I currently live in Los Angeles. I work on a late-night talk show and I do stand-up several weekends out of the year. I don’t have kids and thus far the only person I’ve felt really comfortable living with is myself. And sometimes I’m not a big fan of her, either.
I live what some might consider to be a pretty great life. Others probably think that it’s selfish, or that I’m missing something. It’s tough for me to say who is right and who is wrong. Because where I come from and where I am now are two very different places.
In Los Angeles, I often go to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf with my friend Jackie at noon on Saturdays because we know that the firefighters from Station 19 are going to be there at that time for a coffee fix. They’re fun to look at. In Farmington, Arkansas, firefighters look different. They look like my family. Mostly because they are my family.
If your mother’s entire family was deeply involved in a volunteer fire department, you probably would have moved away from Arkansas, too. At one point my grandmother, Phyllis, was the fire chief, and she wasn’t even a lesbian. She just liked being in charge. Everyone else in my family, besides me, was a volunteer firefighter. It’s something they’re all very proud of. As a teenager who just wanted to get felt up, I found it all pretty annoying. As a semi-mature adult, I’m now proud to say my family saves lives. So maybe stop judging me now and let’s try and get along for the rest of the book.
Most of the other members of the Wedington Volunteer Fire Department (the name Farmington was already taken by the town’s professional fire department; we had to settle for naming ours after a street) served on the mysterious “board.” They had monthly meetings and if someone didn’t show up, my mom sure talked shit about them. I knew that being a volunteer meant you also had to have a real job, so I would suggest to her that some people were probably just too tired to make it to the meetings after a long day at work. My mom would argue back that those people probably should not volunteer to fight fires, then.
“Would you want to depend on someone who can’t even show up for a monthly meeting to save your house if it was burning down?” she’d ask me.
“I guess not.”
The whole thing was pretty cutthroat, and way too much of a commitment for me.
There were several side projects that the fire department had going in order to keep afloat, one being the fire department cookbook. As we got older, my sister, Jennifer, began to contribute recipes. I did not. Like I said, I’ve never been much of a cook. I cook for myself sometimes, but it doesn’t taste very good. It actually tastes pretty awful. I prefer to dine out. My family likes to make fun of me, indicating that being able to cook is part of what makes a woman a woman. I disagree. Getting my period makes me a woman. Cooking just makes me bored.
Most members would submit a recipe, and all these fabulous recipes were bound together in a flimsy little booklet with a yellow cover. I think they sold them for ten dollars, which was a huge rip-off. I can’t imagine how many people got the book home and realized that “Virginia’s Secret Creamy Mac and Cheese” was just fucking mac-and-cheese. I mean, the recipe actually included buying a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, then following instructions. That seemed like cheating to me.
My mother contributed her famous original recipe for “Kung Fu Pasta.” It was something I ate a lot growing up, and I’m not going to lie … it is delicious. It’s the one thing she made really well. It consists of spaghetti noodles, diced carrots, diced pork chop, and something green. The “Kung Fu” part came from the fact that she topped it off with soy sauce. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that it dawned on me the name of that pasta might be slightly offensive to people, like people who do kung fu.
There are some responsibilities while living under your parents’ roof that you just can’t get out of. For me, one of those things was the fire department’s pancake breakfast. It was held at 6 A.M. a few Saturdays a year. My mom keeps telling me now that it was only once a year, but I know she’s lying to try to make my childhood sound more fun.
When the breakfast rolled around, I’d be forced to get out of bed, put on a bright yellow T-shirt that said WEDINGTON VOLUNTEERS that was three sizes too big, and serve pancakes and sausage to everyone I knew. The only other thing I did as humiliating was work at Hardee’s, but at least that paid.
My best friend in high school was Lindsay. She played basketball and I was on drill team. We liked to do the same things, like drink Busch Light and smoke Marlboro 100’s. After first seeing the movie Thelma & Louise, she and I started drinking Wild Turkey. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis drank it while on the run from the cops for a crime they really shouldn’t have been in trouble for, and they seemed to enjoy it. Wild Turkey is 101 proof, which means its alcohol content is over 50 percent, which was more than triple my age when I developed a taste for it. I liked to chase it with Coke, then when I’d run out of Coke I’d drink it straight—just like Thelma and Louise did.
Discovering bourbon at fifteen didn’t do much to help my mood when I had to show up, work pancake duty, and deal with the annoying crowd. At the time I believed that the only people who should wake up that early to stand in line for food that’s made in mass quantities were homeless people. But I wasn’t dealing with people in need. I was just dealing with people who were overweight, cheap, or both. And I was usually hungover.
But before all that, it took me a while to fall in love again. I was still healing from having been duped by a man who was abusive to animals and I wasn’t about to let myself fall for another liar. Men obviously pulled you in with their charm and good looks, then one day, wham! You find out that it’s all been a lie and there you are on Maury Povich trying to warn other women of the signs that their man might be leading a double life. This is exactly what my mother must have felt like when my father left. I was really beginning to understand marriage, and I didn’t like what I saw.
Then I met Ricky Walden. We were in seventh grade together. He had a rattail haircut and he knew how to break-dance. Clearly he was really popular. We all gathered around him at recess while he spun around on his back and hit fake home runs with his fake baseball bat. He was amazing. I was attracted to bad boys. It wasn’t my fault.
I let Ricky finger me on a field trip. We were on the bus and it was dark. We had a blanket over us and I decided to let him go for it. Thus far the only person that had touched my vagina was me, so it was a big event to let him do so. Looking back, I can’t believe the teachers let us cover up with a giant blanket, but maybe they noticed I was a little uptight for a seventh grader and figured I could use the release. I couldn’t wait to tell my best friend, Lindsay, the next day at school. She’s going to die! I got fingered! This was huge.
The next day I didn’t have to tell anybody—everybody already knew. Apparently Ricky had taken the time out of his busy break-dancing schedule to let everyone know what he and I had done on the bus. What a nightmare. I had really only planned on telling Lindsay. I was a very private person, and I was terrified of being known as a slut before I was in high school.
Once I found out that everyone knew, Lindsay and I had an emergency meeting in the bathroom. I cried hysterically. She reminded me that almost everybody else had already been fingered, except the Baptists. She was pretty sure they had, too, but that they were less honest about it. The powwow lifted my spirits and I went through the rest of the day feeling pretty good, until I walked out to catch the bus and saw Ricky letting Jimmy Thompson smell his fingers. I waited until he saw me, then I dramatically raised my middle finger and stormed off. Giving him the finger felt like poetic justice.
I heard a lot of oohs and aahs and was pretty proud of myself for once again telling a guy what was up. I went home and took the yellow sweatshirt with teddy bears on it that I had worn the night Ricky and I had our moment, and threw it in the trash. As a side note, Jimmy Thompson used to pee in his sweats. Glass house, throwing stones—that whole thing.
I’m a fan of sleep, and now I don’t get enough of it. I can’t even comprehend when someone tells me they have to get their “eight hours in” or else they can’t function. I shoot for seven, usually get six, and manage to function. I’m not always in a great mood, but I function. I might have gotten the sleep problem from my dad. He tends to stay up really late and yet wake up early. I developed that same habit when I was bartending, and at thirty-six it seems to just be my pattern. As a teenager my sleep would often be interrupted by the scanner. That’s the really annoying thing that goes off to alert volunteers that there’s a fire. It sat on a long buffet in our dining room. It was always on.
That scanner was an asshole. I swear there isn’t anything more terrifying than being woken up at 3 A.M. to the crackling voice of whoever got the shitty late-night shift, which was usually whoever didn’t show up for the board meeting that month. My heart would race as I’d hear the voice screaming “ATTENTION WEDINGTON VOLUNTEERS, WE GOT A BRUSH FIRE ON OL’ MILLS ROAD!” It’s a terrible way to be woken up, and it happened all of the time.
When I’d get home from school and was alone, I would sometimes turn the scanner off in an attempt at some peace and quiet. I needed to watch General Hospital, and I didn’t need any interruptions. It worked out great for me, but not so great for my stepdad, Eric. I had gotten so wrapped up in the Quartermaines’ drama one time that I had failed to turn the volume back up on the scanner. There was a huge fire and the only person from our family who didn’t show up was Eric. They all teased him the next day: “Sounds like someone had too much pie for dessert and couldn’t get out of the recliner!” They were relentless.
I felt terrible. Eric was the newest member of the family and he wanted them all to know he took the fire department seriously. I didn’t feel bad enough to tell the whole family that it was my fault, though. Grandma would have killed me if she’d known I’d turned off the scanner to watch a soap opera.
I tried to apologize to Eric. “I’m really sorry you missed the fire at the Millers’ house, but Robin Scorpio’s boyfriend Stone grew up in the streets. He got sick and was afraid he had HIV. Today was when they gave the results.”
He just walked away and went to bed.
“His test came back positive if you care! I hope they find a cure soon! Eric?”
This is the same man who offered to get a second job just to make sure I could go to college, so you’d think I could have come clean about whose fault it was, but I was a teenager and I found the whole thing really ridiculous. What was the point of volunteering? There were firefighters who got paid, after all. Let them risk their lives and let’s stay home and enjoy Kung Fu Pasta like a normal family.
My family also gathered yearly to chop wood for the winter. It wasn’t until I moved to California that I learned about gas fireplaces. It would have been pretty fucking nice to have had one of those growing up. I could’ve gotten a lot more sleep during that one Saturday in the winter and I never would have had to know what size I wore in wood-chopping gloves. My mom’s side of the family obviously has a thing for fire. Maybe I shouldn’t complain about something I only had to do once a year, but I was a teenager. I didn’t think I should be out in the woods unless I was drinking bourbon or having teenage sex. I really needed to get out of this situation. My dad never did any manual labor, so I decided to look further into that.
Dad lived in sunny California. Visiting him in the summer was always a win-win. That was back when kids on a plane were treated like they were special. They’d let me and Jennifer, who is three years older than me, see the cockpit before takeoff and give us a pin shaped like wings. Maybe that was because my mom warned them that every time that I flew I threw up. That didn’t stop until I was in college, by the way.
The flight attendants always told Jennifer and me that we were honorary co-pilots. They never took me up on my offer to actually help out when it was time for takeoff, but I was pretty sure they respected me as their peer. It always made me feel so cool. Nobody else I went to school with had that kind of experience. Sure, their families were still together, but we were racking up airline miles. And none of them knew about my compulsive vomiting. Colonna Sisters 1, Everybody Else 0.
My dad was a newspaper sports editor. When my parents first split up, he was working for the Dallas Morning News. Then while I was in about the fifth grade, he got a promotion and moved to California to work at the Orange County Register. By the time I was in high school he had moved on to the Los Angeles Times. He was always moving up and his job seemed to pay well because he had a pool that was not above the ground.
I know that lots of kids from divorced families hate leaving their friends for the summer, but I wasn’t one of those kids. I enjoyed spinning tales of California and the ocean and all of the movie stars’ houses that I’d seen on the “Map of the Stars’ Homes” tour. Sometimes all you’d see was a bunch of trees and the tour guide would just assure you that Brad Pitt’s house was on the other side, which is probably why my dad would lecture me that it was a rip-off. I didn’t really care. I was fine being lied to as long as I got a relaxing trolley ride out of it. Plus I had already decided that one day I was going to be a famous actress. I needed to familiarize myself with the neighborhood. When I did finally move to Hollywood, I couldn’t afford to live in the places that they showed me on that tour. I suffered in a tiny one-bedroom with no air-conditioning. It was behind Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which is a huge tourist trap. I could barely get out of my driveway without having to brake for a guy in a worn-out Spider-Man costume who was on his way to make money by disappointing children with his dirty tights and frail figure. Finally one day I decided that I deserved better. So for now I rent a decent condo in what’s known as “the Valley.” And I have central air.
One summer I took my picture with a cardboard cutout of Patrick Swayze for ten dollars across from Grauman’s. It was so worth the money; I was sure that all of the morons I went to high school with would believe I had actually met Patrick Swayze. Unfortunately only one person bought my story. She was the same girl who thought that if you took a bath after sex you wouldn’t get pregnant. She now has five kids. I never got to meet Patrick Swayze.
There weren’t many rules at my dad’s. From what I could gather, money equaled fun. Not that we were poor and struggling back home; my mom and Eric made enough money and took great care of us. But whatever my dad had going on certainly afforded him a lot more luxuries than I was used to. You know, things that don’t matter but are fantastic to have. My mom was also a neat freak and didn’t really understand sleeping in. At Dad’s nobody ever woke me up early on a Saturday morning with a vacuum, and the only kind of pancake breakfasts I ever attended with him were at the International House of Pancakes. I actually don’t remember ever seeing him do any sort of housework. His place was always really clean so someone must have done it. My mom would scoff at this notion.
“Oh he’s big-time now. He probably has a maid. But at least I don’t have to be his maid anymore,” she’d remind me as she stood on my bed dusting my ceiling fan and explaining to me the dust wouldn’t be falling on my head if I’d just get the fuck up. That was usually around 7:45 A.M. She was scheduled to vacuum at eight and everyone knows you always dust before you vacuum.
“Maybe you should get a maid,” I told her no less than a million times.
“Never.”
My mom now has a housekeeper. In Arkansas you can get one once every couple of weeks for the reasonable price of $35.99. I’m glad she figured out that she deserves to relax after work. But she still cleans up on the day the woman is supposed to come so that the housekeeper doesn’t see her house dirty. I think she has a problem.
Since Farmington was such a small town everybody knew everybody. My mom’s brothers and their wives lived within a couple of miles from us. So did my grandparents and their friends. We were a tight-knit group. My entire life there, every birthday was celebrated with a gathering. It still is. I get cakes in my thirties just like I did when I was a kid; the only difference is now they aren’t shaped like a bunny rabbit with licorice for the whiskers. For every single member of the family’s birthday, we all got together and there was pizza and cake and little to no booze. My mom’s side of the family was a lot different than my dad’s. When I was visiting my dad, parties were fun. When I was home at my mom’s, parties were tame. The loveliness of it all escaped me and I just wanted to know when it would be over so I could go in my room and talk on the phone and listen to Def Leppard. The most exciting part of any gathering was when a fire would erupt and I’d watch every person in the house scatter. I’d then help myself to the remainder of the pizza and ponder who would be there for me if that house went up in flames.
Dad’s family was different. The only person I was close to on his side of our family was his mom. She was wonderful. She’d take the Greyhound all the way from California to visit my sister and me in Arkansas. She lived alone and was a big drinker. I think at some point she drank rubbing alcohol, so she might have been more than just a drinker. She used to send me pictures of herself that she took with a Polaroid. She’d use the handle of a flyswatter to push the button on the camera, so every photo she sent had this long white handle stemming from her arm. It was a reminder to me that she lived alone. Her husband was remarried and she was not, but she was always smiling. Maybe it was the vodka, but all I knew was that she looked happy.
When Dad wasn’t married, he usually had a girlfriend, sometimes two. I really didn’t want to have to hang out with these women. It seemed like such a waste to buddy up with someone who obviously had no idea what she was up against. The odds of things working out for the two of them were never in her favor. I have to give it to Dad, though—he always tried. You could tell he really loved these people, or at least thought he did. He was probably just in love with the idea of being in love, but at that age I hadn’t yet been to therapy, so I couldn’t offer him that sort of insight. He’s now been happily married for fifteen years to a wonderful woman, by the way. I guess sometimes it just takes a few tries to find your perfect match. And he tried four times.
One time when Jennifer and I went to visit him in California he had a new girlfriend named Candy. She was exactly what you’d expect you’d get from a woman with that name. Blond, big boobs, stupid. We hadn’t met her yet, so Dad decided to bring her with him to pick us up at the airport. I was pretty annoyed: I hadn’t seen him in a year and now I had to put up with this disaster all the way to his house. She tried to talk to me, so I pretended to fall asleep and left my sister to maintain the conversation. When we got to Dad’s house I pretended to wake up and we got our bags and went inside. Dad then went back out to the car with Candy.
“I’m going to take her home. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
“What? We just got here!” I whined.
“I’ll be right back!” With that he and Candy drove off into the night.
I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just drop her off before we got home. Wouldn’t that have made more sense than leaving us there by ourselves? Jennifer explained that he probably wanted to have sex with her and it would be easier at her place.
“Gross! Her boobs are gross. I hate her.”
“Me too,” Jennifer decided. “By the way, nice fake sleeping in the car. Way to leave me stuck talking to Candy Cane.”
“Sorry, I’m just a really good actress.”
The rest of the summer we didn’t see much of Candy. She went out to dinner with us one night the week that we arrived, and I could see that Dad was already losing interest in her. Maybe her stupidity was only fun for a few days? I hoped that was the case, but I didn’t want to bring it up. I figured I’d count her absence as a blessing and leave it at that. It would have been too embarrassing to have a stepmom named Candy.
Regardless of who my dad was dating or married to when I came to visit, I got to do cool shit and meet interesting people. Since he was in sports, I was able to meet a handful of famous athletes, although I didn’t know who most of them were. Most of my sports interest was in Friday night football at my school, and my halftime dance with the drill team. Regardless, I’d go home and brag to the guys in my class that I got to meet Jack Youngblood, whoever that was. They were impressed. Mission accomplished.
The only thing I really paid attention to in the professional sports world was baseball. I always liked going to Angels’ games with my dad in the summer. That was when they were the California Angels, before they were the Anaheim Angels, and way before they became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Don’t get me started.
We usually had to watch the game from a press suite, which meant tons of free food and sneaking little bottles of booze when nobody was looking. I’d take my Coke that I had spiked with bourbon out to one of the seats and watch the game from there with the rest of the loyal fans. What were these press people doing inside chatting when they could be outside taking in the game and all of the players’ nice asses? My teenage hormones really loved baseball.
Those summers I sat in the stands and dreamed of being a baseball wife. Sure, I heard stories about the kind of life that those people lived. Baseball wives put on a smile and clapped in the stands, but inside they were sad. Their husbands were always gone. They got tired of being alone so they’d try to go to all of the games, including away games. Then they’d get tired of being on the road. They’d go back home but then they’d hear heartbreaking rumors about who was having an affair with whom so they’d drink chardonnay and take on lovers to hide the pain. I thought it sounded awesome. Still do. I really need to stop watching Lifetime.
Unfortunately I never met any guys when I was visiting Dad. I had a few girlfriends in California, but most were daughters of people who Dad worked with. This one girl, Stephanie, was really impressive to me. She was a full-on California girl. She grew up there and she had the tan to prove it. I’m sure now she has the sun damage and wrinkles to prove it, but I bet she doesn’t care. She also liked to smoke, which piqued my interest. We spent several afternoons together; we usually had her mom or my dad drop us off at the mall. We’d walk around for a while, taking the occasional smoke break. She told me stories of going to junior high in California. She said that people had parties at their parents’ houses and took a bunch of Dramamine. Apparently the right amount of it made you hallucinate. I told her I had taken “my fair share” of Dramamine and she seemed impressed. I didn’t bother to explain that it was never more than two and it was because of the in-flight vomiting.
Stephanie had an older sister, Brie. She was Jennifer’s age and they were friends. I don’t know what they did during their hang-out time together, but I think it was more impressive than looking for tank tops at Express and smoking. At one point my sister was out with Brie and she met a guy. He was in the army or something. I didn’t know exactly what he did, I just knew he had a short haircut and talked about tough training. Jennifer decided that she was in love with him. She spoke tragically of the upcoming end to the summer and how she’d have to go back to Arkansas and leave her true love in California. She told me that “Right Here Waiting” by Richard Marx was their song.
“Oceans apart, day after day, and I slowly go insane …” Jennifer would recite the words of the song to me while she cried about leaving him. I felt bad for her, but I was more interested in what ocean she thought separated California and Arkansas. I guessed that Eric wasn’t helping her with geography.
When we returned home after the summer, Jennifer announced to Mom that she was in love, that her new boyfriend was coming to visit for a week, and that he’d be staying with us. His name was Greg and he was going to be Mom’s son-in-law when Jennifer turned eighteen, so she might as well welcome him with open arms. My mom stared at her for a long time, then simply said, “Fine.”
“Really?” Jennifer asked.
“Really?” I also asked.
“Really,” Mom said. “Oh, just one thing. He’s not staying in the house. He can sleep in the camper.”
The camper was in our driveway. Greg was going to have to fly to Arkansas and camp in our driveway if he wanted to see Jennifer. Sure, we had a decent camper, complete with a TV and a table that converted to a bed, but it certainly wasn’t a place you wanted to make company sleep. It definitely wasn’t the place you wanted your future husband to have to sleep the first time he visited you.
Greg sucked it up and came to stay with us. He slept in his designated area outside and didn’t seem to mind too much. He thought it was a pretty nice trailer.
“Do you guys use it often?” he inquired.
“We use it a lot when it’s nice out,” I explained. “During the winter it just sits there, but Mom hides our Christmas presents in it. Let me know if you see a pair of Z. Cavariccis in any of the cabinets. I better get them this year.”
After Greg went back to California, Jennifer stopped talking about him and eventually she never brought him up again. Sometimes when people show you that they really care about you, you don’t care about them anymore. Later on in life, I’d find out that I could relate.
A couple of broken engagements and three or so years after Lori, my dad got married again. Her name was Carol, and she was kind of a bitch.
She worked at a rival newspaper, so she and Dad would drink coffee in the morning and talk about what was wrong with each other’s paper. They had kind of a love-hate relationship, mostly consisting of hate. There was one thing I liked about Carol and that was that she let me drink wine. I think she was just doing what she could to get through our summer visits. It was half-water/half-wine, but it was better than nothing. She always let Jennifer and me have it with dinner, under the expectation that we wouldn’t go home and tell our mom that her twelve- and fifteen-year-old daughters were allowed to drink when we went to California. That wasn’t going to be a problem. We certainly weren’t going to open our mouths and ruin our fun.
I remember once she took me shopping with her so that she could buy an outfit for some sort of opening of some sort of library. She purchased a $2,000 silk suit and some shoes that ran about $450. My feelings were mixed with shock and awe. Spending that kind of money on one outfit would have sent my mother to a mental institution. I was sure she’d be in a ton of trouble when she got home, and I was kind of looking forward to watching Dad yell at her, especially since she had denied me a really cute pair of jeans.
When we got back, I noticed she didn’t mention it to him. He just asked if she found what she needed, she said that she had, and that was the end of that. I later let the price of her outfit slip out on purpose, but Dad seemed unfazed. “It’s her money,” he said flatly. He had no idea how much that one statement would impact me forever. It wasn’t “their money,” it was “her money.” She could do whatever she wanted to do because she made her own money. Good to know.
I then became even more pissed that she didn’t spring for the sixty-dollar jeans I wanted, and decided to expect some pretty good shit for Christmas from her that year.
Halfway through my senior year of high school my dad took my sister and me on a cruise with him and Carol. We were both pretty excited. This was when I thought cruises were cool, before I discovered that vacationing with hundreds of people and doing group aerobics on a deck was pretty humiliating.
The cruise was going to Mexico, and up to that point the only part of Mexico we’d seen was Tijuana, which was only good for stocking up on cheap dolls and maracas to show off back home. We managed to have a lot of fun on the ship, the highlight of the cruise being the Rod Stewart impersonator. He ran around in a Speedo bathing suit with spiky blond hair and an amazing tan. My sister and I found him highly entertaining and did our best to hang out with him. I didn’t know he was an impersonator until the last night during the talent show, though. Prior to that, I just thought he was Rod Stewart.
There was a nightclub on the ship, and my dad gave them a credit card to keep open for the three-day stint. He told us to “go nuts,” but I don’t think he knew what we were capable of. At the time Jennifer was twenty, so she could legally drink since we were A) on water and B) headed to Mexico. I was still not old enough to drink, but my face was ahead of its time (a positive then, but now not so much), so nobody asked. We stayed up late every night with Fake Rod Stewart earning prestigious “Night Owl” badges and talking to people about all the athletes we’d rubbed elbows with in our short lives. Jennifer woke up every morning with a hangover; she was drinking specialty cocktails and frozen drinks. I woke up feeling fine; I was drinking bourbon and water. I knew better than to mix. My older sister was such a rookie.
When my father finally got his bar bill for the three days, he looked at us in shock. He went through each tab that was attached to it asking if that was one of our signatures. We confirmed all but one … one was Fake Rod Stewart’s, but we had told him that his drinks were on you, Dad. I shut my eyes and waited for him to yell. My dad is a ton of fun, but when he gets mad it isn’t pretty. I felt his hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes to see him smiling. “That’s my girls,” he said, then he signed the tab.
Toward the end of my summer visits with Dad I would start to miss my family and friends. I would usually get the pang when I still had a week or so left to go, making the last seven days almost unbearable. I’d spent enough time in the pool, at the beach, at nice restaurants and sporting events; now it was time to go home and tell everybody how much better my summer was than theirs.
We are all made up of two totally different people. Sometimes you live with them both, sometimes you don’t. I don’t know what it’s like to live in an angry household, because my parents did the smart thing (in my opinion) when they knew it wasn’t working: They walked away. Some people stay together for “the sake of the kids,” but then the kids just get stuck thinking that people who are married are supposed to hate each other. My parents made sure I grew up in a house where people loved each other, even if for a few years it was just us girls. And even if one of them loved many different people.
No matter how we are raised or what values we are taught, we still have both of our parents’ DNA. That’s not a bad thing … it makes us who we are. I grew up in a small town. We canned our own green beans and fed apples to our horses on Christmas morning. It was a really nice life. It was a life you had if you raised a family, and you all lived close to each other, and you all remembered each other’s birthday. It was completely different than the way it was at Dad’s house. In his world people went to the beach and dressed up and had cocktail parties. I wanted to do that. I wanted to spend my own money on clothes that were too expensive and not have anybody yell at me about it.
Back home, watching parents drag kids to a spaghetti supper and knowing it was probably the highlight of their week freaked me out. They seemed happy, so why didn’t I want it? One side of my family volunteered every day, at times putting their lives on the line to help others while I slumped around pissed off that I had to get up early on a Saturday. I felt like such an asshole. If someone wanted to live a perfectly normal Southern family life, who was I to judge? Something about the thought of it all made me cringe. I wasn’t judging other people’s happiness; I was judging myself for not understanding theirs. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that I didn’t like about it. Whatever it was, I knew I had a different idea of fun and from what I understood, you couldn’t take a baby to a bar.