THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT. THEY’RE JUST A LITTLE GAY: A MALL HATER’S TALE
The day I turned eight my mother took me to see a psychic for my birthday. Initially I was supposed to see Eric Estrada, who was appearing with his teeth and signing autographs at Shakey’s Pizza, but then my older brother—doing everything first and better—came back from the place Eric wasn’t and happily announced it was “just the other guy.”
So no Eric. No Eric’s teeth. The psychic would have to do.
In a room filled with cigarette smoke, a RuPaul-ish woman held my hands and revealed the prophecy of my future. “You will grow up to be a writer,” she said. “I think I see Austria as the place where you’ll settle to raise a lot of children. A whole bunch of children. Six or seven boys.”
She said she saw a lot of testosterone around me.
I wasn’t sure what testosterone was or how close Austria was to my school, but the idea of getting paid to make stuff up took away the disappointment of not becoming a Solid Gold dancer and marrying Scott Baio. The whole-bunch-of-children part was okay as long as she was sure about them being all boys. I liked boys. I liked boyish things. Even when I played Neonatal ICU, I gave all my dolls tragically masculine names like Edward and Montague. Names that looked sickly yet regal on pretend death certificates.
I was the only girl in my fourth-grade class to have the Joey Stivic doll (named after Archie Bunker’s grandson), the first anatomically correct poly-cotton-filled infant. His little pee-pee fascinated me. I spent hours forcing him to drink from his precious blue bottle, and then I’d hold him over the toilet, press his chubby tummy, and watch with love and jealousy as he tinkled away his insides.
Me and all boys. I could totally see that.
As it turns out, the psychic was right on the career choice (writer coming twenty years after Confused Orange Julius Cash Register Girl and Napping Office Assistant). The Austria move never happened, and, unless she was counting ex-husbands, she was only half right on the boys.
“Isn’t this exciting?” my mother asked that day as we pulled away from the psychic’s office in her gold Monte Carlo. Full of tricks and nicotine, my mother had another birthday surprise up her sleeve. She turned on the AC and lit a cigarette. “We’ve got the whole rest of the day,” she said. “Just you, me, and the mall.”
The psychic mentioned nothing about me leaping from a moving vehicle into oncoming traffic.
Few things cause me more anxiety than shopping. Both then and now. Not even a pop quiz on multiplying fractions made my stomach as knotty as when I heard my mother announce how much fun we were going to have looking at pants.
It was her use of the word looking instead of buying that was always the tip-off. Looking meant hours of sifting through discount bins, lengthy belt/shoe/purse assessments, blouse and skirt decisions based on seasonal colors. “Pink’s still okay in October, right? Maybe fuchsia? Would this fall under fuchsia or red? Why is the light so poor in here? We should bring this jacket down to hardware, it’s brighter there. You know why it’s always easier to see in hardware? It’s men. They won’t buy if they can’t see things in clear light. That’s called market strategy. But now I’m thinking this is more purple than pink. Okay, so that’s a no. Here’s red. Or would you call this cherry?”
Sure, things would begin well enough. We’d get up at the crack of dawn, all Egg McMuffins and sale ads, but come midafternoon the fun would begin to unravel. This usually started with me announcing I was hungry; I was hot; I was itchy. By my third unheeded demand for a wheelchair rental, I could be found red-faced and crying through a seizurelike meltdown in the Sears garden section.
But buying—now that was a safe word. The get-it-done-yesterday word. A word with purpose, lists, organization. All the things a nervous shopper can use as an anchor to keep from hyperventilating on the escalator. Buying meant a sensible amount of time picking out one shirt, possibly sunglasses, no dressing rooms, and then a speedy delivery back home where I would be safe once more with a bag of Frito’s and General Hospital.
Growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then a later diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, I was assured that shopping would always be nothing more than a giant sensory overload for me. Other, less distressing activities come to mind when compared to those nonstop aisles of ADD-infused decisions: looking out the safety-glass window in the suspicious persons holding room at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, for instance. Jogging around Hong Kong’s metro district in the middle of July without a face mask sounds as if it might not be as bad as a stroll beneath the Drakkar Noir pollutants and unbearable house music of Abercrombie and Fitch.
OCD can turn even the smallest shopping errand into a Lewis Carroll whirl of terror. Obsessive-compulsives feel calm and protected in order, more so if they are the ones responsible for making that order. Not being able to understand why a display rack of men’s bathrobes would be placed next to camping gear was enough to set my mind reeling. Maybe outdoorsy types enjoy comfy sleepwear after a day of hiking and fishing?
As I grew older, so did the inability to get my thoughts together for any shopping trip that required more than twenty minutes of browsing. Even with the help of a therapist, it was nearly impossible for my mother to understand the craziness all that stimuli inflicted. I had to make detailed lists of everything I needed the night before, arranging each item according to their shelf coordinates in the store. How well I handled picking out a suitcase in T.J. Maxx depended on knowing exactly how long I would be there—that I could leave in a hot-mess hurry if the power went out or someone coughed too close to where I was standing.
Along the way of my neurosis there were a couple of things that would help ease the panic and terror that is me and the stores. One, by the time I hit puberty, my mother—older, wiser, and completely exhausted from having to explain to onlookers that a preteen girl crying in the customer service lounge of Mervyn’s was simply tired from dance class—decided it was best for everyone involved if my clothing needs were handled via mail order. Or by my dad. Also, I never forgot the psychic’s prediction of being blessed with rearing the sex that hates looking at pants as much as I do. Visions of handsome young men who shared my love of books and vacuuming would take the frightening place of the exchange line at Ross (though many years would have to pass before I understood that if your child is the kind of boy who gets excited over cleaning out your makeup drawer, chances are pretty high he’s going to be a shopper).
The word metrosexual had not yet been invented when the psychic told me about my sons.
Flash forward twenty years and I am sitting nervously on the dressing room sofa in Macy’s while a smart-mouthed seventeen-year-old boy tries on jeans. I have been appointed Personal Wardrobe Technician.
“These are black. I asked you to bring me the gray ones.”
“What’s with the pockets on this pair?”
“Not Wranglers, Mom. I’m not Charles Ingalls.”
If my teenage version of Jean Paul Gaultier would calm down enough to see how upsetting the whole ordeal of shopping is to me, maybe he could sympathize about the panic I feel under the restraint of these lights, these smells, this fucking Coldplay Muzak. Maybe if I had forced him to read my memoir on growing up with OCD, he could better understand that the Xanax I took in the car hasn’t kicked in enough to make me give a rat’s ass about straight leg versus boot cut, and he would suggest I stay outside near the planters and the nice security guard. I could smoke my cigarettes and read my copy of Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas. Maybe if he read anything at all, he would also know that Charles Ingalls wore Levi’s.
But it isn’t just Black Friday or the buy-one-get-one rack at Kohl’s that can make all four of my boys go from zero to slightly homosexual in less than ten. I truly believe their retail tool tendencies may boil down to something that makes me rethink everything I learned in tenth-grade biology. Aside from the fact that teenagers have about as much compassion for anything that doesn’t affect them directly as, say, a garden snake, my boys are very much into their looks. And all of them are very good-looking.
Of course, I know every mother thinks her kids are pageant-worthy—mine would never stop crying long enough to actually do any pageants—but as much as I think their beautiful full lips, flawless skin, and big eyes are the stuff of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting, the problem lies in the way they see themselves, which is exactly the way I see them. Also, my boys are half Sicilian, and where my lower Mediterranean blood proves useful for important Italian things like knowing how to peel an artichoke and stealing, something must have happened in utero to turn my Regular Joes into the cast of Jersey Shore.
People say boys don’t come with as many accessories as girls. People are wrong.
My oldest, Ricardo, is obsessed with hair and skin care items that he usually acquires by asking me to send him my Ulta coupons and any leftover product I feel isn’t working for me. Last Christmas he called me from what sounded like a drunken slumber party and asked me to guess where he was. Of course, the first thing that came to mind was his hairdresser hosting a Yuletide makeover celebration, which actually occurred a few Christmases back. “Nope,” he said and then lifted his phone into the cackles of middle-aged women and Mariah Carey’s “Never Too Far” blaring in the background. “I’m at a Botox party!” he shouted. “Can you believe it?!”
Yes, I could.
At an age at which he should be attending keggers and tailgate parties, my first baby boy had been captured, cougared, and forced to sip chardonnay to the Glitter soundtrack.
They were getting ready to stick needles into his little face.
My two middle boys, Jordan and Julian, are the clothes shoppers. They know the definition—and importance—of the phrase “to the nines” and are disturbingly versed in the difference between a retro Izod shirt and one that’s “trying to perpetrate a flashback.”
Last summer they pooled their money to buy their own iron because mine was “crusted up with old lady.” They have separate accessory caddies in their closets. One for ties. One for belts. Lint rollers are purchased every week and kept at an arm’s reach lest a cat hair make its way to a new tank top.
My youngest, Rocco, is the cook and crafter of the bunch. Model airplanes, birdhouses, potholders to match the colors of his Easy Bake oven. He designs his own T-shirts and has recently taken his Martha Stewart up a notch to duvet covers. “Better than IKEA,” he says whenever he finishes one of the only two square patterns he knows. Once he actually said, “bric-a-brac” in front of a bunch of people at JoAnn Fabric’s.
Who are these children? And even more perplexing, how did a shopping/craft/hair product hater manage to pop out four of them? When the psychic said she had seen a lot of testosterone around me, I am now certain she meant just me. The only glimpse of reassurance I have that mama has done something right is the fact that each of my boys, with the exception of my eleven-year-old, would rather spend an afternoon taking their girlfriends to get pedicures than sitting around watching ESPN.
The only person I have ever been able to spend some quality J.C. Penney time with is my father, who is old and mean and sits in his truck picking his ears with his car keys while my stepmother makes all the important open toe/strapless sandal decisions.
Shopping is one of the few activities my father and I can do together without the day ending in a vow of never speaking to each other again. We have been known to negotiate entire outfits, shoes included, at Nordstrom’s Rack in just under fifteen minutes. We are the Special Forces of the retail industry. Get in, identify, seize, and then get the hell out.
Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be with boys? My friends who have sons complain about soccer carpools and violent video games. Although those things certainly have places in our lives, it’s hard to share my frustration when I have to leave a coffee date early because my youngest has sent me twelve texts reminding me that today is Michael’s BOGO on embroidery thread.
No parent wants to hate the things her children love.
Almost every other weekend I run into my next-door neighbor and her teenage daughter at Starbuck’s. I watch with envy as she and her daughter giggle in line, whisper, and playfully nudge each other. “Another Saturday looking at homecoming dresses,” my neighbor says to me. “And school hasn’t even started yet!” She puts her arm around her daughter’s shoulder and gives her a giant can you believe this girl squeeze. Loving every second of the things I can’t even force myself to like.
I want that, too. I mean, I think I want that.
Two years ago I came up with what I was sure to be a fail-free bonding idea to start me and my boys on the path to girly togetherness. The epiphany came from that show on the Learning Channel. You know, the one in which the women save five million dollars a year by scanning the Internet for bargains and purchasing vats of medicated lip balm they will never use but will happily give away to friends who have a tendency to break out in mouth sores.
I’m talking about coupons. Good, old-fashioned buy-ten-cans-of-tuna-and-get-fifty-cents-off-your-next-purchase-of-fiber-laxatives coupons.
I can do coupons.
If women who don’t even bother to wear support bras on national television can stock up on sliced beets and save enough money to take their families to Busch Gardens, then what the hell is stopping me? My boobs aren’t that big. I can force myself to love beets.
Like a New Year’s resolution dieter who must convince herself of how much she’s going to enjoy those rice cakes, I first had to declare my intention. I gathered up my brood from their clouds of Axe cologne and announced we were starting a new project. “You know that couponing show you guys are totally addicted to?” I said. “Well, that’s going to be us!”
After reassuring them they would be spared the humiliation of appearing on television with their mom, and that no one would have to do anything involving putting together a shelf, it was time to prepare for my mission. Armed with a week’s worth of grocery money and a new, though somewhat forced, optimism, I went to Staples and went a little crazy. I bought markers and paperclips, a top-of-the-line pink Velcro Trapper Keeper, plastic baseball card inserts, four packs of printer paper, more baseball card inserts, four pairs of scissors, stickers of shooting stars and ladybugs, lined paper in purple and orange, neon and pastel Post-It notes, a scientific calculator, and a leather accordion index card folder that cost as much as my best pair of shoes. I spent three days signing up for every deal-buster website I could find. I bought triple subscriptions to three newspapers (a cost totaling, almost to the penny, the down payment on my youngest son’s braces), and printed out the coupon policies for the stores I planned to bitch slap with my giant folder of savings. Then late at night, my eyes burning from instant messaging about Downton Abbey instead of coupons on the Krazy Saver Facebook page, my fingers bent and numb from arranging those hateful baseball card holders, I watched and studied each recorded episode of what the kids and I were now simply referring to as “our coupon show.”
I may not be able to walk through Tilly’s without a shot of vodka in my Crystal Light, but, by God, now I was ready to shop the fuck out of my local Ralph’s. With my children.
Couple of things you should know about extreme couponing. First, you have to be very good at math. I don’t mean I-passed-eighth-grade-algebra-with-flying-colors-because-I-let-the-teacher’s-aide-feel-me-up good, I mean Pythagoras-meets-Good-Will-Hunting good. A constant eye for sum versus difference is a couponing must, so you pretty much have to turn yourself into North Korea the minute you step inside the grocery store. Although basic addition and subtraction come easy for lots of folks who aren’t newborns or Muppets, in my case, having OCD makes dealing with numbers, odd ones in particular, extremely stressful. I do okay with 50 percent off because half of something is easy, but throw me into the middle of a two-hour sale in which 75 percent is the number of the day and my mind turns into a blathering swirl of gobbledygook. A million little Courtney Loves and Rush Limbaughs competing for air time in my frontal lobe.
Yes, you can bust out your calculator along with the other Extreme Couponers, but you still have to know what the hell you’re doing on said calculator. Especially the kind I shelled out fifty dollars for.
I was in the checkout line, right after my first massive purchase adventure, when I discovered my savings estimation on Epsom salts and Rice-A-Roni was off by two hundred and seventeen dollars. Red patches of panic swelled through my neck while I frantically pushed buttons on a machine that was clearly designed to be used by astronauts. It was my youngest son, only nine at the time, who grabbed the calculator out of my hand and asked why I was trying to work out exponents.
Ever the professional obsessor, I would not give up so easily. By my third shopping trip, I was kind of—sort of—getting the hang of it. I clipped and sorted, rearranged, and self-medicated. I involved the kids in the preshopping activities by assigning them their own scissors and delegating a Math Emergency Person should another aspirin and dish soap FAIL find me forcing the boys into McDonald’s while I sat outside in my car crying.
Luckily, it never came to that again.
In our little storage-challenged house I stocked every shelf and cabinet with stacks of toilet paper and instant mashed potatoes. Eyedrops and bandages lined the walls of what used to be our linen closet. Did you know you can fit twenty containers of Tic Tacs in a Crock-Pot?
My boyfriend Max, who pays the majority of our household expenses, had entrusted me to use our joint account for what I was now calling “My home business.”
“Three hundred dollars is a lot to spend on just three different items,” he said one night, a squiggly green vein plumping against his forehead as he peered into my bags of toothpaste, gravy mixes, and feminine douches. “We don’t even use Crest.”
“So what,” I said. “I needed to get the extra credit points on my saver card.”
And what did he know about big business anyway? Max is a PhD who works in a tiny office building where they make robotic arms and microscopes. He stands around in a lab coat all day taking stock photos of latexed fingers holding test tubes. Every entrepreneur knows you have to spend money to make money. And from all the things I’d been learning about how the credits on sale items worked, it can take up to three years before you attain the type of savings status where you get your twenty-ounce cans of tomato sauce for free. And if you’re doing it right, you shouldn’t really see that much of a difference in your usual grocery budget.
I told Max not to worry. Sure, we were completely out of our regular staples like milk, bread, vegetables, butter, meat, cheese, fruit, and eggs, but I tried to explain all the macaroni salad we were eating was still within the range of what we usually spent.
Yet as the weeks went by, my checkbook began to tell a very different story.
Turns out, to get these super-savings points—a “check” of sorts that comes in the mail from the store where you’re saving all this money—you have to spend a certain amount within a certain time frame. To simplify: If we were going to reap the benefits of a prime rib dinner for less than a dollar, I would have to find a tasty way to incorporate panty liners and shaving cream into my casserole. And fast.
Just before the start of a new school year, my youngest said his sewing machine needed some repairs. He’d been hand-stitching colored squares onto more colored squares and showed me where the thimble raised two big blisters on his little hand. “I don’t know,” I told him. “That sounds expensive. Why don’t you make something nice out of your puffy fabric paints? Draw a peace sign or a dragon.”
He told me his puffy paints were all dried up. “The only one I have left is hot pink. I’m kind of over that style now.” He grumbled on about how much he missed going to the fabric store, then went back to eating his instant mashed potatoes with rice.
That night I sat down at my computer and started printing out more coupons for more of the same crap that now seemed to be ruining our lives. My family was eating poorly. My sons needed new clothes. My printer blinked to let me know its ink level was low.
As I watched my instant message box pop up from the Krazy Saver Facebook page—someone in Atlanta just scored an entire year’s worth of Vitamin C pills for two dollars—I imagined my little fashion designer and his broken sewing machine, my sweet blue-eyed feme, starting the fourth grade in a crummy old T-shirt with a Wimpy Kid sad face above peeling letters that read:
my mom went to the grocery store and all i got was this stupid t-shirt because she spent all our money on mouthwash
I slumped into my chair and thought about what to do next.
Do they let you sell toothpaste on eBay?
Something that is stressed in OCD therapy is to know your limits. Sure, going outside your comfort zone to conquer phobias like hyperventilating during a job interview or touching doorknobs is pretty important because those things are required if you want to have any kind of a life outside of Meals on Wheels and cats. But I kept thinking about the limits part. “Accepting them,” a counselor once told me, “is very different than avoiding them.”
I looked at the stacks of newspapers on my desk, the piles of coupons that still needed to be sorted, the sheets of ladybug stickers that now seemed the stuff of a grown woman losing her mind. And her money.
A mother’s defeat is a wretched thing, but, despite all the time and energy I had put into the intention of spending more time and energy with my children, I was beginning to feel as if my effort was just me trying to close that long-ago rift of failing to make my own mother happy. All the shopping anxiety I experienced as a child was still there, in every checkout stand, in all the numbers I couldn’t figure correctly. “Don’t crap on others when you’re working out your crap,” someone once said. But that’s exactly what I was doing. Instead of accepting my anxiety about shopping, I was avoiding it by trying to turn it into something else.
Shit shined up, and so on.
I poured myself a drink and wrote this on the grocery list I had started for my next coupon trip: In this world there are the spenders and the savers. I am neither. I am not sure what I am. Yes, it’s cheesy and reeks of people in folding chairs introducing themselves by first name only, but an honest to goodness list maker makes lists of everything. Even her lies. The truth gets truer when you write it down. I folded up the paper and stuck it in the act now! section of my leather accordion file.
And that was that. I had made the decision to release myself and my family from the perforated hell of pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
When I laid my head on my pillow that night, it was the first time in six months I didn’t see the cereal aisle in monochrome swirls behind my eyes.
It wouldn’t happen in a day. The transformation from Super Shopping Mom back to Super Stay-at-Home Mom—with a huge emphasis on the stay-at-home part—would have to be a slow adjustment, one that began with lies and excuses, and then small sprinkles of truth to be added later as my children warmed up to the idea of doing the mall without their mother.
Sometimes, that’s the way it is with anxiety disorders. People don’t always understand right away when you tell them the reason you seemed unsociable at the cocktail party was that you had an overwhelming urge to Windex the bathroom mirrors (which you did, and then felt bad for rummaging under the bathroom sink of someone you hardly knew looking for cleaning products). It’s easier for others to accept that your son fractured his shin during soccer practice and that’s why you had to leave the baby shower early, rather than telling someone her house was so damn hot it gave you heart palpitations and you were afraid you might have a panic attack in the middle of “Guess What’s in the Diaper.”
Even if you’ve never had troubles with OCD or anxiety, it stands to reason that the truth of what is really going on inside your head should only be revealed when you trust someone enough, when you’re certain someone likes you enough not to press harassment charges because you have to touch the tip of their nose every time you see them or something awful will happen.
It took many years of excuses for my girlfriends to finally realize I was not the person to call during a sundress emergency at Anthropologie.
My kids would have to learn this as well. And I would have to hold onto the fact that they would not stop loving me because of it.
Last week my son Julian handed me his iPhone and said, “Here is my wish list for prom.” Then he asked if I could go with him to price tuxedo rentals.
I told him I could not. I reminded him of our last dressing room adventure that ended with me driving away, him taking the bus home, and, for some reason, a heated argument over Sylvester Stallone. “Believe me,” I said, “this is a big deal for you, and I think we both know everything will work out for the best if I’m not a part of that.” I suggested he go with Max or his best friend, Devin. “Make a man-date out of it,” I said. “Pizza afterwards, maybe a trip to Game Stop.”
It didn’t take long for him to agree, which made me feel weird. Relieved and sad.
“They’re starting not to need me anymore,” I told Max as I watched my son and his friend drive away from the house.
“That’s not true,” Max answered. “They’re starting to let you breathe.”
I often joke to my sons that one of them had better give me a granddaughter for all my years of boy trouble. Though I’m only in my forties, I can already see her little face in my dreams. Tiny and smart and perfect. I will read to her from all of my Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I’ll paint her little nails and do up her hair. We’ll put makeup on each other and have tea parties with all the stuffed animal characters from Angelina Ballerina. Of course, I realize a granddaughter will up the chances of me having to once more endure the horrors of the mall. But who knows. Maybe she’ll hate shopping as much as I do. Maybe she will be gay, but gay in the right way. Totally butch, caring only about sales if it’s a buy-one-get-one on neck tattoos. Perhaps she will share my love of cleaning, opting to organize the closets rather than buying the stuff to fill them. I’ll give her a little pink cleaning caddy and her own DustBuster. We’ll spend entire afternoons together scrubbing and labeling while her father and uncles loiter around Foot Locker. We’ll put stickers on our Swiffers and stay in the house, where it is properly cleaned and temperature controlled.
“Just you and me,” I’ll tell her, as I pass her the bleach spray that she will happily accept with her flowered rubber gloves. We’ll make everything sparkle and smell like lemon. We’ll make sandwiches for the men when they come home from doing the things they love to do. If she asks me why I never take her shopping, I’ll say, “It’s more fun in the house.” Because it is. “And Grandma is a better person in here than out there.” I know she won’t understand at first. That’s all right. When you love a child you’ll say anything to make them happy, to protect them from the absurdities and confusion of people and their problems. Sometimes you’ll have to lie just to get them off your ass. And that’s all right, too.