Throwback Thursday: My Wedding Day

I recently pulled a bunch of old files off a computer that was being retired, and it's been kind of fun to dip into them. Today, for Throwback Thursday, I share a write-up of Raider's and my wedding day, which happened when I was about five months pregnant with the Lego Savant. I was a grad student at  the time, and was taking an expensive anti-nausea medication because I was very sick during that pregnancy. I ran out of prescription coverage, and we hoped I could do without the meds. That turned out not to be true, so we decided to get married to get me on Raider's health insurance.

I remember that Raider proposed to me on the stairs, which I had made it only halfway down before being unable to proceed. I called to him and he brought me saltines and applesauce. In my memory, I felt like I might throw up. In Raider's memory, I had thrown up, and since he's the guy who had to clean up, we might trust his memory over mine. We had a running joke earlier in my pregnancy where, after a bout of upchucking, we'd say something like, "At least if I had to throw up in the living room, I made it to the wastepaper basket!" Then that had to be downgraded to, "At least I made it off the rug and onto the hardwood floor," like a cat with a hairball. And so on.

What we both remember is sitting on the steps, feeling discouraged that my nausea had come back so quickly after I went off the Zofran, and we remember the words of Raider's proposal: "I think it's time for that shotgun wedding we've been planning."

This report was written to friends and family.

The Romantic Engagement, February 4, 2001

Really, this will be quick. I just want to let people know that I've now been off my anti-nausea meds for six days, and after several days of feeling worse and worse, I started throwing up again yesterday. I feel like all I did yesterday was cry. Today I feel more cheerful, though still nauseated.

I talked to my practitioner about less-expensive medication options, and it turns out that I have very few. Apparently most of the available ones are related to compazine, and my bad reaction to compazine back in December means I can't take any of them.

Therefore, Raider and I are going to get a marriage license on his lunch hour today. I called the district court for information about civil ceremonies, and it turns out it's so simple that by the time I got off the phone I had made us an appointment for Friday afternoon. That's a weird thing to put in your calendar: "Wedding, 2:30 Friday." Especially since I picked Friday afternoon instead of Friday morning because I already have an appointment on Friday morning, and this way I don't have to cancel it. And then, of course, I should add: "Pharmacy, 3:00 Friday." My coverage under Raider's insurance is effective as of the date of the wedding. Woo-hoo.

It struck me funny that the scheduler at the district court didn't blink at all when she asked me when we wanted to get married, and I said, "Um, sometime in the next week, I guess? Is that possible?" I wanted to say, "Really, we're not rushing into anything. We've been together 7 1/2 years, it's just that I'm taking this really expensive medication my insurance won't cover anymore." How's that for a good reason to get married? Perhaps we should work it into the vows.

I don't feel very good about getting married this way, but it seems like the best choice right now. And Raider keeps framing it as "once this is done, we'll be legal next-of-kin," which does feel very positive. Perhaps we should work that into the vows, too: "Raider, I hereby take you as legal next-of-kin, with all the rights and obligations pertaining thereto, including the right to take a very expensive drug and have it paid for by your health plan." Then I throw up into a nearby potted plant, and then Raider says, "Su, I hereby take you as legal next-of-kin, in sickness (obviously) and in health (someday, with any luck)." And then the magistrate pronounces us, and the waiting ambulance rushes us to the Sparrow Professional Building pharmacy, where I fork over $800+ for my medication and pop one on the spot; then we rush to Human Resources at CoreComm Formerly Voyager.Net, slam the license on the desk, and say, "Sign us up, and by the way may we please have a claim form?"

The Ceremony, February 9, 2001

I think the baby might have had hiccups this morning. I felt movement that was very regular in exactly the same place for 2-3 minutes, which is not something that has happened before. Cute.

I wrote a huge long e-mail yesterday all about the Wedding Day, and just as I was finishing, lost it in a computer crash. Sigh. Normally I’m really good about saving as I go, but of course you have to get zinged every now and then. I suppose I could just write a short version for you now, since re-writing a thing that has already been written is so tedious. I think the short version would be something like this:

License gives my last name as "Pen" (but my father's as "Penn") and states Raider’s birthplace as the imaginary town of Bismarck, South Dakota. These errors are corrected. Quick drive from county clerk office to courthouse. Glamorous lunch at Arby’s on the way. Romantic ambiance at the courthouse: Guy in handcuffs, many lawyers, and disgruntled people involved in lawsuits share the waiting room. Many tedious jokes about "last chance to back out." Ceremony: 27 seconds flat. "Raider, you may kiss your bride"--blech. Vows otherwise unobjectionable. Also unmemorable. No ID requested from any party involved, bride, groom, or witnesses, at any time during entire process. Bride, groom, and witnesses convinced there is a lucrative scam in that fact if only we can figure it out.

Let’s see…what is worth expanding in that? Cora found a blue marble in the parking lot at Arby’s and we decided that counted for my something new and something blue. When it became clear that neither Raider nor I had brought any cash, we thought for a moment that the 10 bucks for the wedding might have to be the something borrowed, but fortunately the court takes checks. When I got my receipt from the clerk, it read "Received from Su Penn. On behalf of Penn, Su," which struck me funny. The clerk then yelled "Hey, Mike, feel like doing a wedding?" which made all four of us laugh.

Since we did not want to repeat vows or exchange rings, the service consisted of Raider and I holding hands, each being asked a short question to which we replied "I do," and then Toots and Cora signing the wedding certificate in triplicate, two copies for the county clerk and one, with a gold seal, for us. The question we were asked was quite acceptable to both of us, though the whole thing happened so quickly that we have some trouble remembering it. On the way out to the car, we were trying to recreate it, and I said, "I remember we promised to support and encourage each other in all the conditions of life, but there was something else…I just can’t remember it…what was it?" Toots said. "Uh,  love." Oh, yeah. I find it interesting that a purely civil ceremony requires us to promise love, support, and encouragement. I mean, we've been loving, supporting, and encouraging each other for 7 1/2 years. But I guess now it's a legal obligation.

The wedding was sandwiched into quite a busy day. I got up in the morning with 4 pages of my 5-page paper still to write, and suggested to Raider that if he drove himself to work I could re-claim the round-trip drive time to write. At 9:50, I went into the kitchen for a glass of juice, and noticed the time. At that point, I had 6 pages of my 5-page paper written. "Why was I worried about finishing this?" I asked myself. "We have three hours before we have to leave for the wedding."

Back at my computer, I suddenly remembered I had a massage at 10:30. OK. So I wrote for another 20 minutes, put on my coat, and reached for the car keys. No car keys. Ever since the key broke off in the ignition last year, there has been only one useable key for our car, so it's very important that people not leave it in their pockets but hang it on its special hook by the door. Imagine my disgruntlement upon discovering that Raider had not left the key hanging on the hook. "That darn Raider took the key!" I said to myself. Then I remembered that he had, of course, taken the key because he had, at my request, taken the car. Great.

I stole Toots's car, hoping that this would not be the one morning in 20 when he had an appointment or an errand to run before noon. My massage was lovely, and left me with a very pleasant feeling of physical and emotional well-being. It also left me with massage hair, a special oily, spiky look I get after she finishes massaging my scalp. This ended up being my wedding coif, as I had to use the hour between the massage and leaving for the wedding to finish my paper, print it, proof it, and print it again, leaving no time for hair-washing. My paper was coming off the printer just as Toots was thundering damply down the stairs after his shower which was just as the clock was chiming 1 p.m.

Toots and I quickly discovered that one of the problems with quickie weddings is that there is so little time to think through the details. For instance, Toots and I knew we were supposed to pick our friend Cora up at 1, but neither of us had been told whether we were collecting her at home or at work. We guessed work, and were fortunately correct. Then we discovered that no one had told Toots that we were also picking Raider up, so he had had no opportunity to clear out the Supplemental Storage Area in his car so that a 4th person could sit there. This was quickly accomplished in the parking lot at CoreComm Formerly Voyager Dot Net, in the steady rain which had by that time been falling for over 12 hours.

The rain made us grateful we had decided against the outdoor wedding in the park.

After the wedding, we dropped Cora back at work, put my paper in Dr. Arch's mailbox, and went for ice cream. Then we decided it might be a good day to finally get my birthday present, a $50 CD shopping spree I had been promised in October but had been too sick to take advantage of. So Toots, Raider, and I wandered pleasantly in and out of used CD shops in East Lansing (in the rain), picking out CDs. "What a pleasant day we're having!" we kept saying to each other, meaning that we had enjoyed eating ice cream and were enjoying wandering around town together.

When we got home, we discovered that, not only had Raider's 120 megabytes of memory, ordered only the day before, arrived days before he expected it, but the new computer books he had ordered from Amazon.com and anxiously awaited all week had also arrived. "What an exciting day for you!" Toots gushed enthusiastically, knowing how much fun Raider was going to have installing his memory and reading his new books ("Programming the Perl CGI" and "Learning Red Hat Linux."). We kept laughing at ourselves because we kept saying what a great day it was, completely forgetting that we had been married in the course of it.

Of course, we weren't feeling romantic about the wedding and it didn't represent a new level of commitment for us. Raider and I commented that it didn't feel much more significant than the last time we were in the county seat, last August, to execute a quit-claim deed. But one significant thing is that I did, on Friday morning, re-fill my prescription and start taking my medication again. If past experience is any guide, I should start feeling better today or tomorrow.

I will say this about the last two weeks: although I have been nauseated all the time, my stomach has hurt, and I have, on occasion, thrown up, it has not been nearly as bad as it was in the fall. I've been able to have pretty normal days, to continue to go to classes, run errands, do my housework, do my animal chores (and some of Raider's, since he's been sick with a cold all week). But it has also been two weeks of feeling steadily worse each day, so who knows how bad it might have gotten--I am very glad to have my little pills back.

The Anniversary

November 8 was my mom's birthday, and I was really taken by surprise when I had a bit of a meltdown over it. My mom died a year ago today, and my year hasn't been anything like what other people told me it would be. My relationship with my mom was such that her death brought a mix of grief, anger, and relief, and after a couple of weeks of grieving, I didn't feel it much.

There was only one time all year--in a Whole Foods in Philadelphia--when I saw something that reminded me of her and felt sad for a minute. And only once, about two months ago, did I have the impulse to talk to her about something. And then I had to laugh at myself because whenever I gave into that impulse while she was alive, it ended badly for me.

I'm surprised, therefore, and a little pissed off, to be having anniversary-of-death related feelings today. But there you have it. Apparently the emotional brain has an internal clock that keeps track of these things. I've been in a very low mood the last few days, and I suppose this is part of it. I suppose, too, that it will pass.

When my parents were alive--oh, there's a Freudian slip. My dad is still alive, but he disowned me at Christmastime last year and I haven't seen him since. Anyway, when my parents were part of our lives, I didn't talk to my kids about the bad stuff in my relationship with them. I wanted my kids to have their own relationship with my parents, whatever that might be. But since they've been gone, I've had opportunities to talk to the older kids about how complicated things were.

One day recently, Word Boy was with me someplace, and I got chatting with an old guy, as I often do. The old guy was going on and on about the pleasures of grandparenthood, and I said, in a making-conversation-way, "Yes, my parents loved being grandparents. My dad says the best part of being a parent is the grandchildren." This is true.

But Word Boy doesn't miss much, and he asked me about it later: if grandma and grandpa like being grandparents so much, how come we hardly ever saw them? And I had to say that my parents did really love being grandparents--to my brother's kids. Why they weren't interested in mine, I don't know. But they weren't. They used to take care of my brother's older two kids all the time, and when he and his wife had a late-life baby a few years ago, my dad even learned to change diapers so they could babysit him, because my mom's arthritis no longer allowed her to do it.

But when I called once, when I was pregnant with Word Boy, to ask if they might watch the Lego Savant for a few hours so Raider and I could go to lunch and a matinee, my mom let me know that they were not, and would not be, available to babysit my kids. I honestly don't know why. I can't even claim that they always liked my brother better because as far as I could tell growing up, they didn't like either one of us. So I couldn't explain it to Word Boy. I could only tell him about it.

Whenever I write about this, somebody e-mails me or comments on Facebook to say, "Su, isn't it time you got over this?" But I would argue that I am over it. I'm living a functional life, I'm in a functional relationship (technically, two functional relationships), I take good care of my kids, I'm loved by my friends and valued in my community.

My parents did a pretty good job of fucking up my childhood, but I unfucked my life all on own.* I don't think it means I'm "not over it" if I still sometimes think about it, or have feelings. And I don't think it means I'm not over it if I refuse to pretend to conform to some narrative where I show my spiritual depth by declaring my mother forgiven. My mother had so many opportunities in her life to change the way she did things: when I asked, in so many words, for things to change during my teenage years; when I reached out to her in my 20s; when my cousin went into rehab and my aunt took a long, hard look at the ways she'd reproduced their upbringing as she was raising her kids; heck, any time during the last 20 years of living next door to my brother and watching him hurt his kids the same way he and I were hurt.** It was her choice, every time, to cling to what she knew instead of working for something better.

It doesn't matter whether I forgive her or not. She made her choices, right up to the end, and she's gone now. I do miss her, but I miss even more the hope I could never let go of that someday I'd have a mother I could trust to be kind to me. I didn't realize until she died how much I was still hoping for that. There's no point in hoping anymore, but I don't suppose I'll ever stop wishing for it.

Footnotes:

* "All on my own" if by "all on my own" you mean with the help of a middle-school librarian, two lesbian high school math teachers, my grandfather's cousin Marion, my great-aunts Hazel and Doris, my friends Carol and Amy, my first woman lover, three particularly helpful therapists, Raider and Toots, and friends too numerous to name.

** I used to be so angry at my brother for his part in what was painful about my childhood that I didn't want to see him get better. I wanted to be better than him. I spent so much of my childhood being tormented and humiliated by him that I wanted to spend the rest of my life looking down on him. Of course, I wasn't thinking about his children. I'd give just about anything for my niece and nephews to have the world's greatest dad, even if it meant admitting my brother was better than me.

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An Answer is a Useful Thing Even if It's Not the One You Wanted

When Quakers are going on and on about way opening, my friend Sally will sometimes remind us that a clear No is as useful as a clear Yes. Sometimes even moreso. I have been thinking about Sally's words a fair bit lately.

My mom died two days before Thanksgiving, after a short stay in the ICU. It wasn't entirely unexpected; she had intractable heart problems and we'd known for awhile that one of these days she'd take a turn for the worse and not turn back. Those days in the ICU were a rollercoaster of family drama, both good and bad. On the one hand, my always-sensitive dad took the opportunity to tell me once again, as we stood by my mother's bed together, what a disappointment I'd been to him. On the other hand, my brother and I had a late-night conversation in the hospital cafeteria that was the most honest, intimate, and hilarious talk we'd ever had--a hint of what might have been if we'd grown up together in a different family.

Ever since the doctors told us a couple of years ago that there was nothing more that could be done for my mother's heart, I've been wondering how things would end for us. There are some questions I've carried my whole life: Will my mother ever say she loves me? Will she ever suggest that she is pleased with me, or proud, or even simply, for heaven's sake, approves of me? Will she ever get interested in my life and who I am?

The answer to these questions, it turns out, is No.

That's not the answer I wanted. I never could stop hoping. Since she died, I have been alternately (and sometimes at the same time) hurt, sad, angry, grieved. But I have also been relieved. Those questions, that futile hope, have been a heavy thing to carry and I've been carrying them for almost fifty years. It is, in its way, a gift to be able to set them down at last.

My brother and sister-in-law hosted the remains of the family for lunch on Christmas Eve. At this lunch, my father told me that if we didn't stop treating the Tiny Tornado as a boy, he wanted nothing more to do with me. I'd have gotten up and left right then, but the kids weren't in the room when it happened; they were having a wonderful time with their cousins, and they wanted to stay to open presents. So I cried in the bathroom for awhile, soldiered through, and left as soon as the gifts were unwrapped. "If you change your mind," I told my dad, "give me a call."

My time sense is all distorted; I can't believe that was only five days ago. I spent one day profoundly hurt; one day righteously angry; and then I woke up on the third day and realized that this, too, is a relief. My father has always been rigid, judgmental, cold. He believes that there is one right way to do things; this is, of course, his way. As recently as this summer, when I was forty-six years old, he was still trying to tell me how to live my life. One of the hard questions I've been carrying has been how I would have a relationship with him after my mother's death, since my mother has always been the mediator and the social glue in our little clan.

I have tried so hard for so long to improve my relationship with my parents. I've done it by lowering my expectations; by practicing compassion; by trying to appreciate what they were able to give me even when it fell far short of what I wanted and needed from them. With both my parents, I have struggled with how to love people who don't want to be loved, how to win the approval of people who will never give it. I've treasured crumbs; I've been wronged and I've forgiven, only to be wronged again; I've cried on Raider's shoulder; I've been foolishly optimistic and let myself be disappointed again and again. I have prayed, consulted wise loved ones, looked for hints about how to be a good daughter to my father once my mother was gone.

My father, bless him, has freed me of this burden.

What I have written may sound self-pitying. I don't mean it to. I'm not feeling that way. But I don't see any reason to pretend my parents were other than they were. In many ways, they failed me--and my brother--from the very beginning. I miss my mom very much. I loved her very much. I treasured many things about her.

But I am better off without her. As for my dad--I wish him well. I would have loved him if he had let me.

What's Hecuba to Him, or He to Hecuba?

Raider and I have an especially beloved friend; the kids call him Uncle Toots. We have a long history with Toots. Raider and Toots can remember the night they met as college students; they quickly became best friends and, sometimes, lovers. They have so much in common and have been through so much together that we joke that they are the same person; indeed, once when they were young, someone seeing them together at an event did a double-take: this person, knowing them separately, had thought they were one person. (First aside: sometime even I confuse them. One time I said to Raider, "I made a stir-fry for dinner, but I didn't put in any ginger because I know you don't like it." Raider said, "I like ginger. Toots doesn't like ginger.")

I moved to town a few years later and met Toots on our first day working at the same place. We fell in love. I didn't get to know Raider well over the next couple of years, because he was back and forth to North Dakota caring for his parents, but I remember the night I met Raider: he and Toots lived together, and I met Raider when I picked Toots up for our first date. Until Toots and I got an apartment together, there was a room across the hall from his that belonged to Raider; I saw his stuff, I even slept in his bed a time or two, before I got to know him.

Toots and I stopped being lover-lovers after awhile. Two years? I can't remember exactly. But we had this weird inertia--we knew that one of us should move out of the apartment, but somehow we never could bring ourselves to do it. And, after awhile, we found that we had transitioned to a new relationship, something more than friends and other than lovers, although we were still occaionally "lovers" in the technical sense, as were Toots and Raider, once in a blue moon. This was the beginning of our having a relationship there is no name for. (Second aside: I've been re-thinking the expression "break up," because I have had so many relationships with lovers that didn't end, but rather turned into something else. Sometimes that transition is painful; sometimes it's not. But in the long run, it often turns out that nothing was broken.)

Raider's parents died within a few months of each other when he was 25. (Third aside: now that many of my friends and I are beginning to deal with parents who are aging, I have a new sympathy for what it must have been like for him, as an only child, to go through that so young.)

A few months after his mother died, Raider came back to Michigan, to continue work on a library science degree at Michigan. He had a tiny single on North Campus, but during this time of intense grieving, what he needed was to be with his other half, and day after day he would finish classes and drive the hour to our house so he could be with Toots. This is when Raider and I began to know each other; and we got even closer when we decided that it made more sense for him to live with us and commute to school the next semester.

In the years since then, Toots and Raider and I have lived together and apart in a variety of configurations. We all lived together for awhile, then Raider got his own house and Toots lit out for San Francisco. Then Raider and I moved in together. Then some malignant idiot ran a red light and nearly killed Toots, and he came back to Michigan to recuperate while his multiple broken limbs healed. He ended up staying, and we lived together after that for, what, four or five years? Until the Lego Savant was about 18 months old anyway. If Toots comes back to Michigan someday--as he may, to be near his own aging parents, and us--we will most likely live together again.

When the Lego Savant was a toddler, Toots moved to Boston to be with his sweetie, the Crafty Elf. We can tolerate this separation only because we love the Crafty Elf so very much. And we spent some time seriously considering whether we should move to Boston, too.

My point is: What is Toots to us? What are we to Toots? The kids call him Uncle, but we could just as easily have decided to call him Papa Toots; he is the closest thing they have to a third parent. I sometimes tell people that they might think of Toots as the third adult in our nuclear family, even though he lives with the Crafty Elf these days. Toots sometimes tries to convey his relationship with the children by telling people he is their godfather; that works pretty well. Sometimes he takes flack from his family for spending more time with our kids than with his biological nephew; would it help people understand the relationship and accept it if we had decided to call him their stepfather?

I remember one night when I was pregnant with the Lego Savant. I was very sick, as usual. Raider had tucked me into bed early, and he and Toots were next door in Toots' bedroom watching ST:TNG. I lay there listening to them talk and laugh, and I could feel their intimacy and love for one another, and I felt so warmed by it. Their connection gave me tremendous pleasure. It still does.

Recently, Toots was visiting, and we were hanging out in the living room after the kids had gone to bed. I was crocheting in my big chair, and drifted out of the conversation a little bit, listening to them talk, and it occurred to me: in some ways, Raider is closer to Toots than he is to me. In important ways. I am non-optional for Raider. But so is Toots. I miss Toots when we don't see him often enough; Raider feels his absence profoundly much of the time.

This gets me thinking: are we polyamorous with Toots? Neither of us has had a sexual relationship with Toots in a very long time, but why do we so often use sex to define relationships? Heck, you don't need intimate details of my relationship with Raider to guess that, between two terrible pregnancies, a lifetime of chronic pain, extended illness, and the normal pressures of having young children, we have had some long stretches when sex was a happy memory and a longed-for future. If our relationship had to be redefined every time we went a certain number of weeks or months without sex, we'd have been married, unmarried, married, unmarried, married, and unmarried many times over the past 19 years. (Fourth aside: a new euphemism. "Hey, Raider: Will you marry met? Marry me hard!")

The only thing I know for sure is: this is one of the ways that family looks in our lives.

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This Post Could Cost Me Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars and the Love of My Mother. So Be It.

My mom visited me twice last week, driving over with my dad, who is fixing up my breezeway. She and I sat at my dining room table and yakked up a storm. At some point during her second visit, she said to me, "If any of this turns up on Facebook, you're out of the will."

I choose to interpret that injunction as applying to only the subject we'd been discussing for some time at that point: the disposition of estates, family finances, and my father's life expectancy, which I promise you we had a good reason for discussing beyond "when can we get our hands on his hard-earned loot?"

But the conversation we had two days earlier? I figure that's fair game.

Also, my mother didn't say anything about my blog.

My dad is a man for whom actions speak much louder than words. Indeed, his actions often contradict his words. He complains about my mother's disability, but when it comes to caring for her he is, if not quite tender, then certainly kind and indefatiguable. Over the last decade he has taken over all the cooking and housework, after 50 years in a marriage with such traditional division of labor that my mother even fixed him lunch on Saturdays, something it would never occur to me to do for Raider. When my nephew, Word Boy 2, was born three years ago, my 75-year-old dad even took up diaper-changing so my folks could baby-sit him.

He built my mom a little half-step that he carries in the car to help her get up short unavoidable flights of stairs, like my front stoop. For some reason, this little wooden home-made step warmed my heart. Quintessence of Dad, right there, to jump in and build something to solve a problem.

Anyway, on Wednesday my mom and I sat around for three hours and told family stories. I like re-hearing the stories I heard as a kid, if only because it reassures me that I haven't made stuff up. Or because it lets me correct the misunderstandings and mistakes in my versions.

But sometimes, my mom surprises me by telling a story I haven't heard before, and that happened on Wednesday.

I used to joke, darkly, that I came from a long line of women who didn't want children. The only thing in that line that's not true is the "long" part. I don't know how my maternal great-grandmother, parent of 13, felt about having children. I do know that the family story goes that my grandma, number 13, didn't have a middle name because her parents had flat-out run out of ideas.

My grandma, though, didn't choose to have children. The defining story of her life is that at 17, a senior in high school and on-track to be valedictorian, she fell pregnant and was forced to drop out of school to marry my grandfather. She always regretted school; she was proud of her accomplishments there, and hoped at least to go on to nursing school as so many of her sisters had. She sometimes regretted my grandfather; their marriage was not an easy one, marked by conflict, some of it physical, and it wasn't until their children were grown and gone that they enjoyed some measure of financial stability.

She blamed my aunt for ruining her life, as if my aunt somehow got herself conceived and born, and she had a remarkable capacity for not forgiving. She carried childhood slights to her grave, and apparently never repented of her tendency to blame her children for the disappointments of her life.

She was 17 in 1927; she had three children while she and grandpa were still living with her parents. And here's the new story my mom told me:

Apparently, the road they lived on was a long, straight country road with no stop signs. Cars got moving pretty fast, and when the road ended in a T, it took many drivers by surprise. You could tell how surprised they were by the wreckage of their cars up against a big tree that stood straight ahead and brought them up short if they didn't make the turn onto the cross street.

My grandmother, not very happily married and with three young children, found herself pregnant again, and despaired. She told my mother that she drove down that street, thinking about that tree, and it was a powerful temptation.

"Well," my mother said, "I was her fourth child. Talk about your unwanted children!"

My grandma didn't want that fourth child so strongly that she thought about suicide. My mother, pregnant in 1965, didn't want that baby, either. She wanted an abortion, but she couldn't get one.

My mom told me about grandma and the tree without apprently referencing or remembering my own status as the baby who wouldn't be here if she'd had her druthers. And one direction this writing could go in might be about my mother's and my shared wound, of knowing that we were unwanted children. Or it could turn into a story about how my mother, recognizing her own wound, nonetheless turned around and inflicted the same one on me. I've always thought that the "I wanted an abortion" story was one I could have lived my whole life without hearing, and knowing that she was told her own version of it does make me wonder, just a little, what she was thinking, not keeping that to herself?

(It also lends a delicious irony to her distaste for people on Facebook who don't know when to shut up.)

But I don't see the story that way right now. What it has had me thinking about for days is my grandma, my mom, and me, and how our lives were shaped by the times we lived in.

My grandma became sexually active at 17 in a time when birth control was not only not readily available, but frowned upon for "decent" women. There's a story (there's always a story!) about her turning my grandpa out of her bed unless he bought protection. He drove to a neighboring town to buy condoms, because no decent man would use condoms with his wife.

Well, somebody saw him there. And word got back to my grandma that LJ was cheating on her. Because why else would he be buying condoms? The story goes, my grandma just laughed when she heard that.

I don't know if the condoms failed them, or they didn't use them for long, but my grandma got pregnant three more times after my mom, the unwanted fourth child, was born. One of the babies was a full-term stillbirth, which she birthed at home, all alone. Grandpa had to go to work, and although he had stopped by on his way to tell his sisters my grandma needed them, by the time they got to the house it was all over. My grandma had given birth, stripped the bed, bathed and dressed herself, washed and wrapped her stillborn baby and laid it neatly in a clean shoe box.

Because back then, women like my grandma were tough, strong, matter-of-fact people who did what needed to be done. I wonder how she felt about that baby, buried under a walnut tree somewhere on that farm. Grief, I imagine, and also relief. In what measures? We'll never know.

That's my grandma's story, in her time and place: seven pregnancies she had almost no control over; six children to raise in poverty. Wanted or not, the babies came.

My mom got married 40 years later, in 1957. She was 24 years old and had been living on her own and supporting herself for eight years. She and my dad had their first child, my brother, four years later. Sooner than they'd planned to; they were putting my dad through college and wanted him to graduate first. And they had me not quite four years after that, also at a time not of their choosing.

My mom and dad at least had some option for family planning. In the pre-Roe, pre-Pill days of their early marriage, though, their children also came as they would. Two birth control failures. That my folks wanted at least one child is implicit in the plan to "wait" until after graduation. They didn't get to choose their times, but they were at least able to space their children, to have only one kid under three at a time instead of 2 or 3. And they were able to stop at two.

My mom quit work when my brother was born. She'd been at the phone company since she was sixteen, and was by then a supervisor. She liked her work and was good at it. She has some great stories (of course) about being a telephone operator in a college town in the days when operators had to place long-distance calls for you, and fake collect calls ("Collect call from Miss Blue Shoes") could be placed in the hope that Dad would be clever enough to realize you needed something mailed to you in time for Saturday's dance.

In 1961, women quit work when they "started a family." So that's what my mom did. But she always regretted it, at least a little. She liked her work, and felt competent and appreciated there. She liked her independence. And she did not find being home full-time with her children especially fulfilling.

She was just a bit too early; she just missed a coming revolution. By the time I was in middle school in the mid-70s, the mothers of my friends--most of them a decade or so younger than my mom, who'd had me when she was 32--worked. Our neighbors worked. My mom thought it mattered that there was someone home for us when we got back from school, but the other kids in our neighhorhood got by with a mix of babysitters, unsupervised time, and the careless oversight of slightly older children. And they seemed to be doing fine.

To add insult to injury, it seemed to my mother that my brother and I envied them, that we also wanted the freedom of an empty house and no adult supervision. We didn't, it seemed to her, treasure the mother who waited for us at home. We resented her.

(I say "it seemed to her" because I don't remember feeling that way. But I am perfectly preparted to believe that my behavior was consistent with her interpretation.)

By the time I became sexually active, around 1985, I had easy access to a whole array of birth control options (and my mother, bless her, made damn sure I knew what they were and how important it was to use them). Abortion was an option. And by 1986, I'd stopped having procreative sex--I haven't had to deal with the spectre of unwanted pregnancy for 25 years.

I know that, as a lesbian and then as part of a couple who can't reproduce without medical intervention, I'm an outlyer. I could only have babies I planned for. I know that people still have surprise babies. Word Boy 2 was a late-life bonus for my brother and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law's sister has a daughter who is significantly younger than her other children. "We joked," she told me one time, "that we should name her Daisy. As in, Whoops-a-daisy!"

But even these surprise babies are, at least in some measure, chosen babies. At least for the families I know, who have the knowledge and the resources to exercise their options even in today's climate of attacks on abortion rights.

I had the luxury of actively choosing each of my children, something my mother aspired to and couldn't quite manage, something my grandmother couldn't even imagine.

My point is that I don't think my grandma's story, my mom's story, and my story are just sad personal tales of children who weren't wanted and knew it, of women trapped or constrained by childrearing. My grandma was eight years old when women got the right to vote in federal elections. The first time I voted, I voted for a woman for vice president. We're not just our own stories. We're the story of a whole century of women in America.

Another Satisfied Customer

When I was in my early 20s, and my mom was in her mid-50s, she went to school at our local community college. She hadn't been in school since graduating from high school at the age of 16, but she did well and enjoyed it. She told me one time, though, that when she sat down in class she would take out a clean piece of paper for taking notes, and she would write across the top of it "KYMSUCUJ."

This meant: Keep Your Mouth Shut Until Called Upon, Joanne. It was supposed to keep her from blurting out inappropriate jokes in class.

From this single anecdote, you will readily infer that I am much like my mother. I look like her, I have her sense of humor, I have her tendency to blurt things out, her inclination to the slightly off-color, and her habit of sharing too much information. She is a collector and teller of family stories, as well. Truly, I am an apple that did not fall far from the tree in this case.

My dad, though? At first glance, we are nothing alike. He doesn't think about the past much; or, if he does, he doesn't talk about it. He doesn't talk about much, in general. He's taciturn and cranky. His default facial expression is a forbidding scowl. Once, on a family vacation, my mom, my brother, and I were waiting outside some touristy welcome center while he went in to pick up a map or something. He came out the door, carrying the map and wearing his characteristic frown. My mom said, "Another satisfied customer!" and we all cracked up. This became a running joke which only he failed to see the humor in.

In the last couple of years, though, I've noticed some of the ways he influenced me. That he was not just something to react against in my childhood and young adult years.

My two oldest kids are left-handed, color-blind boys. In this, they are the image of their grandfather. Word Boy's big square head? Grandpa. The Lego Savant's ability to build anything, and his interest in mechanisms? Grandpa.

Their rigidness and inflexibility? Grandpa, too. Since he always had power over me, I saw him as ridiculously controlling. My dad believes there is one right way to do everything, and that way is his way. (I've probably told you the story from when I was a teenage girl with long, thick hair, and my dad got mad at me for using too much shampoo. He showed me how much shampoo he used--a tiny dot in the palm of his hand--and informed me that this was how much I should also use. This from a man who was already bald when he got married at the age of 24.)

I watch my kids, though, and wonder how much of my dad's tendency to be controlling was about his own emotional comfort. When I watch Word Boy struggle with perfectionism, or fall to pieces when presented with a question that has no single right answer, I see my dad. When the Lego Savant tries to micro-manage the whole family so that his environment can be comfortable for him, I see my dad. When I think about my own inflexibility--which I didn't fully recognize until I became a mom and had less control over my time and environment than I'd ever had before--I see myself in my dad, and my dad in me. I recently read a blog post (which I can't find now but will link to if it turns up) in which the writer said, "I have to write 'be spontaneous' in my calendar, or I'll forget to do it," and that is a pretty good description of me, as well. I used to think my dad was very controlling of his loved ones because we were his loved ones, and that he was trying to take care of us and keep us safe by guiding us very carefully, with attention to every minute detail.

I still think that.

But now I wonder if he wasn't also managing some form of the anxiety that seems to run in our family. Or suffering from a mild version of anxiety's stepsibling, obsessive-compulsive disorder (my first actual psychiatric diagnosis was "Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Tendences." Now I wonder if they shouldn't just print that right on the birth certificates of new babies born into my family).

I'm like my dad in other ways, too, if you look behind the superficial. My dad keeps busy building things, fixing things, planning to build things. He spent most evenings and weekends throughout my childhood in his very well-equipped garage, doing god only knows what with power tools. My brother is like this, too--they live next door to each other and have quite the impressive pole barn workspace, with heat and a little fridge and microwave. My brother has build a dune buggy (from scratch!) and a race car (from a regular car) out there.

I used to think my dad and I were not alike: he works with his hands, whereas I am a word person. While he's rebuilding an engine, I'm reading something or writing something or taking a class on something. If my home needs a minor repair, I can live with that quite comfortably for a good long time--indeed, I recently noticed something small that needed fixing ( I can't remember what now) and realized that it had been broken for six months and it had never occurred to me to fix it.

My dad, on the other hand, read exactly one book the whole time I was growing up (though he and my mom have been hooked on audiobooks they listen to together for some years now).

So, just how are we alike in all this?

We both like to be busy. We both are always planning and doing projects. We are both quick to volunteer our expertise--you need a new driveway poured? He's there. You need a press release written for your non-profit organization? I'm happy to do that for you.

My dad, despite his habitual scowl, has a wonderful capacity for maintaining relationships, as well. All the years I was growing up, we only went on three vacations-for-vacation's-sake. But we traveled a lot. We spent many weekends at my grandma and grandpa's house in the woods up north; we drove as often as twice a year to Virginia, where we visited my dad's best friend Kevin and his family. We probably logged thousands of miles around Michigan visiting my dad's counsins and aunts and uncles and old friends from high school or college. We were always off to see somebody.

Even now, when my parents take their annual RV trek to the warmth of the southwest, they give much of their time to meeting up with relatives and friends in Arizona and southern California.

My dad and Kevin have been close friends since they were in the Army together in the 50s, and they have probably seen each other 2-3 times a year almost every year for all that time. My dad's other best friend, John, was his office mate when they were both hired as entry-level engineers at GM in the early 60s. Sometimes when Kevin makes one of his rare visits to Michigan, John and Kevin and my dad sit around the dining room table drinking beer, and John and Kevin have drunken pseudo-arguments about which one is really my dad's best friend. At least, they used to when I was young.

Like my dad, I love old friends--I keep saying that one of the benefits of middle age that nobody tells you about in advance is that you start to have friends you've known for 20, 30, 35 years. Like my dad, I rarely travel just to go see a place. Though I am not close to my extended family, I'm very close to an extended chosen family and I travel multiple times a year to be with these people. When I worry that I might lose a friend, because someone moves away, for instance, I think of my dad and the role model he is for not letting mere geography control his relationships.

(And I have many pleasant mental images of my dad laughing with his friends. He can relax the scowl when he's around them--or around his grandkids.)

I suppose I've been a cliche all my life--hard at work differentiating from my parents as a young adult, finding more common ground as a no-longer-young adult. But I would say that this is also one of the satisfactions of middle age for me.

My dad spent the day at my house today, working on fixing up my breezeway. He's putting in all-new screens, a new floor, and new doors. I worked on my front yard, weeding and moving some things around and getting ready for a big delivery of mulch. Partway through the day, I posted this as a status update on Facebook:

I have just peeked my head into the breezeway to admire my dad's work. We chat a bit.

Me: Well, I'm going to get back to work in the front yard.

Dad: Why don't you get those kids out here to help you?

I laugh.

Dad: Why are you all "ha ha"? They're old enough.

Me: I know. And they will help. They like helping in the yard. I'm laughing because I'm 46 years old and you're still bossing me around.

Dad: Well, that's the way I am.

Me: I know. That's why I laughed instead of getting mad.

We both laugh and then we go about our business.

That Man I Love

A couple of years ago, when money was very tight for us, I was in line to buy my groceries and an older woman in front of me was handing things back to the cashier one by one, waiting for her total to drop low enough that she could pay her bill. I have always regretted not stepping up with my debit card and paying for at least part of her groceries. Because while, sure, at the time money was very tight for us (so tight that there were quite commonly weeks where we had no money left after paying our bills), buying this woman her ice cream and and a few cans of soup was not going to make any difference to us in the long run. And having the generous impulse and squelching it left me feeling small.

I liked life better back in the days when I simply didn't have generous impulses. I have always been anxious about money, concerned that there won't ever be enough, worried about the future. On the one hand, this can lead to good things--I'm one of those people who started saving for retirement at age 24. [That modest account got cashed in to pay a lawyer bill during our custody dispute. We now count on the Tiny Tornado to support us in our old age.]

On the other hand, I have well and truly earned one of my family nicknames: Penny-Pinching Control Freak.

I've been fretting about money lately because we have more of it to fret about. About a year ago, we paid off a couple of large loans, and there started to be some wiggle room in our budget again. I had imagined that when this happened, it would be a smooth process: things would loosen up a little, and we would spend a little more to take up the slack: pay down another loan that much more quickly, order takeout just that much more often, start getting professional haircuts again. Step by step, I imagined, we would slowly grow into our freer financial situation.

Ha! As it turns out, it can be a psychologically challenging transition from "clearly not enough money" to "enough, but not infinite" money. It was impossible to prioritize the list of things we'd had to put off. Which was more important: getting the gutters fixed, or buying new shoes for Raider? The curriculum I'd been eyeing for years, or a shirt for me that cost more than $9? New tires for the van, or Raider finally having a chance to visit his best friend several states away? Life insurance, or a new bike for the long-legged Lego Savant? College savings or charitable contributions?

In some ways, it was easier when the answer to everything was simply "no."

Normally a very good money manager, I lost my grip. Last summer, I went overboard on house maintenance, somehow failing to foresee that this very reasonable $100 job plus this pricey $300 job plus this practically-nothing $75 job plus this other $200 job added up to more free money than we had. This spring, I've gone overboard on curriculum and on cool things for the kids that have been on our wishlist for years. And, for once, I haven't gone drastically underboard on buying decent quality clothes that actually fit me and are cute.

For some reason, despite having an excellent system in place for planning and tracking, I just can't manage our cash flow right now. I'm sure I'll get it sorted out soon enough, but it's not sorted yet. And because I am a person who cares abut this kind of thing, I've been feeling fretful about it.

Raider is used to my fretting. He pays it little attention. The other day, he wanted to go buy a new iPad, which we have all been coveting, because he could get 18 months same-as-cash plus double rewards points. Since I am the Budget Guru at our house, he asked me if he could. I said, "Oh, jeez, honey, I don't know. I feel like we've been overspending already, and I just can't seem to get a grip on things, and I think the van might need new rear brakes..." Raider pretended to look at his watch, and said, "How long do you think the Ritual Angst will take? Because I'd like to get going."

That wasn't my point, though.

I was going to tell you that I learned to be generous from Raider. He often sees a financial windfall, or an opportunity to get a little extra, not as a bonus for us, but as an opportunity to act on one of his own generous impulses. Many years ago, a friend of ours living on a low income needed a new computer in order to use some adaptive software; Raider said to me, "We should buy him a computer." And we did. He wonders if we can use his bonus this year to help a friend-of-a-friend get a replacement for his recently-retired service dog. When I had the absolutely crazy idea a few years ago that we should give our second car to a family we knew who were having a transportation crisis, he said "What a great idea. We should do that. We're hardly using it."

Before I had lived with Raider for a few years and let myself get rubbed off on, I'd never have done anything like that. I'd have been sure that giving away a car we could have sold instead meant we'd be poor someday. That buying someone a computer might somehow make the difference between eating and starving. That it wasn't our responsibility. Even that these were offers you couldn't make, that these were conversations you simply couldn't have. "I'd like to give you some money so you can take a break from work and focus on your painting." "I'd like to buy you that computer you need." "We'd like to talk to you about helping out so you don't have to go too long without a service dog." What the frell, Raider? I know you grew up in North Dakota and are a dork, but surely you must know that these things simply aren't done.

But Raider does them. He is generous all the time, in big and small ways. And if he is sometimes generous with himself (new iPad! xBox 360!) he is much more often generous with me, with the kids, with his friends, and with total strangers. And he is generous both with his money and with his, what would you call it? His approbation? Over the years, I've had hundreds of conversations with Raider that go like this:

Me: I want to go to a writing retreat for a month, and take our only car.
Raider: OK.

Me: I know we've been using a 6-foot utility table since our dining room table fell apart two years ago, and that we had set aside this money toward getting a new table with matching chairs so our house won't look so much like a frat lives here, but someone posted a Mindstorms NXT 2.0 set for a really good price on eBay this morning and I used the table money to buy it.
Raider: The Lego Savant will be so excited.

Me: I didn't get any dishes or laundry done because I spent the whole day watching TV and playing with the baby.
Raider: That sounds like a pleasant day.

Me: I know I said we couldn't afford the Summer Gathering this year, but I really want to go and it means a lot to the kids.
Raider: You should go.

Today I did something generous for some strangers. I'm not going to say what, because I have been bragging already and that's not the point. The point is: I didn't come by this naturally. I caught it from Raider, who is simply one of the most fundamentally decent people I know.

Dad and Nephew overheard

My dad and my nephew, who is 14, came to clean my gutters today, bless their hearts. Yehva and I went out to watch them, and I overheard this conversation:

Garrett: This is so matted, I can just pull it down and pull the next bit out...I'll be able to get halfway behind that tree without moving the ladder.

Dad: Do you want a broomstick? Sometimes it's easier to get that stuff with a broomstick.

Garrett: No, this is OK.

Dad: I can get you a broomstick.

Garrett: I'm doing fine.

Dad: Here's a stick.

Garrett, to me: Grandpa always keeps asking me stuff after I've already said no. Like, I'll be having eggs and he'll ask if I want toast, and I say no, and he's like, have some toast, toast is good with eggs, and I'll say no thanks, I don't need any toast, and he'll be like, Here, I made you some toast.

Dad: I'm just trying to teach you to do things right!

Garrett: There's a right way to eat eggs?

Dad, vehemently: Ya gotta have toast with eggs!

Garrett: I don't think there's a rule book...

Me, scoffing: You've been a Penn for 14 years and you don't know about the thousand-page rule book of Gary Penn? I'm astonished!

Dad: Oh, ha ha ha.

Me, to Garrett: We love him a lot, but he hasn't changed in 50 years.

The Penn Family Talks about Guns and Babies

I had a nice visit with my parents yesterday; they came to drop off a big cushy recliner my mom isn't using anymore and stayed for several hours, mostly just chatting. My nephew Garrett, who is 14 and much-adored by my kids (and by David and me), came along and spent most of the time running the kids ragged in the backyard.

My mom looks good. She had a cardiac catheterization some weeks ago that showed that she has a fully-blocked artery to her heart, and it can't be repaired, and week before last she had a procedure to clean out her carotid artery. So I have been worrying about her. She seems to be recovering well; I could tell from her voice on the phone when she called to ask if yesterday was a good day for a visit that she was feeling better.

It charms me that Yehva reminds my mother of me as a little girl. "How funny," she said drily, "that you should get a daughter who's smart, outgoing, and headstrong." A little bit of grandmotherly schadenfreude there, I think. There's a famous family story (with picture!) about her finding me standing naked in the bathroom sink when I was about Yehva's age, planning to give myself a bath because I wanted one and she wasn't going to give me one. And another famous story from when I was maybe a late 3, and sang a little song for the church. It was my first time in front of an audience, and apparently it was quite a challenge to get me to yield the stage when I was done. I'd still be up there singing, apparently, if I hadn't been small enough to carry off.

We like smart-baby stories in our family, and my parents told me a good one about my 11-month-old nephew, Oscar. Apparently my sister-in-law got him a jack-in-the-box. She cranked the handle, it played its little tune, and then pop! up came the jack-in-the-box. Oscar liked that! So she did it again. He liked it again!

So she scooted the jack-in-the-box over to him and suggested he crank the handle himself. Oscar looked at it a second, and then reached over and popped open the latch on the lid.

We laughed. We are all familiar--as you probably are, too, if you have kids--with those moments when you are torn between thinking, "Wow, I'm so impressed with this kid," and "Oh, man, I am so doomed." Smart kids, we agree, are both a blessing and a burden.

I told my parents a friend's story about taking her kids to a shooting range as part of Be A Tourist In Your Own Town, an event here in Lansing every year where you buy a passport that gets you into all kinds of attractions free for the day. Her son, almost 8, is interested in target shooting, and my friend asked one of the staff how old kids have to be to take lessons. She figured the answer would be "older than 8" and this would be a backup for her own uncertainty about the idea. The guy answered, "Old enough to do it safely, and to follow the rules. These guys could absolutely do it! We work with beginners one on one until we're confident they can do it."

She should have seen enough lawyer shows by now to know you never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.

That story got us talking about guns in our own families. My mom grew up in a house where guns were propped in the corner in every room, and she was always afraid of them and says she only ever fired one once in her life. My dad had a couple of guns in a rack behind the door in the spare room when I was growing up, but I don't remember him using them (he goes to deer camp every year, but he's the kind of "hunter" who can spend a week at deer camp and not notice he forgot his gun at home). He did hunt when I was younger; I was born in October, and he went hunting soon afterwards. He sent home a postcard with a picture of a deer on it. If I remember it correctly, he wrote "Daddy has not seen any deer yet." He addressed it to my mom and brother, and then squeezed "and Susan" into the margin. That offended me when I was a kid: I was an afterthought! But I'm pretty sure 3-week-old me was not bothered by it.

I mentioned my friend Adrianne's Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and my one experience shooting it. My dad said, "I got a concealed carry permit a few years ago."

Me: Oh, yeah? What made you decide to get a concealed carry permit?

My dad: I didn't have one.

Ah.

There was a big locked gun case at my grandparents' house in Gaylord, and men and boys sometimes went shooting when a bunch of us were up there. I shot some, I know; I mostly remember a few times doing target practice in my backyard, shooting paper plates with a gun I only remember as "grandma's deer rifle."

My grandma could shoot a gun; there's a story about her shooting a rabid dog from her back porch when she was eight months pregnant. Though I could be mis-remembering the pregnant part because there's another story about her getting bit by a dog just a few days before my Uncle Charlie was born, and then sometime later my aunt Clara Jean, who was 5 or 6, got bit by a dog and wouldn't stop crying, and when she finally calmed down enough to tell them what was wrong, she said, "I'm too young to have a baby!" An early lesson in correlation v. causation.

On the other hand, my grandma was pregnant six times, so maybe both those things did happen when she was about to have a baby. Just different babies.

My grandpa once shot and killed a rat in the wall of the house. With the expected unpleasant results.

My nephew Garrett seems to be following in my brother's footsteps. He loves dirt bikes and snowmobiles, things with big engines that go fast. He also likes to shoot. His big present from my parents last Christmas was a new rifle he'd been wanting. He's a very good shot, I'm told. My dad said that he is interested in firing "the pistols" but my brother isn't sure about letting him do that. "He's fired a lot of guns, though," my dad said, and rattled off a little list that ended with, "and of course he's fired Gary's machine gun."

Me: Gary has a machine gun?

Not a fully-automatic one, I am assured. Those are illegal. It's a Thompson--a Tommy gun! I said delightedly--with that round magazine like the gangsters in Bugs Bunny cartoons carry around. He also has some kind of deadly Eastern European-made not-an-AK47-but-something-like-that. From this I infer that one of the many things I did not know about my brother is that he collects guns. I think it would be interesting if he agreed to show them to me next time I visit.

Sometimes I feel like my family are all very much like each other--they live together on the same piece of land, for crying out loud! I call it The Penn Family Hilltop Compound. It has two houses on it, and two enormous pole barns full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, a race car, a dune buggy, my dad's little bulldozer ("you'd be surprised how many uses you find for it once you have it," we joked yesterday), the almost-bigger-than-my-house RV my parents roam the southwest in every winter, and God only knows what else. I didn't know about the bulldozer or the machine gun; what other surprises might there be?

Very much like each other, I think sometimes, and not so much like me. This is a feeling that was very painful to me as a child and young adult. But I get more and more peaceful with it as I get older, because, you know, I like them. And because it gets easier for me to see the ways we are alike--my parents and I laughed a lot yesterday, because we have the same sense of humor. We like to tell each other stories. I knew they'd like the story about my friend and her kids at the shooting range; they knew I'd like the story about Oscar and the jack-in-the-box. I told stories about Yehva, full of piss and vinegar and always into something, and my mom told stories about me, much the same. It was a good way to spend an afternoon.

In My Mother's Voice

It's a truism you hear a lot when you become a parent, that at some point you will hear yourself speaking in your mother's voice. Usually this means saying something that you found hurtful as a child and swore you would never say to your own kids. But for me, it took a very different form recently.

My mom grew up rural working poor. Feedsack dresses, her mother killing chickens for dinner, two bedrooms for eight or more people, three kids per bed, something like 15 kids in her grade at school. Some of her childhood stories are like something out of Little House on the Prairie: two walnuts, an orange, and a pencil in each kid's Christmas stocking. Maybe a new penny in the toe. Maybe I made up the penny.

And every year, one pair of shoes. They ordered them from a catalog; it was some kind of program to provide shoes to poor children. Every year, the shoes were too big the first half of the year, and too small the rest of the year, and they probably didn't get worn at all around home in the summer (Do I really remember my mother telling me something when I was a kid about how good warm manure felt between your toes on a chilly morning...and thinking, "Oh, god, ewww, I'm so glad Dad is an engineer at GM and there are no cows here"?).

Anyway, the catalog shoes were never great. Whatever passed for fashionable footwear among 9-year-old girls in South Lyon, Michigan, in 1942, you can be sure that the best the catalog had to offer was not it. But there was this one year that the shoes my mom picked had run out by the time her family's order was processed, and the company sent The Most Hideous Shoes In The History of the World in their place. I don't know how many details my mother really gave me, and how much I made up a picture in my head, but they were black, and thick-soled, and they came up over her ankles, and they were heavy and hard to walk in. And she had no choice but to wear them, too big the first half of the year and too small the second half, because those were the shoes there were and there was no way to get another pair.

My mom is a good storyteller. She can tell stories from her family that will simultaneously break your heart and have you laughing so hard the tears roll down your face. She has this amazing gift for seeing the humor in a situation while it's happening. Those thing that happen where people say, "Someday we'll laugh about this"? She starts laughing right in the middle of it.

But she has told me the story of these shoes many times, and there is never anything funny about them. They were horrible for her, a daily humiliation, and I think a symbol of everything that was hard and painful about her life growing up. Even in her 70s, when she tells this story, you can see how hurt she still is for the little girl she was.

So, the other week I take Carl over to Playmakers to get a new pair of sneakers because he has worn his old pair to treadless rags. The clerk measures his feet, and he chooses a few pairs to try on, and after running around in various shoes for a few minutes, he finds some he likes, that don't slip off his heels when he runs, and he says he'd like to take that pair home.

OK, I say. We'll take these.

The clerk says, "Would you like to go up a half-size, so he can get more wear out of them?"

And I say, not sharply but more firmly than I mean to, "Absolutely not. Children should have shoes that fit properly."

The clerk holds up her hands placatingly, "OK, OK, that's fine. It's just a lot of parents like to do that..."

I say, "How can he run in shoes that don't fit right? If he outgrows them halfway through the summer, we'll buy another pair."

I hadn't realized I had such a strong opinion about Shoes, For Children, Importance of Proper Fit Thereof. But it turns out I do, and it's because I've heard this story from my mom so many times, starting when I was probably three and most recently at the age of 42 or 43. I don't really care that some parents buy shoes a half-size up, and I doubt it would scar Carl for life if I'd done that with his new sneakers. But my mom, or the humiliated little girl with horrible shoes that she was almost 70 years ago, cares. She'd have loved to choose her own shoes, to have someone measure her feet to make sure they fit properly. She got catalog shoes instead, and no sympathy at all.

I think it might have been her voice speaking through me at Playmakers. That girl my mother was. Carl, cheerful, oblivious, accustomed his whole life to shoes he likes that fit him: he doesn't need an advocate. But he has one anyway.

Performing Family (p. 4)

We don’t look like a family. I’m white, and Victoria is black. So we’ve learned, over the years, to make you see us as a family. I learned to stand behind her with my hand clearly on her shoulder when we rang the violin’s teacher’s door. “Hello, I’m Barbara and this is my daughter Victoria,” I say before the teacher can so much as open her mouth. And put her foot in it. I call Victoria “my daughter” like a newlywed on a fifties sitcom said “my husband.” Often. With a big smile. Straight at you.

Victoria and I “do” family, “present” as family, the way that a transsexual does gender, presents as female [sic—or male] We’re just doing what normal people do, but we know we’re doing it.

Rothman is talking about something that people who live near boundaries, or transgress them, have in common: the need to assertively self-define, and the burden (and gift) of having to be aware of what people who dwell in the middle have the luxury not to notice.

It can be necessary to assert who you are, when you live on a boundary, or people will invent a story about you that they are more comfortable with, and they can go to great lengths to do so. When I was a young lesbian in college, my lover and I used to hold hands around campus. Eventually, a classmate of hers told her that, for some months, she had seen us get on the bus together holding hands, and thought, “Isn’t that nice of Joey, to help that blind woman.” Eventually, she had a lightbulb moment, but this is one of my favorite stories about how far people will go not to see what they don’t expect—or in some cases, want—to see.

One of my female lovers used to introduce me as “my lover Su,” always, to everyone, by way of saying, “Just so there’s no mistake, just so you can’t pretend you don’t know, just so this doesn’t have to be on of those unspoken things between us..” I used to have a business card that said, “Su Penn: Writer. Storyteller. Lesbian,” for much the same reason.

This idea brings up so much for me that I was about to veer off here into more about being a lesbian, about my experiences with transsexualism, about what it’s like to be a queer woman in an opposite-sex relationship and how hard it is to make that visible to people. But this is supposed to be about interracial adoption, so I’ll rein myself in and focus on that.

So far, I have been fascinated by the variation in how Yehva and I are seen. When we’re out alone together, we are (so far as I can tell; this is based on people who make comments to me) universally seen as mother and daughter. When we were still in Chicago, the two of us waiting for clearance to come home to Michigan after she was born, people didn’t even assume she was adopted. “What are you doing up on your feet?” more than one solicitous person asked me, after stopping to admire her. Back home in mid-Michigan, “adopted” seems to be the first thing people think of, rather than “black male partner,” but in Chicago the latter possibility seemed more available to people.

I have three kids altogether, two boys who are my biological children, and white, and my daughter, who is black. They are spaced neatly, at three-year-intervals, like the proverbial stair-steps but with a very high rise. So far as I can tell, nobody mistakes us for anything but what we are: a family with two biological children and one adopted child (though I could digress—again—to my own mistaken assumption about another racially-mixed family I know, that their white daughter was biological). But if we have one extra kid with us, I start getting asked if I’m a daycare provider, and I wonder to what extent Yehva’s race contributes to the perception that we might not be just a family, or that I might be a professional caregiver rather than a mom with an extra kid.

It’s also true that the assumed tie between me and Yehva attenuates remarkably fast with distance, and seems to disappear completely if she gets ten feet or more away from me, or about the width of one aisle in a big-box store. This is the distance at which, twice now, a concerned and angry employee has mistaken Yehva for an unattended toddler, and I have had to speak up and say, from just a few feet away, “I’m her mother! She’s with me.”

Another digression: I can’t help wonder what the presumed race of the missing mother has to do with the mix of anger and concern the employees display. It makes me want to abandon a white toddler in the same store and watch through a hidden camera as the store employees interact with her. More concern, less anger? Or do they deal with so many unattended toddlers that they have a build-up of frustration about it that has little to do with race?

I wonder, too, to what extent I’ll have to be more assertive about “performing” family with Yehva as she gets older.. A woman with a baby or toddler seems presumed to be the mother—at least around here, where nannies aren’t common—but as Yehva gets older, it seems to me that more options would come to people’s mind: daughter of a friend, Little Sister, something else unspecified. Perhaps I’ll have to perfect the hand-on-shoulder, the dazzling smile, “this is my daughter….”

I don’t think those of us on the edges should be too hard on people who make mistakes. Of course people are going to revert to the most available possibility. We should be honest about our own mistakes in this regard; besides the above-mentioned assumption that a certain couple’s white daughter was not adopted, when I knew that their black children were, I have in the not-too-distant past assumed that a lesbian couple’s child was conceived by donor insemination—only to learn, to my chagrin, that at least one of them didn’t identify as a lesbian, that they were polyamorous, and that their son was a happy mistake resulting from a relationship one of them had with a man. So, gentle with the people whose assumptions we bump up against, OK? Gentle—but firm. Oh, so firm.