Amateur Hour Read online

  No, not catching it? I’m saying she was a total bitch, you guys. That’s what I’m saying. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That was obviously inappropriate. I mean, I stand by my assessment of her condition, if not my particular phrasing of it. Obviously things back then weren’t nearly as sophisticated as they are today, from a diagnostic perspective. But my layperson’s hunch is that your great-grandmother was also a Real Piece of Work.

  That aside, I’m sure you’re wondering what our next steps are and what can be done. As far as I’ve been able to figure out, there’s no actual cure for your mother’s condition. She will continue to be a Real Piece of Work for the rest of her life. She was a Real Piece of Work when we met, and, if anything, this is one area of her life where she’s been remarkably consistent. And completely oppressive.

  I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on this and I do think there could be a silver lining to this whole situation. We’ll finally have a name to put with her condition. Instead of just thinking—and I’ll speak for myself here—that we’ll never be good enough for her or that we’re horrible people, we can all just know, deep down, it’s simply because she’s a Real Piece of Work.

  It reminds me of my boss, who has a condition called Born Rich and Doesn’t Really Need This Job. Every time I think, Man, why am I always the one who’s working late, grabbing him a coffee, making excuses for why he can’t be at a meeting? That’s when I remind myself he can’t help it—it’s just that he was Born Rich and Doesn’t Really Need This Job. It helps, it honestly does.

  I guess what I’d like to emphasize as we sort this all out is that we need to take care of ourselves. Just do whatever you need to do to feel happy and sane. You might not believe this, but I’ve gotten back into painting and I’ve been doing a lot of reading as well.

  Recently I came across this poem and I’d like to read it to you girls. I think it might help us reframe our predicament. But I guess, to be accurate, I didn’t just “come across” it; I actually rewrote it. Okay, fine, I stole it. The original is called “Welcome to Holland.” Maybe you’ve heard of it?

  My version is called “Welcome to Hell.” I hope you like it.

  Welcome to Hell

  I am often asked to describe the experience of living with someone who’s a Real Piece of Work—to try to help people who have not shared this unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this . . .

  When you’re getting married, it’s like planning a fabulous party—in a bar, on a floating barge, to Sex Land. You buy a bunch of “guidebooks” and make your wonderful plans. The Reverse Cowgirl, the Naughty Financial Adviser, the Rent Is Two Months Late, and Someone Needs a Spanking. It’s all very exciting.

  After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in, tongue flickering, hands raised in devil horns, and she whisper-shouts, “Welcome to hell.”

  “Hell?!” you say. “What do you mean, hell? I signed up for Sex Land! I’m supposed to be in Sex Land. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Sex Land!”

  But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in hell and there you must stay.

  The important thing is they haven’t taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine, and disease. OR HAVE THEY? IT’S CALLED HELL AFTER ALL.

  So, shit, now you have to go out and buy a new guidebook. And you have to learn a whole bunch of new facial expressions. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met—or you would have if your wife hadn’t alienated every last one of them.

  It’s just a different place. It’s much more hell-y than Sex Land, way less fun than Sex Land. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice hell has a lot of sighing, hell has inexplicable rage, hell even has the most biting judgments; it just honestly takes your breath away sometimes. This place sucks.

  Meanwhile, everyone you know is busy coming and going from Sex Land, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. God, you think, my friends are total dicks. And for the rest of your life you will say, “Ugh, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

  The pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream will make you want to stab your so-called friends. Right in their parts.

  But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Sex Land, you may never be free to enjoy the very special hell that is hell.

  You know what, now that I read this out loud, this poem is stupid. It’s not helping at all.

  Fuck Holland.

  Fuck hell.

  Fuck your mother.

  Someone should.

  Showdowns

  Overshare

  My phone currently contains more than thirty-eight thousand photos and seven hundred videos.

  This digital shit storm doesn’t take into account the pre-iPhone film photos or even the digital-camera ones, nor does it include the videos on my desktop, laptop, and floating across multiple clouds (What are clouds? Does anyone even know?). It doesn’t include what’s on Instagram or across all the photo-editing apps I’ve since abandoned. And of course it can’t include the hundreds of shots I wished I had taken and did not.

  It’s like Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

  When my kids were little, I worried I was documenting them too much, which didn’t stop me from actually doing it. Not even a little bit. I was training them to the camera, like circus lions to the whip. I needed every smile, every outfit, every crazy-hair morning, every beach, every Popsicle, every ice cream cone, every new book, every hat, every snowman, every Christmas Eve, every birthday, every sparkly dress, every Lego, every first day of school, every last day of school, every morning, every afternoon, every moment of every day of their lives. Line up against this wall, this mural, this place where the light is better.

  I worried about the end game here. What was the end game here? I kept telling myself everyone else was doing it too, so it must be okay. I was using an adolescent argument for a very grown-up problem.

  Now that my kids are older, and as I continue to try to tease this apart, I can see I was conflating documenting with sharing. Because I wasn’t just documenting moments so I could savor them down the road or press them in a book, I was documenting moments in order to share them, and share them immediately. It wasn’t enough for us to know we went blueberry picking, everyone else must also know we went blueberry picking. And not just blueberry picking but blueberry picking on a beautiful day in Vermont, rolling hills and puffy white clouds very much in evidence. Behold my children wearing good outfits and showing their adorable faces and those curls or eyes or chubby fingers. Look at us! We are killing it over here! Aren’t we? Please like this photo.

  I have occasionally followed basic ethical guidelines for photography, like asking my kids for their permission to take a photo. The problem with that is they will sometimes say no and isn’t that a pickle? So I have also taken many, many more photos of them without asking. I have begged them. I have paid them a dollar and once paid them each three dollars. I have asked them nicely and I have guilted them into it.

  The documenting that would often cause the most friction were the shots I wanted to take as we raced out the door to something, when they looked their cutest, their most dressed up, or were fully engulfed in costumes. When we were on our way to An Event. We would always end up running late, as my kids posed and jumped and finally ran out of the frame and away from me.

  The best moments were when we worked together, picking outfits or settings for a photo, or creating different roles and scenarios for videos. There was one period in particular when I struggled to hold myself together as a dear friendship imploded. I never wanted to return home after school because that’s when the loneliness would hit me, as we
all went our separate ways. I needed them with me; I needed them close, to try to dull how alone I felt. For weeks on end, I’d pick them up from school and we’d take off on afternoon adventures. We’d pick raspberries or walk through the woods. We’d wander in sunflower fields and drive to small-town libraries forty-five minutes away. I wanted to be away from everyone I knew, everyone except them. I was attempting to escape the ache in my life, and although they didn’t know it, my kids were consoling me with their presence. Simply by being in this with me.

  One memorable afternoon, I brought along the giant costume tree heads Jon and I had bought at a library tag sale when we first moved to Vermont. The kids and I traipsed through the woods and stood in front of barns, pretending to be autumn trees. It was completely silly. And really wonderful. Sharing took on this veneer of “Here I am, and I am fine. I am doing fine. See me? I’m doing great.” It was a way of signaling to people who didn’t even care anymore that I would survive this. A breakup is a breakup is a breakup.

  Although it’s difficult all these years later to look at those photos without feeling incredibly sad, I also cherish them because they represent my kids and I creating something together. It felt healing. There was no work, no homework, no chores, no unfriending, no sadness, and no life outside the three of us. At least for a couple of hours each day.

  But the worst moments were profoundly, almost unspeakably, awful. Those were the times when I crossed the line, when I got so frustrated that I utterly blew my stack. Over a photo. For Facebook. There is one photo in particular that always springs to mind. It’s of my daughter when she was about five years old. We had picked up a mini watermelon from the farmers’ market after school and I wanted to get a photo of her holding it when we got home. She complained it was too heavy, she didn’t want to hold it, she wanted to go inside, and when she shifted it ever so slightly it almost slipped from her hands. I screeched, “DON’T YOU DARE DROP THAT WATERMELON.”

  Oh my God.

  She burst into tears. I still have the photo from right before that moment. The worst I ever feel as a parent is when I come across it during an archival dig. It tells me everything I’ve ever done wrong with her in exactly one frame. A little kid. A powerful adult. Me bending her to my will. Her not strong enough to even hold this tiny smooth watermelon. Me yelling at her for almost dropping it. All for a photo.

  I know I shared that photo. I know it got some likes—how many, who knows now. I know my daughter still remembers that moment, even all these years later. How could she not? Even still, I’m afraid to ask her, to conjure that ghost. And I know it was never even remotely worth it. What was happening to me there? What was I hoping for?

  There is a hunger to share our children with the world or even just our supposedly private circle (nothing is private, nothing). They are special to us, and we want everyone else to think they’re special too. Can’t you see it? Just look at them! Swimming and jumping across hay bales, graduating from preschool and eating birthday cake. Can’t you see it too? Would you please like this photo to prove to me you also see how wonderful they are? Would you please encourage me to do more of this sort of thing? Let’s admire my children together.

  Another time, another utter failure of my position. My kids, just two and four, had tagged along with me when I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Now that was a day. When we arrived at our polling place, I took a photo of them standing next to the vote—enter here sign as they shouted “Vote! Vote! Vote!” to passersby. My son wore a cowboy hat and his red puffy vest. And she wore a handmade paper crown, pink pants, and held her orange-and-white stuffed kitty named Milky. She was rocking on the sides of her feet, her little white Converse on rubber edge in the photo.

  Four years later. As we prepared to repeat that voting field trip, I mentioned how we should try to re-create the original photo as accurately as we could. That it would be fun to see how much they’d grown, that it was important to mark this incredible occasion, for them, for us as a family, but let’s face it, mostly for me. I printed out the old photo. We found my son’s old cowboy hat. My daughter plucked Milky from her bed, the one thing that hadn’t yet been outgrown.

  They were more self-conscious this time, especially as my eight-year-old son popped a cowboy hat on his head that he had last worn when he was four, half a lifetime ago. And my daughter held her stuffed kitty Milky, although her ivory cable sweater dress and knee-high leather boots gave her the look of a teenager instead of the child she still was. I tried to take the photo fast, to not get in the way of other people attempting to dash in and out to cast their vote. I tried to get my kids to look in the same direction as they did in that old photo or to hold hands the same way, not too tight, just a little bit loose. Neither of them really wanted to do it. They were distracted by all the activity, embarrassed by the attention, just wanting to be done with it already. Still, they soldiered on, albeit a bit more vocally. My daughter, especially, put up a stink about it. She is always the one unafraid to put up a stink about things.

  I had promised we would get cupcakes after this whole thing, if they would just cooperate. I knew we were in bribery territory, and I was more than okay with it. It wasn’t the first time and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  But my daughter kept messing around. She was tired and whiny. She didn’t want to cooperate. Or at least that’s what I thought was happening as she seemed to be squirming around with her legs and her feet and not standing up tall. Christ. I finally snapped, “STOP DOING THAT. YOU’RE NOT GETTING A CUPCAKE AFTER THIS.”

  Oh my God.

  OH MY GOD.

  Of course she cried. Of course she did! What a goddamn monster! And through her tears she said, “I was . . . trying . . . to have my foot . . . the way it was . . . in the old picture.”

  Are you trying to figure out which part is worse? Because it’s five years later and I’m still not sure. Was it me yelling? Or me threatening to take away her cupcake? Maybe it was the fact that even though she didn’t want to, she was posing for that photo anyway? And not only posing, but trying to make her six-year-old foot rock to the side in the same exact position as her two-year-old foot? Or was it that she had studied the photo and was doing her hardest to replicate it? And I yelled at her. And she was six. And I’m a grown-up and I yelled at her.

  I am such a fucking asshole.

  I’m looking at that photo now. And my heart feels utterly broken. It feels broken for how far down a rabbit hole I had to be to think that was normal-person behavior. It feels broken for how far down a rabbit hole I still am. It feels broken for how much I trained my children to stop what they were doing, to hold up the flower, the mud pie, the shell, the feather. To stand in the sunset, no this way, no that way, jump! Run! Now do it again!

  Would I have taken so many photos if I hadn’t planned on sharing them? I can guarantee I wouldn’t have. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have taken any. I originally became interested in photography when my dad gave me my first camera in junior high. I graduated from college with a bachelor of fine arts in photography. This isn’t a new interest or hobby; it didn’t float up from the Internet and snatch me in its evil grasp. I have always been looking for patterns and possibilities. But there are no longer any consequences for taking a million photos. We have completely lost the time and cost barriers of dropping off film, paying for prints, and tracking our negatives. You never knew what shots you had. And unless you were a professional photographer with an unlimited film budget, you wouldn’t keep firing away on a motor drive until you got what you came for.

  But when you combine the ease of taking endlessly free digital photos with something that is always on you, the ability to share those images instantly from that same thing in your pocket, and then let’s go ahead and frost that whole shit cake with a feedback loop that only encourages you to do it more? Well.

  When we document simply for the pleasure of doing so, for our own use and satisfaction, I believe we are more likely to let moments unfold. To
capture what is happening in front of us versus engineering what we want to happen. It’s the difference between a documentary and a reality show. Not always, not every time. There have been posed group shots, first-day-of-school snaps, and “Hold up your Christmas present!” photos since photography became accessible to the masses. But the addition of interaction and validation has blurred the lines completely and permanently.

  There is pleasure in letting yourself be known. There is satisfaction that even given all the (highly stylized, highly fictionalized) evidence of your life, others approve. And especially as mothers, as women, I believe there is a desire to be seen. We go from being so visible during our pregnancies to being shoved aside the minute our babies are born. We step back into the shadows as the light—and attention, resources, and time—shine down upon our children. Perhaps it is a way of reclaiming our space or some semblance of self. And maybe that’s all just bullshit and we’re simply hungry for validation. Like I’m the expert.

  I’m also not a psychic, I have no ability to see ten or twenty or thirty years into the future. I can’t anticipate what all of this documenting and sharing has done to my kids. I only know what it’s done to me. The sheer volume of photos I take of them has dropped steeply with each passing year, although no one on social media would likely be able to tell the difference. They are getting older, more aware of their digital presence. And I have stopped competing with other parents online, to try to get the better photo of that thing our kids all do. Whatever it is.

  I have tried harder to be respectful of what they want and what they don’t want. I’m often taken aback when they ask me to take a photo or video of something they’re doing. And I can’t help but feel the deepest sense of irony when I actually hear myself say, “You know you don’t need to take a photo of everything you do.”