I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (27 page)

“Is that right?” My dad’s suitably impressed. Freddie is the opposite of Dan. He reacts to
everything,
usually in exactly the way you wanted him to. The pimp/hustler part of him can read your mind, and he lives to fulfill (or prey upon) your desires. At least until he gets locked up for something. “Do you speak Arabic?”

I notice with a smidgen of pride that my dad didn’t ask if Dan speaks Lebanese. For a guy who only got to, like, eighth grade, Freddie’s pretty knowledgeable.

“I did.” Dan blushes. “But I don’t remember any of it.”

My dad turns to me. “You’re looking good, Tracy.”

“Thanks.” I am wearing a brand-new pair of jeans, which might have been a mistake, because they are getting all creasy in the crotch
area, which I hate. If I had worn them before, I would have known this in advance and chosen a different pair for a prison visit, which is nothing
but
sitting.

“I was worried. Those pictures you sent me—you looked a little chunky.”

He means the pictures I sent of me and the baby, taken in the hospital hours after the birth! My dad is such a douche sometimes. He has no idea
what
he is saying. I tell him that with a smile on my face. “Jesus, dude. I had just given birth! You’re unbelievable.”

I just called my dad “dude.” He deserved it.

So that’s pretty much the way it goes until the visiting hours end at three
P.M
. My dad getting to know his son-in-law. Dan getting to know his father-in-law. My dad lovingly finding all my flaws.

And me holding my darling new baby, thinking,
I can’t believe I brought my baby to prison.

I’M GOING TO WEAR WHITE
to marry Paul. I bought my dress today in a vintage wedding-dress shop in Toronto, where Paul is working on a soft drink commercial. It’s from the 1950s, full-length, ivory, with a teeny-tiny waist, high neck, lace bodice, long sleeves, and two thousand buttons up the back. It looks like something Grace Kelly would wear to marry a prince. I’m just excited that, even though it took me three weddings, I will finally fulfill my fantasy of being a traditional bride.

Paul has pulled a few strings with the producer of the commercial and gotten us a suite for the long weekend. It’s the most beautiful hotel room I’ve ever been in—the size of an apartment, with floor-to-ceiling windows and staggeringly beautiful views of Lake Ontario. I brought Sam with me, and the two of us are having a grand time eating crepes and hanging out while Paul works. We even took a day trip to Niagara Falls. Leave it to me to go to the honeymoon capital of the world right
before
I get married.

The wedding is two weeks away and things are a whirlwind. Paul gets back from Toronto next weekend, and I have talked him into making a pilgrimage to northern California to see an Indian guru who goes around the world blessing people by giving them hugs, which I think is totally punk rock. I want us to get a hug to bless our marriage. The plan is to drive up there the day Paul gets back, stay for one night, then drive back the next morning.

Nine days after that we get married.

We’ve kept all the wedding plans as simple as possible. There’s an abandoned hotel next door, owned by the company that converted our building into lofts, where we’re going to hold the ceremony. The place is a beautiful ruin—built around the turn of the century, it hasn’t been inhabited in decades—with a three-story lobby, a grand center staircase, and floors made of marble. But everything else about it is destroyed. There’s no electricity, and dead wires hang from the ceiling like twisted tree branches. Alabaster light streams in through the windows, some of which are broken. It’s devastated and gorgeous.

We’ve invited just a handful of people: our closest friends, my son, and Paul’s dad and stepmom. How funny that both of us have a family member who can’t attend because they’re institutionalized—my dad in prison, Paul’s brother in a psychiatric facility—which must mean we’re a perfect match. Saundra, my therapist, is officiating.

When the ceremony is over, we’re all going to one of L.A.’s landmark restaurants for steaks and wedding cake. And after a night in a hotel, we’ll head for a five-day honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas.

For a wedding we just started planning four weeks ago, everything has come together beautifully. Magically. Like when I said to Paul, “You know what we need for the ceremony? A candelabra.” And literally two minutes later, we pass a store with a perfect pair of five-foot candelabras made of iron in the window. Like that.

All that’s left now is to put the dress on and say, “I do.”

Oh, and see the guru.

MOTHERHOOD IS MAKING ME
obsessed with the electrical towers down the street. They’re not far enough away from our house for my liking. They are giant sentinels of steel and electricity that seem to watch everything I do. I think about them in the middle of the night, when I wake up to nurse Sam. Sometimes I can’t get back to sleep, I am thinking so hard about them. They are transmitting all of my anxiety.

Having a baby, not surprisingly, has freaked me out a little. To mother a child, I’m discovering, is a bit like accessing a 401(k) retirement account: you pull from whatever is in there, a combination of “employer contributions”—the way you were cared for by your own mother (or in my case father)—and your own ongoing deposits, i.e., whatever therapy and personal growth you’ve done.

I am a natural mom, in the way someone is a natural, say, tennis player: I’m warm and nurturing and comfortable caring for all of Sam’s needs, but I am terribly anxious, too. Especially about leaving. I’m afraid if I go out and Sam wakes up while I am gone, he’ll conclude I’m never coming back. The obvious solution is to ask myself if I am coming back—
Yeah, of course, I’m coming back!
—then rest assured that the baby will eventually figure that out when I show up in a little while, toting bags from Trader Joe’s. This is what reasonable people are encouraging me to try.

But I seem incapable of understanding this. Maybe because it’s not the grown woman in me who is afraid my baby will think I’m gone forever, but the baby in me who is remembering my own fear from when my parents left and then were gone “forever.” Perhaps my preverbal traumas are like fossils—not only not forgotten, but
perfectly
preserved in my memory, the way a tiny etching of a shell is engraved in sedimentary rock even after thousands of years. Motherhood is the light-rail project that brings in the jackhammers, breaking up all that rock once and for all.

This makes me think that postpartum depression is when a mother has a baby and it “wakes up” that part of her that was un
mothered or undermothered and thus is deeply, preverbally, achingly sad. They should call it postpartum grief. It makes sense that doctors prescribe antidepressants to “cure” it. That said, I don’t think I’m depressed. Not at all.

I’m just very very concerned about the power lines.

WHEN I’M NOT OBSESSING
about the power lines, I’m thinking about Gwyneth Paltrow. Of all people. I saw her once at the Sundance Film Festival, back when she was dating Brad Pitt. She was tall, and blond, and rich looking, exactly like in
Us Weekly
. At the time, I didn’t think much of her one way or another.

But motherhood has forced my own “daughterhood” to the surface, and that is making me have all kinds of feelings toward Gwyneth. Like, I kind of hate her. Not actual
hate
-hate. (I’m too Minnesotan for that.) More like middle-school hate. The special type of hate for tall, blond, rich girls who date Brad Pitt that is experienced by the rest of us less-fortunates. Which is to say the vast majority of vagina-having Americans.

I know right when it started: Oscar night 1997. I’m sitting there, watching Gwyneth sashay to the podium in her pink Ralph Lauren gown, when this intense feeling arises in me. The word “envy” comes to mind, but it’s really more than that. It’s more like
injustice
. Not wrongly-convicted-of-murder injustice, but close.
THIS IS SO, SO, SO UNFAIR,
my mind screams. How is it that one girl—Gwynnie—can pretty much get born, go shopping, date movie stars, sail around on Valentino’s yacht, then collect an Oscar, all before the age of twenty-seven? How does that happen?

Of course, I already know how, and that’s precisely what’s got me so upset. There’s even a special term for it. Gwyneth is a
daddy’s girl.

Apparently, when you have a father who takes excellent care of you, who is dedicated to giving you what you need
and
what you want (and not just Pixy Stix between prison sentences), you grow up
feeling like you should be treated very, very well. You feel
deserving
. And other people just naturally feel like you deserve stuff, too. So they give it to you.

This is obviously not quite what happened to me. But rather than mourn that, I’ve just decided to middle-school-hate Gwyneth.

My whole Gwyneth-Daddy obsession culminates a few years later at work. I’m supposed to be writing something for the five o’clock newscast when Gwyneth’s lovely face pops up on the twelve-inch TV that sits on my desk. She’s on
Oprah
. I have to watch.

I turn up the sound just as Gwyneth is sharing a story about how her dad surprised her with a father-daughter trip to Paris when she was ten. They stayed at the Ritz or something five-star like that, just the two of them. What kills me is the part where Gwyneth tells Oprah her dad’s reason for the trip.

“I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who will always love you,” he said.

That’s a quote.

My first reaction is white-hot anger—
A man who will always love me? No man will always love me. Tolerate me, maybe. Marry me if I beg him to, or if I’m pregnant. But love me so much he’ll whisk me off to Paris?

Stop it.

Then—and this surprises me—I begin to cry. Right there at my desk in the newsroom where everyone can see me. Big, clean tears, like summery white cotton. The kind good for halter tops and elephant bells.

Because Gwyneth was loved like that. And because I wasn’t, but I wanted to be.

THEN THERE’S MY PARTYING,
which is starting to look an awful lot like a drinking problem. Dan and I have started a band. Actually, Dan started it; I demanded membership when I saw how
much fun it was and how much time he would be away from the house without me. There are almost always one or two musicians at the house now, and the band gives me a nice little cover story for my near-constant use of marijuana, and later in the day, wine.

Here’s the thing about my drinking and pot smoking—you would never know. I make sure of that. It’s almost like I have two lives: in one, I’m a stay-at-home mom learning the ropes of new motherhood; in the other, I’m a chick in a band. In the first life, I’m surrounded by women; in the second, I’m surrounded by men. In one, I hide my partying; in the other, it’s pretty much all I do. It’s like I have two opposing parts of myself: one that nurtures, and one that destroys.

I am trying to convince myself that I am freethinking, a countercultural hippie. But it’s hard. I am paranoid about the next-door neighbor, a do-gooder with a brand-new master of social work degree. I have these morbid fears that she is going to smell the marijuana smoke wafting out of our garage and turn me in to Children’s Services, who will take my baby away from me.

Interestingly, my morbid fear doesn’t seem to be enough to make me stop doing it.

I have a bottle of wine to myself pretty much every night and smoke all kinds of weed at all hours. I try to leave at least one inch on the joint and at least one inch in the wine bottle, so I don’t feel like I finished it. If I finished it, that would mean I have a problem. Most awfully, I have been doing all this drinking and weed smoking while breastfeeding Sam. I try to limit the feedings to when I’m sober, but I’m very ashamed of myself. It might sound kind of harmless—
It’s just a little red wine and marijuana
—but it’s not just a little and more important,
if I could stop I would
. But clearly, I can’t.

As my baby grows—he’s almost two now—it’s getting easier and easier to just finish the bottle every night. And harder and harder to ignore the fact that, in spirit, I’m just like my own mother—except with a husband, a house, and a college degree. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t want to do anything without getting high first.

Like today, when I went to a toddler Halloween party. Three minutes before walking out the door, I had to smoke myself out. In the middle of the afternoon. For me, topping off my high is like freshening up my lipstick. The one last thing I have to do before I leave the house. I don’t know how I would feel if I didn’t do it, but I don’t want to find out.

The party is being held at a very swanky house in the hills. I’m not intimidated by the house, as I have grown used to the level of wealth all around me in Los Angeles, which can border on the ridiculous. Still, I am very aware that I’m a long, loooong way from Minneapolis. But being impressed is a dead giveaway that you don’t belong. So I cultivate my unimpressedness.

The crowd is made up of the women from my playgroup (most of whom have retired from whatever career they might have had, in order to become full-time moms) and their ambitious, clubby husbands, many of whom are quite successful in the music industry and seem to talk only to one another. They are a lot like the guys on the hockey team.

We all stand around discussing preschools and Teletubbies while watching our toddlers grab stuff from each other, lurch around, and occasionally fall over.

I feel weird. I know my eyes are bloodshot—there aren’t enough eyedrops in the world anymore—and I’m spacey and woozy. I can hear myself saying things that sound, uh, stupid. I spend all of my mental energy making sure no one knows I’m high. Acting “normal.” It never occurs to me to ask myself why I get high when I spend my whole time high acting as if I’m not high.