student of normal

There is a poem that my aunt wrote to her big sister, my mother, on her 35th birthday, the same year that my mother had a nervous breakdown and could not get out of bed and was haunted by her dead mother who recently burned to death in a fire, perhaps by choice, as much choice as anyone with schizophrenia has. This poem is a thing of beauty to me, and contains a line about “dreaming of the red mini skirts our freer children would wear.” I always liked this line most because a) it refers to me, and b) I would like a red mini skirt.

This is also the same year that my mother starts smoking, she claims because she feels like she has to defend the diminishing rights of smokers everywhere, but it seems like she is somehow more nervous and restless than before. It takes her two years to learn how to inhale. I already know how to, having had my first cigarette at age 11. I felt ready for all things adult, having been doing many adult things my whole life. Like, for example, waking my drunken dad from his stupor to move the 2×4s he put in front of the door to lock my mother out. Like imploring my mother to not let her abusive, drug-dealer boyfriend back in the house. Like being attentive in school though we had to leave our house in the middle of the night to stay in a hotel so he will not get us.

It is even earlier than this that I became a student of normal. It is hard to remember, but I feel like it must have begun when I was seven, and my parents were getting divorced. I, being the oldest child, was a part of the custody battle, when I learned from my grandmother that we were dirty and that my mom did not do a good job taking care of us. I did not like living with my dad because he got drunk, but my grandmother’s argument made me curious. I started looking for signs that we were not normal. I was instructed to look in coffee cans for drugs and drawers for other paraphernalia, but I actually found the signs in much different places. When I would visit friends with nice houses, I noticed that they had toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues, whereas we only ever had just one of those products for multiple uses, unless we ran out and had to use coffee filters.

I think that my mother was a student of normal, too. In her world, normal meant being able to take your kids camping and sending them to dance classes and soccer practice and gymnastics. These things were essential, even if it meant that the electric bill could not be paid. It is odd to have costumes of satin and tulle, but have no light. Fortunately, because of the two-year stint of camping, we had a solar shower which we were able to use when we did not have hot water in the house.

We have dogs, my husband and I. We got them in the first blush of love, when we were bursting and had to share our joy with others. Except that we were poor, lived in New Jersey, and knew nothing about raising dogs. Sometimes at night now, when we our huddled in our pack, my husband and I will move towards each other, or move away from each other, and my little dog will growl at us. In this guttural growl I hear someone who did not have the easiest of puppyhoods, and I feel guilty and make more room for her. Then I think of the man next to me, with whom I share this failure, and I wonder if we will ever be nurturing and selfless enough to have children.

He does not know it, but my husband helps me carry the shame I am weighted with. He does not experience this lesser emotion, so he is able to interact with landlords, doctors, bill collectors, the vet, and all the other people I am embarrassed in front of. He has a voice when I only have longing to cease to exist in a world in which I am never good enough.

There are other poems, found in the high school I am teaching English at, the same all-girls institution in Newark, NJ that my mother and aunts attended. During my second and final year of teaching, the administrator finds an old literary magazine from the all women’s college my aunt attended, and in it are more of her poems. I see my mom in them, a happy free character in these beat poems of college in the 70s. This job, for me, is almost the punch line of joke, the product of an exchange between this administrator and my mother at a funeral the year I graduated college. My mother says that she wanted to give me to the nuns in service to others for all that they have done for her. I am excited at the prospect of having a job in which I will not have to take someone’s order or refill a diet coke ever again. But it is a debt I can never repay. It is too upsetting to my identity and my sense of justice to learn these young women know more about poverty, drugs, and abuse than I. It is too frustrating that the one tool I can think of to give them, the power of language, of subject and verb and comma all in the right place, is not in favor with adolescents, particularly those abandoned and forced to make up their own language. It is too scary to me that these, my darker sisters, will not learn the rules of normal, because they do not likely see it in their neighborhoods and ghettos.

I remember the first time I realized that I had passed. I was in San Francisco “changing the face of education” as an academic coach to college students. I was meeting with a student, a young Mexican male that had become a success story for us because he had struggled and excelled in his first semester. But he had to drop out of school because his dad just lost his job and was not doing well and he needed to earn rent. As was the protocol in this oasis of idealism and cubicles, I brought in my manager. He is very tall, from the Upper East Side, and graduated from Harvard. He looks strikingly like Gavin Newsome, and goes skiing at places I cannot spell. We meet with this student to explore his “options”, but he is determined that he must leave school. During our debrief, Gavin asks if I think the outcome could have been different. I am struck by a flashback of my own time in college, when the tuition bill would come in the mail and we would not have the money and it was a definite possibility for me to stay home and continue to work as a secretary for $8 an hour where I was not entirely unhappy. When I mention to Gavin that I faced the possibility of not finishing college, he laughed. I got an ache in my Adam’s apple. I replied quietly, as it was as much a revelation to me as it was to him, “no, really, I almost didn’t go back to college most semesters.” And then he understood, and I understood, that we were not who we thought each other was, and we were not the same. He was apologetic, and I tried not to cry, uncertain whether opening that chasm would cause me to unleash all my anger at this person or whether, at the first sign of comfort, I would just try to disappear into this man’s world.

I did go to college, uninterrupted. It is when my mother would visit the pristine New England liberal arts campus and would gaze at the young people holding hands, playing Frisbee, or reading on the quad that I began to understand what “freer children” meant. I got to be melancholy and homesick, a luxury afforded to those who have too much time to think. I got to feel like I didn’t fit in, a luxury afforded to those who have the opportunity to leave their socio-economically and culturally homogenous hometowns. I got credit cards, a luxury afforded to those who can spell their own name and who can covet that which other people have. Normalcy. I got to get drunk to oblivion, do drugs, take lovers, read Sartre and Hemingway and Homer, go to Europe, fight with roommates, and delay adulthood until my brain and earning potential increased accordingly to the degree that I was pursuing.

It was during this time that I decided that college was the place for me to level the playing field. I was at least as smart as my peers, and was endowed with scholarships and the aforementioned credit cards that I was sure would be the gateway to being normal. So I got workout clothes and preppy clothes and grungy alternative clothes and slutty party clothes and a haircut. It is now, when I am almost 30 and dread going to the office because I do not have nice clothes because I am paying for the clothes that I bought when I was 20, that I realize that normal is a journey, not a destination.

Of course, I understand the inherent flaw in this whole discussion. It is the loaded rhetorical question, “what is normal?”. My learning in all these years as a student of this is that normal is often perceived as whatever the other is to your otherness. So normal, for me, is really defined by the oft-entwined triad of money, class, and education, which is, I imagine, rather, uh, normal. Due to this triumvirate, I have less experienced a class shift and more a class collision. I now have matching forks and plates, hand towels, and a pottery barn couch in an expensive apartment that is never clean and not even fully unpacked. We have a six-figure household income with no savings, enormous debt, and defaulted student loans. I have a lovely husband who is tattooed and pierced and belongs on stage but spends more time with numbers in a cubicle. We have two cute dogs that are on anti-depressants and terribly behind on their shots. And sometimes this is all ok; sometimes I know I wear the metaphorical “red mini skirt.”