Before Sarah was born, my mother would wake me up some nights so we could look for my father. She would bundle me up, carry me through the chilly night air, and buckle me into our old Chevy. We would drive around to cheap hotels to see if we could spot his Crayola-blue Toyota truck in the parking lot. I would scan the rows of cars until I found the color blue to point out to my mom. Sometimes we found him at three in the morning, his beat-up truck tucked in the back of a Motel 6. I know this happened several times, but I have no recollection of what happened once the truck was found. All that remains is my mother and me, driving in the dark, looking for his betrayal.
My mother was an artist, finishing up her master’s in painting while I was still in preschool. She would bring me to her drawing classes. I have memories of the smell of charcoal, bodies draped over chairs, the sound of large pieces of paper rustling. She had to bring me with her, since my father wasn’t able to watch me. He was either working on a construction crew he would inevitably bail on, or at home, watching TV while chain-smoking. My mother finished her degree, defended her thesis while pregnant with my sister. She has never stopped painting.
My father wanted to be a writer. He wrote a science fiction book before I was born. One of his female protagonists was named Soanna, and within the world he had created, she was considered the perfect woman. When I was born, Soanna became my middle name. I never read that book, or any others he wrote. I believe my father had an agent once, who tried to sell his nonfiction book about his years of involvement in Native American shamanism. The rights were sold to a small publishing house in France. That was the extent of my father’s imprint on the literary world.
My uncle Rex once told me a story about a time he visited our house. I was five years old, and Rex was watching Sesame Street with me while my parents were out. He described the sounds of my parents’ car screeching into the driveway, their loud voices as they stomped up the stairs, the slamming of the front door so hard the house shook, and my mother and father retreating to their bedroom to continue their fight. Once my parents were sequestered in their room, I turned to Rex with a somber look on my face and said, “They are going to have some alone time now,” before turning my gaze back to the TV, the roar of their anger in the background.
My parents split when I was ten and my sister was four. They found new partners quickly. My mother’s new boyfriend, Rick, was introduced to my sister and me one evening over dinner. He moved in later that night. My father drove us to meet his partner, a woman named Sharon, and didn’t inform us beforehand that she was the person he’d had an affair with years before, causing my parents’ first major separation.
Rick admired Captain von Trapp from The Sound of Music, before Maria comes along. He was an acclaimed nonviolent peace activist who went to prison for a year after a demonstration had gone awry. He drove a VW van that had a distinct sputter and owned a sweet, old pit bull named Hobo. He liked to sea-kayak, protest, and drink. It was clear from the first night that I met Rick that I wasn’t going to like the change in our household. My mother was an artist who slept in late and was lax about housework and playtime, whereas Rick preferred order, cleanliness, and discipline. My mother liked that Rick was organized where she was messy, that he was focused where she was distracted. He said he was going to get a whistle so he could summon Sarah and me.
Sharon was the antithesis of Rick. She was warm, funny, and wickedly smart. Our first night meeting her, she grilled salmon, played Nina Simone while we ate, and taught my sister and me all the good hiding spots in her house so we could scare each other. By the time Sarah and I figured out who she was, the woman our father had left our mother for years before, it was too late—we already loved her.
Sharon had chronic Lyme disease and an accompanying myriad of health issues. Her knees would swell to the size of grapefruits, and she spent a lot of time in pain. That meant she spent a lot of time at home, and a lot of that time was spent reading: Arundhati Roy, Jonathan Carroll, Toni Morrison. She lived in the mountains, a half-hour drive away from the highway. She and her former partner, Shelly, had built the house together in the early 1970s. Sharon liked to tell stories of the two of them carrying the heavy wooden beams up the hill, when they measured something wrong and everything was crooked, how for the first few years their roof was a tarp. Sharon’s friends were mostly queer, primarily sober, and they had all known one another for decades. They were loud and told great stories while everyone drank diet sodas and smoked cigarettes on the porch overlooking the hillside.
Sharon had been the caretaker for both her parents, her grandmother, and countless friends, many who had died during the AIDS epidemic. For as long as I’ve known her, death has followed her closely, with a remarkable number of people dying on or within days of her May birthday. She said she was cursed. The curse didn’t seem to affect her ability to love or be vulnerable, though. Sharon was frank: about sobriety, sexuality, death, and her history.
As Sarah entered kindergarten and I hit puberty, we lived in these two very different homes. My father’s house, where he lay on the couch, his T-shirt riding up his expanding belly, chain-smoking and watching football, while Sharon splashed with us in her pool and answered our questions about everything: being queer, falling in love, sex, what it meant to be a good friend. And my mother’s house, where she read out loud to us and came to every swim meet, but was partnered to a man who was cruel and impossible to please.
If I could go back in time, I would take my mother’s hand and tell her, “Pick a man as wild and absolute as your paintings. You are worthy of unwavering kindness.” I would whisper in Sharon’s ear, “Don’t return to my father—he will apologize to you for eight hours the day he wins you back, and then you will never hear him say ‘I’m sorry’ again.” But as a child, it seemed normal to me that my mothers would choose such men as their partners. It did not occur to me that both of these women deserved better until I was much older.
When Sarah was just six years old, she told me that Rick was an alcoholic. I wasn’t even sure she knew what that word meant until she showed me his secret stash of beer bottle caps. She was also scared of our father, wary of his moods and quick to lie to him if she thought it could get her out of trouble. But she was fast to forgive both of them as well. She wanted a father, even if that father was a drunk or mean or didn’t pay enough attention to her. She wanted to be loved.
