and scarred me. I've been thinking about writing about this ever since What Now's fabulous response to a meme circulating which asked people to list ten things people don't know about them. Somehow What Now's ended up being, in part, about several of her (delightfully eccentric)
childhood-into-adulthood anxieties-everything from doing time to being whacked by the mafia. I've wanted to do a similar post for a while now.
1.
BYU. Just when I've coaxed myself into believing it only exists in my distant past, there as a rich source of anecdotes with which I can amuse friends and colleagues, something reminds me that it's still there, still educating LDS youth, matching them with their eternal mates, and sending them (the men, or priesthood holders, in Mormon-speak) off to law and mba programs among the "gentiles," as Mormons call anyone who isn't Mormon, including, you got it, Jewish people. Today it was
this link, courtesy of
The Great Whatsit.
It's been twenty years since I started school there and I still can't wrap my head around the version of Mormonism I found there. For example, Mormons being predominantly Republican. Who knew? I never got that memo, and neither had any of my dyed-in-the-wool Democrat relatives. Honestly, I didn't even have an inkling until a new college friend gasped in horror as I pretended to tear up her
Elect George H. Bush bumper sticker. I just assumed she had it as a joke. And don't even get me started on the time I found out Mormons aren't allowed to be pro-choice. . . (p.s. The school's logo has been changed since I graduated. It no longers says "The Glory of God is Intelligence," because, you know,
many are learned who think they are wise.)
2.
Monstro, the whale from Pinnochio
I found better representations than this, but this was the most I could handle. Even image-searching Monstro freaked me out, and my heart is pounding and I feel the familiar dread resting across my shoulders even as I write this. This is one of my oldest and most lingering fears. (
Old women and the wolf from The Three Little Pigs are older, but I got over them.) I never even saw the movie, only a clip from it at
Disney on Ice, but that was enough. Nothing could talk me out of my fear, not explanations that whales don't hurt people, and that even if they did, they couldn't hurt you on dry land, or talks about the difference between real life and a cartoon. When we went to Disneyland (several times a year, since I'm from O.C.) my dad would spank me and force me to look at the giant cement Monstro which served as the offical gateway to Fantasyland, believing that if I faced my fears, I could conquer them. At four, this was a pretty ineffective strategy, and I'd wake up more nights than not screaming about whales. My parents had a big coffee table book of
The Art of Walt Disney which had a two page spread just of Monstro's eye, with Jiminy Cricket floating past it with his umberella. One of my babysitters used to taunt me with that. He'd say, "come here and look at this beautiful picture of Cinderella," and then when I got near him he'd flip open to the picture of the eye. Cool that he got paid to do that. This has been on my mind a lot lately because of a chapter in Jacqui Alexander's newest book,
Pedagogies of Crossing. I have an epiphanic, spiritual post brewing in me, where I'll explain the connection, but not today.
I used to have a reoccuring nightmare that I was sitting on my dad's lap watching Pinnochio, and when it got to the whale part I would realize that everyone in the theater had turned into a whale. Then I'd turn to my dad for comfort and realize that he was a whale, too.
Which brings me to . . .
3.
My father. I'm really not interested in using this space to talk about my relationship with my dad. Like so many people, it's fraught and complicated and impossible. I'm the only one of my siblings who currently talks to him and that's because I just think it's easier to have an amicable, shallow phone relationship with him than to be involved in a drawn-out not-talking-to-him drama. I talk to him several times a year, he tells me about Rotary Club and the goings on at church--assiduously avoiding asking me anything about my life--and I listen and laugh politely and go back to my life. I think my sisters are really invested in this idealized image of what a father should be, and they can't stop being hurt that he's not like that. I just don't believe in it, probably because I'm the oldest and remember the best what life was like when he was around. Sometimes men ejeculate sperm, and it makes a human. Period. End of connection. Get over it.
But check this out: the last time my dad and stepmother (who's great, really. I adore her.) visited me was about 13 years ago, when I was in grad school and still married. He often says he's going to come visit. Last fall, for example, he swore he was driving across the midwest to pickup a boat motor in Wisconsin (I don't understand it either. Don't ask.) but fall came and went and he never showed and never mentioned it again. So when he started saying he was coming to visit this spring, I only half listened, assuming a) that it wouldn't happen and b) that if it did I'd have plenty of notice. Yesterday I got an email saying that they were coming the week of the sixteenth and wanted to check with my schedule. I wrote back saying that week in May would work just fine--I would cancel any meetings and start figuring out what kind of things we would do. He wrote back and said, you misunderstand, I mean April . . .
People, that's next week!!!!!!!!!!! I'm mid-quarter, have a formal review due in a couple of weeks, two panel proposals to write, meetings almost every day, etc. I can't even have my house clean by next week! And I don't know if they think they're staying here. They don't usually, but what if this is the exception? I don't know how to ask because if they weren't thinking of staying here, now they will.
What I'm really worried about is upsetting the equilibrium I've worked so hard to maintain over the past several years. When you piss off my dad, he stops talking to you and then there's drama, and if you want to resume contact you have to grovel. I like the shallow, superficial relationship we have. Anyway, the easy answer is, if he can't respect that I have a full life and need more advance notice before a visit, losing him isn't such a loss, and I shouldn't stress about it. Maybe this time I won't grovel. Maybe this time it will be forever. I'll try to make peace with the loss and maybe figure out a way to be zen about it. Acch. Whatever.
