French Toast for the Table

When I was little, tiny things used to bother me. I’m talking about things like the tags on my clothing. Whatever else might be happening around me, if there was an itchy tag scratching the back of my neck or side of my ribcage, I found it nearly impossible to focus on anything else. I needed to have the tags cut off, a thing that could make either of my parents furious if the request came at the wrong moment.

This happened one of the first nights I spent at my dad’s new apartment after he left me and my mom in the apartment I called home. He hadn’t said goodbye when he left, I’d just woken up one morning to find my mother sitting at the dining room table. She told me my dad wasn’t going to live with us anymore, he was going to find his own apartment, and when he did, I’d go visit him there.

Months went by where a lot of things happened that made even less sense. I didn’t see my dad or talk to him, and then my mom picked me up from daycare one evening, and told me I was going to spend the night at his new place.

I think I’d become a kid who’d lost faith in object permanence by then.

I couldn’t quite remember what my dad looked like, which seemed strange because he was my dad and it hadn’t been that long since I’d seen him. My mom had taken all his pictures down, except for one in her bedside table that I’d found, and would look at when she went out sometimes. It was an older picture of them from when I wasn’t even born. They looked happy. My mom didn’t look happy anymore. I didn’t want to go to a new place I’d never been.

I didn’t have the kind of parents who got down at eye level to ask how I was feeling, or if I had questions about anything, I had parents who told me what was going to happen. “Your dad is coming to get you, you’re going to sleep at his new apartment for a few nights, I’ll pick you up Friday after school. Here is your bag, there are clothes for the next few days. Your dad will buy you some things for his house soon.”

That’s how it was and how it had been. This was seventies parenting, and maybe this is why Gen X is Gen X. I brought my doll Suzy back and forth with me on transition days. She had to stay in my bag at school, but I couldn’t sleep without her so there wasn’t a way around it. On the night of pajama-gate, I think Suzy and I had done the back-and-forth routine two or three times. I was struggling with all of it.

I was in the loft with Suzy, trying to fall asleep. My dad’s new apartment was a big open place. No walls. There were two loft spaces for sleeping on either side. My dad and his girlfriend N were in the other loft, I could hear them murmuring to each other. N’s reading light was on, it gave off a little glow which I liked. Otherwise it was really dark in the apartment, and scary if I woke up while my dad and N were sleeping. My dad had gotten me a couple of sets of pajamas a few hours earlier.

It hadn’t been great. He couldn’t get me from daycare, he picked me up from my mom’s, and when he got there, she handed me a bag that only had my doll Suzy in it. When he asked where my other stuff was, my mom said she’d told him to get me clothes and pajamas and a toothbrush so I wouldn’t have to keep dragging a huge bag back and forth. She said, “She’s there half the time, I told you to buy her some things, I gave you her sizes. If you haven’t done it yet, you’ll have to do it on the way.”

My dad got angry then, and banged his fist into the kitchen counter. He asked her to just throw some goddamn things in a bag and he’d make sure I had what I needed next time, but my mom said no, she’d asked him four times already. My heart started pounding when my dad’s fist hit the counter, and I felt a lump forming in my throat watching my mom’s face get twisted when she looked up at him. Her eyes flashed like there was electricity behind them. For a second it looked like my dad was going to push his way past her to get my stuff himself, but he shook his head, grabbed my arm, and pulled me out the door.

She didn’t hug me when I left, and I knew if I cried they would both get angry.

My dad talked about my mom while we walked to his new place, so I didn’t have to say anything. This was good because I couldn’t have spoken, I was trying to breathe and having a hard time. It didn’t seem like it was just because my dad was tall and walked fast so I had to run to keep up, I felt like there was something heavy on my chest and I couldn’t get enough air. We stopped at Woolworth’s on the way and picked up pajamas, a pair of jeans, a package of underwear and socks, and some t-shirts. My dad said I could wear some of his sweatshirts if I got cold, he hadn’t been planning to spend all this money.

He was in a bad mood from the fight and called my mom lots of words I didn’t understand but knew were bad. I didn’t know if she was right because he should have gotten me things for his place, or he was right because she should have put some of my clothes in a bag. I just knew I wanted to disappear.

When I started crying about the tag that night, I’m sure it wasn’t just the tag. I said the tag was itchy and I couldn’t sleep, and my dad told me from his own loft that I was fine. I tried to pull the tag off myself, then, as hard as I could, but it wouldn’t budge. I wanted to sleep so I wouldn’t have to think about missing my mom, and my grandma, too, because I always missed her the worst at night. She had died right before my dad left. I held onto Suzy and cried into my pillow, trying not to make any noise. After about ten minutes my dad exploded, “OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, ALLY!”

I heard him coming down the ladder. “Alan,” N said, “don’t yell, she’s just little.” Then he flipped on the lights. “She’s old enough to be able to handle a goddamn tag,” he growled. I peered over the loft. I wished I’d been quieter. My dad was banging drawers open and then he went to the kitchen island for scissors. He took the t-shirts we bought out of the package and cut the tags off one at a time. Then he grabbed my new jeans and did the same. He went to the drawers under my loft, I heard them sliding open, and came out with the other set of pajamas. He cut the tags out of the top and bottoms. Then he started coming toward my loft again.

His face was purple and he was holding the scissors, and not the way you were supposed to, with the pointy side down. I didn’t want him to cut the tags off my pajamas anymore. My dad appeared at the top of the ladder. I said it was okay and I was sorry, but he insisted, and I knew I’d make him even angrier if I didn’t do as I was told, so I crawled over to where he was.

He shoved my hair out of the way, and yanked the collar down so the back of it was inside out. I could feel the front of it digging into my neck. It hurt, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I could feel him tug the scissors along the tag, and then he let go. “THERE!” he said, louder than he needed to, but not as loudly as he’d been yelling. “Hold on, let’s do the pants before I go back to bed and you start crying about that.” He grabbed the waist and cut the tag there, too, then went back down the ladder. I was relieved it was over.

“Thank you, Daddy, I’m sorry,” I said, and crawled back to my pillow and Suzy. I was shaking. When I breathed in, it came in two short, heaving breaths. When I let the breath out, I tried not to make any sound.

There are a lot of ways to teach a little kid to say thank you for not hurting me worse. It doesn’t take long to learn never to complain about anything, and to be afraid of men. Even the ones who are supposed to love you.

I started fixating on small details with people. The sound of my mother’s sigh, whether it was forlorn or furious. The way the space between her eyebrows looked, smooth or crinkled. The way my dad’s face fell and his eyes turned a darker shade of blue if I said something he didn’t like, and the way I could fix it if I said the right thing, which was usually something good about him. I’m sure I started noticing the small things because I thought if I was vigilant, I’d be safe.

I’ve been trying to figure out how we ended up here.

My guess is every one of us has been that kid, tiny in a big world, trying to make sense of what is happening around us. I saw a man on instagram the other day. I don’t follow him, or know why he was in my feed, just that I opened the app and there he was, and he was distraught. He said it was the hardest video he’d ever made, but his wife had died in childbirth two days ago. His lip quivered and tears were spilling out of his eyes. I could see the shock and grief just pouring out of him.

Their baby survived. He is in the NICU hooked up to machines. They’re trying to heal his brain, because he was denied oxygen during the labor, for some amount of time. They also have a two-year-old little boy, and a four-year-old. He said he was trying to keep it together for his boys, that they’d seen him crying, and he was fine with that because he wanted them to know it was okay to be sad, but he wanted to be strong for them, too.

Then he said his four-year-old had asked him that morning whether Mommy had her phone in Heaven because he really missed her and wanted to call. That was it for me, I just sat there bawling my eyes out. Then I noticed this man’s mother was answering comments. She said the grief they were all experiencing was unimaginable. She was thanking people for their kindness. I felt comforted that grandma was there, and so heartbroken for all of them.

I suggested Patrice Karst’s The Invisible String because it’s a beautiful kids’ book about grief and losing people, and how they’re never really lost to us. I thought it might comfort the four-year-old, maybe the two-year-old also. Maybe all of them a little bit. I wanted to send it to them myself, but we don’t give our addresses to strangers on the internet.

Some man in the comments said the kids would be fine, all of them, that they wouldn’t remember, but the husband needed support and he should take everyone to church. I miss my grandma every day of my life, though, and she died the week before my fourth birthday, the week before my dad left. I remember.

I remember her smile and her laugh and the way she smelled and I remember how I felt in her lap and in her arms. I remember her house at the Jersey Shore, and our walks to the beach before anyone else was awake. I remember riding the ferris wheel with her, sitting in her lap while she read me books, and the feeling of her fingertips making circles around my eyes, my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, to help me fall asleep at night. I also remember riding in the bucket seat of her car, the feeling of her arm flying across me if she had to stop short, the smell of her cigarettes and her tomato sauce.

I wanted to say all that in case there were any mothers dealing with terminal diagnoses or grandmas in those comments thinking maybe children don’t remember. I wanted to say that when I read Tatiana Schlossberg’s gorgeous essay and she wondered if her son would remember her.

That man on the internet has no idea what those boys will remember. I have no doubt he meant well, but sometimes it’s good to say less. He has no idea what this family’s beliefs are, either. Why would anyone presume church is a place that’s comforting to everyone? Why would we assume anything except kindness always helps?

It’s been hard lately. I don’t want to dwell on heartbreaking and enraging things, I wish the world was better than this, and that more people would recognize what a wild thing it is to open our eyes here on planet earth every morning. Not everyone gets to do that, sometimes things happen and suddenly you are ripped away from people you love more than life and you don’t even get to say goodbye — or they are ripped away from you, and then it’s too late. It’s too late.

You just have to hope you showed them how much you loved them every single day and that they carry that knowledge in their heart and in their bones. You have to hope you lived your life, and didn’t waste it screaming at people on the internet, or keeping lists in your head of all the ways you’ve been wronged.

I know people like that, we all do, and there’s nothing for it. Some people hold onto their anger and feed it until it’s a beast that consumes them and no one can get close. Then they get enraged because no one can get close, or because people who love them stop trying out of self-preservation. It isn’t loving to ask people to go up in flames with you, though. It isn’t loving to be venomous.

You have to hope you were good to people, that you didn’t spend your one, precious life being violent and angry, pounding your chest like you owned the place, grabbing children, using them any way you wanted to, grabbing girls and women, thinking they owed you something, thinking you were better than someone because of the color of your skin or the stubble on your chin.

Thinking the planet was yours for the taking, along with all the animals that fly through the sky, or walk across its surface, or swim below sea level. Thinking the land was yours if you wanted it, the mountains and the redwoods and the airspace, too — and if anyone tried to stop you from taking what you wanted, you’d kill them. I can’t even fathom a mindset like that, and I’m thankful.

I spent Mother’s Day with my kids, it was kind of a fever dream weekend because I didn’t sleep last Friday night. I was writing until 3:30am. I don’t have any kind of hold on time right now, or my place on the timeline. My circadian rhythm is not rhythming and sometimes I have no idea where the day went or how it could be over, because there are so many things left to do.

I get a surge of energy at 2am or 3am, and I have tried meditating and every other thing, believe me, so I just work instead. I sleep when I can, I seem to get a decent night of sleep every other night. I have a meeting with a doctor to discuss HRT (hormone replacement therapy) because I suspect that’s the culprit, or a big part of what’s happening, anyway.

Women have to be their own detectives and their own advocates, a thing any woman in your life will confirm if you ask, especially if she’s in perimenopause, which I am. I was told I wasn’t a good candidate for HRT a few years ago, because my maternal grandmother died of breast cancer. This information was based on a study that has since been called into question for a thousand and one reasons, but good luck to all of us because, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” — a quote attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and many other men — thus proving the point because no one knows where the quote came from originally.

The fun part is if you have children, perimenopause usually (not always) hits around the same time your children enter puberty and your parents are aging, which is why they call it the sandwich generation.

You are sandwiched between caring for your teenage children who suddenly have massive amounts of hormones surging through their veins, and your parents, who may be on different coasts, all while your own hormones start to fluctuate wildly. It’s fantastic. And you are carrying the mental load for everyone — which has never been a problem before because you were trained for that your whole life — getting texts about where someone’s keys, homework, or favorite sweater is, while maybe you are meeting with a team of doctors telling you your mom won’t make it if they have to perform CPR, they will break her ribs in the condition she’s in, and it would be better if she signs a DNR. And your half-sister calls to say your dad needs to be moved into an assisted living facility near her because he just kicked her dog across the kitchen.

Then your mom will die after the most gut-wrenching month of your life, but at least you will be there, stroking her hair and telling her not to be scared when it happens, even though you are sadder than you have ever been because you finally had the mom you always wanted — but you only got to have her for three weeks. Before long you will move your dad to be near you for the last year of his life, because your half-sister will die of a stroke six months after your mom dies. When your dad goes, you will cry, but you will not miss him. He wasn’t a great dad. Sorry, Daddy, RIP. I wish I missed you. I wish you’d given me more reasons.

Anyway, the point is you won’t know if it’s grief or hormones, or both, you’ll just know you’ve never felt this way, ever. You’ve never been so untethered. That’s all of us, to some degree. The details change, not everyone has kids, not everyone has all the loss one right after the other. Some people lose their parents when they are so young it hurts to think about, as mentioned. This is why you can never go wrong if you assume everyone is grappling with some kind of loss, and kindness is never wasted.

The Lyft came at 5am to take me and my daughter to the airport Saturday, so there wasn’t any sleeping for me. We flew to UC Davis for a college tour, then rented a car to drive to my son who is in his second year of college about two hours away. By the time we got to the hotel, I napped, a thing I rarely do. The three of us had dinner Saturday night, we went for pizza.

I suppose I knew we wouldn’t live under the same roof forever, because there was always a part of me mourning, even as I was soaking up all the joy when they were tiny, scampering around saying profound or hilarious things. My daughter at three asked me if I was there when the egg broke, and when I asked her which egg, she said, “The egg, Mommy. The egg that was my body before my body became my body. Were you there when it broke?” Uh … yeah? Lol.

Or my son, when he was four, suddenly realizing if his friend’s mom could die, then I could die, too, and asking me out loud from the backseat if that was the case, his little voice quavering. The way his eyes looked when I met them in the rearview mirror. He already knew.

I was reminded while we were at dinner about when they were little and we’d go out to eat — how many times the servers would comment when my daughter finished her food. It used to make me furious. This started as early as you can imagine, when they were two and four, three and five, four and six. My daughter is younger. I used to follow her around handing her food because her little knees and elbows jutted out all over the place.

Once in a while she’d clean her plate, though, and I’d be relieved. But if it happened when we were at a restaurant, nine times out of ten the server would say something like, “Wow, someone was hungry!” But nothing to my son, who’d also cleaned his plate. It wasn’t lost on any of us, and I could not allow that to be normalized, even though I’ve never been the person to “make it uncomfortable.” I guess motherhood cures some of us of that, because I started responding, “Yes, she was, and so was my son! Don’t forget to congratulate him, too!”

Are girls not allowed to be hungry? Are they not allowed to enjoy food and eat with enthusiasm? Is it so noteworthy if they do, that complete strangers feel comfortable commenting? This is rhetorical, of course. I grew up knowing I was supposed to be very careful with food. How much of it I ate. Whether my body was small enough. Small enough for what, though? Small enough to be easy to grab in a stairwell at thirteen? Small enough for a man to overpower me at any time?

Small enough to not take up too much space in a room? Small enough to not be intimidating? Small enough to prove I’d defer to a man? Small enough to know my place and stay in it. What is it we’re training girls to believe they’re allowed to enjoy? What kind of women do girls become with that kind of training?

I just read this article by Sara Szal, MD, about women and sex, and got to a part about the clitoris and how it “was not correctly mapped in a peer-reviewed medical publication until 1998, when Helen O’Connell, an Australian urologist, published the first complete anatomical dissection using modern technique.” And later in the article, “Even flibanserin, a drug developed specifically for female sexual desire, was tested almost entirely on male animals during preclinical development.^7” FFS. I don’t have words for how stupid that is.

In the cis-het world, women are not supposed to enjoy sex, we’re just supposed to be chaste and have babies. We’re under-babied in case you didn’t hear. Men get to enjoy sex, they can have as many partners as they like. We might roll our eyes and call them “playboys” or “confirmed bachelors” or say they have “Peter Pan Syndrome”, but we don’t call them whores and sluts and cast aspersions on their character.

There’s a certain kind of man who respects men like that, who is envious. There are far too many of them. They look at their single guy friend, out there at forty-five, trying to date twenty-year-olds, “living the life” while they’re tied down to the “old ball and chain” (haha, how funny), and think about greener pastures where no one is talking about bills or trying to manage childcare and a fulltime job, feeling unseen.

Women are supposed to keep their body count low. We all know about body count, right? We’re not talking about dead bodies in this context, we’re talking about the number of men a woman has had sex with, that’s her body count. Although, any man talking about a woman’s body count should stay very alert, because women my age have had it with their crap.

These are the same men who talk about “high value women” — a high value woman has a low body count. She’s feminine and soft, she takes good care of herself (she works out and is thin, her nails are done, she is waxed, she prioritizes “her man”). The second you hear language like this, you know you’ve landed in the incel funnel and you should run, fast. This is the world where men will tell you, “women only date men with money.”

I read an essay by a male therapist who said that, so keep your eyes open, and don’t assume letters after someone’s name mean they aren’t a misogynist. Imagine being a woman, paying that man to help you. When a man says women want men with money, he is saying he believes women are for sale. They are superficial. They can be bought. How lovely.

These are the men who hate women. Before long you’ll be hearing about the tradwife life and how great it is to churn butter.

You might remember I’ve been wondering how we got here. By here, I mean all of it. I’m wondering how we go from sweet little boys who love their mamas to men who disrespect and hurt children and women.

How we go from sweet little boys who love their mamas to men who hate people because they are Black.

How we go from sweet little boys who love their mamas to men who work to overturn Roe, destroy the Voting Rights Act, and dismantle democracy. (Currently there are too many people I could tag here. They include every man in the administration, every Republican senator and congressman who has not stood up to this president, every Democratic senator and congressman who has not fought hard enough, and every man on the Supreme Court who decided to back John Roberts in his twisted endeavors. Also, Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, Yarvin, and The Heritage Foundation. This is an incomplete list.)

Of course they can’t do it without women. It’s systemic, it’s white supremacy, it’s patriarchy, it’s technocracy, it’s rampant capitalism…but underneath all of that you have to be able to dehumanize people — to not care about them, genuinely. You have to see a certain kind of person as not being worthy of your compassion.

I think to get to that place, you must not have an ounce of respect for yourself.

What is grinding my gears like an itchy tag at the back of my neck is the consistent effort made by the people with power in this country to give cover to the perpetrators of heinous crimes while hanging the survivors out to dry. I feel positive if CNN did an undercover report and found women were drugging, assaulting, and filming their husbands and uploading that content to websites so other women could pay to watch or learn how to do it, too, the FBI would be pounding down their doors. Those women would be behind bars, their faces would be splashed across every newspaper and magazine, we’d know their names, their husbands would have book deals and movie deals and interviews … but not in reverse.

Just like the Epstein files get released and the perpetrators’ names are blurred and survivors’ names are in the public domain, even the ones who wanted to remain anonymous. These people are brazen in their lack of care. Ghislaine Maxwell shows no remorse from her prison camp in Texas where she goes to pilates and eats organic meals. The women inmates who had the audacity to tell reporters she was getting special treatment were moved to higher-security facilities in retaliation. For what? Why are they being punished for telling the truth?

Photo by Alexandra Tran on Unsplash

At brunch on Sunday, we got “French Toast for the table.” If you’re a fan of Somebody, Somewhere, you’ll get the reference right away, and if you aren’t, you’re welcome, it’s one of my favorite shows ever. Pretty sure you can watch it on YouTube with a subscription, I watched before we were boycotting everything. French toast for the table is exactly as it sounds. It’s like an appetizer order of French Toast and I don’t know why this wasn’t a thing before.

The French Toast we ordered had mascarpone in the middle and berry compote on top and it was insane. My son’s fantastic girlfriend was there, and my daughter of course, and my son, and our server was a woman. She was ecstatic about our appetizer, and very encouraging of everyone’s full and enthusiastic participation in savoring every bite. I loved her.

My son was talking about how vision is two-dimensional, and we’re filling in the rest with our minds. That we’re basically seeing two 2D images, one from each eye, and because there’s distance between our eyes, we get depth perception, and there are shadows and light, and then there’s our brain, filling in the blank space. (He’s studying cognitive science.)

I brought up that debunked thing everyone used to say about how people only use 15% of their brains, and he was saying you might use 15% at one time or another, but obviously unless something has gone wrong or there’s an injury, we’re all using our entire brains. I wondered aloud if maybe what people really meant is we’re only understanding 15% of life. After all, we’re on one planet, in one solar system, in a vast universe, and no one knows what happens next.

I said when I get really down, I try to remind myself that we have no idea about any of this. Maybe we are a really young species and that’s why we’re so unfathomably dumb and cruel (not all humans). This was a few days after the idiot-in-chief had the Pentagon release the alien/UFO footage, which was maybe the heartiest laugh I had last week.

Our whole lives we’ve been hearing “people can’t handle it.” They can’t tell us about UFOs and aliens, because we’d have an existential crisis — and here’s this absolute buffoon, making such a colossal mess of things and underestimating people’s intelligence to such a degree he’s like, “Release the UFO shit, they won’t even notice we’ve spent $29 billion so far on the war no one wanted, the $6-dollar-a-gallon gas prices, the gutting of the VRA, the way we’re going after reproductive rights even in blue states, or the fact that I’m awarding myself $1.7 billion dollars in taxpayer money from the IRS I now control because someone leaked my tax returns so the public would know about my finances which is a thing everyone who runs for president always does, and they had the gall to investigate me and my blindly loyal followers for actually and factually causing an insurrection!” If you think he isn’t directing that money back to himself after awarding the insurrectionists, might I interest you in a gold phone?

So we were laughing because it was Mother’s Day and I didn’t want to cry, and I said maybe we see in 2D in a 3D world because if we could really see everything that’s going on we’d freak out. Like maybe there are portals to other timelines right in front of us. Staircases to other dimensions and the people we love who’ve moved to the next level are right there, keeping an eye on us, hoping we can feel them. Hoping we’re all going to be okay down here.

Maybe there’s a world where we don’t have to work so hard for the really basic things, where it’s a total given that whatever the color of your skin, whatever your gender, whomever and however you love, you are always worthy of compassion and dignity and the same rights to freedom and peace as anyone else. Maybe there’s a world where people take care of each other, and everyone eats, and no one ever sleeps on the street because, maybe in that world they don’t cover the grass with concrete, or pollute the skies with emissions of every possible kind.

There aren’t people sleeping outside, because if someone needs a place, they’re invited in like family, or the village builds them a place of their own. Maybe there’s a world where people share what they have, and trade the things they don’t, where sick people are always cared for, and you don’t even have to vote for it because no one needs to be told the things any four-year-old could tell you, and would, if you sat down to chat.

Maybe we could build that world right where we are. There are more of us, after all. Maybe we could even build it without itchy tags.

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