Girl in a Band (21 page)

SOMETIME IN MY
late thirties I'd begun looking at babies. Babies on the sidewalk, in strollers, on shoulders. The problem was, I could never figure out the best time to start a family. Thurston's and my life as a couple, and as a band, was all about writing, recording, doing press, endlessly touring. Still, once the idea came into my head it was hard to push back.

As always, Thurston's self-assuredness and outward confidence helped convince me we could carry the parenting thing off. He didn't talk much about having a child, but he didn't discuss much of anything at length—the music connected us, taking the place of words, and we ended up in agreement about most things.

But after Coco was born, I realized we had never talked about what kind of parents or partners we wanted to be. I'd simply assumed Thurston was supportive of feminist issues, like equal participation in child care, equal responsibilities around the house, and so forth.

Like most new moms, I found that no matter how just and shared you expect the experience to be, or how equal the man thinks parenting should be, it isn't. It can't be. Most child-raising falls on women's shoulders. Some things, like the laundry, are just easier to do yourself than to have to explain in detail to someone else. Other things were biological. As a baby, whenever Coco cried I felt it immediately, physically, because my breasts began to leak. Thurston, and any man for that matter, would never feel that same kind of urgency, that desire to make the crying stop not only to comfort your baby but for your own body's sake. This doesn't make men bad parents, though it can make women feel alone in what they'd hoped would be an equal division of labor. This is a dynamic that carried over to other parts of our relationship.

Being pregnant made me nervous. In my third trimester, I remember going to a party where I ran into Peter Buck of R.E.M. and his then wife Stephanie. They'd just had twin babies, Zelda and Zoe, and I was frightened when Stephanie asked me if I wanted to hold one. I also had a series of anxiety dreams. In one, Coco was a baby who talked and went out to lunch without me. In another, right after Kurt killed himself, someone left Frances Bean in my charge. (In real life, whenever Courtney had visited New York, her nanny Jackie brought Frances over to play with Coco. I have photos of Frances curled up in our disgusting cat bed. Crawling babies seem to gravitate to the places you least want them to go.)

Thurston immediately took to fatherhood. He was a natural, in fact. I'd read my share of parenting and baby books, but he was much more experienced around kids, having done a lot of babysitting when he was younger. He was never awkward holding Coco or getting down on the floor and playing with her.

At the same time, it was hard to tell him anything I was feeling without his getting offended, since he took everything so personally. I wish he had sometimes said, “Tell me what I can do to help out,” but he never did. That's no slam; it's just the way it was. But it made me feel like I was the only one in control, the only one looking out for us as a family, the lighthouse keeper. I wasn't always comfortable in that role, but I had little choice. I had to do what was right for our family.

Having a baby also created a huge identity crisis inside of me. It didn't help that during press interviews, journalists always said, “What's it like to be a rock-and-roll mom?” just as over the last decades they couldn't help asking, “What's it like to be a girl in a band?” I'm sure Thurston got the same question, but at least on the surface it didn't appear to bother him as much. Like a lot of guys, he was the “cool, fun dad,” which was great for Coco in many ways. In the end he was probably a better dad than he was a partner, as more and more he'd begun pulling away from me, wanting to do everything his way. Looking back, I think it was probably because he didn't want to be with me anymore.

IT WASN'T THAT
our apartment on Lafayette was all that cramped, more that it was simply time for a change. Anyone who leaves New York knows that when the city isn't working for them the way it used to, the only question is where to go. Portland, Oregon. Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We considered both those places, and we also scoped out Brooklyn—Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill—but outer-borough prices were more than we wanted to pay, and I didn't want to live any farther out in the New York suburbs.

I was thinking ahead, too. I didn't want to raise Coco on Lafayette
Street. Not on the fringes of Soho, not with giraffe-packs of skinny models on every sidewalk within the Soho pedestrian mall of high-end consumerism. The New York nanny culture also bugged me, both parents working all day to be able to afford to pay a stranger to take care of a child they never got to see. The expense and the inconvenience, and later down the line, schools and tests and applications and micromanaging your child in a city where no kid can walk around unaccompanied, where there are no yards and no real neighbors to speak of—all of these were factors in our decision to go.

Northampton, Massachusetts, was a longtime secondary market for us. It was a student town. Smith was there, and close by were Amherst, UMass Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke. Williams was an hour away, too. It was filled with lots of New York City transplants, so it didn't feel like a traditional suburb or a commuter town. Northampton is also one of the most liberal small cities in America. The main drag was a spiky blur of coffee shops, tattoo parlors, vegetarian restaurants, yoga studios, and therapists' offices. Underlying the decision to move there was the hope that maybe Thurston, Coco, and I could become more family centered, more unified, less scattered. Helping to smooth things were the good friends we had in the area, like Byron Coley and his family, and J Mascis, who lived in Amherst.

But moving from the city to the country still felt exotic. A Realtor showed us a few properties, mostly farmhouses with rectangular unlit rooms and ceilings that grazed your scalp. Thurston had grown up in an extremely old house with ceilings so low he couldn't stand all the way up in his own bedroom. When we found a big rangy brick house with three floors and a backyard for sale close to the Smith College campus, we jumped on it, or rather Thurston did. He approached things with a kid-like overconfidence, unlike me, who stood back and questioned things more. In the end, using the money I'd gotten from the sale of X-Girl, we bought the house. We held on to the Lafayette Street apartment, but we were now New Englanders.

Before we'd even moved in, a local newspaper, the
Gazette,
ran a front-page story about Thurston's and my moving to Northampton, which bugged me, because now everybody in town knew where we lived. One night, I remember, someone dropped a demo tape on our front porch. Another night two Smith students who lived in senior housing across the street from us left a note taped to our screen door asking if Julie Cafritz and I would deejay at a Smith College radio show. Julie and her husband, Bob, had moved to the area a few years after we did. Julie and I ended up doing it, and we had fun, too.

Compared to New York, everything felt more affordable in Massachusetts, and the house gave us a whole new feeling of space and freedom. The basement was ideal for playing, and also provided storage for Thurston's huge LP collection. Over time it would fill up with books, cassettes, and VHS tapes, plus assorted Sonic Youth archival material and merchandise, all sharing the stage with family furniture I'd inherited from my parents, as well as other souvenirs, including clay figurines I'd made when I was a teenager.

Over time I grew to like living in Northampton. It was New York–centric rather than Boston-centric—people read the
New York Times,
not the
Boston Globe
—even though New York was a three-hour drive south and Boston less than ninety miles to the east. It was also rural and beautiful, a small town with the sophistication of a bigger city. The last thing in the world I ever wanted was to live in suburbia, but with its students, academia, hippies, farmers, New York transplants, and old Yankees, Northampton was something else entirely. A few years after Thurston and I moved, I ran into Lawrence Weiner, the artist, at an exhibition in New York. “Are you still living in Massachusetts?” he asked. “Then why are you here? Don't you need a passport to leave?” Lawrence's fantasy of Northampton, and of all of New England, was that the Puritans were still running the show. I laughed.

Whatever fantasy I had about living in Northampton couldn't make me overcome the fear any ex–New Yorker would feel of being surrounded
by blandness and conformity. But no place gives you everything. I'm equally mistrustful of the energy bursts New York gives you, which fragment and exhaust you. Living there gives you a phony sense of self-importance and confidence. If you're at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.

THAT FIRST NEW ENGLAND
winter was hard. Snowstorms, then more snowstorms, with long icicles dripping from the gutters like swords or freeze-frames of lightning, and the responsibility of taking care of things we'd never had to think about before, like shoveling the back stairs or the walkway. Sometimes when I drove along Route 9 into Amherst in January or February, everything looked so gray and ugly, especially the shut-down vegetable stands and of course the mall, filled with suburban big-box stores like Home Depot, Chipotle, Target, Walmart, just like in every suburb in America.

We'd wanted a change, something different, and now we had it. But
when I look back, maybe we'd moved in an attempt to get away not from New York but from an unspoken tension that had been growing in our marriage since Coco was born. The game Thurston and I seemed to be playing, without saying a single word, was,
Who's the adult here?

Coco had started kindergarten at the local lab school affiliated with Smith College, less a true lab school than a small private school with a few progressive ideas. It was only a block from our house, an easy stroll in the mornings and afternoons, and it reminded me of the UCLA Lab School I'd attended at that age, the one with the beautiful campus and the gully.

Other family matters were taking up space, too. On the next-to-last day of a tour we were doing with Pearl Jam in 2000, the same year Al Gore lost the presidential election to Bush, my mother was involved in a serious car accident. Her caretaker was driving her on various errands when she made a left turn at the wrong time. Heroic measures were taken to revive her. My old L.A. friend Margie, who was almost an older sister to me, called to give me the news a few minutes before we went onstage in Washington, D.C. Ian MacKaye, the iconic performer from Minor Threat and Fugazi, was there. He said to me, “There's tour reality, and then there's reality.” Thurston and I got on a plane to L.A. I was sobbing the whole plane ride.

My mom had suffered a severe head injury and was in a Los Angeles ICU for more than a month. Thurston could stay only a few days, and then he had to fly back east to take care of Coco, whom we'd left with her babysitter. I was still in Los Angeles when Coco went to her first day of first grade. Thurston took a sweet photograph of the two of them on their way to school, and my heart broke not to be there, to feel split in half between the joy of seeing Coco starting first grade and keeping vigil over my mom. But I also felt lucky and secure that Thurston was a good dad who could give our daughter everything she needed even if I couldn't physically be there.

My mom remained in the hospital for another two months. She ended up with a feeding tube, unable to communicate during the last three years of her life. But she was lucid, knew who everyone around her was,
and her personality was intact. Sometimes I wondered if she was looking at me with bitterness or reproach about her condition—had it been the right decision to consent to heroic efforts to save her? Hard to say, and I'll never know.

Eventually, my mom returned home with a cast of caregivers. I flew back and forth every two months to see her and check on her progress, and when I couldn't be there, Margie was there, filling me in on her progress. I could never have survived that period without Margie. My mother had worked so hard in her later years to make sure she never ended up in a wheelchair—she did yoga, played golf, and walked every day—so it was crushing for me to see her like this. Plus, it was painful to me that she'd lived her entire life in Los Angeles without having a major car accident, only to be brought down by someone else, a caretaker, at the wheel.