12. Congratulations! You May Already Be A Loser!
The Year of Paying Attention
I’m a Pisces, as is my daughter Lizzie. I was born close to Aquarius, while she was born near Aries. I don’t know what any of this means, and no, I don’t want my chart done, yes I know what time I was born, please don’t tell me why all of this is perfectly predictable from an astrological perspective. I don’t want to argue with you, and I don’t want to argue with Lizzie, but we’d done an awful lot of it.
The girl is very funny, quick-witted and sensitive, and when she’s angry, she’s scary, and I’m afraid of her. Scary anger runs in my family. As a little boy, I was afraid of my father’s anger, because it got loud and felt dangerous, and occasionally there was spanking. My mother rarely got very mad, but hers was scarier, because it meant my sisters and I had pushed her beyond her breaking point, from which there was no return. The rare dark threat of “when your father gets home — ” would evoke pleading and squealing vows to be good forevermore. So my sisters and me, Susan five years older, Marianne two years younger, we three avoided angering our father, while exploring how far we could push our mother.
Anger as a control system certainly worked on me, so I utilized it myself. Early in my marriage I got mad, a lot, and behaved like an ass and a bully. This started to change only after I stopped drinking and pursued recovery, and even then slowly, with plenty of anger relapses. Consequently I believe I trained Lizzie in the destructive art of rage, including how to wield the straight razor of shame and ridicule. Where else would she have picked it up? Both her mother and her sister are nice people, disinclined to burn things to the ground when confronted with stubborn difficulties, so that leaves an earlier version of yours truly holding the bag.
But I was not nervous yesterday driving to Brooklyn to see Lizzie at her job in gentrifying Bed-Stuy, where she’s a barista in a little shop that sells plants and flowers along with coffee. I was going to select my Christmas present from her, a cactus from among the succulents for sale, and I had a game plan: to be happy to see her, easy enough, and to avoid at all costs the subject of health insurance, specifically hers. Her employed mother’s insurance would no longer cover her, and my former wife had asked me to join the campaign to convince Lizzie to sign up for her own. Having issued a flurry of cheerful (and completely ignored) text messages suggesting we make it a fun project and do the insurance sign-up together, I finally admitted defeat — the girl’s full grown, I reminded myself, with a formidable will; accept the things I cannot change.
Lizzie grinned and hugged me when I walked into the quiet shop. She made me a coffee, and without warning, she floored me: she had procured health insurance! Two strong feelings rose in me simultaneously: wondrous gratitude, that she’d accomplished something complicated and necessary; and shame, for never imagining she would do it. I tried to appear neither disbelieving nor overly relieved, and turned my attention to which cactus to take home. Then we sat and chatted, and when customers began to trickle in, saying hello like friendly neighbors, I gave her a goodbye hug, and took my prickly plant home.
My relationship with Lizzie has long been fraught, since her days in middle school. During family therapy sessions years ago, I realized with a start that she and I operate the same way emotionally. I am oversensitive to her, as she is to me. I sometimes feel unloved and unappreciated by her, as she does by me. I want to convince her, she wants to resist me. When things were at their worst between us, just after she’d graduated college and my marriage was ending, Lizzie would say and email things that took my breath away with their savagery. It became worse after her mother moved out of the apartment, and both daughters learned that I was in a relationship with Sarah. The two of them stopped communicating with me, maintaining complete silence for a year and a half. That was eighteen years after my first banishment, when it was me who left the apartment, the day before I attended my first 12-step meeting.
***
“I knew it was over, that I was a fifty-year-old loser who was never going to get another good job,” I told my tall, accomplished friend over coffee, discussing his current job search. I described being ten years sober, with daughters in a fancy, pricey private school, listening to my friends tell me to pick myself up, dust myself off, and get on out there! They were full of shit. I’d been forced out of a company I’d started! By a partner who turned out to be my terminator! Humiliated and wounded by this betrayal, I knew I was never going to find a job. I was too old. It would soon be industry-wide knowledge that I was a fraud, a phony, and a coward to boot, and that would be that. All the old terrors had reemerged, as if I’d never done any recovery work, never practiced courage, never willed myself to take action despite fear and doubt. I was doomed. Despite this glaring truth, and to shut up my “helpful, encouraging friends,” I got my resume together, and spread the word that I was “looking for my next opportunity,” code for “Loser — Do Not Acknowledge.”
To make things worse, I was about to leave with my wife and teenage daughters for a long-planned trip to Italy, underwritten to some extent by my brother-in-law, but still costly for a guy who would never again earn one red cent. I had two possible approaches for the trip: take all my anxiety with me, and ruin it for everybody; or impersonate a man who believed everything was going to be all right. I was familiar with “fake it ’til you make it.” It was fakery time.
As if to confirm where I stood with the universe, days before departure a colleague called about my only hope, a job I’d been pursuing for months. “I’m sorry, Tim, but I’m not going to be able to offer you that job,” she said, then something about her boss blah blah internal candidate blah blah, her voice drowned out by Carmina Burana blaring in my head. Doom doom doom.
But there’d been a moment, I told Quentin, some months before that miserable phone call. I’d spent ten years rebuilding my marriage, which felt steady. I was managing a freelance project, putting out feelers, asking for help, meeting with people. It was a sunny day. I’d left a meeting and walked out onto 57th Street. The things I needed to do were done, for that day anyway. The project was going well. My next few days were busy, but there was nothing I needed to do right then. I thought: I can go to Central Park and sit on the grass. I felt my stomach. It wasn’t churning. I felt the sun on my face. I felt like a man for whom everything was going to be okay. I went to the park. The next day I got back to worrying. But I’d had that moment.
I went to Italy. We had a great time, wonderful food, the girls embraced in the crowd of cousins, aunts and uncles, all of us wandering around charming towns and dazzling cities. I surprised myself as I kept the terror at bay. Ten days later, back home in New York, I played back a telephone voicemail, for this was a time before everyone could reach everyone at every moment of the day. It was an old boss talking about a new job. Before I had time to throw myself in front of the F train, I was sitting in his office, and with no rigmarole he offered me a job. Actually, a great one. In many ways the best position I would ever have, and the last one, it’s safe to say. I walked out onto Seventh Avenue. I was a saved man. I could pay my bills, educate my daughters, hold my head up. But more important: I could stop wondering whether I would be okay.
“How long before you went back to believing the fraud-loser thing?” Quentin asked. “Oh, it came back right away,” I told him.
Next week: Welcome To Your Midlife Crisis!
