The Sixth Gear

Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop...

There’s a thing about growing up in a house where you have to be on high alert all the time, and in my case, I grew up in two households like that. At my mom’s I was always waiting and watching to see what kind of night it would be. The timer would start when I’d hear the phlunk of the cork coming out of the first bottle of chardonnay. This was usually around 5pm, but sometimes earlier. As the night would progress and more corks would be released from more bottles, I’d be trying to figure out what kind of mood my mother was in, if there was any way to slow things down, distract her, or find a way to keep myself safe. There never was, but not for lack of effort on my part.

At my dad’s it was mostly about the phone. If a “lady friend” called the house, that would be it for the night, especially if my dad didn’t get to the phone in time. If my stepmom answered and a woman asked for my dad, she’d lock herself in the bathroom, run a very hot bath, and sit in the tub sobbing for hours. It sucked because I loved her, and also because my dad would feign innocence, roll his eyes, and shrug his shoulders like he could not imagine why she was beside herself, why she had to ruin the night this way.

You’d’ve thought she was a real depressive to hear him tell it. Just because he could not keep his dick in his pants, just because her family had disowned her for living in sin with my dad, just because he was her first and she was twenty-two when they met, why on earth would she be so upset? As a kid I had no way of knowing, so I followed his lead. It must be her. Still, I hated hearing her cry like that, and I hated the way the night would be overtaken by so much sadness.

I was always trying to outsmart the trouble. If my mom went out for the night, I’d make sure my baby brother was asleep when she got back. I’d make sure the house looked perfect - and that meant everything in its place, couch-pillows-fluffed, not-a-fork-in-the-sink perfection. I’d make sure my homework was done, my lunch was packed for the next day, my clothes were laid out for the morning.

I’d be in bed with my door shut and the lights out, and I’d breathe slow and steady, the way I knew sleeping people breathed, even though I was never asleep. None of it mattered if she was in an alcohol-fueled rage, and she was most nights. She’d flip my light on and tell me to climb down out of my loft right now. She’d come up with something I’d said or done or not done or said, and all hell would break loose in my bedroom. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it except try to shield my face and head, and hope it wouldn’t be too awful or go on too long.

At my dad’s, my favorite kind of night was the kind when the phone didn’t ring. No way to control that.

The thing about growing up and learning to scan the environment for danger as a regular thing you do, is that it makes you unnaturally good in an emergency. You get used to chaos, so when something unexpected happens, you’re probably going to spring into action a little sooner than everyone else, or appear calmer than a normal person would. It can be handy to have people like me around if something terrible is going down, but it can also be super fucking weird.

I’ve written about this before, but once I was driving my parents’ minivan in Connecticut with my best friend Tracy, and I hit a patch of black ice. You can’t do anything about that except take your foot off the gas and keep your hands on the wheel, and sure enough, the back end swung out and we started crossing the road - meaning the part where traffic comes from the other direction - heading toward a stone wall. We were just lucky there was no traffic coming from the other direction. But as the stone wall loomed larger and larger and it was clear we were going to hit it head-on, I said, “We’re going to hit the wall, but we’re going to be okay.” Mind you, this all happened in about four seconds.

Photo by mike mcgrath on Unsplash

I said that out loud, like a robot-narrator, as we were heading toward the wall. We laughed about it later. We still laugh about it sometimes, because it’s crazy. Who does that? Me. Hi, I do that. Then we hit the stone wall, and we were, in fact, okay. Tracy had a sprained sternum, and I had whiplash and could never do shoulder-stand again, but we were okay. I put the minivan in reverse, and drove us back to Tracy’s house.

She was doing regular things like crying, like an actual human. She’d seen her life flash in front of her, she’d thought of her boys, so little at the time. I said we’d be back at her house in three minutes, and she could go and hug them right away. I said I loved her. I’m not a robot normally, just when I’m heading toward a stone wall. We got to her driveway.

She got out of the minivan, but I stayed in the drivers’ seat. I told her I was going to drive back to New York City so I could tell my parents about the car in person. She looked at me like I was insane, and said I should come and take a look. So I got out, and walked to the front of the car, except there was no front of the car. It was an accordion-looking thing with lights, the minivan version of a french bulldog, and clearly, not a vehicle anyone should be driving. There was smoke pouring out from under the hood. The idea that anyone would think this was a car that was drivable is hilarious in retrospect. There’s such a thing as too calm.

Shock can do all kinds of things to people - fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop. For people who grew up with intense chaos, there’s a sixth gear that’s something like autopilot or cruise control. You can do all the things you need to do, but you might not be fully there. It’s a survival technique, kind of like a scale you’re trying to balance - you may not be able to control the elements around you, but you can retreat to a place inside yourself where everything is quiet and still. It’s the only way you make it.

Last Friday after I recorded the podcast, I went to meet my agent for lunch. She’s a close friend, I’ve known her for years now. She’s the kind of person you’d want in your corner in a professional setting or a personal one, and it so happened we were sitting in the corner at the cafe. We talked about everything, her grown kids, my growing kids, work generally, the book I’m finishing, and the things you only talk about with the people you trust.

We talked about the (ongoing, horrifying, enraging) dismantling of all our checks and balances, of course - I don’t think it would be possible to have lunch with anyone sane and not talk about that - but we also tried to just have lunch and connect. There’s a shifting awareness you have to find to survive here right now, and I don’t say that lightly. You have to pay attention to what’s happening in our country and fight wherever and however you can, and you also have to replenish your tank with some hope and joy so you can show up for your friends and neighbors.

Your Friends and Neighbors is great by the way, even though I wouldn’t want to know any of the characters IRL. Except the guitar-playing sister. John Hamm is so good. I digress, but watching the shows and escaping here and there is also a coping mechanism. I might as well tell you while we’re on the subject, I wasn’t sure I could handle The Handmaid’s Tale this season since we’re living it, but it’s very satisfying. They’re fighting. As in, fighting.

They’re not sitting around calling their senators and uh…not shopping. I mean I know we’re protesting, I’m protesting. I know the boycotts are working, I’m boycotting, too. I’m just saying they’re doing things all the time, they’re strategizing out in the world. They’re meeting in abandoned buildings and having conversations about what to try next. It’s good to see, even on a television show, and maybe we’ll take note.

Anyway, things are strange is the point. It feels like we’re protesting where and how we can, and also waiting to see what’s going to happen, even though a lot of really terrible shit has already happened and continues to happen and will probably happen tomorrow. Still, somehow you have to live. You have to laugh. You have to work. You have to buy groceries and make sure your kids are okay. You have to hold your people a little closer and tighter. Hopefully you can also do things like literally make sure your neighbors are okay, especially the older ones who live alone.

When we left the cafe, we walked toward my agent’s house, which was in the same direction I’d parked. We turned the corner, and stopped to say goodbye when there was a loud bang behind us. We turned, and it took a few seconds to make sense of what was happening. There was traffic, but it was slowing. There was an overturned bike in the road, and a person in the street, on their back in the bike lane.

There were several people frozen at each corner of the intersection, also trying to understand what they were seeing. A few people had come out of restaurants on the block. I realized a car had hit someone on a bike. The bike was overturned in the street, the person in the bike lane was starting to move. It took several seconds for my brain to register that the person who’d been hit was a kid.

He was about the shape and height of my own kids. My mom-brain went into action. One thing you don’t want to do right after you’ve been hit by a car is start moving too quickly, because shock can mask pain, even broken bones. I started heading in his direction and that’s when I realized he was a teenage boy. My heart clutched because he reminded me of my son - not the way he looked, exactly, but just the way he was. He was sweet and stunned and trying to shake it off. I was too late, he was up on his feet. I told him to come sit down on the curb, the curb that was on the side street where he could be away from traffic and sit in the grass.

“I feel okay,” he said a little too loudly, “this isn’t as bad as the last time I got hit by a car on my bike,” and he grinned at me in a lopsided way, but his voice sounded full of adrenaline, and his pupils were dilated. “I think you’re in shock,” I said to him, “should we give your mom a call?” He pulled his phone out of his bag, unlocked it and called his mom on speaker.

She answered right away. “Hi, I got hit by a car again!” he said, and I heard her yelp in this way I felt in my chest. “Is it okay if I talk to her?” I asked him, and he nodded, so I took his poor mom off speakerphone and introduced myself. I said he had gotten up off the street and walked to where we were sitting, he was in one piece and not bleeding, but I did think he was stunned.

She said she agreed, his voice sounded funny. I told her the paramedics were on the way, and he should probably have X-rays, because his tailbone was hurting and so was his hip. I told her where we were and asked if she could get to us. That’s when she said she was in Florida, coming back the next day. Her voice sounded so tiny.

I knew how helpless and devastated I would feel if this was one of my kids and I was in another state. The thought of it physically hurt. I told her I’d stay with him until the ambulance came, and if she needed me to meet him at the ER I would.

The paramedics came and it turned out he did have a hairline fracture of his hip. His mom found a friend who met him at the ER, but she and I texted all weekend, and she sent me the X-ray when she got it. Turns out our kids are at the same high school.

After the ambulance left I saw the old man who had been driving. He was just standing on the corner by himself. I knew it was him because he had pulled over and given his ID and insurance to the cops. He had answered their questions. He had watched the paramedics drive away with the kid in the ambulance and he’d seen the cops load his bike into their car to drop it off at his house. The man didn’t look well, he looked pale. He was in shock, too. I felt sorry for him and stopped to see if I could do anything.

He said the last two years had been really awful, his wife was dying, he was broke, and this was the last thing he needed. He didn’t see the kid pull out in front of him. But why were they taking him to the hospital if he’d been up on his feet? I said sometimes when you’re in shock you don’t feel pain. I said it was good he was getting X-rays. I put my hand on the man’s arm. “Imagine if he wasn’t okay. Seriously, this could be so much worse.” His eyes got wide. “You’re right,” he said, “you’re right.” I told him I was very sorry about his wife.

I’m not a saint, believe me. I’ve just spent a lot of time with people who are in their last years. It’s not easy. People start dying. Your close friends, people you grew up with, your siblings, your partner. It’s brutal and lonely. Your body betrays you. Your mind gets a little spotty, or it gets really spotty, or you forget where you are or who you are. You might lose a lot more than that.

Sometimes people can’t speak anymore, or they can’t swallow. Sometimes they can’t get up out of bed, or even breathe without help. It fucking guts you to watch that happen to people you love. I wish I couldn’t tell you how much. That’s a shock, too, going through all that loss. When I think about the shocks we endure in this world, it’s a wonder we’re able to get up and out the door some days. A little compassion in all directions goes a long way.

Once, years ago, I pulled into my driveway. My kids were about five and seven, my son is older. I got out of the car and went to the gate, my kids were getting out of the backseat. My daughter got out of her car seat behind the drivers’ side, my son got out the passenger door side. They slammed the doors at the same time, but suddenly my son was yelling. Not words, just “Ahhhhhhhhh!!!!’

I went running to where he was standing, outside the car, and I could not understand what I was seeing. He was staring at his index finger, which was stuck in the car door. The door was closed. His finger was not in the part of the door that you enter, it was in the hinge. I raced over and opened the door. We both looked down at his finger.

It was the very tip that had been closed in the door when he slammed it. It was flattened and purple, and that’s when the tears came, his and mine. He lost the nail and that was the worst of it. But that moment where you freeze, where your brain can’t process what it’s seeing, that’s the moment. That's the place where it’s hard to act, where it takes a second before you open the door.

About a year after that when my daughter was six and my son was eight, I got a call from their elementary school. My daughter was in the nurse’s office and the nurse thought I’d better come right away. I was grabbing my keys and locking the door as she was telling me what happened. My kids had been playing on the schoolyard during recess. My daughter had seen my son across the yard and started running toward him, and tripped. She split her chin, in that same place where people do, right underneath the jawline.

When she stood up, the front of her shirt was covered in blood and she started screaming. My son went running toward her, but a school guard got to her first, didn’t understand they were siblings, and would not let him go to the nurse’s office with her. That part isn’t relevant, maybe, but it kills me a little every time I think of it. I asked the nurse how bad it was and she said the wound was deep, she could see white, and my daughter would definitely need stitches. I almost passed out on the phone.

I got there in about three minutes to find my daughter pale and in shock. I picked her up and carried her to the car, and drove her to the ER. When we got there, we waited for a bit before they took us in. My daughter was in my lap, and I was holding her, rocking back and forth, kissing her head and telling her everything was going to be okay. I would have loved for someone to be there kissing my head, telling me the same thing if you want to know the truth.

Eventually the doctor came and took a look at my daughter’s chin. She suggested a combination of stitches and glue. She gave us ice to numb her chin and said she would give her shots of anesthetic before the stitches. I did not feel fully in my body. We went into the room where the stitches were going to happen. The doctor asked me if I was okay and I said yes. There wasn’t an option not to be okay.

They’d shot my daughter up with the anesthetic by then. She was on the table, they’d strapped her arms down, but I was there, talking to her, reassuring her everything was all right. She believed me. The weight of that alone is enough to humble you. She was calm. I was holding her hand, but I was feeling sick. My stomach was doing flips.

What’s happening? I wondered, I watch The Walking Dead, I have an iron stomach. I can handle this. Friends, this is literally what I was telling myself, as if watching The Walking Dead should somehow prepare me to deal with someone taking what looked like a fish-hook to my tiny daughter’s gaping chin.

The room went grey. It turned sideways and got pixelated and I realized I might pass out which was not an option for fuck’s sake. My kid needed me. I put my head down near the bed, very close to her protruding hip-bone. She was all elbows and knees and giant eyes looking up at me in those days. She couldn’t see me in that moment, she just needed to know I was there.

“You okay, Mom?” I heard the doctor ask through some kind of tunnel. It’s strange when people who aren’t your kids call you Mom. I nodded. Forced myself to say yes with a lot more confidence than I felt. Managed to stay on my feet, holding my girl’s hand until it was over. The doctor announced she was done, told my daughter she’d done a great job, and then told me to sit down.

She instructed someone to bring me apple juice and graham crackers. She told me to put my head between my knees. I didn’t question anything, I did what I was told. I know when I’m beat. When the apple juice came I drank it, when the graham crackers showed up, I ate them. Sometimes you want someone to tell you what to do to make things better. You want instructions.

Or maybe I should say I want that occasionally. Not most of the time. But when there’s something way outside my scope of knowledge - for example, what the fuck to do when your country is in the midst of a self-coup - then yes. I don’t always know what to do, I’m just supposed to know. I had to know as a kid, it’s the only way I got through. I have to know as a mom. But I don’t have all the answers for this, none of us do.

I will say I knew the Friday Elon Musk showed up at the Treasury with 6 kids and some flash drives - we were screwed. I knew when senators were going live from their couches on instagram to tell us about it over that weekend, something was very, very wrong. I called it a coup that weekend, and I saw a few eyebrows raise. I called it a coup in my essay that week. It was like that moment when my son stood staring and screaming at his finger, or seeing the fish-hook about to go into my daughter’s chin, or the moment on the corner last week after that boy got hit by the car.

It was the same feeling every night watching the corks add up on the dining room table, or wondering if the phone was going to ring at my dad’s. I know when something is bad. I know when it’s an emergency. I know when there’s clear and present danger. No one has to tell me how to recognize those signs.

No one has to tell me what to do when a teenage kid gets hit by a car and his mom isn’t there, it’s obvious. No one has to tell me to talk to the old man standing on the corner, alone, staring into the middle distance. No one has to tell me to check on my neighbors or be there for my friends.

Sometimes you can see what’s happening clearly even if you can’t stop it, so you say it out loud because it’s better than nothing. We’re going to hit the wall, but we’re going to be okay. I think a lot of us are doing that as we write. We’re saying: you don’t share attack plans in a group chat. You don’t kidnap people in the dead of night, deny them due process and traffick them to El Salvador. You don’t arrest women for having miscarriages. You don’t tell schools what they can teach, and withhold federal funds if they refuse to obey. You don’t let wacked out billionaires steal our data and sell it to Russia.

You say, this is a coup. You say this is a Constitutional crisis. You say it’s really strange to be against diversity. It’s really sad to believe that everyone does not deserve equal access to clean air, drinkable water, solid infrastructure, a good education, and affordable healthcare. You say - it’s so odd to proudly declare you are against inclusion - have you really thought about that?

You say everyone should be able to love who they love, pray or not pray, and use whatever name or pronoun they want. You say everyone should have bodily autonomy. You say it should not be harder for women to vote than it is for men…are you serious?

The things you have to say get more offensive and outrageous every day. Off the top of my head, for example, if you want more babies in the United States, don’t give women $5000 for having a baby, or a medal (seriously, someone needs to round these people up and sit them down and do some kind of intervention and teach them how to be just like, remotely normal human beings if we can’t get them out of the building), and don’t discriminate against queer people by allocating 30% of fellowships to married couples (because this administration ONLY RECOGNIZES STRAIGHT MARRIAGES) -

excuse me while I rip my clothes off and run naked through the house screaming expletives -

This is what you do: Give us paid family leave, affordable childcare, free lunch at school, support for our public schools, teachers, and public libraries, and sane gun control laws so the children we have don’t get shot in their classrooms every single week.

You say these things out loud for yourself, and for other people who feel the way you do. That way you know you aren’t alone. But you don’t always know what to do, and I know this might seem so strange from the outside. I see it in comments on social media - people in other countries telling us to fight before it’s too late, asking us what the hell we’re waiting for, and why we aren’t doing anything.

Half the voting public here like what’s happening. The half that hate what’s happening are the people who believe in the rule of law. We believe in the Constitution and we’re hoping the courts are going to work, maybe. We’re hoping there are going to be more Harvards, more big universities saying hell no and fighting back. More corporations saying no, more law firms. Every time it happens, the swell of support is huge. Every time a giant university caves, or a company does, we lose ground.

We are fighting, we are trying. We’re protesting and boycotting the companies that have caved, supporting local businesses as a rule and trying to keep our people safe. Some of it is working some amount. I don’t know that there’s anything that will fix this quickly, because there isn’t a unified front (yet). There isn’t a groundswell of support amongst we, the people. We’re divided here. It’s devastating because for people like me, who think this is just about basic empathy and decency, the idea that so many people don’t agree is a real blow to the soul. But I’m not shocked anymore.

We’re seeing how many corks are going to pile up and how bad things are going to get. Most of us have some kind of escape plan, even if it’s vague. No one is coming to save us, that much we know. We save ourselves or we don’t get saved. The how we save ourselves is the thing we’re still figuring out. We don’t need all of us to figure it out, just about 3.5 million of us. On my good days, I’m looking for abandoned buildings big enough. Some days I’m in sixth gear. Blessed be the fruit.

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Friends, I’ll be in conversation with the wonderful Paul Crenshaw tomorrow night (4/24) at 5:30pm PST, 7:30pm CDT, 8:30pm ET here on Substack. This is Part 2 of Off the Page, Growing up Gen X, this time diving into the music and films that shaped us, and also the topic of self-doubt and writing. How you overcome that beast or make friends with it, or do what you have to do so you can get busy getting the words out of your head, and somewhere other people can see them. Hope you can join us :)