority of my tongue kalestenics come via the discussion of gay people, gay music, gay jobs, and gay hair.  But every time my mom asks if I’ve been keeping up with the WNBA, I hate that little gay gene and it’s blonde tips inside of me as much as Larry Craig hates the foot-rubbing bottom inside him.  It’s not like my parents even give a fuck that I’m homo.  In fact, I bet they prayed to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that at least one of the twins would be either black or gay.  I mean, what’s better than having a gay daughter to a couple of left-wingers?  A gay son, of course, but a dyke will do as long as there are a couple of Asian babies in a Prius somewhere in my future.  Shit, I didn’t even come out to my parents—they came out to me.  When I asked who told them, my mother said, “No one.  Your father has gaydar.”  And yet, every time my mom suggests we watch Boys On the Side, my gay ass knows the hometown reprieve has come to an end.

Oh, fuck.  Lil Kim is on Dancing With The Stars. I gotta get out of here.