Mom Goes to Sex Ed

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Brett Paesel writes a Fictional Blog

Meagan McPhee is a fictional character, created by Brett Paesel. 

Meagan will be posting on her site every Monday from her desk at First Lutheran Church in Evanston, Ill. Join her every week as she creates a new life for herself and her son after her divorce (http://meaganmcpheead.wordpress.com/)

 

The first blog starts out:

 

"The upside of being divorced at age thirty-seven and supporting yourself and a kid is that you hardly give a crap about anything anymore.  The word “hardly” is important here.  Because just when you’re sure you’ve abandoned all feeling about what people think about you or say about you or promise-and-don’t-deliver to you, a teenage grocery store checker says you look tired on a Saturday morning and you burst into tears, drop the bottle of vodka you were buying for Bloody Mary’s and run out to the parking lot, choking on snot and obscenities until your best friend, Diane, pulls the car around to load you in like a wounded dog.  We’ve all had moments like that.  But, really (apart from these lapses) once you’re divorced and on your own, you care a whole lot less than you did before."

Read more at Meagan McPhee AD (After Divorce): http://meaganmcpheead.wordpress.com/

 

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The Christmas Loan -- Part Three (After the Loan)

It was January of 2010. Over our Christmas vacation in Madison, my parents lent us a thousand dollars to float us through the New Year. With that, we managed to pay our rent and some bills. Then, we returned to Los Angeles and waited for a large check that was due to me for work I had completed a couple of months before. 

As soon as the door to our apartment swings open, the boys race past us into their bedroom. Pat and I yank our suitcases into the hallway, making adjustments around each other on the slippery area rug. My suitcase falls over and I pick it up again, leaning it against a broken chair that is still waiting to be hauled down to its final resting place next to the trash bins in the basement. The chair is only one of the mocking markers of unaccomplished domestic tasks that litter our abode like vandalized tombstones. There is the vacuum cleaner without a handle, another chair with stuffing hanging out of its seat, the broken laptop under the desk, and the large rug (dotted with worn beige patches) that never lived up to its indoor/outdoor promise. 

Before we left for Madison, we hired a kid downstairs to watch the cat for twenty-five dollars. At the time it seemed like a steal for two-weeks worth of feeding and litter-cleaning. Now that I survey the soft white hair that floats over everything like a spun sugar confection, I think that I should have gotten more bang for my buck. Would it have hurt the kid to have brushed the dining table a few times? Didn’t he notice that the living room was beginning to look like a scene from a gothic novel? I wouldn’t be surprised to find a skeleton lying in our bedroom next to a withered rose.

My scan of the room stops at the tree next to our entertainment center. It has been in critical condition for years, dropping big brown leaves to the floor at regular intervals. But every time I have given up hope, a green shoot has peeked out from the dry soil in its pot or a leaf will raise itself up when I toss it a dram of water from my glass. This time, however, its mortality is not in question. I cannot discern a speck of green, fallen brown leaves surround the pot, and it lists to one side at a forty-five degree angle.

I hear the kids pulling toys from their places of temporary retirement in their bedroom.

“Whatever you take out, you will have to put back,” I yell to them, my voice betraying more irritation than I intended.

Pat grabs our stack of mail from the dresser, swipes dust and fluff off the top envelope, and plops down on the couch. I watch the debris swirl in the sunlight that streams through a gap in our closed blinds.

“You’re going to have cat hair on your ass,” I say to Pat.

“I’ll live,” he says, tossing a couple of envelopes on the coffee table.

My stomach is tight, but I shrug like I don’t care. I am struggling to resist the urge to start cleaning and then scream at the children and Pat that they aren’t doing enough. This is my pattern and Pat knows it. The impulse is born from my need to control the uncontrollable. Cleaning the house won’t make my check from the studio come any faster. Vacuuming the fur off the rugs won’t pay my parents back their loan any more efficiently. But creating the illusion of domestic order will calm my spirit. At least that’s what I think. Pat disagrees. He claims that the impulse is born from a need to make everyone else to feel my discomfort and resentment as keenly as I do.

Pat throws the rest of the stack of mail on the coffee table.

“Let’s go out to dinner,” He says.

A slight gasp escapes me. We have barely a hundred dollars left in the bank. Dinner would clean us out. Usually Pat is the one to point out the fiscal impossibility of any proposed venture outside the home, not me. I glance at him. He smiles back at me innocently. I feel a flutter in my chest. I like the way Pat’s hair is flopped over one eye.

“We don’t have the money,” I say because it should be said.  But I want to go out to dinner. I really, really do.

“Your check will come in a couple of days,” Pat says.

“I guess…” I say, playacting now. This is my opportunity to abdicate responsibility for a foolish choice.

“Dinner?” Spencer’s head pokes out of his bedroom doorway.

“We’re talking about it,” I say.

“We’re going out to dinner,” Pat says and stands up. He looks tall to me -- standing there, making decisions. I feel an unbidden smile steal across my face. I’m sure that my eyes are sparkling.

“Kids,” Pat yells over his shoulder, “grab your sweatshirts, we’re going to Fiddler’s.”

I can hear the kids whoop like they’ve won something. Drawers are being opened and slammed shut in their room. Fiddler’s is a family friendly restaurant down the street and they know that they will be given free gumi bears after our meal. The boys run into the living room, pulling sweatshirts over their heads. I grab my jacket. Pat strides to the door with a white fluff of hair on his ass. We tumble into the hallway, giggling like kids ditching school.

Outside the air is crisp but nothing like the cold in Madison. I breathe it in, fill up my lungs, and skip to keep up with Pat. The boys jog ahead of us. I no longer feel like the penniless mother with a cat haired living room to clean and a skeleton in my bed. I am free from domestic constraints, free from the judgment of my family in Madison, and free from self-punishing thoughts about how we got into this mess in the first place.

I grab Pat’s hand at the crosswalk and glance at him sideways. His hand is alive in mine, tightening and relaxing. He feels it too, I think. This is rebellion plain and simple. We’ll regret having spent the money tomorrow. But today? Today we’re living fast and dying young. Spencer reaches the door of the restaurant first and flings it open. Murphy slips in behind him. I squeeze Pat’s hand. We have shared moments like this before, watching our children filled with such confidence and complete surety that the world cares about them.

Inside Fiddler’s there is nothing to indicate that the boys’ confidence is misplaced. The staff clucks over them, asking about their Christmas vacation and Pat and I slide into our favorite spot on a banquette.

“I’m going to eat all the green ones first,” Murphy says about the gumi bears.

“The red ones are sweeter,” Spencer says, pulling out his chair opposite Pat and me.

“That’s why I like the green ones. I like some sour in mine,” says Murphy.

The waitress comes over to our table. She’s been working at Fiddler’s since I started coming here six years ago. Her accent sounds Eastern European and she always seems to be in a good mood. I wonder if this is because she’s continually grateful that she’s not back where she came from.

“We’re talking about our gumi bears,” Murphy tells her.

“What gumi bears?” the waitress asks in a teasing tone, her eyes mock wide with innocence.

“The ones you always give us,” says Spencer.

“Oh those,” she says. “We don’t give those any more. Now we give out green beans.”

Murphy’s face drops, but Spencer says, “OK. Then show us the green beans.”

“They’re in the kitchen,” she says. “I only bring them out after you’ve eaten your dinner.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” says Spencer. “It’s not like green beans are a reward.”

“Right,” says Murphy. I’m not sure if he’s following Spencer’s logic, but he has infinite faith in Spencer’s brain. Spencer speaks with such a tone of academic authority that younger and impressionable kids simply assume that he’s right. I wish I had this gift. My voice betrays my every emotion and I rarely run on empty. I worry that the quaver of passion in my lower register is sometimes scary. I’ve sensed hesitance from even casual listeners.

“Well, we’ll see,” says the waitress, rolling her l’s and her eyes.

“That’s right,” says Spencer. “We’ll see.”

He and the waitress smile at each other, the game played out.

“Two chocolate milks, a diet coke, and wine, right?” she says, turning to Pat and me, anticipating our order.

I nod, “Red wine, please. It’s chilly out.”

“This?!” she says. “It’s California. Please. It’s never cold.”

I feel my face flush, imagining her frozen tundra of a homeland. She is, of course, right. California is always warm compared to any spot that experiences an actual winter. What is more, I tell myself, any family who can skip down the street for dinner is living large in comparison to the vast majority of the global population. I know this to be true. I’ve always known it. But I know it in abstraction. I know that I know it in abstraction. How, I wonder, do I make that abstraction, concrete? How do I tunnel through my fear to find gratitude? Not the kind of gratitude you find expressed on greeting cards but the kind that is transformative and indelible. 

Pat’s shoulder is warm against mine as I look out the window at the orange sun dipping behind our apartment building. 

The sun over our apartment complex

The Christmas Loan -- Part Two (To Take is to Give)

My mother’s father quit school after sixth grade to support his family after his father and brother drowned in a lake. Later, he married a beautiful Swedish girl, started a family, and moved into a small two-bedroom apartment on the south side of Chicago. He was a streetcar conductor who woke up at four in the morning, six days a week, to head to work downtown. My mother slept in the living room on a pullout couch that she shared with her sister until she left for college. Her other sister shared a bed and bedroom with her aunt who sang hymns almost constantly and was dying a slow death from untreated breast cancer. All three sisters grew up knowing the price of everything and distrusting credit or a deal that sounded too good to be true. I doubt that any of them ever bought a lottery ticket. No one, they firmly believed, ever got anything for nothing. Frugality was inbred, carved into their DNA. Born in America, their faces were cast by the land their grandparents came from. Cheekbones like bluffs and ice blue eyes. Andersens, Johnsens, Lundquists. The sisters grew up knowing that having enough money meant that they would never have to ask for anything. And if a Swede can die without ever having asked for one goddamned thing, that’s one successful Swede.

            The house in Madison is always cold. My mother says that heat makes you soft, which may be what she’s thinking when she says that I have become, “so California.” It is true. I am soft, softer than my mother. Although her core radiates heat and love so fierce that it embarrasses her.

            She sits at the table in the kitchen, with her calendar. For as long as I can remember, my mother has filled in the squares of a monthly calendar with family comings and goings, along with deadlines for art contests she wants to enter. In the morning, she consults her calendar, adds anything that’s new, and then writes down a schedule for that day, even scheduling her breaks. She does this, she says, to give shape to her day.

            I grab a coffee mug from the cabinet and walk behind her to get a tea bag from the shelf next to the oven. I look over her shoulder to glance at her schedule. Aha. She’s having coffee until she dusts the living room at ten. My pulse quickens. This might be the best moment to ask her.

“Where are Erik and Shona?” I ask. If my brother and sister-in-law are around and might interrupt, I should put it off.

            “They took Kiran to the lake. They wanted to get pictures of him in the snow.” She lifts her head from her calendar and looks out at the lake, “Where did Spencer and Murph go?”

            “Pat took them to the library.” I fill my mug with water and pop it in the microwave, “Where’s Du?”

            “He’s not upstairs?”

            I set the timer and the microwave hums, “I didn’t see him.”

            My mother shrugs, “I don’t know where he is.”

            My father’s comings and goings are puzzling to us all. He disappears and appears without announcing his departure or arrival. Later this afternoon, he will materialize in his rocking chair, reading the newspaper without a word said.

            The microwave bings and I open the door to retrieve my mug of tea. My mind scrambles for something to talk about.  I don’t want to simply blurt out a request for a loan. If it leaps out with no preamble, I’ll seem desperate. Of course, I am desperate. I shuffle though our usual topics: politics; the children; books; clothes, my father; her painting; my writing; my father. Nothing catches. I put my tea on the table, slide out a chair, and sit down. Just ask her, I tell myself. She’s never said no. She won’t yell or cry or recriminate.  She’ll simply pull back. How bad is that? My shoulders ache. My throat is tight, like it’s trying to prevent the request from being voiced at all. Jesus, I’m going to have to write it down on paper and slide it to her like I’m holding up a bank.

            My mother looks at me, her eyes misty; her fine, high cheekbones evincing her younger self.  My throat tightens even more. I don’t dare try to sip my tea. I might choke.

“I’m worried about Muriel,” she says.  I hear her, but don’t take it in. It’s a reprieve. This much I know. A change of subject. A shift in the game plan. My shoulders soften. I pull in a breath.

“What’s wrong with Muriel?” I ask stupidly, because everything’s wrong with Muriel. My mother’s oldest sister has been in the hospital for over two years. After caring for her husband with advanced Alzheimer’s for a decade before his death and enduring a crippling case of rheumatoid arthritis, my aunt barely eats. She sleeps most of the day hoping for death to come soon and lift her up, her corporal self almost ether now, to meet her husband in a world beyond pain.

             “It’s so sad,” my mother says. Her jaw goes slack. She looks past me to the lake. I want to reach out and hold her hand. My reason for coming into the kitchen has evaporated. Now it seems that my only reason was to sit with her like this. Unable to reach for her because she would not be able to bear it.

“I know,” I say.  This is all I ever say, because there is nothing else. And because this is all that my mother wants to hear. She simply needs to know that I know. Until recently, my mother wouldn’t have shared her sorrow at all. Traditionally, she has suffered losses in virtual silence. In this, I am not my mother’s daughter. I am a chest thumper and a copious weeper who can’t get through the opening credits of ET without wailing. At bedtime, my sons try to avoid books that will make me cry and extract promises that they will never leave their mother. With the exception of Pat, everyone in my family hates my inability to marshal my emotions. I have even been told that my emotional displays are intimidating. My mother, on the other hand, was once referred to by Erik as “six feet of Nordic ice”.

She is not six feet tall, nor is she that removed. Neither am I an emotional terrorist. These, however, are the labels we have both borne for years.

I remember my mother’s habitual remove two years ago, when she called to tell me that her sister, Muriel, had taken to her bed and that her daughter, my cousin, Rachel had said that she believed that Muriel would die very soon.

“How soon can you get down to see her?” I asked her then. Muriel was in Kentucky.

            There was a pause on the line before my mother said tightly, “I don’t think I’ll be going.”

            “Of course you have to go,” I said. “You’ll regret it if you don’t see her.”

            “Brett, I can’t go. She wouldn’t…” my mother took a long pause. “She wouldn’t want me to see her like that.”

            Another pause. That was it. Final. She had made the decision. I could hear it in her voice. There was nothing for me to say. I knew the Lundquist women. My mother would be immovable in her belief that Muriel wouldn’t want her baby sister to see her vulnerable, helpless, needy. Any appeals from me would meet with steely resistance and the conviction that I simply didn’t understand.

            But I did understand. As soon as I hung up the phone that morning, I called my cousin, Rachel. Our exchange was pragmatic, but kind. We spent more time together when we were younger and while there wasn’t much that bound us together these days, we were connected through these staid sisters.

            “I want you to invite my mother down to see Muriel,” I said. “She won’t go unless you ask her.”

            Rachel sighed, “I bet Mom would love to see her.”

            “I know. But my mother thinks that Muriel will be embarrassed.”

            “That’s true. She would be,” said Rachel. And so unbeknownst to her mother, Rachel crafted an e-mail to mine, inviting her to see her dying sister. It was an invitation my mother could not turn down because the Lundquist code had always been clear: refusing a request was worse than making one. This was the kind of circular logic Rachel and I had lived with all of our lives.

            Upon her return from Kentucky, my mother said that seeing her sister was good. Muriel’s hand was lighter than paper, my mother said. The soup my mother fed her was too hot for her. But the spoon, Muriel told my mother was too cold.

            “Were you glad you went?” I asked her over the phone.

            “Oh yes,” she said, as if the answer was obvious. “Oh, yes.”

            Muriel didn’t die then and in the months that have followed my mother’s habit of restraint has slightly diminished. She doles her sadness out in small amounts that she thinks I can handle, often by simply evoking Muriel’s name. And each time she gives it to me, I take it. Because I know that sometimes to take is to give.

The emotional landscape in the kitchen with my mother and her calendar and her grief is a topography of stinted impulses. Mine to reach for her hand and weep with her. My mother’s to harden her face into a smile of acceptance, get up from the chair, and apply herself to a domestic task. Hers is the harder job because she has had thirty more years of inculcation.

I wait and she pushes her calendar to the middle of the table.

            “Will you give me pictures of the boys on their sleds yesterday?” she asks. 

            “Of course,” I say, lifting the mug of tea to my lips. My mother has been sending Muriel a package every week. Sometimes it’s an envelope of pictures and sometimes she sends cookies, books for Rachel to read to her, or articles that I have written.

            “Good,” my mother says, with a wistful smile. “I’ll send them to her on Monday.” She stands up, walks over to the sink, and looks out the high window there. Her back tells me nothing.

            “Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?” she asks. “Do you need something?”

            I put the tea down, fighting every synaptic urge to deflect. Instead I hold myself to the chair. She has asked if I need something and I do. It is within her power to help me. She cannot help Muriel but she can help me. And I can help her. To take is to give.

“Yes, Mom, “ I say, my throat catching. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

            This is how the request is made and granted. The mother at the sink and the daughter at the table, her hand resting on a mug of cooled tea. Their words are not important because they do not tell the story of what each of them had to give up to be there.