Results for how I learned I was white

what I learned this week…this crap should be illegal.

by Janelle Hanchett

 

  1. There is so much going on in my life right now I can hardly breathe. I think I may be losing my mind for real, though I’m not sure.
  2. Here are the things I’m facing this month. In August. Just this month (yes, I feel a little sorry for myself): Wrapping up an 8-year job/ Beginning grad school/ Ava starting a new school/ Beginning to homeschool Rocket/ First day with a new nanny for the baby (holy fuck that’s a big one)/ Going on a small but big-enough-to-require-planning vacation at the end of the month/Georgia’s 1st birthday celebration/ Planning Rocket’s 6th birthday party, which occurs the first part of September…
  3. The only of the above-listed items I’ve completed is Georgia’s birthday party, which was a small, family-only affair (of about 12 people)…in which I for some god-forsaken reason decided to cook homemade carnitas, refried beans and tortillas ALL FROM SCRATCH – by myself, for the party. It was lovely but I swear I almost lost it due to the stress. I was flipping, delirious. Still am.
  4. Georgia likes white sugar. She tasted it for the first time at her party. We cut her a little piece of cake and held it out in front of her…after she took a bite, she got this surprised look on her face and did a complete face-plant into it. As if her hands were just gonna take Way.Too.Long. It was beyond perfect.
  5. It was a great party. It was at my mom’s house, and my brother and sister-in-law and niece & nephew came and my grandparents and my dad and stepmom and my in-laws – all of them came – and we surrounded the little Georgia with big crazy ass family arms.
  6. And then we fell silent into a pork-fat coma.
  7. Nature and I need to have a little talk. When we do, it’s going to go something like this: “Look, bitch, if you’re gonna give me pimples like when I was 16, you better hook me up with my 16-year-old body, too. You can’t pick and choose like that, yo.”
  8. I guess I’m that stressed – I’m returning to having pubescent skin issues.
  9. I’m afraid I’m going to lose friends this month since I most likely won’t be returning many phone calls, reading blogs, texting, Skyping, visiting in person (do people still do that?), emailing, Facebook stalking, Twittering, standing in front lawns peeping into windows, or any other variation of enjoyable social activities.
  10. Please don’t desert me, people. I’ll resurface one of these days. Well in a month, actually. Seriously, though, months like this one should be illegal.

Cheers, all.

double-fistin' it, wondering "Mama, why the hell did you keep this from me for so long?"

lovely birthday girl, post cake face-plant

5 Comments | Posted in weeks of mayhem | August 7, 2011

2023 Writing Retreat

by Janelle Hanchett

 :

“He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself.

The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness,

blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing,

lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all,

to make the world a more human dwelling place.

–  James Baldwin

 

The Role of The Artist: 

A 6-day writing retreat with

Janelle Hanchett

***

September 17-23, 2023

Agriturismo Le Pianore

Tuscany, Italy

***

All slots have been filled as of May 2023

 

In 2015, I held my first writing retreat with eight women. They were all from the first writing workshop I had ever taught, and we had been working together for a year.

In a word, it was magic. And you know how I feel about words like “it was magic.”

Only it was, in fact, magic.

The following year, I held my first retreat with 12 people who weren’t in that writing group, and it was, again, don’t make me say it.

We spent mornings on a sunny deck drinking coffee under the coastal redwoods, then headed off to the yurt with a roaring wood stove to discuss various aspects of the craft of writing. We ate lunch together at a massive, ancient wooden table, enjoying food prepared by my best friend, Sarah, who also happens to be a chef.

In the afternoons, we spread out around the retreat center and wrote or read or napped, sat in the hot tub or took a dip in the pool. In the evenings, we (well, they, since I don’t drink) sipped wine on the deck and after dinner, gathered around the enormous fireplace in the main ranch house to workshop one another’s writing.

We left as friends and better writers. And possibly crying.

These retreats have been transformative, and since we now live in the Netherlands, we figured we’d better take advantage of, well, Europe. So in 2021, we headed to southern France.

We hiked in the Pyrenees (look, I’m sorry the hike was longer than I thought it would be), got attacked by wild goats at lunch, recovered in ancient Roman baths deep in a valley under the soaring mountains. We visited the local market, laid down on the country road in the middle of the night to look at the stars, and ate croissants every morning from a local bakery.

This summer we went to a 10th-century castle in rural Catalunya. While there we learned that it was run by an order of women for 100 years during the 11th century, which is absolutely unheard of. A whole community of women developed and thrived in the valley, until the Pope decided they had grown too powerful and shut down the order.

And when two guests (one of whom is my husband) literally heard women’s voices singing, the proprietor said “Oh, those are the women in the stones. They are happy you are here, a group of women writers.” I got chills again just now.

We walked to a very, very old hostel where the menu consisted of eight choices, handwritten, and every item came from the farmers in that very valley. We walked home at midnight under a night sky you wouldn’t believe.

We took a rack rail train into the Spanish Pyrenees and spent an afternoon at high-mountain lake with cafes and a very friendly Spanish dude renting little boats to paddle around in the sunshine. I can’t make this shit up.

And through it all we write, study writing, laugh with and learn from each other.

What I’m saying is this: My retreats are as much about living as they are about writing. They are about experiencing this world in a vivid and authentic way. They’re about just enough adventure (I do about 9 billion hours of research for our activities, but I have never been, so we are up for adventure). They are not curated perfection.

They are about being awake to this life, the people on this earth, the characters, the stories, the beauty and annoyance and wildness we encounter every day. How else can we write? How can we make art?

Somebody said writers are people who pay attention to things.

Real people, real food, real locations, real friendship.

And, at times, real wtf. We’ll pay attention, and we will remember.

In September 2023 we’re headed to a very special 12th-century farmhouse and retreat center set in the heart of Tuscan Maremma, surrounded by woodlands, vineyards, olive groves and mountain streams. Unblemished views and landscapes as far as you can see. In the words of Elena, the founder:

“When we came upon Le Pianore for the first time back in 1990, there was no way to reach it by car, so we wrapped our feet in plastic packets and crossed the icy stream standing between us and our future home on foot.  We must have been quite a site walking through that wintry forest, as I was heavily pregnant with our second child and my husband Francesco was carrying our young son in his arms, trying to protect him from the falling snow with piece of torn-off cardboard.

Villa Maladina appeared at the end of a small dry stone-walled path, and I had a tremendous feeling of déjà-vu: I had dreamt of this very moment the previous night, and it felt to me as though we had finally come home.”

Please let’s look:

“For me Le Pianore has alway been a place of freedom, joy and possibility. That is what I want to share with people. I want to give my guests a space in which they can explore and express themselves, where they can play, experience real emotions and be moved by beauty.” – Elena, owner

 

 

This is an organic produce and winery owned by a family for 22 years. Grandparents to grandchildren. Babies born and raised here. A family–did I mention that?

Apparently there are white horses that run through the hills near the property. I am not joking.

Forest, streams, miles to wander. A wooden deck in the side of a hill on the property where you can do yoga in the mornings, read, or, and this is what I will definitely be doing: Lying on blankets at night to stargaze in the pitch dark.

This is not tourist Tuscany. This is family, food, nature, life.

Join us at Le Pianore September 17-23.

We will wake up, eat a lovely breakfast (and consume a lot of coffee and tea), then we’ll have 2.5 hours of craft workshops in the seminar (yoga) room –actual workshop space!

We will eat lunch, then have afternoons free for writing, exploring the area, sleeping, chatting. Staring off into the mountains and looking for the white horses, which apparently exist. I am not joking.

You can hike to neighboring villages, take a swim if it’s warm enough, or find a private nook to write in. Most bedrooms have their own bathrooms, and desks, but there are lots of places for you to be alone and write or read and think.

In the evenings we’ll enjoy dinner prepared by Sarah with locally sourced ingredients. We will reconvene in the evening for discussions and/or workshop writing.

As always, my approach is this: I want us comfortable, content, friendly, mellow, and having A LOT of possibly raucous fun while also writing and seriously considering our relationship to writing.

Forgive the cliche but we work hard and play hard. I remind writers always that they are spending money on this—and so we shall write. I take my commitment to you very seriously and am honored you trust me as a teacher and mentor.

I built my writing career from 40 blog readers while raising three, then four kids. I published a book in 2018 and have a Master’s degree in English. I see writing in realistic terms and work from a place of pragmatism and honesty instead of airy declarations of the muse: I won’t insist you find “your jewel within” (simply because I don’t know what the fuck that means), but I will remind you how Toni Morrison wrote her first book on a yellow legal pad next to a toddler, who then vomited on it, and how she “wrote around the puke.”

I’m a write-around-the-puke kinda writer. But the thing is, in my opinion, that is the jewel, and it’s one I know well. It’s the one that has in fact changed my life.

We think. We discuss. We get deep into the grit of it. And then we pull back and enjoy our surroundings, food, each other, and life.

I want you to leave with a feeling of experiential transformation. As in, the experience itself adding as much to your writing as the workshops.

Here’s a sample daily schedule: 

So, this retreat is for the writer looking to improve their craft, get writing done, and hang out in Tuscany.

While we will talk about creative work generally, and focus some on fear and the thought processes that block us from writing, our main focus is on improving our skill in writing. That said, this is not a lecture/school course. This is a dynamic, fun, interactive time for you to hone your craft and learn how doing often affects thinking.

In other words, the act of writing often systematically deconstructs our fears about writing. I will explain this more, but for now, you’ll have to trust me.

This is why I focus mostly on craft. Because if we focus on becoming the best writers we can become, a lot of the mental bullshit will fall away. Or, perhaps better said, it simply becomes irrelevant.

Sleeping Arrangements:

This retreat is open to 12 writers. There are many room and bed options, ranging from single to triple occupancy, twin to double or queen-sized beds. Below I have listed the room options and prices, but once you send me the application and we’re good to go, I’ll ask you to choose a room. If you know immediately what you’d like, just let me know in the email and I’ll reserve it.

Getting there:

You can fly into Rome or Florence. The retreat center is 2 hours from each (smack in the middle of the two). We will be chartering small busses from Rome or Florence, or possibly one to each, but this will be arranged on a planning call once the retreat is filled.

Transport will be an extra €170, and I AM SORRY ABOUT THIS. You can definitely rent a car with other writers if it’s cheaper, but given inflation and the cost of rental cars and fuel, I kinda doubt it will be. Not sure how aware you are of the inflation in western Europe, but holy shit. And the energy and fuel crisis. It’s fun.

Anyway the key point here is you will not be left alone to figure out how to get to a farm in the middle of the Tuscan countryside, with only kind Italian farmers to help you. Wait. Why does that sound fun.

We will have a Facebook group and then a WhatsApp group closer to the event. We will have planning calls and discuss all the things.

I truly hope you join us.

P.S. If this is not a fit for you, we will also hold retreats as I’ve done in the past.

 

The Role of the Artist: 
A Writing Retreat in Italy with Janelle Hanchett

September 17-23, 2023

Cost: €2500-€2850  (can be paid in installments; please email me to discuss)

Anyway, here’s what that cost includes:

        • Six-night accommodations
        • All of your meals: Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, all prepared by Sarah, a professional chef. Healthy, expansive, and locally sourced.
        • 2.5-3 hours of writing craft instruction each morning (Again, if you’ve attended my retreats/workshops before, don’t worry, the content will be NEW.)
        • 1 hour of evening time together, either in a writing roundtable (where we receive feedback on work submitted), or have a discussion on writing process
        • Optional hikes, yoga, and journeys into nearby villages.
        • A full day outing. I usually make this a surprise but I will offer a HINT in the form of the photo to the right. Everything else, though, I ain’t mentioning.
        • Afternoons and evenings around free for writing, reading, staring into the distance. We often we end up hanging out, drinking wine (well, I don’t), listening to Mac and Sarah play guitar and sing. Somehow this seems to be everyone’s favorite feature of these retreats. DON’T WORRY I’M NOT OFFENDED.

Here are the rooms available. I cross them off as they fill but leave them here for my own bizarre, boring reasons.

Single bed in large triple-occupancy room with en suite bathroom: €2500 (2 of 3 available)

Single bed in double-occupancy room with en suite bathroom: €2600 (1 of 5 available)

Queen bed in double-occupancy room with en suite bathroom: €2650 (1 available)

Single bed in large double-occupancy room with en suite bathroom & private terrace: €2700 (1 available)

Queen bed in large double-occupancy room with en suite bathroom & private terrace: €2750 (1 available)

Queen bed in single occupancy room with en suite bathroom: €2850 (1 available)

Double bed in single-occupancy room with adjacent bathroom shared with one other room: €2700 (1 available)

Note: This retreat is fully booked as of May 2023. However, you can sign up for my mailing list to receive information regarding upcoming retreats!

  


*REFUND POLICY: The €400 deposit is non-refundable. The full retreat amount will be due June 1, 2023. If you cannot attend the retreat after you’ve paid the remaining balance, I will refund you if I can fill the spot, but I must be notified by July 1, 2023. I’m sorry this is so strict. I had a very questionable man last year announce to me one week before the retreat that he wouldn’t be paying. Just flat out invented a story and expected to come anyway, for free. One of the most astonishing things I’ve ever experienced. I also once had three people cancel two weeks before the retreat. Frankly I don’t charge enough to accommodate this sort of thing and my laidback ways tend to bite me in the ass. Is this the longest refund policy ever, and the most ridiculous? I sure hope so. Anyway, by paying the deposit you agree to this policy. Thank you!

 

Comments Closed | Posted in | December 5, 2022

California human experiences first Dutch Winter. Doing great.

by Janelle Hanchett

Good news. I have figured out how boilers work. Is that even what they’re called? I don’t know. Those metal flat things attached to walls that run water through them, getting warm but not hot enough to burn your house down if your kid leaves a stuffed animal on it (not that I checked this five times a day for the first month we used the fucker).

You know, the heating system everywhere in Europe built in approximately 1743? Those.

Anyway, the way they work is this: When you are cold, so cold, like ice melting across your wordless soul, you turn the thermostat up one degree Celsius.

Seventeen minutes later you are so sauna-hot you go outside, into Dutch Siberia (which is the whole country), on purpose, to cool off. Then, about two hours later, you start the process over again.

It’s a wet cold here in Holland. Humans I wanted to punch in the face used to tell me that the 110 degrees in California I experienced wasn’t really that hot because it’s a “dry heat,” and yes, I get it, humidity is a special hell, but can we all just fucking agree that 110 is like living in Satan’s ball sack no matter what the conditions? You can’t breathe in hot humid you can’t breathe in not humid hot.

Oh, hot sounds nice.

My toes will never be warm again. Jeans do not cut the wind. My socks are 12% effective. People say I should wear two pair made of merino wool. They are clearly not taking into account my laziness here. Two socks.

Fun fact, it’s not even full winter yet.

This has all been perhaps a grave mistake.

I burn 3-7 candles at all times in my house. George says I “have a problem.” I say, “I AM TRYING TO CREATE SOME COZY SO I DON’T DROWN MYSELF IN A MOTHERFUCKING CANAL.” I say this with my brain not my mouth because saying that word to your kid even as apt modifier is frowned upon.

The Dutch word here is “gezellig.” It means “cozy” but more than cozy. It’s like comfortable, lived in, warm, general togetherness, friendly. For example, when a Dutch neighbor came over and I did the standard apology for kid shit all over the floor, she said, “No, I like it. It’s gezellig. It means children live here and are comfortable to play here.”

And then I cried and cradled her in my arms for a good ten minutes. I didn’t. The Dutch would hate that. Niet gezellig to force affection on acquaintances.

I got a heated blanket because I’m elderly and also I take a lot of baths in our giant tub. God gave us a long, deep, massive (that’s what she said) tub because he knows I used to think closed-toed shoes meant “winter.” And this is definitely how god works, an act of divine providence as opposed to just, like, luck, since this is the only house that would rent to us.

I’m really into the really good tea from the tea shop in the center of town. I also like the way I bundle up to go outside then SWEAT CONSTANTLY once I get inside where I’m going because gezellig and boilers.

Did I mention it’s going to get colder and rain like this and be gray and get dark at noon even though the sun rises at 10am for the next four months?

No need to look at the weather app. IT’S ALL GRAY ALL DAY ASSHOLES.

It hails occasionally. That’s fun. But no snow. Snow is too pleasant. Too bright. Whoever said white is the absence of color has clearly never lived through a Dutch winter. Sea of Gray, a love song. If it snowed, maybe the moon that peaks out the clouds for 3 minutes every tenth night would reflect off it, almost giving the impression of light. And we don’t do “light” in Dutch winter.

Okay fine. I’m exaggerating. The sun comes out for at least ten minutes over the course of a week.

Meanwhile, Dutch families ride their bikes in this shit, all day, shaming with their toughness and stoic “what’s your problem” attitudes. Some of them even smile. They aren’t like positive about it, they just don’t seem to care. I feel personally attacked. They cart 2-3 kids on those bikes, in the fucking rain, with or without ponchos or gloves.

They’ve obviously given up on life.

Or embraced it. Your call.

Yes, I am aware that It is nowhere near as cold here as Chicago or Minnesota or Canada or wherever else people put kids in snowsuits and have tears freeze to their cheeks. My friend Antonia said that happened to her here, so that’s a nice thought.

But, where I lived in California we had two seasons: Hot as Fuck and Orgasm-Level Perfect.

Mixed in there between December and January would be a week or two of “Guess I shouldn’t wear Birkenstocks today” AKA “Where’s my coat?” AKA “Do I own a coat?” AKA “WHY CAN NONE OF US DRIVE IN THE FUCKING RAIN?”.

One thing I have learned about “actual winter,” though, is that one always complains about actual winter. Every year. Just like I complained about the one-hundredth 90+ degree day in a row, people with winters complain about winters. Unless you’re Dutch, in which case you get all gezellig and shit, throw some flowers in your bike basket and say things like “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.”

I FUCKING DISAGREE DUDE BUT SURE LET’S DO IT YOUR WAY (sorry for yelling please don’t kick me out).

In conclusion, apparently Mac wears scarves now.

COZY.

****

Hey friends I’m running three writing workshops in the beginning of 2020.

Check them out.

FROM MEMORY TO MEMOIR, for the writer ready to write her story (January)

RENEGADE WRITERS’ GROUP, for the writer ready to get lots of actual words written (January)

WRITE ANYWAY, where we gain a new relationship to our fears of writing (March)

A FOCUS ON CRAFT, um, where we work on becoming better writers (only more fun than that I swear) (April)

I found this a year after I named my workshop “write anyway,” which basically means I am Junot Diaz.

 

31 Comments | Posted in I guess we're moving to the Netherlands | November 14, 2019

I’m done behaving. It got us nowhere.

by Janelle Hanchett

On my book tour, on a flight between Washington DC and Austin, Texas, I sat in the window seat with an empty seat beside me. A man in his sixties sat in the aisle seat, and about halfway through the flight, I got up to pee. He moved to let me out.

When I came back, I stood next to him and said, “Sorry,” kind of shrugging, annoyed that I had to annoy him. I stepped back to allow him to get out of the seat to let me in.

Oddly, he stepped back toward me, positioning himself in the aisle directly in front of me instead of stepping forward so I could go in behind him. His position would require me to squeeze past him in the tiny aisle, my body pressing against his.

Surprising myself, I refused to do it. I just stood there. Fuck you, man. Get the fuck out of my way. I don’t want to touch you, and I won’t, and whether you’re doing this to be creepy or out of sheer lack of social skills, I don’t care. Get the fuck out of my way.

I stood there and stared at his back until enough time passed that it got weird. He looked back at me and I motioned for him to step forward so I could get by. He didn’t move. I said, “Move forward so I can get in behind you.” I didn’t even say please.

He looked at me irritated, like I was insane, like not wanting my groin pressed against a stranger’s ass was an irrational request, and I realized I have fucking had it with the tiny courtesies I extend to men who demand space in this world at the cost of women.

I am done with it.

My new approach, when it comes to these mediocre, posturing white men – because let’s be real they’re pretty much the only ones I notice doing this – is get the fuck out of my way.

A man did his manspreading thing against my legs on an airport bench. I moved my legs to press against his, until he adjusted. He was in my space. I was in my own. He can move the fuck over.

A man did his mansplaining thing, explaining how publishing works, even though he had never published a book and I, um, have. I looked at him and said, “Why are you explaining my own career to me?”

When acquaintances tell me to “settle down,” or “calm down,” etc., because I have the audacity to speak openly and passionately about a topic, I tell them to calm down. I get to speak, and loudly.

I haven’t always been this way, and the truth is I have always accepted a certain level of bullshit from the men around me – ones I know and don’t – even when it made me very uncomfortable, or angry, or put me in positions of holding my tongue to “keep the peace.”

I’m not talking about a refusal on my part to extend common courtesy, or about sharing space with other humans, men and women. I’m talking about no longer catering to men who CHARGE THE WORLD with their voices, bodies, and assumed power to trample women around them.

I usually deferred to these men, hating myself for doing it, wondering what people would think if they saw me doing that. I’m supposed to be a feminist. I’m supposed to be strong. I’m so tough on the page.

But I have been programmed in a misogynistic world just like the rest of us. I have been sexually abused and nearly raped. I’ve been taught to be ashamed of my body, told my voice was like “nails on a chalkboard.” I have had sex when I didn’t particularly want it. To appease. Because I thought I owed them, led them on.

When I was younger, and thin, and thus interesting for the male gaze, I looked away when cat-called, walked faster. Shirked, while my blood boiled in humiliation. I never said a word.

I have listened silently while men ranted on and on about their mediocre knowledge, even if I knew more. Not always, but often, because something in me said, “You be quiet and let the man speak.”

I ain’t a fucking shrinking violet, but more often than not, I moved my body to accommodate theirs. I don’t even know exactly how I learned this behavior, but literally and figuratively, I shrunk to allow them space.

 

But lately I’ve been wondering: What did all this fucking good behavior get me?  

It got me a nation who elected a pussy-grabbing president. It got me millions of people voting for a party that wants to remove my daughter’s dominion over her own body. It got me no paid federal maternity leave, fat shaming, and a rising maternal death rate. It got me Harvey Weinstein (at every turn) and less money on the dollar. It got me “cover up in public when you nurse.” It got me the vast majority of the domestic labor.

And I’m white. ALL of this is worse for women of color. All of it.

As a whole, it got us damn near fucking nothing.

There’s something viscerally infuriating about looking at my country and realizing it voted against my body. Against my child’s body. Against my freedom. And for my assault.

And so I’m done. I’m done catering to overbearing, sexist men. I’m done stepping aside simply because they’ve righteously demanded it. I’m done keeping my mouth shut and I’m done pretending I’m smaller than I am to feed that delicate male ego, or because I am afraid of something I cannot quite define.

Am I angry? Of course I fucking am. I gave the world a chance, and played by the rules, and all it got us was “I moved on her like a bitch.”

From the President of the United States of America.

So get the fuck out of my way, and then, maybe, if I feel like it, and you shut the hell up long enough to hear my voice, we can talk.

Clearly, there’s no space for anything else.

 

Note: I wrote this piece a few days ago, and in between then and now, I read this, and, though a bit off topic (and it needs a whole blog post to itself), I want to draw attention to the intersectionality of all this. That we, as white women, while demanding our space in a man’s world, need to be acutely aware of how we take up space in a white world. Love you all. 

*****

Though it is about recovery from alcoholism, one of the overarching themes of my memoir is the sanctity of motherhood and how it is, in short, utter bullshit.

Practically the whole book is calling out the vapid narratives surrounding motherhood, telling my own story of battling with erasure, inadequacy (both real and imagined), and finding some peace in there, somewhere.

Check it out.

Also my upcoming tour dates

45 Comments | Posted in feminist AF | July 18, 2018

Family Planning on Ecstasy: An excerpt from Chapter 1

by Janelle Hanchett

Friends, I am really excited to share this excerpt from Chapter 1 of my book, I’M JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE, which is out in EIGHT DAYS, on May 1. 

I cannot wait for you to read this.

And hey! I’m coming to a few cities. Check them out, and come say hello if you can. I’d love to meet you.

Anyway, here we go. Eight days. What a life this is.

 

From Chapter 1: Family Planning on Ecstasy

The first thing I did when I found out I was pregnant with my first child was head out to the balcony of our one-bedroom apartment and smoke a cigarette. It wasn’t even a real balcony. It was a gray stoop barely big enough for one unwatered plant, a dusty mat, and a twenty-one-year-old in vague denial. I would have preferred outright denial but found it impossible, having just peed on two sticks offering no ambiguity.

My plan was to formulate a plan out there on the balcony before informing the father, who was my boyfriend of three full months. We shared the apartment, but I made sure I was alone that afternoon, protected in isolation, so nobody would see me cry, or rage, or decide to handle the situation silently. I was never the kind of person who wanted company in moments of vulnerability. I never wanted a concerned friend to pat my head and smooth the hair off my forehead while I puked or cried. I wanted to lie in bed in solitude, where I could turn my head to the wall, stretch my legs out, and rise again smiling, while the world slept soundly in its room.

The last thing I needed was a loving and emotional man celebrating the seed in my womb before I knew how I felt about it.

Moments before, I had stared at those double lines with detached curiosity, a sort of numbed awe, as they popped up without hesitation in what seemed like a “fuck you” pink. I figured there could still be some mistake, so I took another test, and upon the second neon positive, pulled up my jeans, walked through the living room and onto the balcony, grabbing my Camel Lights and lighter on the way. I allowed my condition to sink one inch into my brain, where it hovered like a storm cloud creeping toward me. I knew it would shower me in panic, and soon I would feel it pouring down my arms and into my shoes, but those first moments felt liminal, half-real. I emboldened them with a cigarette. One more cigarette in the line of a thousand before it, a meaningless action of my same old life. An action of the nonpregnant.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just another woman on a balcony having a smoke.

That February afternoon was cool and bright, and as I watched the cars do nothing in the parking lot of our apartment complex, I thought about being a senior in college, my job as a waitress, and the few months Mac and I had been together, most of it grayed and hazy from alcohol, fast and romantic and possibly fake. I thought about how he would respond if he were there.

He would smile a soft smile. “Wow,” he would say, “I love you so much,” and his eyes would fill with grateful tears as more supportive words crossed his lips. He would study my reaction with his huge brown eyes. He would look as if he had waited his whole life to hear those three words.

I am pregnant.

I took a drag, inhaling I could have an abortion, but exhaled the startling realization that I would not.

And with the thought, the cigarette grew foul between my fingers. I stamped it out beneath my foot and wondered how the fuck I had ended up here again. I understood the physiology of pregnancy. I did not understand how that wasn’t enough.

In my defense, the first one was an honest mistake. I was eighteen, in my first semester of college, and had spontaneous, unprotected make-up sex with my long-term boyfriend. I knew immediately I would not have that baby, and I did not feel guilty about that decision, though I suspected this made me something of a monster. I felt sadness, but at that age, in that life, I mostly felt relief. We had sex, and yes I happen to have a uterus and ovaries hell-bent on reproduction, and our act was neither smart nor mature, but it was his fault too. My defense was that of a petulant child, but I had no interest in spending my whole life paying for a five-minute interval of questionable sex with a man who could walk away if he felt like it.

As I stood on the balcony, I wondered again, Who the hell gets pregnant accidentallymore than once?

I stared at the horizon and shook my head in disgust as I traveled the recesses of my brain looking for answers, recalling only a woman in my freshman comparative literature class. She had told me, “Getting an abortion is like getting your teeth cleaned.” When I raised an eyebrow, she explained, “It’s just something you have to do.” She was in her thirties and married to a local rock star. She had bad teeth, three children, tattoos, and that haircut of the ’90s where bangs were cut stupidly short in a band right against the forehead. I respected her.

Her teeth cleaning theory sounded erroneous if not downright depraved, but her nonchalance convinced me I would be alright, and that I was even perhaps not quite as foul as I had believed during my trip to the clinic that week, feeling like a slut and regretting with my whole heart those minutes in the dorms.

Apparently this is a thing women do.

That seemed true. I did it.

But I would not do it now.

And it didn’t feel like the fucking dentist.

Back inside, I stretched out on our quilt-covered couch, clicking my tongue at Fatboy, the giant black-and-white cat we inherited from Mac’s childhood. When feeling particularly affectionate, Fatboy would turn his head and glance at you from across the room. But that day, he folded up in the crook of my knees and stared up at me, as if he knew things were heavy.

I took a deep breath, looking around the apartment, the carpet so bland I couldn’t tell what color it was, the kitchen and bathroom floors a yellowed linoleum with pastel blue squares, ripped up and black at the corners. The cabinets were a 1970s brown with gold handles, and metal mini-blinds hung above a box air conditioner in the window that would sputter along against California’s Central Valley heat. That summer, we moved our mattress beneath the little box, creating a pocket of decency between the white walls. Our television sat on boards and cinder blocks. It was the kind of apartment that never felt alive or permanent, but Mac and I were kids and in love, and it was ours.

He was nineteen and I was twenty-one.

•     •     •

I was right about Mac. He did smile through tears and say all the lovely things I suspected he’d say when I told him I was pregnant, but the next day he added, “If you don’t have our baby, I can’t stay with you.” I considered telling him about the moment I knew I wouldn’t have an abortion, but instead I merely nodded. I wasn’t ready to speak the words, “I am having a baby.” I was stretching the liminal gray a few days longer.

When he spoke those words, he didn’t read my face to adjust his tone. He was not afraid of my response, or conflict, and there was no subtext. It was merely data to inform a decision. If his statement had been a threat, an attempted entrapment, I would have left immediately on those grounds alone. Fuck you for even trying to get me to stay, I’d have thought.

But that’s not what he said, and I knew it, because he said it with warm acceptance in his eyes and mouth and forehead—the way he looked at me when he said everything, even when he yelled and postured and I thought maybe I hated him. Or, perhaps that’s why I hated him, because he seemed capable of only adoration, and even in his anger he was devoted and irrationally loyal. It made me feel a little sick.

I get it, man. You can’t withstand the resentment you’d feel toward me if I didn’t have our baby.

But he is not why I had her. I was always going to have her and I knew it, though I didn’t know how to explain that I knew. I didn’t understand yet that motherhood is a lot of knowing without knowing.

But I knew her. She was already made.

I was afraid of having a baby. I was afraid of committing to him like that. I was afraid of what my parents would say, but Mac misread this fear as indecision. I had her because she was meant to be here and I was meant to be her mother, and I believed that in the same way I know the sun will rise. I had her because the moment I knew of her, she existed, like a strange new friend who moved in and wouldn’t leave.

I told myself I was about to graduate from college, that I wasn’t that young, that Mac was going to be a good father—and I loved him, or thought I did. In this way, I rearranged the facts, the furniture of my life, to accommodate my new friend.

Two weeks later, Mac peeked his head over the curtain while I showered and said, “It’s going to be a girl.”

“I know,” I said, and laughed. How weird we are, I thought. Clairvoyant.So in love she’s already shining through—through the blood and walls of my body.

We thought of names. We thought of Aurora and Leah and Althea, but one day while I waited for customers to arrive for dinner in the restaurant where I waitressed, I flipped through a magazine and found an article about Ava Gardner.

We settled on Ava Grace, as if anything could be more beautiful.

•     •     •

I told my mother I knew she was a girl; she didn’t think that was strange at all. When I asked her what the hell I was going to do with my life now, she said, “Well, honey, you’re going to have a baby.” Her simplicity and perky use of the word “honey” shot red annoyance down my spine.

My mother’s perpetual optimism made me wonder if she existed in some sort of sociopathic love cloud. As a young girl, I joined in her optimism, jumped on the “it’s going to be great!” train with glee, but over the years, as each new beginning almost never turned out “great,” I realized her outlook was as much fantasy as it was hope. It was a story to justify rushing headlong into another disaster, the same thing we’d done for years. Businesses. Marriages. Personality improvements. Diets. It was always going to be different this time.

It was an old, raw burn, and her sweetness still stung.

The moment she mentioned relationships, mine or hers, somewhere in me the memory of my former stepfather stirred, the way we moved in and out of his house like a vacation rental. But mostly, I remembered her suffering and how I thought I could fix it, how the solution was perfectly clear to me, how everybody said I was “very mature for my age.” My mother used to say, “I don’t know how you see the things you see, Janelle.”

I didn’t either, but I wished she’d see them too, because I was tired. And even at twenty-one, I was still tired, perhaps more tired than I’d ever been, and I had long since stopped believing in her dreams.

And yet, I always called her first, to bathe in the optimism she turned toward me, too, toward the person she believed I could become. I needed that. I needed to believe things were going to be different right around the corner. That sick hope was infectious, seeping into me whether I wanted it or not, and as much as I distrusted it in her, I clung to it like a drowning woman, because at least it was something.

“But how do you know, Mom?” I didn’t mask my irritation.

“Because you are going to be fine, sweetie.” I wanted to throw up.

She must have told her mother right away, because the next day Grandma Joan called and said, “You know you don’t have to marry this guy just because you’re pregnant,” and my jaw hit my flip phone. I wasn’t anywhere near marrying Mac. I barely knew him. I am merely going to have his baby, Grandma.

Being a woman born in 1930, Grandma Joan of course assumed marriage, and I assumed she would push marriage. She was in her seventies and a Mormon woman who had made her husband dinner every night since they were married at eighteen, and if she was not home in the evening, she prepared the food and put it on the counter so all he had to do was heat it up. He had been the quarterback of the high school football team and she had been the new girl in town—and a cheerleader. It was a movie, and yet true. They still held hands when they sat on the couch together, and they flirted like teenagers. He was sure old Benny at the post office was waiting for him to “kick the bucket” so he could swoop in on Grandma.

She would smack his leg, roll her eyes, and say, “Oh, Bob,” with exasperation and a kiss in her eye.

At family functions in her home, all the women would bustle around the kitchen for hours preparing dinner for thirty while the kids played in the basement and the men watched football in the living room. After dinner, all the women would bustle around in the kitchen for hours doing dishes while the men watched football in the living room, and the kids ran around in the basement. By the time I was a teenager, I wondered what the hell was wrong with these people. But I loved being in the kitchen, where my mother and three aunts talked and cooked with the chatter and laughter of a lifetime of sisterhood, occasionally popping out to rescue a screaming baby, talking of report cards and breastfeeding and wayward teens, of Grandma’s silly ways and how she really should sit down, she’s tired, but she never would. When she finally did, my uncles had begun barbequing on the deck outside and nobody played in the basement anymore.

I sat with the men, too, as babies crawled around their laps, each of their faces illuminated with the television screen as they watched sports, speaking of things I didn’t understand, like “downs” and “bad calls” and “finals.” I felt honored when they spoke to me, a little nod to my sport-less existence. I understood their acknowledgment of me was a quick trip beneath themselves, a little jaunt to a place less sacred. They were, after all, the ones who got to do nothing while groups of women worked on their behalf.

Although the kitchen was warmer, and had better conversation, sometimes I would sit at the dining table between the living room and kitchen, so I could watch both ends and refuse to commit.

At twenty-one, I joined the women in the kitchen for good, though I had always promised I’d never be like them. “I’m not going to get married until I’m thirty,” I’d say as a teenager at our annual Christmas party, “and I won’t have a baby until thirty-five.”

“Good job,” my aunt would nod. “Just don’t rush it.”

“Of course not,” I’d answer, irritated that she’d even consider the possibility of me ruining my life with an unplanned pregnancy at a young age.

I was the youngest of my cousins to have a baby.

People surprise you, though, especially when they’re old and sick of the bullshit, and I saw Joan anew the day she called me, after fifty-five years spent with my grandfather. While she spoke, I wondered how many women of her generation married terrible men because of unexpected pregnancies, and then stayed because of more. I felt myself, for an instant, counted among them.

“Thank you for your concern, Grandma, but it’s different with us,” I said.

I may be in the kitchen like the rest of you broads, but I am different. I could not articulate how, exactly, but I knew I wouldn’t end up washing dishes while the men watched other men slam into each other on brightly lit screens. It seemed archaic and absurd. I would demand freedom, even within the confines of pregnancy. I suppose that, too, is something women “just have to do.”

If I had to guess, I would have said my future would unfold more along the lines of my paternal grandmother, Bonny Jean. She was an intellectual, a fiery Christian Scientist, and natural skeptic who believed in God but not doctors, grassroots journalism, and stockpiling mayonnaise in case there was another Great Depression.

She grew up behind the stage with her parents, who were traveling actors. I once attempted to explain “gay people” to her because, you know, as a relic she wouldn’t understand such things. She spun around to face me in her house robe and said, “I grew up behind a vaudeville stage in the twenties. You think any of those people were straight?” I never tried that shit again.

She had five children from 1945 to 1955. They were raised largely by her father-in-law while she ran her newspaper, which she and my grandfather purchased in 1956. Bonny Jean would attend every local city council meeting, critiquing what she saw in scathing weekly editorials, which she would often dictate over the pay phone in the city council hallway. She once fought the head of the San Francisco plumbers’ union, a man with rumored Mafia ties, who was trying to take over her small town’s water council. When she broke the story and refused to back down, he threatened her. I once asked how she managed to fight a man like him as a woman in the 1960s. She said, “Oh, that was easy, honey. I was not afraid of him. The truth is a strong defense.”

When I told her about the pregnancy, I thought I heard a touch of sadness in her voice, despite her congratulations, because for a split second, they sounded like condolences.

The hardest person to tell was my father. I was barely old enough to handle him knowing I had sex, and yet I had to tell him there was an actual human growing in my body, deposited there by the sperm of a man. Telling him felt something like bra shopping with my mother at fourteen: uncomfortable in a deeply shameful, yet unknown way. Everybody has sex. Everybody gets boobs.

Still, somebody please kill me.

I had always felt my father saw me as a kid who was going to do something impressive in life, who was going to become a lawyer or doctor or at least make a lot of money. Instead, I was joining the Mormons in the kitchen. I knew he wouldn’t say it, but he would be disappointed in me. He knew how many times I had stood at family functions declaring my plan, and he knew I never consciously abandoned that.

It’s hardest to fall in front of those you’ve convinced, through years of tone moderation and personality suppression, that you are not the type to falter.

•     •     •

I stopped smoking and drinking immediately after my balcony denial, which felt wholesome and deeply mature, despite Mac’s and my decision to move out of our apartment and into his parents’ house on their ranch. They lived in a dome-shaped house about ten miles outside of Davis, California, the clean, well-manicured town where I went to college and met Mac.

Davis boasts the second-highest per capita number of PhDs in any city in the nation, and a special tunnel for frogs so they don’t get killed on the road. The town is teeming with students, artists, and intellectuals on bicycles, but also suffers from an epidemic of highly educated, splendid liberals. I learned to spot and avoid the latter from a distance of approximately one hundred feet, having had many years’ practice. The problem is not that they’re liberal—surely one can learn to live with that—it’s that they can’t quite understand why a person wouldn’t dress her child in only organic cotton, or shop solely at the co-op, where they sell nineteen dollar olive oil pressed from olives grown on blessed trees in sacred Native American valleys.

These are the kind of people who call gentrification “restoring the neighborhood” and spend four years on a waiting list for a $1,500 a month preschool while claiming to deeply understand the plight of the underprivileged. Davis is the kind of town where everyone breathes social justice via diversity stickers on their Priuses, but many citizens request that the kids from the Mexican enclaves surrounding the town simply stay in their schools. It’s not about race. It’s just…you know…let’s talk about public radio. Do you support it? It’s kind of my cause. That, and the ACLU.

Most of the mothers in Davis were married, in their late thirties, and living in $700,000 houses when I showed up at age twenty-one, unmarried and pregnant. When I realized nobody would talk to me at the park, having dismissed me immediately as some sort of teen-pregnancy situation, Mac and I bought a pink diaper bag with a giant rhinestone Playboy bunny on the front. It was my subtle “fuck you” to everyone who wouldn’t talk to me anyway, and it almost convinced me I didn’t care.

I turned twenty-two that March and finished my last semester of college in September of 2001, two months before our baby was due. Mac worked at his father’s slaughterhouse on the ranch, and our bedroom was where Mac had played with Hot Wheels and G.I. Joes as a boy, and hid his weed at fifteen. We shared the home with five other people: his parents, two sisters, and his sister’s boyfriend. All the bedrooms were upstairs and opened into a shared center hallway, kind of like Foucault’s panopticon only without the glass. His family was kind and relaxed and pretended we weren’t kids about to have a kid, but I felt exposed and watched—too close to people who weren’t quite mine, humans I knew but didn’t understand, and whom I was still trying to impress. They were family, but I didn’t want them to see me naked, or notice I stunk up the bathroom or yelled at their son. I self-regulated, even though there was no guard in the watchtower.

We bought a crib and an oak dresser, which we wedged together in a corner of the bedroom. I lined each drawer in lavender-scented paper with tiny pastel pink flowers on it, and I bought clothes from Baby Gap and Gymboree and Marshalls. I bought most of them in “newborn” size because they were the cutest and least expensive. I didn’t know they were discounted because babies outgrow them in twelve minutes.

We had a keg of beer at our baby shower, and Mac came because we were “too in love to be apart.” I received about seventy-five various bath items because when my stepmother asked, “What do you need for the baby?” I answered, “Bath items.” I didn’t know you were supposed to “register.” I didn’t have any friends telling me about pregnancy or babies because only losers had babies this young. And I never hung out with losers.

My pregnancy was like living in a dream, a sort of ethereal fantasy ticking by in nebulous form. While my belly grew, I spent my days petting hand-smocked outfits with embroidered ducks and imagining our little threesome. Mac and I played pool at my local university’s student union, and I wasn’t even embarrassed of my belly. I wasn’t embarrassed of my age, or Mac’s lack of career, or that we lived in a room in his parents’ house. Those things weren’t in the dream.

But I couldn’t help but feel inklings of shame as I walked to class during that last semester, when I barely fit in the desks, because the sidewalks and grass and offices on campus were the places where women like me rarely succeeded, and nobody was impressed with expanding uteri. These were PhDs and MAs and lovers of Derrida. They could see right through me: I was the kid who lost, the girl who failed. As I walked I remembered maybe I was going to be more than this, but then I thought of Mac and the baby girl to come. I thought of that love and squared my shoulders.

We went to peaceful birthing classes and breathed together and when Ava came it was fast and insane and Mac sat by me and held my hands and never broke my gaze. The nurses said we were the most beautiful birthing couple they had ever seen.

I wasn’t surprised. It was the only way it could be.

•     •     •

I met Mac for the first time in my living room the night before Halloween, thirteen months before Ava was born. I was living in a converted garage in a house I shared with four eighteen- and nineteen-year-old males I had found in a newspaper. Three months before I responded to their “roommate wanted” ad, I returned home from a year studying abroad in Spain. I tried living with my mother up north in Mendocino, California, and found a job waitressing, but got fired after two weeks for counseling the owner on how she could improve her business. I found myself bored, embarrassed, and broke, so I moved back to Davis in the fall and began waitressing at an “Asian fusion” restaurant and drinking too much.

I had long before decided I could not live with women. They were too complicated. They needed things like talking and support and genuineness. I needed things like rum and Coke and silence. So I asked those boys looking for a roommate if I could move in, and they said yes immediately upon hearing I could legally buy alcohol.

Three months later, a man I had never seen before sat stoned against our living room wall, next to the television. He had a beard that stuck out in every direction and a head of hair that looked exactly the same. It was as if somebody had taken a donut of three-inch-long black curly hair and popped a face into the center of it. He was a high school friend of my roommates’, a newcomer, thin and tall and quiet, and I would not have noticed him at all had he not said something witty. In our house of drunk eighteen- and nineteen-year-old man-boys, nobody was saying anything witty. I beamed my eyes at him from across the room in curious surprise and locked them with his. They were the kindest eyes I had ever seen. I remember that moment exactly as it happened, in slow motion, as if it were a scene in a Meg Ryan movie. The Eye Lock. His were deep brown with eyelashes that carried on ridiculously, but it was their gentleness, their steady calm, that made me want to know more.

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19 Comments | Posted in what the fuck is a writer | April 23, 2018