Aren't You Forgetting Someone? Read online

  But at four months, reality crashed in because I had to go back to work. Since I worked on a television writing staff that consisted of all men, only one of them married, I knew I had to get my shit together. Seeing me in my current condition could emotionally scar the sweet young guys I worked with. No reason for them to know the cruel details of the early days of parenthood until they had to. As it was, the mechanical sounds and dairy farm whooshing coming from my office at lunchtime from the breast pump were probably going to alter their enjoyment of their catered Universal commissary lunch. And the bottles of breast milk in the communal fridge marked “Kari’s boob juice” was undoubtedly enough education. I’m not saying it wasn’t good for them, but I didn’t need to overdo it. I also had to give the showrunners confidence that I was up to the task of returning to my job, especially since I had departed for maternity leave in a bit of haste. I’d finished only twenty-three pages of my thirty-two-page script that was due. I had a cast on my arm from tripping on the stairs on the way into work one day, breaking my wrist when I reached out to stop from falling on my enormous, baby-filled middle. It was almost a hundred degrees in the San Fernando Valley every day, I was nearing two hundred pounds, and there was a rash where my thighs rubbed together that could only be alleviated with a grease-like lubricant meant for old people with diabetic feet. I finally waddled into my bosses’ office, threw the twenty-three pages on their desk, and said, “I’m sorry. This is all I got. I have to go home and have some babies.”

  So now, coming back, I needed to work twice as hard, be twice as good as my nonlactating brethren. I couldn’t burst into tears during table reads. I had to woman up. What that meant was these twins were going to have to let me sleep more than fifteen minutes at a stretch all night long. So I agreed to try to Ferberize them.

  I told Jack I didn’t think I could do it; I couldn’t put them in their cribs and listen to them cry without going to them. He agreed this was on him. “The first time is only three minutes,” he reminded me. “That’s nothing.” He promised we would just go for a three-hour night and work our way up to a full night’s sleep.

  We brought them into their room and laid them down in their cribs, and holding back tears, I told Annabel and Elias I loved them as if I were saying goodbye for the last time. And then I walked away. I went into the bedroom and listened on the baby monitor. I heard Jack say, “Good night, guys. You’re going to be okay. We’re right here. You’re not alone,” as the book instructed.

  I thought to myself, They don’t speak English. You could be saying, “Mom and I are going on a Caribbean cruise. Try not to mess up the house while we’re gone. We never loved you.”

  Then I heard his footsteps as he walked away. Then I heard him close the door. At first, there was stunned silence. I burst into tears thinking about their confused little faces. I missed them. Then Elias started to wail. I jumped up from the bed, but Jack was in the doorway. He held up the timer in his hand. Then Annabel joined in the wailing, summoning me. Milk began pouring from my breasts in sympathy. I held a pillow to my chest. Jack suggested maybe I should go where I couldn’t hear them. I said no. I needed to hear them. I needed to suffer. Now they were hysterical. I writhed on the bed in actual physical pain; it was unbearable. Finally, after what seemed like five hours, the timer went off. “Hurry!” I said. And Jack ran to them.

  I clutched the baby monitor. I heard Jack go into their room. Their crying didn’t pause. He didn’t pick them up—that was the rule. He just yelled over their screams, “You’re okay. It’s bedtime. You’re not alone!” It seemed to me their wailing got louder when they realized that was all they were going to get.

  There was a short hiccup pause in their hysterics when he patted their backs as recommended, and then, once again, I heard their bedroom door close. The twins went apeshit with outrage. I could tell Elias was doing that kind of crying where his entire face turned purple and his limbs were shaking. Finally, after another minute of this torture, I had a thought: Fuck. This. I jumped up from the bed and ran down the hallway. Jack intercepted me and tried to stop me, saying, “It’s only five minutes this time.” I would have killed him if I had to. Like, I would have stuck my thumbs into the soft part of his throat and squeezed the life out of him. I think he sensed this and let me pass.

  Every maternal cell in my body rejected the premise that for four months you teach those baby brains, “When you call me, I’ll be there”—growing those synapses in a way that lets them trust that for the rest of their lives, there is someone who thinks about them, worries about them, lets them know, “I’ve got you.” Then, at four months, when it can’t even be explained to them, I’m suddenly supposed to change the rules and say, “You’re on your own, kid.” Sure, I thought. If I keep this up, no doubt they will stop crying eventually. I’m sure Dr. Ferber was right about that, but when they did, I was also certain, as the mother of these two, they would stop because they would have given up. I could break them like people break horses of their willfulness and need—but that night I declared, “I don’t care if they’re sleeping in our bed until they’re twenty-five years old; I’m not doing this. Dr. Ferber can suck my dick.”

  Dr. Ferber, I know you’re a Harvard-educated shrink and I have a high school education and was fired from McDonald’s for fainting at the french fryer. But you didn’t spend two years trying to conceive them, drinking dried bugs and mud from the Chinese acupuncturist, and turning sex into homework. You’re not the one with scabs on your nipples and scars on your once-flat stomach.

  And for the first time in my life, I was not going to defer to a white man with a superior education. For the first time in my life, I was going to trust my own instincts.

  Motherhood was about to make me fearless instead of insecure. It was about to change me as a person. It was my job to protect them, and if Dr. Richard Ferber had been standing in that hallway, I would have happily killed him too. Not everyone needs to become a parent to grow up. But I did. The fierceness that being a mother brought out in me was new. I sold myself out on a regular basis before that, but those six-pound evil geniuses gave me something to fight for.

  They never learned to sleep in their own beds, and when my next baby, Dayton, came along two and a half years later, the sleeping routine became a nightlong dance: lying down with Annabel and Elias on a bed in one room until they slept; then moving into my bed with Dayton until Annabel or Elias woke up, realized I was missing, and called out for me; trudging down the hallway to lie back down until they slept again—until Dayton realized I ditched him; then scurrying back to bed with Dayton until Annabel or Elias realized I had abandoned them. All night. Every night. Until it was time to go to work in the morning. And it meant I couldn’t go out of town, but there was nowhere I wanted to go. Going to work and leaving them with nannies during the week was brutal, so nighttime belonged to them. Period. It was how I overcorrected for long hours in the writer’s room when I couldn’t get home for dinner. I was well aware that my working mother’s guilt was driving my parenting choices. And I was okay with that. I believe in a guilty conscience. I think guilt makes people behave better.

  I saw a lot of parents who could have stood to have a slightly more active conscience where their kids were concerned. Not that I judge.

  I was warned that my behavior would bite me in the ass when it came time to send them to pursue their independence. I was told they would cling to me like ring-tailed lemurs when I tried to drop them off at preschool or if at some point I ever developed an interest in leaving my house without them. But they didn’t have separation issues.

  In fact, the little fuckers walked away that first day of preschool as if I were their taxi driver. They unlatched their fingers from mine, waved goodbye, and skipped off into the sunset. “Okay!” I yelled after them. “Have fun at school! Don’t worry; Mommy will be right here when you’re done. I’m right here. You’re not alone!” I reassured no one because they had disappeared onto the climbing structure without looking b
ack.

  I looked at the kids on the bench outside the Red Room at the Country School, their heads buried into their parents’ necks, nails digging into their arms. One mom told me she had to sit on that bench outside the classroom for three weeks. Another had to stay so long she finally just took a job at the school. I would have given anything for one of those needy kids. But mine never struggled with summer camps or school trips. I was never the parent called to pick my weeping child up from sleepovers in the middle of the night like Dr. Ferber promised. I knew one lucky parent with a kid so paralyzed with social anxiety he couldn’t attend any of the elementary science camp sleepovers unless she was a chaperone.

  It used to drive me crazy when people said, “You know the days are long, but the years are short.” But now here I am with two babies legal to drink and one legal to draft—who I still wouldn’t let cry in five-minute increments.

  They don’t sleep in my bed anymore. And they won’t let me sleep in theirs. My marriage didn’t last—shut up—it wasn’t all my fault. And the kids aren’t around very much these days—no goddamn separation issues there. When I said to them, “It’s weird, this middle-age thing,” they comforted me by saying, “You’re not middle aged. It’s pretty unlikely you’re going to live to a hundred and ten.”

  Sometimes I miss them, and sometimes I don’t. Those first nights alone, when I couldn’t soothe myself into sleep, I looked over at my nightstand to inspect my unhealthy sleep attachments: a healthy glass of chardonnay, Advil PM, the TV remote, my iPhone at the ready in case something on the ever-present MSNBC set fire to my hair-trigger rage and I needed to post an angry Facebook status. Dr. Ferber would probably suggest that this sleep environment was not ideal for self-soothing. That’s the book Dr. Richard Ferber should have written. Someone should have Ferberized me. Let me cry it out, but please come in every five minutes to pat me on the back and let me know, “It’s okay. We’re here. You’re not alone.”

  Daughter, Divorcée, Storyteller, Jew?

  When I first started spending time with my ex-husband’s family, the difference between our two clans was a shock to me. His family’s favorite pastime was to sit together for hours on end telling and retelling stories of the past and present. Pots of coffee and packs of cigarettes would fuel endless tales of their relatives both alive and dead. Their ideal vacation would be a cluster of cottages situated lakeside so they could wake up and go to sleep in close proximity to one another, starting and ending the day visiting, as they called it—regaling each other with stories that had been told so many times they could have sung them in unison. After I had been part of the group for a few years, I had heard the stories enough times that I could have sung along too. The stories were brought out like photo albums. The kids would make requests of some of the old favorites: “Tell about when the cousins snuck out on Fourth of July to light fireworks and set the dock on fire.” “Tell us about Uncle Tom and his fighter plane over the Pacific.” “Tell us about Grandpa coming to this country and selling hats.” “Aunt Frida’s candy store.” “When Cousin Ralph cooked dinner for Robert Kennedy.” “Why did Aunt Mary go bald?” I knew the stories so well I’d sometimes get confused about which ones I’d just heard about as opposed to participated in.

  My family was different. Reminiscing wasn’t a soothing pastime. If a story got repeated in my house, it was quickly shut down with, “You already told me that.” My mother and father held on to their personal history like well-guarded secrets.

  When I was growing up and had projects that required background information, like a family tree, for instance, my father would stubbornly refuse to answer any questions about his heritage. When I tell people this, they don’t understand. “What do you mean? What does he say when you ask him what nationality he is?”

  “He changes the subject,” I tell them, leading more than one of my friends to speculate that my father must be hiding something very dark from his past.

  My parents simply aren’t interested in legends or history or the passing down of family lore. I think that’s why I love old things: antiques, houses, and thrift store clothes. My family referred to my vintage wedding gown as the “dead bride dress.” My family is funny. My family is funny in a way that most people would find disturbing. We make jokes where feelings are supposed to be. We’re uncomfortable with public displays of affection and sharing. We don’t like rituals designed to comfort and bring people together. In other words, we’re Scandinavians. We move away from our feelings. Sometimes literally. My sister died at the age of forty-one. I grew up with no customs or traditions to contain the shock and pain of death. A few weeks after my sister’s funeral (an observance my parents certainly would have forgone altogether if not for her husband’s insistence), my father drove an hour and a half away from our family home—the house that held the memories of my sister—and made an offer on another house, sight unseen by my mother or anyone else. And they moved away from those memories. Problem solved. Forget about the fact that it put them two and a half hours away from their grandkids and me—it was every man for himself now. We don’t stew in our feelings. Which is why I suppose I was always so taken with my friends’ Jewish families. They seemed like Crock-Pots to me, making warm meals of their traditions and turning their grief into a time when they are surrounded by the potatoes and carrots of their community—warmed by the broths of friendship and healed by the simmering juice of shared memories. Scandinavians are fast food. We drive through our feelings, consume them in our car, and throw them away at the next rest stop on the side of the road—feeling a wave of shame and regret but vowing to be healthier in the future.

  I’m not trying to idealize Jews. Or Crock-Pots. I know everything that’s cooked in one sort of tastes the same. I know everything gets a little too comfortable and the carrots overstay their welcome. I know. I’ve dated a lot of Jewish guys. Also, it’s not a perfect analogy: Are we the food or the people eating the food? Maybe we’re both. The Jewish family is both the comfort food and the family that gathers around the table to eat the meal. My ex-husband’s family is Lebanese. Also Crock-Pot people. My many friends in AA are Crock-Pot people too, healed by group sharing as they are. I went to a few Al-Anon meetings in my thirties, and the empathetic looks and warm hugs sent me running to my car at the first smoke break. I’ve fired more than one therapist for being too compassionate. I need tough love or none at all. I’m not genetically cut out for mush.

  Fast-food people rarely say “I’m sorry” or “I love you” unless someone’s getting on a plane and we’ve had a premonition that they might die in a fiery crash, in which case the I love you is muttered quickly with embarrassment at the end of a phone call and if someone ever were asked to repeat it, we would definitely say, “Never mind.” The Lizer apology goes like this: You get into a fight where dreadful, hurtful things are said—personal, terrible things—the kind of things that make you wonder how you’ll ever walk them back. The phone is slammed down without a resolution. A couple of days pass. Angry emails are written but not sent (but saved in the drafts folder because that was a really good line). After four days, you make the phone call, because you’re the bigger person.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hey.”

  “I’m getting rid of that sofa in my family room. Do you have any use for it?”

  “Oh. I could use that in the TV room. Are you sure you don’t need it?”

  “I don’t. I’m going to move my desk in there.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll bring it out to you next weekend.”

  “Thanks. Bye, honey.”

  Done. The rift is repaired. Never to be spoken of again.

  Crock-Pot families can usually be described as tribal, the kind of families that have dozens of distant cousins that all gather for family reunions where they make T-shirts to identify themselves as members of the tribe. It’s hard to get kicked out of a Crock-Pot tribe. You can get shitfaced drunk, steal a twenty from your nephew’s birthday card, and rip
Nana’s pearls off her neck at Thanksgiving, and you’ll still be at the table for the next holiday meal because “you’re family.” I’ve been divorced from my ex for sixteen years, and I’m still in with his family. In a fast-food family, you could not pay child support for fourteen years and deal drugs to foster children and still be okay, but you might get banished for forgetting to write a thank-you card for a Christmas gift. The rules are murky and ever-changing. You never really know where you stand in a fast-food family.

  As my parents have gotten older, their lips have loosened, and while they haven’t started telling stories exactly, they have started dropping bombs.

  Occasionally, an odd detail from my family history will slip out, like when I told my parents I was considering getting myself a pet pig and my dad said, “Be careful. My uncle Frank got eaten by a pig.”

  “What are you talking about, Dad?”

  “He lived on a farm and fell into the pigpen when he was feeding them, and they ate him because pigs are omnivorous.”

  My dad was seventy-five years old and that was the first time I heard that a close relative was eaten by a pig. That was also the first time I’d heard of an uncle Frank.

  My dad obviously came by his enigmatic tendencies naturally. When my grandmother on my father’s side died, we all found out she had been married before she was married to my grandfather when my parents were going through papers in her attic.

  My shock produced a laugh from my parents, which then led to my discovery that my dad had also been married before he was married to my mom. They wed before he went to Korea, and the first Mrs. Lizer still worked as a salesperson in the Crescent department store in Spokane, which is why my mother wouldn’t shop there when we visited in the summer. I was thirty years old when I learned this news.