The last days of my mother, the control freak

Mom made meticulous plans for everything in life, but when she neared the end, she wasn't sure what they were

By Judith Levine

The last days of my mother, the control freak

Topics:Life stories, Motherhood, Real Families

Two weeks after my mother’s final stroke, it occurred to me she might not know she was dying.

The symptoms of her impending death were all there. She was too tired to open her eyes. She was subsisting on ice chips the size of a baby’s fingernail. Her extremities were cool, the traffic in her veins so lazy that the hospice nurses couldn’t find a pulse. Her breathing would cease for many seconds, then resume with a deep drag — until the next hiatus. She fiddled with the bedclothes and asked me what that dog was doing in the room. There was no dog.

“Do you know you’ve had two more strokes?” I asked her.

“No!”

I wasn’t surprised by her surprise. All year she’d expressed fresh astonishment each time she was informed of her condition — the first stroke that robbed her of memory and sight; the second and third that rendered her more demented, and incontinent; the fall that fractured her hip and propelled her further into frailty and confusion. “This is the first time anyone’s told me!” she’d declare.

My mother was a woman proud of being in charge. In fact, she could bear hardly a moment of not knowing what was coming next, of intellectual ambiguity or emotional irresolution.

This anxiety had practical outlets. At the various agencies she managed, she’d designed systems that were still in use decades later. Her closets were immaculate; a week’s worth of dinners were cooked and frozen each Sunday.

But her allergy to ambivalence also made her impulsive and controlling. Unsure how to live with my father as he descended into Alzheimer’s, she’d moved them from Manhattan to an assisted living facility in Ithaca and back three months later, $30,000 poorer. If you visited her summer house, she had every second accounted for and was perpetually pushing you on to the next activity: Finish breakfast so we can go for a hike. Hurry down the mountain so we can get back for lunch. Eat the soup, clear the table for pie …

Like everything else, dying and death were written into the agenda. She and my father signed living wills in their 50s and periodically renewed them, checking off the boxes to decline extraordinary — and in some cases ordinary — measures to prolong their days if there was little promise of a decent quality of life. Every few months she mailed me an updated sheet containing their Social Security numbers, insurance policies, bank account balances, and so on.

Then, six months before her 90th birthday, three blood clots migrated from her heart to her brain, and the woman who had walked two miles and practiced the piano daily, kept the books, distributed leaflets for peace, and organized a social life to rival Marie Antoinette’s could no longer make toast or remember her phone number. Her beau, unable to cope with her new needs, asked her to leave the apartment they’d shared for eight years.

Perched on the examining table a few weeks after returning from rehab, my mother wept to her gerontologist. “I have no say anymore,” she kept repeating. The crowning proof of her lost autonomy: She possessed neither the courage nor the cognitive ability to commit suicide.

Now, I didn’t want my mother to be the last to hear the momentous news — and I wanted her to have a say. “Mom,” I asked, “are you aware that you’re dying?”

Her face registered surprise again, then trouble. She shook her head, as if to deny not knowledge of the fact but the fact itself.

Technically, she had a point. My mother was performing every end-of-life act on schedule — except dying.

According to the death-and-dying websites I pored over while she dozed, today’s surge of energy and hunger was another typical end-of-life sign — or not. A friend’s husband had swung his legs over the side of the hospital bed, ordered breakfast, delivered a disquisition on the role of the Menscheviks in the Russian Revolution, and 12 hours later was on his way to that great soviet in the sky.

On the other hand, Mom’s nurse Jeff had a patient who’d asked for a pastrami on rye, gotten up, and lived another year.

This morning on the phone, Jeff concurred that Mom probably couldn’t down a pastrami sandwich; she coughed on a half-teaspoonful of water. He suggested we try applesauce, but wanted to check her swallowing first.

To tell the truth, I hoped he’d pronounce her unable. Mom and I had discussed the options for checking out. The only one that didn’t involve my committing a felony was for her to stop eating and drinking. But I knew she couldn’t do it. Food had become Mom’s only pleasure.

Now, at last, her body was taking on the job. Her appetite gone and her throat muscles compromised, she was on the way to fatal starvation and dehydration. Then this morning she’d said yes when her caregiver asked if she wanted something to eat.

Was this a habitual response? (In the last months, she never refused a snack.) Or was she actually hungry?

Did she desire just to eat — or to live?

It seemed the right moment to review the wishes she’d set down in her advanced directive. Feeding tube? No. Intravenous nutrition? No. Her answers were nearly inaudible, but emphatic.

Now came the part between the little boxes on the document — the part, it turns out, that covers much of dying. “So, OK,” I began. “You have a choice. We could keep giving you the ice chips whenever you want them, and keeping your mouth wet, and you would die — pretty soon.” I paused to let her take that in. “Or we could start feeding you again. You’d still die,” I said, “but more slowly.”

Moments passed. “Do you understand?” I prompted.

She nodded that she did, then turned her head to me: “What’s the prognosis?”

I wasn’t going to lie to her. “Well, Ma, I gotta say: It ain’t good. You’re half-paralyzed. You’ll never walk again. You’re not going to get your mind back, and your sight is only getting worse.”

Another long pause. Finally, she sighed: “Oy.”

I laughed at this astute summary of the situation.

Mom asked: “What’s your recommendation?”

This was turning into the most cogent conversation I’d had with my mother in six months.

“I’m sorry, Mom. But I can’t recommend. It’s your life.”

I felt her drifting. Was she thinking about it, too tired to think about it, unwilling to think about it? Then she spoke slowly, almost soundlessly, but with crystalline clarity: “To tell you the truth, I feel pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.”

To appropriate St. Augustine, my mother wanted to be dead, but not yet.

Jeff came an hour later. In the living room with my partner, Paul, and me, he confirmed that food would stall, but not forestall, Mom’s demise. Still, if she wanted to eat and could, we should let her eat. “Hospice isn’t about hastening anyone’s death,” he said. Then he excused himself to examine my mother and came back to tell us her throat muscles were too impaired to admit food or even water. The decision was made: keep on with the ice, and wait.

I was relieved, and not just about resolving the dilemma at hand. The last year had overtaken my life, demolished my ability to work, and roiled a fragile détente with my brother. Full-time care was draining my mother’s savings. I’d badgered her doctor to discontinue her meds and let nature takes its course. He said the drugs were bettering her quality of life. I countered that they were prolonging her death. I kept telling him she was ready to die — she kept telling me she was. We all knew I was ready for her to die.

Now that she was “actively dying,” however, it seemed she was up for prolonging her death with every ounce of life she had left. And why not? She was in no pain. Her caregivers were swaddling her in meticulous attention.

And she finally had what she’d wanted all my life: me. Her prickly daughter was at her side, doting with inexhaustible patience, anticipating her every need, acknowledging her every feeling — loving her. Paul and I joked that just to get even, she would live forever. (Or at least until the next thing on her agenda.) My mother had been giving advance directives all her life. The living will was just the ultimate one.

But here’s the thing: Plan all you like, you can’t know the territory of dying until you arrive. And then there is nothing like the glint off the Grim Reaper’s scythe to blind you to the path you thought you’d mapped.

My mother was desperate to get there, then wasn’t so sure. She hung on for what to her must have been an interminable period of indecision — living an entire month on nothing but ice chips.

On day 30, I again asked if she knew she was dying.

This time she nodded her head yes.

“Are you ready? Is it OK, Mom?”

Her face was calm, her voice less than a whisper. Yes, she said. She was ready.

: Judith Levine is a journalist and author of four books, most recently "Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping." More Judith Levine

- 74Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume

When I took the job at the bar, I looked down on it -- and the women who worked there. But I had so much to learn

By Jennifer Wright

Topics:Life stories, Feminism, Editor's Picks

The job description had me at “wear a pirate costume.” A sexy pirate costume, for the very sexy pirate-themed bar on Bleecker Street. The fact that the bar promised hundreds of dollars a night for selling people shots sounded quite all right, too.

I grappled for a few moments over what anyone would find sexy about an eye patch. It implied my eyeball had been gored in a fearsome bayonet fight with a British grenadier. I asked the manager whether I should look for a parrot. She was not charmed.

But by God, I was. I’d grow up on a steady diet of country club sandwiches and tennis lessons, and this was what I came to New York for: to do odd things, and see interesting people. People who went to pirate bars, for fun. I had been a model for art classes, but I had never been a pirate. I kept thinking of the Dorothy Parker poem “Song of Perfect Propriety” where she wrote:

I should like to strut and curse
Among my blackguard crew . . .
But I am writing little verse
As little ladies do

There would be time for a little verse years later, once I doffed my absolutely hilarious eye patch. Before I went in for my first day, I received a list of rules on ways to be a good shot girl. The first was:

Make up: Black mascara, lip-gloss, GLITTER around your eye.
Dress code: short black skirt and heals [sic].

So by “pirate” they meant “shiny eyed slattern with a rare gift for healing.” Like Mary Magdalene, maybe. Other tips just made me think that selling shots was going to be a weird, weird job.

Some people have fun eating from their own hands. Do not force feed anyone!

It had not occurred to me that I would deliberately force shots down people’s throats, though, years later, I find it hard to watch any romantic couple feeding one another without thinking, “Some people have fun eating from their own hands!”

But I imagined the women working at the bar would take such a list seriously. After all, women who make a living peddling shots weren’t going to be smart. They wouldn’t see the humor in any of this. I assumed my co-workers would be girls who spoke very, very slowly and thought that Puccini was a type of pasta. To their credit, I also imagined they’d have great hair, and I double-conditioned accordingly.

I was in love with my own incongruity — being a poetry-spouting college graduate in a pleather miniskirt. And I loved this notion of doing something at which I was entirely unsuited, and which seemed to go so much against my personality. I would never have said it at the time, but I very much believed I was above being a fun-loving pirate wench selling shots. I had read Meno and lived in cardigans and went to museums for fun.

I was a terrific little snob who thought she knew everything, and subsequently, I was about to learn a great deal.

As soon as I started, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately, the other cocktail waitresses were quick to make suggestions. My first night on the job, a fellow shot girl offered practical advice. “You have to be a little cold,” she explained. “Make them feel like you’re doing them a favor by letting them buy shots.” But it’s difficult to maintain a Queen of Sheba demeanor while trying to rub globs of green glitter out of your eyes. Instead I became a level of friendly you typically only see at Disneyland, if Disneyland reeked of vomit and spilled appletinis. I doled out shots as people in cartoon costumes offer hugs. The manager would point out that I wasn’t being sexy enough, which was surprising, because I was wearing 6-inch heels and less clothing than I ever had.

It quickly became clear that I was not the first literate person to don a miniskirt. Sometime during that first week, I was hiding in the backroom reading Margaret Atwood. I was sitting on the counter next to baskets of party mix because my feet hurt, which they did for the entirety of my shot-selling career. One cocktail waitress swept in, asked what I thought of Atwood’s novel “Oryx and Crake,” did a tricky little analysis where she compared it to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” mentioned some other female dystopian writers I’d never heard of, and then went out balancing a tray of shots on one hand.

As ridiculous as it sounds, that was the first time I became aware that clever people are buried in every nook and cranny of life. It is astonishing that no one pointed this out to me sooner. The girls working at the bar — they were so bright. Another shot girl had a journal that she filled with poetry that was — that rarest of all rare things — crisp and clean and very, very good. This was never a bar where everyone knew your name, but the cocktail waitresses came to know one another’s reading lists, and pitch letters, and audition schedules extremely well.

Of course, we were all there for the money. Shots were sold starting at $3 — the bar received a dollar, the shot company another one and then one for the girl. But once you realized how comically overpriced $3 is for a shot, it’s just as easy to sell them for $4. A customer once suggested I try selling them for $5 and see what happened.

Taking price variations into account, and often considerable tips, and the fact that if you were good you could expect to sell around 100 shots in a six-hour evening, the money was — well, it was the kind of money that teachers in America really ought to make. Periodically, I compare how much I made on an hourly basis as a shot girl to what I make at a job that doesn’t require eye glitter and fishnets, and, barring the possibility that there is a job opening for “wildly corrupt dictator,” I think the result will depress me for the rest of my life.

I don’t mean to make the bar sound friendlier or more glamorous than it was. A great many customers were precisely the kind of people that you would expect to find at a pirate bar buying shots at 2 in the morning. Bottoms got grabbed. Bodies got groped. One customer rolled in nearly every night, wearing a pair of Ray Bans. One of the waitresses always served him while loudly humming “I wear my sunglasses at night.” I wondered aloud if he ever noticed that he was being mocked through Corey Hart’s soothing sounds, and the waitress laughed and said, “Oh, I just do it for me.”

And that’s when you realize that everyone — not just me and my superiority — knows they’re too good for this sort of job.

One night, an older woman came into the bar. I can’t imagine why; I suspect it wasn’t the beer pong. She was one of those very elegant ladies who put their hair up with bobby pins instead of elastic and wore a perfectly cut black dress. I assumed she was lost. She smiled, and gave me $100 and said, “You know, I used to work in a bar when I was younger. It won’t last forever.”

She was right, of course. It’s been years since I’ve been in that bar. But even now I cannot go into a bar or a restaurant without scanning the waitress’ shoes to see if they look comfortable. Every time anyone says something slightly dismissive to a cocktail waitress I am immediately, instinctively on her side, as if we were members of a blood-bonded clan.

I think about that older woman often, usually when I am pinning up my hair. I hope that, like her, I will not forget that strange period in my life, especially as I move past it. I think of the girls in the bar when I am — as I still am — too quick to dismiss people. When I am about to write someone off for their choice of eye shadow, I remember that they might be a fellow Atwood reader, and I wonder if she and I are in the same boat. Once in a while they are, and if that makes me feel slightly less special, it also makes the world seem much less lonely.

And in that way, the lady was quite wrong. Those times, and those alliances with a blackguard crew: Thank goodness, they do last forever.

: Jennifer Wright is the editor in chief of TheGloss.com. She has written for The New York Post, Maxim, Popular Mechanics, Time Out New York, Gourmet and The New York Observer. You can follow her on Twitter at JenAshleyWright. More Jennifer Wright

- 17Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

When my job stopped paying

After a year of unemployment, I landed a contract gig. Then the paychecks stopped coming -- but the work didn't

By Catherine Lane

People waiting in line at a job fair in Portland, Ore. (Credit: AP/Rick Bowmer)

Topics:F**ked, Food Stamps, Great Recession, Life stories

Catherine Lane is the pseudonym of an Open Salon blogger. A longer version of this piece originally appeared on her Open Salon blog. Do you have a story about being unemployed during the Great Recession? Blog about it on Open Salon -- and we might publish it on Salon.

It comes up all the time in conversation. Most recently, I heard it from a stranger at the dentist’s office, talking back to the television news and those of us fortunate enough to be stuck in the waiting room with her. “High unemployment, my ass. Just a bunch of lazy people looking to sit on their sofa and watch TV while we pay their bills.”

Sorry, lady. You’ve mistaken me as a responsible, upright citizen. Allow me to introduce myself: I am a former sofa-lounger, and now I qualify as something even lower than that.

My last full-time job ended in January 2009. Everyone at our small pharmaceutical marketing agency received an email invitation to a mandatory staff meeting. And, much like a bad reality show, it was only moments before the scheduled time that we began to realize we weren’t all invited to the same room.

Along with more than 30 colleagues, I got voted off the island.

Those lucky enough to receive invitations to the other room were told to take a long lunch while we poor saps cleared our desks.

I spent the first several weeks in a daze. There is not a lot of room for pride when you’re a single mom, so I filed for unemployment benefits. And in the height of irony, I was told I wasn’t eligible for food assistance because my income was too high.

That’s right. My unemployment benefits pushed me over the income bracket.

I spent that first year sending out resumes and supplementing my unemployment checks by buying designer clothes at thrift stores and reselling them for cash.

After 51 jobless weeks, I finally landed a contract position. Income! No benefits, but income!

It started out great. I worked; I got paid. Not the life-fulfilling work I’d hoped to be doing in my late 30s, but it was money. No complaints.

For a while, life was good. I married the wonderful man I’d been dating for several years. We bought a house. Saved money. My kids got to take after-school classes. All we needed was the golden retriever, and we would be living the American dream.

But all good things must come to an end. By law, once you’ve used a contractor for 18 months, if the need for a position is still there, you don’t need a contractor. You need an employee. So you have to let the contractor go and create an actual job.

But creating jobs is expensive, so there are a few loopholes that corporations can exploit to avoid those costs. The company can boot the old contractor and bring in a new one to do that very same job. Or the company can change the contractor’s employment status, which means the clock can run indefinitely. I got Door No. 2. Lucky me.

For my first year and a half, I’d been paid as a W-2 employee by the staffing agency who hired me. But if I became a 1099 contractor, we could continue business as usual. The company didn’t have to train a new person; I didn’t have to find another position in a terrible economy.

My new status meant I billed the company directly, and I paid my own payroll taxes. The company managed to dodge the expenses of creating a job, and got to pocket the placement fee the agency previously added to my hourly rate.

But I still had a job. And, like many contractors, I was so glad to have work, I was willing to put up with almost anything.

Like five months without a paycheck.

Because large international companies don’t live by the same rules as the rest of us. When your annual revenue is north of $20 billion, a piddly little $30K debt to an insignificant editor is so inconsequential … well, I’ve already used more words than it warrants.

I reminded. And cajoled. And begged.

Nothing. Except a steady flow of work assignments that needed to be completed.

A few days before Thanksgiving, it dawned on me: If I’m not getting paid, it’s not a job. It’s volunteer work. And that’s not what I signed up for.

And yet, I still naively believed that, given the opportunity, people would do the right thing. So I told my employers that I was not available for work until they paid me.

To say they laughed in my face would suggest that I was more than an insignificant speck of dust.

So here I sit.

Several weeks ago, I had to create a new folder in my hard drive: JOB HUNT 2012. It sits next to JOB HUNT 2009, JOB HUNT 2010 and JOB HUNT 2011.

I can’t remember what it’s like to weigh a potential job in terms of whether I’d enjoy it. And I’m actually a pretty good catch. I have a college education. And skills. I’ve even won some awards. It’s all right here on my resume. I can forward it to you, if you’d like.

: More Catherine Lane

- 42Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

My ex went to prison for sex crimes

He ruined our marriage but never my family. It took years of struggle, and a long road trip, to let go of the pain

By Jean Ellen Whatley

(Credit: iStockphoto/shakzu)

Topics:Coupling, Divorce, Life stories, Real Families

People assume the wife knows. Not really. I found out about my former husband’s descent into pedophilia at the same time the rest of the world did — on the 10 o’clock news.

My mind could not comprehend what my eyes were seeing. I studied his mug shot on TV. Here was the face of the man I had loved, the cleft in his chin, his square jaw, the soft, smooth skin just below his eyes, which I’d kissed a thousand times. Who was this broken man with the downcast eyes? Did he look away when the shutter closed because he was thinking of his children? What happened to the proud young father who cradled his newborns like fragile glass, the guy with a contagious laugh and shiny blue eyes, who owned any room he walked into? A hometown celebrity, a respected journalist, with a good wife and four great kids — now, reduced to this. Who was this man?

The kids in bed, I turned down the volume on the TV in a futile attempt to shield them for just one more day. My colleagues in the press, with whom I’d jockeyed for position at many a crime scene, were now covering a crime that would deal my kids a blow unimaginable. “The accused is charged with three counts of statutory sodomy stemming from a series of sexual encounters with a teenage boy at a high school field house.” For years I’d been blase about broadcasting the worst day of someone else’s life. In one minute, I knew what that felt like.

What would I say to my children? How could I prepare them? I had one son in college, a 17-year-old, a 14-year-old and my youngest, barely 13. How does a mother explain sodomy to a seventh grader? How does a mother suck back into the cylinder the toxic cloud that has just exploded all over her family? How could he?

Disbelief turned to maternal rage, like jet fuel in my blood. I would not let him ruin my children’s future. I would not let his indefensible addiction stain their beautiful lives. And in this flashpoint, I seized the strength of a righteous fury long trapped.

I had been one of those kids once, a victim kid. A little girl caught in a hopeless game of duck and cover. I remained silent for decades, until I simply couldn’t hold down the bile of violation and secrecy any longer. I was in my 40s when I finally told my mother that my stepdad had molested me. By then he was was dead. I’d even delivered the eulogy at his funeral, skipping over his ignoble deeds. Little did I know that the man I was married to — the man in the first pew, dabbing his eyes — would end up in prison years later for committing some crimes of his own.

I had no clue when I married him that the very thing I was running away from, I was actually running to. This happens sometimes to people who were sexually abused; we tend to behave like refugees. We don’t assert our rights, because we’re not sure we have any. We lack confidence in scrutinizing others, because we feel like damaged goods ourselves.

But in time, I stood up for myself, challenging the endless hours he spent on the Internet, his increasing disengagement from our family. Backed into a corner, he told me he was gay. I told him to get out. But they don’t lock people up for being gay anymore. No longer under the wary eye of a wife, or the threat of being discovered, he took greater risks. He was found out by a mother who made a painful discovery about what was keeping her son so busy on the computer.

After a 14-month IV drip of news coverage, my former husband was sentenced to seven years in prison for having sex with that teenage boy. I spent those seven years trying to convince my children that the sins of their father were not carried on their backs, seven years of trying to help them deflect the shame by association that I had endured firsthand. Seven years; I was like a widow with no death benefits, no child support, no moral support, no “every-other-weekend” relief, no one to call in the middle of the night to meet me at the hospital with a sick kid, nobody else to ante up for college or cars, braces or bail money. Nothing. We inherited nothing, except enough pain and financial hardship to throw us all into a bottomless well with no rope, just the bucket tossed in behind us, smackin’ us on the head. But guess what?

We climbed out. We climbed out of that dark, slimy drowning hole by our bloody fingernails, each one, pushing up the next, back into the sunlight, where we sat on the side of the well, flicking off the mud. We made it. Three of my four kids are now out of college, the fourth will graduate next year. They’re amazing: loving, resilient, remarkably well adjusted, and a funnier lot, I have never seen.

I just didn’t realize how tired I was. It’s hard to process stuff while you’re holding up a car. When my brother died not long ago — the second of my brothers to die inside a few short years — I hit the mat. I couldn’t rally. I found myself asking, “Is this it? Really? Is this what my life is about?” Have you ever felt that way? Like you just might lose it?

So I did something radical. I set the car down, got behind the wheel and drove — all across America. I blew off my soul-killing, 60-hour-a-week job, took every last dime I had in savings (which wasn’t even enough to get back home on), loaded up my dog and more baggage than I realized and hit the road. We drove all over the country last summer, traveling through 21 states, from Missouri to New York to California and back again. I needed a defibrillator as big as a nation. I went to reconnect with every place and every person I had ever loved. I went to find a half-brother I had never seen. I went seeking solace.

What I got was healing. Eight weeks and more than 8,000 miles later, at a scenic overlook alongside a lonely, two-lane highway, it all got settled. Gazing out at the endless Utah desert, I sat on a huge, flat rock with my dog watching the sun go down. We were safe and dry, but out on the far horizon brewed a huge thunderstorm. Rain in the desert comes down in grey, vertical shafts from giant pink and purple clouds. Looking out at what felt like infinity, I was inspired to let it all go. I simply let it go.

All the egregious offenses that had been hurled my way — a betrayed wife, an abused child — over time, had ceased to matter. They were like a downpour on the desert, dark stabs into a porous surface. I absorbed them to make my life better, yes better, because along the way, I’d been blessed with the wisdom that there is far more surface than there is rain.

How quickly the pain can vanish if we are open to the healing. Mile by mile, house by house — at the end of this road trip in which I’d been embraced by friends, family, strangers on the highway, and yes, my found brother, I realized how fortunate I really am. The grimy corners of shame and bitterness had been scrubbed clean by love. Victim, no more.

We’ve heard a lot about victims in the news lately and the staggering abuse that came from people who were charged with helping them, not hurting them. Heads should roll. But, in the cacophony of competing sound bites, with the accusations, denials, demands for retribution and pleas for justice, there is a vital message that isn’t breaking through.

Healing is possible.

It takes time. It takes courage. It takes trusting another human being enough to open up your mind and your heart to speak your truth.

If I had a chance to yell from a mountaintop to anyone whose life has been marred by sexual abuse, here’s what I would say: There is a place where it’s safe and dry. Come see how fleeting the rain can be.

: Jean Ellen Whatley is a writer in St. Louis, Missouri. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, "Off the Leash: A Woman, Her Dog and the Road Trip to Revival." More Jean Ellen Whatley

Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

The abortion I wish she’d been there for

When I was 18, my mother died. But it wasn't until I got pregnant that I realized she was never coming back

By Claire Bidwell Smith

A detail from the cover of "The Rules of Inheritance"

Topics:Life stories, Editor's Picks

This article was adapted from the new memoir "The Rules of Inheritance,", from Hudson Street Press.

In the bathroom I pee on the little plastic stick and then place it carefully on the back of the toilet. I button my jeans and walk back into my bedroom, where I pick up the phone.

Colin is on the other end of the line.

Did you take it?

Yeah.

Well?

You have to wait, like, five minutes, I say.

Oh.

It is January, late at night, and the deep banks of snow outside the windows glow in the dark. Colin is in Atlanta and I am in Vermont. My mother has been dead for exactly one year.

I am back at Marlboro College, picking up after a one-year hiatus following my mother’s death. I’m living off campus, in a subsidized two-story condo in town, with a classmate named Tricia.

Like me, she is a poetry major.

I have been back at Marlboro less than a week when I realize that my period is late. I count the dates backward and then forward again, give it a few more days, and finally buy a test kit at Walmart.

I call Colin that night. We had been seeing each other for less than six months when I left Atlanta to return to school. I had taken a year off from school after my mother’s death, but my father and I both decided that it was time for me to get back in the swing of things.

I think that’s the actual phrase he used. The swing of things.

It was around New Year’s Eve when Colin and I realized that we were in love. The confessions came drunkenly, both of us left unsure the next day, not of how we felt, but of whether we had really said the words aloud.

We’d talked for a while before I mentioned it offhandedly.

I bought a pregnancy test today.

What?

A pregnancy test.

I heard you. Why?

My period is late.

Do you really think you’re pregnant?

No.

Did you take the test yet?

Not yet.

Well, maybe you should take it now.

While we’re on the phone?

Sure.

Fine. Hold on.

And that’s when I went in the bathroom to take the test.

Don’t worry, I tell him, when I get back on the phone. I’m sure it’s fine. I took a few of these in high school and they always turned out negative.

During my senior year of high school it seemed like every week one of us was taking a pregnancy test. We usually went to Lucy’s house to do it. Her parents were divorced and her mom worked late. We had the house to ourselves for several hours after school let out.

Me, Lucy, Laura, Holly, and Sabrina.

None of us ever emerged from Lucy’s bathroom with a positive test.

I tell Colin all of this and then I set down the phone and walk into the bathroom alone. The little plastic stick is exactly where I left it five minutes ago, and I peer into the plastic display window at the plus sign that’s waiting there for me.

I am pregnant.

—–

I can’t remember if it was during my high school pregnancy scare or at another, later, time that my mother told me she had had an abortion.

She was thirty and living in New York. She’d just ended a brief relationship with some slick Wall Street guy, when she realized that he had left her pregnant. Calls to his home went unanswered and messages left at his office were not returned.

Finally, with a fury and impatience typical of my mother, she left a message for his secretary, requesting a check for the abortion she was about to have.

He shelled out immediately, and she went through with it. I don’t remember any other details, though. If she’d felt conflicted over the decision or if the experience was a traumatic one, I’ll never know. Either she didn’t tell me or the details left no impression.

I think about all of this as I watch the laundry tumble around and around.

Is it wrong that the idea of having an abortion makes me feel closer to my mother?

I write her a letter on the one-year anniversary of her death.

Dear Mom,

I don’t know how to be without you. Please come back.

Colin doesn’t protest when I tell him my plan. In fact I’ll later wonder if he would have been so passive had it been the other way around. He tells me he’ll fly up and be there for it.

The next call I place is to my father.

The same week that I moved back to Vermont my father moved to California. He sighs into the phone, three thousand miles away, when I tell him.

Just as the only time he will ever walk me down an aisle in a church was at my mother’s funeral, the only time I’ll ever tell my father that I am pregnant is this one.

Well, kiddo.

He sighs again.

I’m standing in the kitchen of the apartment in Vermont, twirling the phone cord around my wrist, as though I am in high school and talking to a boy I have a crush on instead of telling my elderly father about the abortion I am about to have.

——

Two days later I drive in my old red Saab to the Planned Parenthood clinic. It is deep, deep cold outside. The sky is a hard blue and slick; black ice coats the road. I smoke cigarettes as I drive, listen to Portishead.

How can it feel this wrong? From this moment? How can it feel so wrong?

After a while I am led upstairs, where a kindhearted and very butch old nurse examines me, confirming what I and the nurse-practitioner at school have already determined to be true.

I am pregnant.

Afterward we sit in the nurse’s office. Instead of there being a desk between us, we sit in chairs pulled close so we can face each other. Although I’ve never been, this is what I imagine therapy would be like.

So, what do you want to do?

I want to have an abortion.

Have you considered any other options?

No. I want to have an abortion.

An alternative might be adoption. Also, there are more resources than you might think if you decide to keep it.

I want to have an abortion.

Okay, she says. Her eyes crinkle into a look of sympathy, and I suddenly envy her. I wish I was her. Wise, buoyant, practical. Sitting opposite some girl like me. Not me.

You’re sure, she says, with one more look into my eyes.

Yes.

I don’t know why I’m so firm about the abortion. In some ways it seems like the next logical step in the narrative of my life.

Mother dies at eighteen.

Abortion at nineteen.

It’s as though I don’t have a choice.

But we always have choices.

It won’t be until over a decade later, when I am well into the actual world of parenthood, frazzled and overwhelmed with love and impatience for the tiny creature I have created, that I will realize that if I had actually had a baby at age nineteen it might have been the very thing that would have kept me from the years and years of misery and destruction ahead of me.

It won’t be until I am finally a mother myself, and not until my cheek rests against my child’s soft downy head, that I will realize the bleakness of what I did all those years before.

——

The nurse is right. The procedure doesn’t take very long. I grit my teeth and close my eyes as the doctor pushes and tugs about inside me with his instruments.

I cannot open my eyes. I squeeze them shut as hard as I can, trying to imagine that it is my mother’s hand in mine, not Colin’s.

And it’s here, right here, on this exam table in an abortion clinic in Vermont, that I realize my mother is never coming back. Although I will have to realize this many times over the course of my life, nothing will ever be as strong a reminder as this.

Nothing is going to bring her back.

Some part of me, no matter how magical, believed right up until this very moment that she would make her way back to me before this happened. I realized that I had been ticking off the seconds all morning.

On the bright, cold drive up the highway.

In the warm, wood-paneled waiting room.

Mom, I’m here. Right here. Can you see me?

There’s still time, Mom. Find me.

Please find me.

Don’t let this happen.

But she is not here. She didn’t make it in time. Or at all.

The doctor finishes and the cramps come. Thick and hard, they make me curl onto my side, the plastic sheet crinkling over me, perspiration dampening my sweater, tears running down the side of my face and soaking the exam-table paper beneath me.

I am nineteen and I have just had an abortion.

Reprinted by arrangement with Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group USA, from “The Rules of Inheritance: A Memoir” by Claire Bidwell Smith 2012.

: Claire Bidwell Smith lives in Los Angeles. She is a therapist specializing in grief. More Claire Bidwell Smith

- 63Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

The absurd life of an Abercrombie & Fitch model

How did a regular guy like me stumble into a job of emaciated youths and anonymous six-packs? Funny you should ask

By Terry McCoy

(Credit: abercrombie.com)

Topics:Life stories, Editor's Picks, Fashion

“Remember, we don’t do any advertising. So you are our advertising. You represent our brand. You are Ambercrombie & Fitch.”

Hey, guys — what’s going on? I am Ambercrombie & Fitch. I model for them at their store in the financial district in New York City, but I also do way, way more. I can find different sizes for you if you need it, but if not — hey, that’s cool. No pressure. I can also muss with clothing. Oh, and did I mention that I can shimmy? I can shimmy and gyrate and smell good doing it. I am Ambercrombie & Fitch.

You’re probably curious about a few things right now. One, is this idiot serious? I am. Two, what do I look like shirtless? Very cold. And, perhaps, three: How did this happen? How did a regular guy stumble into a job of emaciated youths and anonymous six-packs? How does one become a “model” for Ambercrombie & Fitch? One recent Tuesday afternoon, I was walking down upper Broadway trying to ignore the rain and avoid eye contact with every other street-bound soul when it happened. I was discovered. Yes, discovered.

“Hey! Hey!” a curly-haired 20-something I soon learned was named Vanessa shouted after me. “Hey. We just love your look.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“We just love your look. What are you doing later? Would you be interested in modeling work for Abercrombie & Fitch? Full-time, part-time. Whatever’s best. I’m a recruiter. And we just love your look.”

Now, this came as a rather large surprise considering a) I’ve been walking down streets for 26 years and this has never happened before and, b) I exclusively wear items purchased at either JC Penny or Kohl’s and am rarely (never) described as fashionable.

“I am downright flattered,” I told Vanessa, and meant it. What I knew about modeling was limited, but I was under the assumption the work likely entailed both more sex and more money than my normal reality as a journalist. (Which involves little, and less.) I told her I was in, so Vanessa jotted down my contact info and disappeared into the rain, promising to call.

To my surprise, two days later, she did. But by then I wasn’t so sure about the whole deal. I mean, Abercrombie & Fitch? I had never even been inside one of their stores, I explained to Vanessa. Would I also need to advertise clothing by not wearing any? Must I pout? What would my fishing buddies back home in Wisconsin think?

Vanessa, cool and persuasive, got me to agree to come “check out” a “group interview” at the original Abercrombie & Fitch store along the South Seaport a few days later. If nothing else, I figured it would give me something to write about. Vanessa added: “They’re going to just love you.”

When I arrived I didn’t know what to think. But after I was inside the store, that stopped being important. Everything, actually, except Abercrombie’s pulsing ephemera stopped being important. If you’ve never been to Abercrombie, let me tell you, it definitely kills one’s ability to form coherent, logical thought. No one has ever discussed matters of philosophy or the status of Iran’s nuclear capabilities within its confines. Everything’s dark and loud and confusing. You half feel like you’re playing laser tag and half like you’ve bumbled onto a reshooting of “Eyes Wide Shut.” The cultural aesthetic of the store straddles all of these notions. It’s a confounding, bombastic and erotic slice of our American zeitgeist. Put another way: White people love it.

Which, some accusations have gone, is exactly what’s wrong with Abercrombie — and its hiring policies. In 2003, several Asian, black and Hispanic job applicants filed a discrimination complaint in San Francisco against the company, alleging they were steered into the stockroom, not the sales floor. They said the company didn’t hire minorities as models. The clothing conglomerate denied this and defended their hiring policies as protecting their trademark look. The suit was eventually settled out of court for $40 million. (Company spokespeople declined to comment for this article.)

At the group interview, I learned that being a model at Abercrombie requires more than gyrating and shimmying, though these are necessary skills. Models are also called upon to fidget with clothing. Additionally they must memorize and employ as many as 10 company “taglines” to greet and dismiss customers, including: “Hey! What’s up?” “Thanks, guys! Catch you later!” And “Hey! What’s going on?” — not to be confused with “Hey, guys! What’s going on?”

As the job interview wound to a finish, I had a rare, existential moment. Maybe I was doing something wrong and deceptive here. All the other applicants really wanted this modeling job. They grinned. They chortled. They wisely advertised themselves with the words, “outgoing,” “positive” and “energetic” after the manager informed us they “wanted an outgoing, positive and energetic workforce.” Was I taking a job from someone in a desperate time — just to write an article?

One earnest applicant even told me he “hoped I would get it. You said some interesting things.” Really? I thought, convinced I had actually blown my cover when I described myself as “dogged and inquisitive” rather than positive. But the exact opposite occurred: I was hired, and told to be back at the store for orientation at 9 a.m. the following Sunday. My pay would be $9 an hour.

I’m sure many things of worth occur at this time of the week, like “Meet the Press” or, for some people, church. For me, however, 9 a.m. Sunday has little to no consequence. I never schedule anything of import early Sunday morning because I’ll likely be either late or still drunk. Luckily, Abercrombie isn’t something of import.

So that Sunday, I arrived for orientation 35 minutes late, half-hammered from the night before, and unapologetic. Something crazy then followed: No one — and I mean no one — cared. Not the other employees, assistant supervisors, or the manager. It was wild. There I was, unshowered, on one hour sleep, and barreling toward a traumatic hangover, and all anyone said was, “Hey! What’s up? What pants size are you?”

I now understand why pets got it so good. Nothing is ever expected of them. They just have to be friendly and be adorable.

I chatted up any coworker who would talk with me. To make conversation, I informed several people that Abercrombie had sold Ernest Hemingway the shotgun he’d used to kill himself in 1961. I also told my associates in jest that my favorite movie was “Zoolander.” I got a lot puzzled looks during those hours of orientation, so I decided to keep quiet and work on my taglines.

Even then, my manager told me I still wasn’t “ready for the show.” This was related to the fact my pants weren’t tight enough. Weren’t tight enough by far. At Abercrombie, I cannot overstate the cultural impact of wearing very skinny jeans, then plunging a thumb into each front pocket. This stance is very important. If you haven’t tried it before, I suggest you do.

With taglines memorized and skinny pants hugging things rarely hugged, I was ready for my first day at Abercrombie. I was ready to be a part-time model.

After enduring one last hiccup for wearing the wrong color of Chuck Taylor shoes — “are those bright green?” — I was put on greeting duty at the front door. This was my moment. I was Abercrombie & Fitch.

When a Korean family stepped inside, I fished out my most potent tagline immediately: “Hey, guys! What’s going on?” They looked at me strangely, didn’t reply, and darted past. This happens a lot when tourists “are taglined,” my co-greeter, another Vanessa, told me. Us models hurl the most American of colloquialisms at thousands of foreign-born tourists who have rarely encountered such Americana before. In that case, I said, what’s the point of taglines? She paused for a moment and said she didn’t know. I agreed.

What I learned about being a model? It’s crushingly boring. I’m sure it’s different for Giselle or Tyra Banks, who get to adopt languid poses on some beach in Australia. But this was New York. And I was wearing skinny jeans and lima bean Chuck Taylors.

Two hours into a six-hour shift I quit. I tried not to be too melodramatic about it but was tempted to hand back my red-and-blue plaid shirt like I would a gun and badge to a police chief, telling my bosses I did everything I could to save those kids on that burning bus.

No one seemed too upset to lose me. Lady Gaga was pounding. The air was thick with perfume. Beautiful people were smiling everywhere. As I walked out, my manager glanced at me, grinned a wide one, and said: “Thanks, bro! Catch you later!”

: Terry McCoy is the Gordon Grey Fellow of International Journalism at Columbia University. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, GlobalPost, and The Daily. He was recently hired as a writing fellow for Village Voice Media at the Houston Press. More Terry McCoy