Amateur Hour Read online

  As I waited in line to check out, a great cosmic joke played out all around me.

  Mother’s Day. It was fucking Mother’s Day. Are you serious?

  I guess all that numbing worked, I thought, realizing I had lost track of the days, of the world around me, my calendar no longer having any use. The Xs ceasing to appear. I was bleeding uterine tissue into my pants and had a hangover and a bag of doughnuts, so by all means, pile on. Fuck you, Mylar balloons and garbage roses encased in clear plastic megaphones. Fuck you, the only Mother’s Day cards left in this store, awaiting the shittiest kids and husbands of all time, on the morning of this holiday. Fuck you, me, for not retaining enough common sense and/or sobriety to know not to be out in public today. Fuck you, life.

  I scurried home as quickly as I could, like a doughnut-loving vampire, the sun finally rising.

  “Do not let me leave this house today. At all,” I told Jon once he was awake, looking confused. “It’s Mother’s Day.”

  I did not think of myself as a mother. The more people I told the more I heard, “You’re still a mother, you’ll always be a mother.” But I didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe I had a fully formed angel baby in heaven; I didn’t think I had experienced motherhood in any sort of real way, in the kinds of ways that would’ve made me feel comfortable claiming that title. I hadn’t had a baby; I had had a lump of dead cells sucked out of me. Sorry, but that ain’t motherhood.

  We didn’t have a ceremony; I never called the baby (was it a baby?) by name. I never whispered to myself when no one was around, “I’m so sorry, Sawyer; I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet you.” I never did that. At the same time, the name Sawyer was permanently retired from my list. I wasn’t looking for a replacement baby to claim it. So to recap: I didn’t feel like a mother, but I had been a mother. And I didn’t think there had been a baby, but then I didn’t want another baby to have my nonbaby’s name. Maybe there was a fantastical part of me that believed my imagined future existed, that there was a Sawyer Hughes living the life I had imagined for him or her. I don’t know. I just went with how I felt. As a nonmother mother who had lost her nonbaby baby.

  Goodbye, Sawyer Hughes. I wonder who you would’ve been?

  That summer slowly unfolded into Opposite Land. Instead of weeks and months of appointments and salads and vitamins and reading e-mails with subject lines like “This is how big your baby is right now!” I watched our design studio sink further into the world of no projects and no money. Jon and I spent hot afternoons lying in a plastic kiddie pool in our backyard drinking beer as I slipped further and further into not giving a fuck about any of it. Nothing felt within my control, nothing was within my control. Might as well live it up while the ship was going down.

  And although my heart was black, my brain continued to whir in the background, a hard drive throwing off alarms. That summer kicked off a lifelong sporadic habit of my waking before the sun and just getting up, feeling wide-awake. My brain was telling me to get to it, but never what that “it” was. Regardless, I listened. It was always productive.

  Some mornings I would pad into my small office to write or read. And other mornings I would simply make a cup of coffee and appreciate the stillness, which was productive in its own way. One memorable morning I picked blackberries from our backyard as the first rays of warm summer sun shot through the clouds. I brought them to our kitchen sink, breathing in their earthy jammy scent, pulling pancake mix and eggs and milk from cupboard and fridge. Blackberry pancakes for breakfast, ready so early it was like I was fueling up before heading out to milk the cows. Jon woke up, looked gratefully and alarmingly at the stack of pancakes and was like, “What is happening?” Fifteen years later and that one particular expression of my sleeplessness has never repeated itself.

  It became apparent that no matter how much I tried to stuff everything down it would find a way to pop back up. In the middle of the night, in the morning, while eating my lunch, after a single sip of beer. It was always there, gurgling under the surface. I would cry at times and at things that made no sense. But that’s grief, isn’t it? I needed more structure. I needed more life.

  I returned to work. I reentered the world at large, the post–Mother’s Day world, the back to our regularly scheduled programming world. It took two weeks before I could handle any sort of social gathering; I just hadn’t been up to it. Simply going to the Starbucks on the corner was enough of a regular test of my strength—slaloming through strollers and toddlers, pregnant women and attached infants. Ignore them by picking up a magazine and get ready to be punched in the face with celebrity baby bumps and trending diaper bags. Motherhood and babies are everywhere. They are our stability porn.

  The days went by. I told more people, if for no other reason than to relieve myself of having to remember who knew and who didn’t. The more my supposedly deep, dark secret came out, the more I discovered that apparently having a miscarriage was as common as having the flu. I felt stupid for suffering alone, even for five minutes. And I realized, as with all grief, that the people who step up aren’t always the ones you expected to or needed to. Sometimes the people you counted on the most are the same ones who will actually say the most hurtful, unbelievable shit imaginable. Sometimes grief ripples out and takes the living with them. Bon voyage, assholes.

  On the flip side of that are the people who played an indelible role in your teenage years or were a coworker at your previous job or a neighbor you had only traded small talk with. They are the people who live on the fringes of your life who, when given the opportunity, will inexplicably rush in to fill the vacuum in your heart. The vacuum left by people you loved and respected who said things like, “You can just get pregnant again” or “It’s probably all for the best” or “Your grandmother/father/dog/best friend lived a good, long life.” They will fill the vacuum left by people you had counted on to not shit all over your grief.

  Firmly in this camp was the first boy I had ever parked with. Eighteen years earlier, there we were, clothes shoved up and down in broad daylight. I remember I had to mentally prepare myself to make out with him. Remember mentally preparing to make out with someone? “Now if he turns his head this way, then which way do I turn my head?” and even still I managed to turn my head the mirror way he turned his head, and is there anything more embarrassing than that? Little did I know then that the urge to get your hot little hands and mouth somewhere on someone else will always triumph over even the greatest humiliation.

  We were never boyfriend and girlfriend. We never had any sort of long-term connection or relationship that would’ve made sense to revisit or continue. We had gone our own ways early on, while we were still in high school—him with the stoner gearhead crowd and me with a crowd made up of single representatives from every other clique, a high school UN. It was a class of sixty-eight kids, for God’s sake; it took real effort to cover all the stereotypes. Like this one over here was a National Honor Society nerd and a jock. Or she was a cheerleader and a theater kid. Regardless. He grew up, not unexpectedly, to be the gruffest, most off-roading, no-bullshit, card-carrying NRA member possible, putting us squarely in epic Odd Couple territory.

  I don’t know why us reconnecting after almost twenty years worked as well as it did. Maybe like any reconnection after that long, it reminds you that you were young. It reminds you that once upon a time you had afternoons free to haul ass on back roads, get half naked with another person, and still make it home in time for a dinner someone else had prepared for you. It reminds you that you didn’t have to pay for your electricity or your house, you didn’t have to think about getting married or having kids, you didn’t have to think about much at all really. So when you look at that other person all those years later, you see all of that. You are on those back roads, and you are in that back seat. You are under the lights of the high school parking lot, and you are at that pizza place. You see each other, the way you used to. You see yourself, when you were fresh, before life started having its way wit
h you.

  This man, this boy from my infinite past, was the only person who offered me an out—a free plane ticket home. And I took it. Within a few days I found myself in the town next to my hometown, three thousand miles away from my house and my husband and my life. My real life and my imagined one. We sat in a diner built in the 1940s, the kind of place that opens at 5 a.m. and closes at 2 in the afternoon. I had a newfound respect for places that opened early. We wolfed down butter-soaked toast and bright yellow eggs. Coffee came in sturdy mugs, and it never stopped coming. As if this scene made all the sense in the world, me being there with him. As if this was how things were going to start being okay again. But somehow, starting with that morning, they did.

  That night we drank like fish, the thick summer heat settling in that way it does in New England. And I wasn’t in my thirties anymore; suddenly I was in high school again. I felt the thrill of all those nights spent aimlessly crawling the spider’s web of back roads, listening to “Night Moves” as steam rose from the asphalt after a sudden storm. I felt familiar and protected, like maybe I had my whole life in front of me again. I was surrounded by fireflies and thickets of overgrown trees. I had always thought of summer as being light, but there was a certain heaviness to summers here. I was back to working on mysteries without any clues.

  We went skinny-dipping in the lake near his house in the still darkness. I skinny-dipped a lot back then. Yes, he had a girlfriend; no, nothing happened; yes, my husband would know about all of it when I returned. We stayed up until sunrise. I fell asleep on his couch, the sun blasting into my face in between the blinds. I slept until noon and woke with a searing headache, the kind that makes you want to rip your head off and beat yourself to death with it.

  I wasn’t gone for long, maybe three or four days. But when I returned home to Portland I was better. I can’t explain exactly how or why, but I was. I hated returning to the sadness, but I knew I couldn’t avoid it forever. And for the first time I felt like I wouldn’t feel that sadness forever. I was ready for whatever might be next. I had to be.

  Jon and I went to a friend’s party, a party for what, I don’t even know. I guess back then no one really needed a reason to have a bunch of people over. And I wound up in the kitchen—of course—with two of our only friends who had kids. One of these women, a dear friend of my husband’s, had also suffered a miscarriage. The baby she lost would’ve been her third child. We soaked in our back-and-forth and our newfound connection, two perspectives from opposite sides of the mothering spectrum. Our experiences simultaneously intermingled and separate, one from the beginning and one from the end.

  She was a levelheaded person, an emotionally in-tune person. She was a mother and a wife. She was smart and empathetic. She was not crazy. She was not woo-woo. So when she told me she had seen a psychic at the urging of her sister-in-law, a psychic who had helped her reconnect with her miscarried baby and that it helped her, that she believed that the connection was real, that the psychic was the real deal, I listened. She said to me with the honesty and clarity of a good friend, “I’m telling you, it helped. It really made me feel at peace.” I left the party with something I wouldn’t have believed when we arrived, a psychic’s phone number jotted down in pencil.

  I made an appointment. I set off into the outer reaches of southeast Portland. The outer, outer reaches. Her office was located in a building that had the feel of an abandoned concrete bunker. There was no signage, and I had come alone. I couldn’t help but wonder, Was this the last thing I’d ever do?

  I had never been to a therapist or talked to any sort of professional or semiprofessional or even an amateur about my feelings or my life. I wasn’t sure how any of this was supposed to work. Being the natural skeptic that I am, I told her very little about my life because, hello, I’m paying you to be a psychic. Figure out what’s wrong with me, please, and tell me what’s going to happen next. With one exception: I did tell her about my miscarriage. No need to burn good money over unnecessary mind games. I had to tell her why I was there.

  It took me a while to settle in to what was happening. The whole situation was simultaneously strange yet hopeful. The more we talked, the more I began to let the strangeness go and instead open up to the possibilities. I started to understand why people who felt desperate reached out to psychics. It was help beyond help. It was help that broke all the rules.

  She told me water was a soothing element in my life, I should be seeking out water whenever and wherever I could. Even listening to the sounds of water would work, she said. I had never realized until that moment how central water had been in my life, from Rhode Island beaches to skinny-dipping my way across pools in LA to the lake I had just returned from. Even for me, a terrifically shitty swimmer, it had the power to make me feel like I was home. I cried, not realizing how much I had been forcing myself to feel normal. Worse than normal, like a robot.

  The baby had been a boy, she said. Sawyer was a boy. That it had not been the right time for him. Or for us. She said he was happy and safe and that he loved us. She said more about him, from him, but it’s now lost to my lack of replaying it.

  A couple of months later I returned to her one last time, when I had a serious job offer in Vermont. I was now the type of person who was consulting a psychic over a job offer. I couldn’t even stand it.

  We didn’t want to leave Portland; it was sickening to even think about. We had always imagined building a family there, taking our baby to the Sellwood pool and berry picking with our kids on Sauvie Island. Roller-skating at Oaks Park roller rink and going to the Oregon State Fair even though that thing was awful.

  But our financial lives were in ruin, and my design partners had left to work at Nike. I wasn’t established enough to freelance, and besides, there was no freelance to get even if I had been. My work world was tanking and something had to give. Everything else that could already give—our plans, our lives, our hopes—already had. The universe was conspiring to spit us out of a place we loved, that’s how it felt. It was going to make us so utterly miserable that we’d have no choice.

  I told her a little about my job offer and the location. I said I was worried that the job would not only be impossible, that the scope of it seemed crazy, but also that I was more concerned that it would be a step backward. It was similar to a job I had already done and didn’t want to do anymore. And although the idea of Vermont was exciting—we had spent time there during our monthlong road-trip honeymoon and had added it to our list of places we’d like to live someday, but obviously when we were retired, because what jobs could there possibly be?—the thought of leaving Portland and Oregon and the West Coast behind was the saddest I had felt since losing the baby.

  At the end of our session she said, “Your job will be hard, but it will allow you to do everything you want to do,” and she added, “You will have a boy and a girl there. Everything you’ve ever wanted is there.”

  I left my job; we left Oregon; I sold my ’65 Chevy; we left our friends; we brought our dogs. My job was hard. But in ways big and small over many years and then due to the absence of it entirely, it allowed me to do exactly what I wanted to do.

  I have a boy.

  I have a girl.

  I have everything I’ve ever wanted.

  After our first child was born, I put together some photos of him and wrote a letter to my ob-gyn in Portland. I told her she was right, it hadn’t been the right time then, but it was now. I told her I was a mother and this cute baby right here? This was my son. I thanked her for everything. I thanked her for giving me permission to hope.

  If You Love Your Grandparents, Go Visit Them

  1. Arrivals

  Florida has never been on my list of favorite destinations (sorry, Florida). But since I moved back to New England I’ve embraced the fact that without Florida, the Winter Ship of Sanity would set sail forever and burst into flames on the horizon.

  I’m a searcher and a ground gazer, so from the very first time I saw pictures
of the beaches of Sanibel Island strung with thick garlands of carnival-colored shells, I knew I wanted to go. And I wanted to bring my kids, who only knew the hard-won small sand dollars of Maine or the occasional freshwater-snail shell delivered from Lake Champlain. I was hungry for abundance in the dead of winter, for saturated color and steam-soaked air.

  When we landed at Fort Myers, I was immediately struck by the formations of grandparents dotting the arrival area — couples, singles, flocks. One with a tentative cane, another with obedient curls, all with the look of permanent tourists. Relaxed, tan, and sporting Florida T-shirts with swoopy beach graphics. Their faces bright with expectation.

  I hadn’t thought much about my grandparents while planning this trip. I’d never been to Sanibel Island before, and for all I knew, neither had they. I had never connected my memories of my grandparents and their life in Florida with this trip until that very moment. As soon as I did, my heart felt the way a bruise does when it’s newly discovered, tender to the touch, a purplish surprise.

  I thought of all the times I should’ve visited them. I thought of all the times it could’ve been them waiting for me. I thought of all of the trips I could’ve made happen but didn’t.

  2. The Rearview Mirror

  When I was little we lived in Rhode Island, next door to my maternal grandparents. I rode to nursery school on the back of my grandmother’s bike. I played in their garden and plucked the tiniest blue-white flowers from the shaded patch of our mutual yard. And although my family eventually moved to Wisconsin and then to Massachusetts, I spent two weeks out of every summer staying with them, just one block from the beach.

  The details, the indelible details, of those days. The way my grandfather rose before the sun, humming to himself and stirring his coffee over and over again. I can still hear the spoon circling around clanging against the inside of the cup, a meditation.