TWENTY-TWO

TRACTION

Things were different after the power cord between Steve and Apple had been cut, but I don’t believe much good would have taken place without Mona. And we were all the better for it. Like families everywhere we had our skirmishes and hurt feelings, but all boats rose in a tide of natural affiliations and shared goals. We were family, no more and no less than the obligations of blood. I believe that Steve, in his core, had always wanted to do the right thing; Mona helped him do it. I had an ally who did something few could: help rebalance things between Steve and me so that Lisa could thrive.

Mona got to thinking about how to improve Lisa’s and my situation like any woman would, by addressing the obvious. I sort of remember her telling me that she was going to help, but still it surprised me as it happened.

In the beginning there were many obvious things to be done and it all must have seemed like low-hanging fruit to Mona as she set about, one by one, to put things in order. She was thoughtful in a woman’s way and she got the details right. First she talked with me about getting Lisa into therapy with a male child psychoanalyst so that my daughter would have a long-term relationship with an emotionally mature father figure. At the time of this conversation I knew—she knew, we both knew—what kind of father Steve was and was not. Things needed to be augmented so that Lisa would have the best possible advantages in life. Mona also suggested that she would look into a therapist for me and ask Steve to pay for both of us if I wanted. What a boon! I said, “Yes!”

Lisa was in third grade when I took her to the first appointment and that night after the session she asked with her sweet belligerence, “Well, what if I don’t want to see him again?” I told her, “Then you don’t have to. It’s your call, sweetie.” It was a moment of pure bliss for me to give her all choice in the matter. Her little face curled into satisfaction and self-ownership. She warmed to the idea after that and always loved going to see her therapist.

It amazes me now how quickly and deeply my psyche was able to figure out whether or not I trusted this therapist with my eight-year-old. In short order, my instincts laid out a very precise map of who he was. He and I did not agree on everything, but in the balance of all things I found him to be professional, insightful, trustworthy, and a person of great kindness. Because federal law mandates that the parent of such a young child is to be included in some of the sessions, I had direct and regular contact in which I saw how he was with her. It was in this way that I discovered that they played checkers and chess, walked to the local shop to get ice cream, and didn’t actually do much of anything except play and talk. Sometimes I thought he was a little too kicked back for the money Steve was paying. But when I joined in on their sessions and witnessed firsthand how free Lisa was to be her most lively authentic self, I knew he had to be remarkable. Like many parents, I navigated by my child’s joy and so understood people by her reception of them. He was pure gold.

As Lisa got older we endured more of Steve’s unconscionable behaviors: from not showing up for prearranged dinners and dance recitals, to being seven hours late from a trip and not calling me to let me know, to kissing Laurene in front of Lisa while telling Lisa how beautiful Laurene was, when at the same time he was telling Lisa she herself was not beautiful … this is only the tip. It was then I discovered that in addition to this therapist’s ability to free up my child for her happiest little self, he also possessed a near surgical ability to cut to the bone of truth about Steve’s behavior—without harming Lisa’s relationship to herself or with her dad.

It’s not for me to share the details of those sessions, but suffice it to say they bolstered Lisa’s self-assurance because her therapist’s anger was clean, quick, and discerning. He presented a fiery cleansing flash to the full Steve Jobs catastrophe. In my whole life, I will never forget the times I witnessed the therapist addressing Steve’s contemptuous, smarmy betrayals with an immediacy that seemed to slice through the air like Blue Angels. His words were the technology of excellence in the future of war: strikes so precise that there could and would be no collateral damage. The sheer severity of his insights sucked the air out of my lungs and gave me wild wonder into what it is to speak the most precise, searing truths without doing harm. Because I would look at Lisa’s expression in the midst of his comments and to my utter delight and relief she would sit serenely, in all consideration, protected. The truth was so good to hear that I felt blessed, blessed, and blessed again.

*   *   *

As we were beginning to feel stable and thrive, a sense of urgency moved through me and I started to think I could go to a four-year college. It was such a happy exciting feeling, like a thousand Christmases all at once. Oh my God, I thought, I can. I can lead a fulfilling life. I can make money. I can be part of the world through my true gifts.

The year before, I had brought my portfolio to a group of children’s game designers in Palo Alto, called Grey Bridge, to see if they might be interested in hiring me. The cofounder and head designer told me that I had the nicest portfolio anyone had brought in a long time. I wondered if he said that to everyone. My portfolio consisted almost entirely of some illustrations I had done for Art Canfil’s book Taipan. It was a computer game in the context of a novel about the opium trade during the English occupation in China. I did about eight highly rendered pencil and ink drawings to illustrate this horrific, yet fascinating, history. I had other images in my portfolio: a painting of a Persian rug that turned into a bee hive that turned into a computer circuit board with bees buzzing all over the surfaces and honey pooling in the circuits; a woman falling, in multiple sequences, naked, Eve thrown out of the garden with ethereal fall lines. The cofounder and I talked about how the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, was the best commercial school in the country. It’s where he went. At the time I thought, Oh, God, I wish I could go to Art Center.

So it was from this and the fact that the circumstances had so improved for Lisa and me that I decided to apply to the Art Center. I drove with Lisa down to Pasadena to interview and showed them my portfolio. I was accepted two months later. A diploma from the Art Center was carte blanche for an interview and quite possibly a great job with any number of the top design groups in the country. Steve was giving me about $2,500 a month, and with the addition of a student loan, I figured I could make it work. I could finally get some traction going in my life.

But Steve begged me not to move so far away. He said, “Please don’t take Lisa away from me. I’d really like to see her on a regular basis.” He wasn’t dramatic, just persistent. He made sure to bring it up each and every time we saw one other. Eventually, between his clear, repeated requests and the fact that the school had warned me that I would have to work an eighty-hour week, I came down to earth. There was no way I could put my daughter through that much hardship.

I had always given Lisa a lot of attention. She thrived with it. I don’t know if she was high maintenance or if all kids need as much as she needed, but I knew it wasn’t right to leave her with babysitters or in school too long. She wasn’t on my schedule. I was on hers. Back then people talked about having “quality time” with your kids as a way of managing two-parent careers, but I never felt Lisa and I shared quality time without a large quantity of time. Maybe others could, but I couldn’t. As Lisa’s welfare was by far the most important thing for me—and this included Steve’s having easy access to her—I put my own requirements on hold, once again.

In the end, I was accepted into the California College of Arts and Crafts, an art college in Oakland. I transferred my credits from Foothill College, so this put me into my junior year. Though clearly this school would never give me the training, financial advantages, and cachet of Art Center, I felt peaceful and thrilled to have a plan that could work for everyone while I built into the next stages of my life. When I asked Steve if he would be willing to pay my tuition, he gave me a happy yes. Steve was making things easy now and I loved him for it. And it seemed to me that helping in this way put a hop in his step, too.

It was during the first year after moving into the Rinconada house that I wanted Lisa to go to The Nueva School, a private school in Hillsborough. It was about forty minutes round trip from Palo Alto. I kept pushing for it, until one day Steve and I had a big argument over how wrong he felt it was for me to keep changing Lisa’s schools. Whoa, I thought, he is actually concerned about her in the right ways. Duly noted! But she wasn’t thriving at the local public school and I couldn’t leave it that way.

A majority of people believe that the most important time to be paying for private education is in the older grades, such as high school and college. But I feel that if you have to choose, early childhood is the time and place to put the resources to work. That’s when children’s hearts and minds are wide open, when they’re creating pathways of meaning for the rest of their lives. (I’ve also wondered if people regard higher education as being the more valuable place for resources because, historically, it is the time when the men take over the teaching.)

My impression of the environment at the public school was that it was structured to dumb down the children and the teachers. Not just intellectually, but also emotionally. For example, I observed that the children and teachers were rarely willing to meet one another’s eyes, which was in marked contrast to the Waldorf school, where the first order of the day was to greet each child with a little handshake and direct, loving eye contact. Lisa was starting to harden and think like everyone. I was extremely uncomfortable about it.

I wanted a school that addressed each child’s individuality. Knowing the great influence Lisa’s childhood environment would inevitably have on her long-term personal relationships and work life, I kept hammering Steve for a change. I needed the money to pay for it and I saw his buy-in as the direct route to my goal. I knew Steve and I shared many of the same creative and educational values for Lisa. I had every hope and intention of turning it around.

Eventually Steve saw what I saw.

Alarmed and exasperated after Lisa spent a year and a half in a public school, he called one day and demanded, “What is happening to her?” indicating that he had, at long last, understood that Lisa was being disconnected from herself. I jumped with a rush of joy. “This is what I’ve been telling you! And this is why I’ve been asking you to help me get her into Nueva.”

Bingo! Steve heard me and got it together to speak with Bill Atkinson about the school. Bill was on the original Mac team and had a child at Nueva. Bill raved about the education there and so it was in this way that we placed our daughter into a top private elementary school in the Bay Area.

Nueva’s approach to education was to take care of the children’s growing hearts and minds in delightful and challenging ways. The subjects were so well conceived and presented that all the children were met with excellence, as well as deep regard. Addressing each student’s uniqueness meant that every child received the admiration of their teachers and peers for their own giftedness, and in this way learned to truly appreciate the gifts of others. This was my idea of a good environment, school and otherwise.

I felt Lisa and I were upheld every day by this school. I am happy to say that long after Lisa graduated from college, she called me from the various homes she was living in all over the world, to tell me, “Mom, Nueva was my Hogwarts! I do not know how to thank you enough.”

*   *   *

So it was in 1988 that Lisa was going to Nueva and I was going to art school in Oakland and both of us were in therapy. We had a nice home and a new car, a gardener and a house cleaner. Steve had also generously paid off the student loans that had been following me around for years. It was a completely appropriate turnaround and everyone was happier. I was enjoying Steve, too.

It was also during this time that Mona had a conversation with Steve about just giving me a financial lump settlement. But this is where it stopped. “No way,” he said. Mona and I rolled our eyes when she told me and we discussed that Steve’s withholding this eminently right action was a way of remaining too attached to me. It further implied that there was something that he was not explaining. Understandably, Steve was a man with attachment disorder. His withholding was a form of intimacy through control, which fit the history. I also suspect that I was caught in the crosshairs of some very pernicious negative female projections, which confused me because I took it to mean I was at fault.

With so much in order, Mona suggested that I move everything out of my bedroom and turn it into an art studio, and get to my real work. Our home had three bedrooms; the master bedroom, the largest, was at the back end of the house, away from everything. Having my own working space was top on my hierarchy of needs and Mona was completely right to have suggested it. But the master bedroom didn’t have good ventilation, and it had been freshly painted and newly carpeted. I loved that she was thinking in my behalf and appreciated her goodwill toward what might be my professional life. But I couldn’t quite see converting that bedroom into working space. Oil painting is toxic and unavoidably messy; the notion of turning it into an art studio felt as impossible as jumping on furniture with muddy boots.

Within the year, however, I set myself to the task of clearing out the detached garage, which was loaded with wood debris the owners had left behind. I had it sheetrocked and my father and I patched the roof. I put up track lighting and my friend Avi, a house painter, kindly painted it for me. Twenty steps away from the house, plenty of room to make a mess, big enough to hold classes, a wide garage door to keep the place aired out from the toxic materials, and close enough to hover for Lisa’s sense of Mom being nearby, I had the best working space imaginable.

It was also at this time that my father gave me small amounts of money on an irregular basis, money I was to use to hire an attorney to force a financial settlement with Steve. I think two things happened for my father to step in this way. First, it may have been that because of Mona’s involvement to get things right, he woke up. My father was sort of a follower. But it wasn’t just that. I was more stable and in a stronger position, so perhaps my father perceived me as finally being able to confront Steve. My father had always wanted to do something about the situation with Steve, but while Steve was at Apple, he was untouchable. Once I had that cash, I started interviewing attorneys in San Jose, but nothing ever worked out because after Steve had gotten kicked out of Apple, he made sure to give me more child support than was required at the time. Long story short, I never found an attorney who had the creative power or interest to establish new legal precedents for my situation with Steve.

It seems my whole life was about moving toward what I felt was right before my mind understood the whys and whats of how everything worked. I didn’t think, I didn’t analyze, I didn’t strategize, I did not manipulate. I was a person who operated out of emotional impressions that drew me into action. I picked my battles with Steve and I now think I should have picked more of them. I should have leveraged my not going to the Art Center into a cash settlement. With so much in place I was finally able to care for Lisa and myself in ways I saw fit. Both of us stable and safe. Lisa thriving in her new school. I let it be. I was thirty-five years old and just catching my balance from the earlier years. And I must have I figured I had more magic beans at the bottom of my pockets since I still didn’t know enough to think and plan and negotiate for my financial future.

*   *   *

I used to go roller-skating all over Menlo Park in the early days at Oak Grove. This was 1979 and I had the classic skates with the big orange wheels. In the beginning skating was a near-death experience; I didn’t know how to stop and the roads vibrated my eyes so much I could hardly see. But once I somehow got past that stage it turned to pure happiness. I found that no matter what, no matter when, where, or how, skating turned into a three count. It was a waltz rhythm and I was always humming “The Blue Danube,” changing from left to right on the first count and elongating the last count with a prolonged glide, 1-2-3——1-2-3——. The rhythm and motion were addictive. The more I skated the more I wanted to skate. The texture of movement under my feet, the air in my hair, and the freedom of all things speeding by was happiness itself.

In the beginning, I’d go next door to the church parking lot when Lisa was napping. There I’d practice twirling. The momentum of the fast spiraling turns would lift my arms outward in graceful lifts, and then I’d flip around fast to stop on my toe guards. It was as if the air were my dance partner.

I fell a lot in the beginning but it didn’t matter, I loved it and was proud of my various scratches and bruises. When Lisa was awake, I’d put her in her stroller and we’d fly together. Much later, when Steve discovered that I had skates, he wanted some, too. So it was on a bright Saturday early afternoon, when Lisa was old enough to have her own skates, that the three of us went down to the Palo Alto Sport Shop and Toy World and he bought a pair for himself and Lisa (both with those big orange wheels), so that we could all go skating together.

On weekends we’d go up to Stanford or across old Palo Alto to Caffe Verona because they had the best soup, pasta, and cappuccinos. After some time, Tina, Steve’s girlfriend, joined us. And Mona after that. Mona was neither as coordinated as me nor as recklessly bold as Steve, and I remember the unspeakably sweet look of her on skates as like that of a grinning schoolgirl. Tina looked like Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner, tall and athletic, sweet in all her magnificence. Eventually, Lisa and Steve started to go out for hours on their own. It could have been at one of our skating outings or at a dinner together or just a time when we were all hanging out talking, when Steve said that he would take Lisa one night a week when I was at school in Oakland. Every semester I stacked all my classes because I didn’t want to be far from Lisa more than two days a week. Babysitting was always an issue, so Steve arranged his life so that he could take Lisa every Wednesday evening. He wanted to be a dad and this seemed like a fabulously great next step for all of us. Lisa was nine years old. It would be the first time Steve would take responsibility for his daughter on a regular basis and he wanted the chance to do it, like a real father.

The logistics ran as follows: every Wednesday, one of Steve’s secretaries would meet Lisa at the bus stop in Menlo Park right when she got dropped off at about 3:45. The secretary would take Lisa to NeXT where she would hang out until the end of Steve’s workday, doing her homework and generally being cute and precocious in what was otherwise an adult’s world. Steve would have her around and she could see him in action in his work life. So every Wednesday Steve had his own take-your-daughter-to-work day. I was flipped-out happy about their being together without me. I never knew what those afternoons looked like exactly, but I trusted the situation because even if Steve was occupied, and just a bit of a new clueless parent, I knew his secretaries to be very conscientious people.

One day Lisa let me in on a little scam she had going at Steve’s office. She and I used to draw the sculptures at the Rodin Sculpture Garden at Stanford University, and there was a day she’d gotten me so involved in her drawing by asking good questions that I’d abandon my own piece to do more and more on hers. As I was teaching her how to draw and working away, it occurred to me that I wasn’t working on my drawing and so laughingly I complained. It was then that the light descended. With her little face looking brightly into mine she told me, “Mommy, this is how I get the secretaries to do my homework at NeXT!” “What!” I said. Then Lisa said, “I tell them that they are really good at how they think about my homework.” I laughed, unable to hide my admiration of her audacity. I knew she had natural leadership qualities when, at age five, she made it possible for the girls to play in the boys-only sandbox. Now I was seeing that she had figured out how to motivate the adults around her without anyone really noticing because it was so fun to help Lisa.

I was thereafter aware of how much time I was working on her drawings, as I played the edge of her very real and remarkable reception of what I was showing her with the fact that my little darling simply wanted to lay claim to a better drawing. It was all in good fun and it wasn’t long before I recognized that the collaborations between her artistic awkwardness and my skill resulted in better, far more interesting drawings than anything we ever did individually. Lisa helped me loosen the grip on my all too factual renderings and I helped her tighten her artful lack of dexterity. We were well matched!

After work, Steve and Lisa would go home to his house and they would make dinner and eat and then watch a movie on the VCR from his bed. Then she would go to sleep in her own bed in the room next to his. Mona had bought Lisa a beautiful bed for Steve’s house and made a nice room for Lisa. On those nights Steve introduced Lisa to all his favorite movies, Harold and Maude being one of them. It was something marvelous between father and daughter and I was so delighted by Steve’s sharing his love of movies with her. Lisa and Steve liked to kick me out of their world, and eventually I found that they would only get me involved if they were having a problem in their relationship. At those times I would help them come back together and then they’d kick me out again. A form of success, I suppose.

There’s a hormonal balance like a wash that comes over women when we know that good is happening for everyone in our sphere of care. I can barely describe the exquisite feeling I had of all being as it needed to be because Steve and Lisa were entering into the world of the normal day-to-day stuff together. I was happy for Lisa, happy for Steve, and happy for me. Yet for every next level of complexity there would be new devastation, so I can only say that I’m glad I was young and of good health.

After what was probably a couple of months of Steve taking Lisa on Wednesday nights, there was one evening when my class was canceled due to finals. I drove back to Steve’s house to see if they wouldn’t mind my joining them for dinner. There were no cells phones then, so I just drove the forty-five miles. It was night, but the front door was always open at the Woodside house. When I stepped inside, I heard their small faraway sounds in the kitchen. Simultaneously knocking and walking in, I sung out, “Hi! Do you mind if I join you?” Both looked up surprised to see me, after which Steve, with a confident smile, motioned me in to sit down. “Yes of course, of course, come in, come in! Have a seat.”

I cozied up to explain what had happened and to watch their interactions and Steve’s cooking. The whole scene was charmingly animated. I hadn’t been a part of these nights and felt something close to bliss at being included. But in that awkwardly shaped and horribly lit kitchen, my heart sank. Steve was teasing Lisa nonstop about her sexual aspirations. She didn’t know what any of it meant, and her face was blank with pain and confusion. He was ridiculing her with sexual innuendos that she wasn’t old enough to understand. And of course she couldn’t understand why her father would talk to her this way. Steve was joking about bedroom antics between Lisa and this or that guy. It was so off. I could see that Lisa was in shock.

I will be clear. Steve was not a sexual predator of children. There was something else going on. I haven’t studied psychology so I still have difficulty framing it, but my sense is that part of Steve’s fractured emotional development resulted in a his ludicrously fetishizing sexuality and romance. And this, in combination with the fact that he was often obsessively looking for ways to disconnect people from their natural confidence. Well, imagine the scene.… I never saw Steve organize around such behaviors, it just happened at times, reflexively. He was on a slide whistle between human and inhuman. He wasn’t conscious of the behaviors because, really, how could someone be so awful? I don’t say this to excuse him, it’s just the stunning fact.

My sadness is beyond telling and sadness is not quite the word for what I felt: damage, betrayal, stupefaction. They come close. I was blown through and vacant and really had no breath to call it anything. I simply wanted to move my body between them, to hold Lisa to my heart, and get her the fuck out of there. Yet I couldn’t even do that because Steve’s behavior had a paralyzing effect on me, too. But I knew I wasn’t going home without her that night. I changed the subject, dinner was served, and after that I gently suggested I take Lisa home with me since I was already there. “That way, Steve, you won’t have to bother getting her to the bus stop.”

I felt very bad for Steve. Somewhere in himself, he knew. I could see it all over him.

No matter how incomprehensibly off Steve was at times such as this, afterward I always forgot. Later when my highly respected Ph.D. psychoanalyst was taken aback by yet another story I told her about Steve, I got mad at her saying, “How the hell is it that after all I have told you that you are shocked by what he does!” and with a wide-eyed, near loss for words, she said, “I am a human being, one never gets used to it with him.” It was balm to my heart to hear her speak these words because they helped me understand my own experience and to forgive myself.

After this I didn’t stop Steve from being with Lisa. I did my own calculations, slowly: Steve and Lisa liked and loved each other and there was every reason in this world and the next to support their being together. I would have been like a wrecking ball if I had tried to speak out about it because anything I would have said or done would have created a big mess. It would have damaged what was good. So I decided to take their being alone together on a case-by-case basis. After that evening, I tended to join them or stay home when they were together so I could go get Lisa if she called. She knew to ask me to pick her up if she felt uncomfortable about something in Steve. Steve always gave her a choice in the matter so it was never a problem for him. They both knew when it wasn’t working for them. In the end, I found another place for her to be on Wednesday nights where she felt cozy and cared for and I think it was a relief for him to stop. He never asked why I had changed the arrangement. It was as if there was an unspoken agreement to slide over it.

*   *   *

In traveling the forty-five miles across land and water to the school in Oakland there came a time in the early spring of 1989 when I started to be concerned about what I would do if there was an earthquake. Both Steve and my boyfriend were often out of town on business so I could not assume their help in the event of an emergency. There was no perfect solution, so I transferred to San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1989 so as not to have a body of water between me and my little daughter. That October, right after I had transferred, the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the area and broke the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland for months. I had finally anticipated a problem in a timely fashion.

The new school had a fabulous history and views of the San Francisco Bay that included Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. I felt a great romance at being there. I was older than most of the undergraduate students by ten years and I soon discovered that I drew better than nearly all of them. Kids would approach me smiling to say, “Wow! You actually know how to draw.” I was so surprised, even irritated that they didn’t. What kind of art school was this!? A few other students were even jealous and behaved badly toward me. I wondered if I had made a big mistake in transferring. On the other hand, it was a gift to be ahead of the game because it gave me some extra time to learn to write. I really needed to make money, and writing was a weak point for me. I needed better communication skills so I could market my art. But I had other reasons, too.

In the beginning I wanted to broaden my own academics to understand what paintings were really saying over time as a way to understand the forces behind culture and social movements. I wanted to understand my own era, I wanted to understand how women were framing the issues compared to men. I wanted to understand the subversive instinct, in myself and in artists like Goya and Manet and even Monet. Simply put, I wanted a dialogue in myself for understanding my creed as an artist. My hunger for this cannot be overstated. I studied writers Linda Nochlin, Camille Paglia, Lucy Lippard, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Frank Stella, who all gave me the handles for art and social analysis that fed my intellect. And thus began my wide arc toward my left brain. I took drawing, painting, and etching classes but my core tussle was in getting myself to put words onto the page for the ideas that mattered to me.

In the beginning I went blank with real terror when I had to write a paper. My mind scattered and I felt utterly undefended as I worked to surface even single words out from under the bottom of the oceans of my perceptions. Instinct alone told me to walk around the house on the days I wasn’t in class and talk out loud so I could hear myself and be present in the body to take words and sentences from speech into writing. Talking out loud in a big room by myself was alarming but also revitalizing. I have heard of other dyslexics learning to write in the same way.

As I walked and talked out loud to myself, I held a pencil and paper in my hands to capture the words and sentences. Often I had the feeling that my mind was a fast river, so fast that I could only participate by sitting quietly and watching on the bank. Eventually I thought to turn on National Public Radio in the background to bring an influx of ambient language into my mind so as to kick-start word fascination while I focused on this or that school topic. By half listening to the random conversations on the radio, I was able to tap into a confident parallel stream of talking where more and more individual words caught my attention like shiny fish and helped my deeper self fly up to where the mind could sparkle them into wordy shape.

In analyzing it now, I feel that the intense promptings to write were the beginning of an urge in me to get both hemispheres of my brain, image and language, to balance, relate, and work together. And it is as interesting for me to think of letters as pictorial forms as it is for me to think of paintings as documents of information like written reports.

Later I put these promptings and skills to use with a job in an emerging field called “graphic recording.” In the late nineties, I started to visualize information for corporations. It was a new kind of work and by using colored pens on huge sheets of paper taped to the walls, I tracked and captured words as well as visualized content as it flew around the room during corporate meetings. Graphic recording was the art of the iteration, and by God, thanks to Steve and my learning to work together, I knew something about the art of iteration! As many companies in the Bay Area were hiring, I started getting jobs and more experience. I was fabulously well paid for what I privately thought of as “corporate graffiti.” Most people who did this work came from an organizational development background and then learned cartooning techniques, but I came from the opposite end, moving from a fine arts background into learning about the organization of information. I was sort of the Jackson Pollack of graphic recorders and I could not believe I was being paid so well for something that was so outrageously experimental and fun. There were particular groups and companies that really liked how I was approaching it and they kept rehiring me. I also did summary maps for weeklong company offsite meetings. These allowed me to bring greater image-making skill and mythology to crystallize the visions that the companies were creating for themselves at the retreats. Years later, the group at Hewlett-Packard, for whom I had worked a lot, told me I was one of the best graphic recorders they’d ever had. I did this work until the dot-com bust in 2001 when companies returned to a meaner and leaner focus again because of the economy.

*   *   *

Steve came by one day to pick Lisa and me up in his little black Porsche to go to a party at his girlfriend’s, Tina Redse’s, house. With Lisa buckled in on my lap, Steve drove the three of us to the little town of Pescadero, about an hour west of the Bay Area over the small mountain range and down to the coast. I was enjoying the ride and feeling the lovely pull on my body as Steve took the fast curves in his low car. Halfway through, as we were just getting near the skyline, Steve started to tell me how it was that Lisa had two thirds his genes and only one third of mine. I don’t know if I’d caught him in an especially inspired state on a day when we just happened to be together or if Steve had been planning for this brilliant conversation.

For years I had seen people tune Steve out because he would at times pull for a concept of reality that was just so off that one dropped into patience waiting for it to be over. Sometimes there would be the noble soul who loved the art of debate and so took time with him to argue the points and laugh and give him a run for his money. But this was never, ever my forte, I just found it annoying, until I really thought through what he was saying at times like this and then it was just outrageous. Okay, I said to myself at the point of this particular conversation, I know he really, really likes and admires Lisa so much he can hardly believe she is his, and this is his lame expression of it. In a convivial manner, I lightly implored in an offhanded way, “Come on Steve, she’s not more you than me.” He was pleasant and enthusiastic but kept going. It was his mental habit to cajole during this kind of conversation. I tuned out because I did not want to dip into his logic or bear up under the implications. Also, I knew that if I had paid close attention there was a good chance I was going to get my feelings hurt and then I’d get mad. He was making me invisible by percentages, again. For most of the ride I was sort of batting it away like a persistent fly while I diffused my awareness by massaging Lisa’s little hands (she loves massages), breathing in the fresh scents of the redwood trees and with the ocean air that was stronger as we got nearer to our destination. We were going to a party on a beautiful afternoon and I was predisposed to being happy.

When we arrived, Steve parked about three hundred yards away from the house and as we all got out he continued his line of thought. It finally dawned on me how long this frigging conversation had been going on. It was likely that he felt badly; if anyone had more influence in our child’s life it would be me because of all the work and time I had put in compared to him. So as per his usual method of dealing with feelings of insecurity, he flipped this into his having the dominant genes. It was also typical of him to plant a suggestion, intending it take root in my sad sense of disempowerment. The truth is, Steve never had to worry because once he and Lisa had come into each other’s lives, she lived as much in his conscious and unconscious as she lived in mine. She was like blotting paper, she soaked us both up because she came from both of us. He just did not know how love worked, and I think he simplistically/primitively thought in terms of owning more shares.

When we walked into the house that afternoon, Steve found Tina and I remember being really relieved that I didn’t have to deal with him and that conversation anymore. It was the beginning of my friendship with Tina. I adored this woman, and Lisa really liked her, too. She was a shiny, lovely person who worked to keep her heart bright and open, and in time she was someone, I came to discover, who had a fabulous sense of humor, which helped me deal with Steve. I did not know then that Tina and I would be good friends for years.

A bunch of people at the party were standing in the kitchen when Steve and Tina leaned up against each other, propping themselves against the counter, and started making out. They would do this a lot, at my house, in restaurants, and I could never quite wrap my head around how public they were about their intimacy. I steered Lisa out of the kitchen and into the living room, where she ran about talking and playing with everyone. My daughter has a bright, innate sense of friendship with all beings great and small; it is just the way she is. And as I sat drinking a beer and eating chips, I watched and enjoyed her interactions with everyone that day. Tina and her friends and family always felt like family to my heart, and they had a beautiful sense of childhood and were playful with Lisa. Steve never brought the genes issue up again.