BE NORMAL

Making a pie with my 15 year old son

Hi Everyone,

How, is what I like to call, “bath season” going? What are your hearts feeling like? How are you navigating this tender, dark time of year? The Pacific NW has been in an atmospheric river for what feels like weeks. There is no dry anymore, there is only wet. No break from the constant drip, damp socks, soaked coats, and muddy dog towels.

The holidays have been rough, as they do, and because two things can be true at once, there are sprinkles of light everywhere. The best holiday party I have ever been to where the only thing required was to sing Christmas carols and dress up. Driving around with my son, Ursa, looking at the ridiculous lights on the houses in our neighborhood. The Christmas tree that is somehow so perfect we can barely believe it so we admire it every night like it’s an extension of ourselves. Trying to date and meeting the most interesting people.

This essay is one of my favorites. It is dark. It is my life now and then and how they are not separate.

And, I changed the title of my substack to Love Letters Only because I once wrote that on my mailbox to signal to the world that I want to know about love. Also, because I was in love. Now, my definition of love, is saying yes to reality as it is. Having the courage to love life now, without needing it to be different. What if I loved myself like that? What if love where complete acceptance so that we might make better choices?

Writing my life, like this, here on substack, feels like an exercise in acceptance. How do I tell my story and stay in love? How do I stay in my own story when it involves so many other people whose hearts have been broken? I’ve never written or given talks on most of this, so it also feels new. David Bowie, I just learned on a date with a very sweet poet, said that when he is performing he liked to feel like he was standing in the part of the ocean where he’d just start to lose his balance because that’s where the magic happens. That’s where the risk is.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for helping me to take risks, to tell my story, to stand in the place where I feel like I might fall.

Don’t forget to sign up for the free online Winter Solstice Gathering next week, and the New Years Day class. Link

Love you so much,

A

There is no one exempt from the pain of being human in my family, maybe in any family, and most likely even in your family.

And, at this time of year, the loneliness that infects a system torn apart by trauma, secrets, and mental health issues feels closer. It’s like expensive perfume sprayed months ago on the collar of my coat; I can still smell it if I’m really paying attention. My son has a deep longing to “be normal,” as he puts it. He is the only one born after the once intact tapestry of my family separated itself into individual threads. He wants to gather, to share food, to make a pie, and to stay long enough to eat it.

“Be normal, Mom,” he’s told me a thousand times. He’s most happy right after we go to Costco when the cupboards and fridge are full enough for him to “feel safe” for weeks. Sometimes I wonder who he used to be? What famine did he live through, or die from?

So we make the pie. And, despite my own internal alarm system begging me to exit this charade of everythingisokayness and wail—ya’ll, my family could really benefit from some deep wailing—the pair of us go to two gatherings, and we stay long enough to eat the pie at one. And, yet there is a cost. We eat the pie, but afterwards, as I bring our dishes into the kitchen, my uncle tells me how much oxycontin he and my aunt take—it’s a lot—and my son overhears him. How do I explain, when he asks about it in the car, that their pain is so much, and that painkillers really do kill pain, but it’s not in their bodies, it’s in their hearts? My cousin, who was my brother in all the ways one is a brother, died by suicide, five days after my wedding. How do we ever recover from that? When we were little we would make our grandparents ornaments that had our school picture framed in glitter and glued to construction paper. You know the ones. This year, Ursa placed a picture of my cousin from the fifth grade on top of our Christmas tree where the star goes.

I want to paint my son a picture of the wholeness he craves, so I do the things I think might make it look like that. We make the pie, we go see family, but it unravels again and again, and the trying doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t make it whole again. He only knows the pile of separate, useless threads that we have become. He never knew the whole picture, what used to be normal, cohesive, even beautiful. And, not for lack of trying, I can’t stay in my body when I’m around my family. It can take me a week to come back, to recover. There is a cost to loving and wishing it could be different.

Normal comes from French norme, which originates from the Latin norma meaning a "carpenter's square, rule, pattern," a word of unknown origin, but it has been suggested that even that was borrowed from the Greek word gnōmōn "meaning a carpenter's square.”

Normal. A square.

A pattern. Rules.

All things good for building,

that create a sense of sturdiness, and certainty. A foundation.

Can he be blamed for wanting that? Can I?

The summer my brother accidentally set a house on fire and lost his mind, I was 21 years old and four months pregnant with Veda. V’s dad was a few months into a terrible cancer treatment that shed him of a job, his hair, his life as he knew it, and any food he tried to keep down. I worked three jobs, and got us a two bedroom apartment so we could grow a baby and ditch the cancer.

I wasn’t in love with him.

Chemo was on Tuesdays and Thursdays over the bridge in Vancouver, Washington. The rest of the week was recovery, and then repeat. I worked nights at The Oregonian, the local newspaper, answering the phones for the night editor and writing the weather blurb. I’m published, I thought, coming up with 100’s of ways to write it’s going to rain.

The night the cops picked my brother up, I had left him at our parents a few hours earlier in the basement where he put his hand up to mine, and said, “Do you feel that?” and honestly, I did. It was like he was radiating a new power he couldn’t control, it skirted off of him like wind. “I have a gift,” he told me.

After I left, he put on my clothes from high school—a mini skirt and a super cute crop top, which I never got back—and told my folks the radio had invited him to go downtown. The cops tackled him in the front yard and he spent the next week in jail, and then in a mental health lock down where he was beloved, passing out construction paper hearts with the words “love is all you need,” written in his childlike scrawl. The people living on the ward spent their days calling into radio stations trying to win tickets to concerts they would never go to.

This year, I’m triggered days before the holiday even begins because my parents change their plans, like they do every year. Every year I tell myself not to depend on them, and every year, I do, which begs the question—is it my son’s longing for normalcy or mine?

There is no studiness, no certainty, but there is a pattern. This is our normal. I know my brother won’t show up. Sometimes I forget to invite him.

To make the pie, we first must go to Winco. They don’t have organic apples this time, and I surprise myself by letting it go. We make a show out of choosing 8 pesticide infused, bright green granny smith apples. Winco is normal, I tell myself. Winco is the best kind of normal. Low prices. Good people. Here we are, playing normal at Winco. And, yet, two things can be true at once.

A customer, who used to come into my restaurant, approaches us like old friends, peeking into our basket, gently teasing my son about making the pie. Ursa, like his sister, is often caught off guard because he doesn’t know this person, and yet she knows him. She knew him in my belly pouring her coffee, making her eggs, serving her friends who gathered at the same booth every morning after their AA meeting. Her voice was one of the voices he heard every day while he duplicated inside of me. She knew him in my arms, nursing at the back of the restaurant. To him she’s a stranger. To me she feels like family.

In jail, my brother tells me, he tried to convince the guards that he was Eminem. We are in my moldy Toyota Corolla, and it’s the day I pick him up from the mental hospital. I take him to my house, where he stays with us for a little while because he’s salty with our folks for calling the police. But I’m the one who is full of guilt. I make a list of all the things I should have done differently:

1. The apple we made into a weed pipe with the stolen screen from someone’s bathroom faucet.

2. The beer we stole from Stacy Miller’s dad’s basement refrigerator.

3. The constant source of mind numbing party I became after my own rape at 14.

4. How I lost myself because there were things I didn’t want to know anymore, and maybe in losing me, I lost him.

I did this, so I have to fix this. This is my fault. All of it is my fault, so you have to make him better. But we had no help, he and I. There were no carpenter’s squares, or rules in our house. After the rape we did whatever we wanted, and so did our parents. My mom got a boyfriend, my dad lived in the basement. There was no normal, and I thought it was my fault. A living version of Joyce Carol Oates We Were the Mulvaneys.

Those first days after he got out of the hospital were the last days he felt the same to me, like my brother. Depakote and lithium changed him first, but the alcohol and oxy took him away from me completely. He’s still living in his body, just six blocks from me, and yet I miss him all the time. The us cackling in the car about him believing he was Eminem. Dying laughing at how fucking fucked up we were—him straight out of the mental hospital with a fresh diagnosis and a fistful of prescriptions, me pregnant at 21 desperately pretending that all of this was fine, and hoping someone anyone, would call my bluff. If you had asked me how I was doing back then, I honestly would have said fine.

Be normal, Mom. I am honey. I’m trying.

When we get home from Winco, I have to walk the dog, so my son starts in on the pie. He’s always been an excellent cook, a natural. His pallet is the kind you can’t teach. By the time I’m home he has peeled the pesticide covered apples and cut them into perfect chunks. A pie dough made from unsalted butter and his big teenage hands is cooling in the refrigerator. We put on some Christmas music, his favorite song plays again and again, and we finish the pie together—me on dish duty, my baby, the one we used to call Puppy, playing Chef de Cuisine. He prepares a caramel sauce that he dumps over the apples, I sneak a few from the bowl while he patiently weaves a lattice crust, asking me for a few tips along the way. I love that he knows how to ask for help.

We use the pie dish that was given to my grandma, a great love of my life, after her son, my Uncle Mel, was killed in a drunk driving accident. Uncle Mel’s girlfriend Cindy, in the midst of what must have been her own grief, made a pie dish out of clay, wrote my grandmother’s nickname on the bottom in cobalt glaze, and brought it over. Now we fill it with a buttery crust and caramel covered apples. Emilio is my son's middle name, after an uncle I never met. Meli, Ursa’s dad calls him. When the pie is constructed, he brushes the uncooked crust with an egg wash, and I don’t tell him the story of the ceramic pie dish.

Be normal, Mom. These are the rules that make us sturdy, at least for today.

By the time the holidays roll around, my brother is six months out of the hospital, and 50 pounds heavier than the 118 pounds he was that summer. We compare our bellies. One holds a baby, the other his sanity? There’s an actual picture of this somewhere, Veda’s dad is in it too, but he’s thin from the chemo. My parents are working to settle a lawsuit related to the fire, and the drugs my brother is on put him to sleep in the middle of the day. No one seems to know enough to have them adjusted. There is no carpenters square. There is no google. We do nothing.

After thanksgiving that year I take him back to my apartment and we watch Meg Ryan in When a Man Loves a Woman, which is just about the most devastating movie I can possibly think to watch on a holiday. Veda’s dad is already in bed, sick from the latest round of radiation, and my brother falls asleep next to me on the couch. I slide to the floor and cry. Like really sob. My belly is big by this point, so I wear the same blue dress most days because it’s one of two things that fit, and by the end the edges are covered in snot and tears. At one point my brother wakes to my sobs and tells me it’s okay in a way that lets me know that it’s really not, an old language we used to speak together. He’s returned to me for a moment. I have never known life without him. He is my first memory. I have never watched that movie again.

A few days later my friend Sarah, who I have essentially hidden the pregnancy from, arrives at my doorstep unannounced from Seattle, and her face is the first face to tell me she doesn’t believe anything about this act I’m putting on. And for the first time in maybe a year, I feel loved.

The pie is perfect. Shiny, golden, bubbly. Not just normal—perfect. I take a thousand pictures from different angles and send the news of the perfect pie to everyone I know. We want to eat it, but we resist and save it for the holiday, so that it can be shared, eaten together with my cousin, aunt, and uncle. A tiny little rule to give some shape to our day.