I’m sitting here on my all-too-short lunch break, dreaming of the magical Central Coast. I had such a perfect, peaceful weekend with my lady friends at the Madonna Inn (#bucketlist), dear reader, and I’m feelin’ mighty reflective.
Listen, if you’re reading this right now and happen to be in a dark place, I get it—I’m sure you’re just fucking TICKLED that I had a perfect, peaceful weekend. Delighted, even. I know, and I’m sorry. Even still, this feels important to share. Because I DID have a perfect, peaceful weekend, and feeling peaceful is still pretty darn novel to me.
I’m not trying to get all Anne Lamott on your ass (mad love to you always, Anne), and I certainly don’t think that I’m the first person to emerge from a dark place with a little tale to tell, but I do think that our stories are important. They’re not just important—they’re everything. Sharing our stories of who we are with each other is the most powerful way that we connect as human beings—and as far as I’m concerned, that’s really all we’re doing here on planet Whatever. Connecting. Trying to connect. Failing to connect and then trying again.
I’m not even saying that I’m any good at it. I’m fucking not. I’m still a bit awkward, a bit detached, a bit dissociated, a bit guarded. All of that. I’m all of that. I’m just saying that I’ve been doing the fucking work. I’ve been doing so much schlepping and heavy lifting that, at some point, I stopped realizing that’s what it was. All of it—the writing, the truth-telling, the digging, the rearranging, the discarding—it just became what I do. Somewhere along the line, what started out as a sweaty-palmed, heart-racing scramble to survive (and I swear to God there were days where it felt like my lungs were filling with water) became a steady walk.
Love doesn’t happen when you stop looking for it; love happens when you have made space for it.
This weekend marked the first time I have ever been to Boston and not seen him. The entire city feels amiss. Everything is gray, and all the buttons are in the wrong buttonholes. And since thirty-two years of being greeted on trips back east with a signature Jim Broderick “Ho-ho!” don’t come to a close without some kind of emotional undoing, I’m all choked up and writing this on an airplane.
I’m a crier by nature, but these tears are the kind that I’m not comfortable letting go of. Letting go of these tears just facilitates letting go of my grandfather, and at this point, I’d rather make a burning nest of them in the back of my throat than let them fall.
Dramatic, perhaps, but I can be a dramatic person. I think he enjoyed that about me.
People have been asking me since his passing last month, “Were you close?” It’s a well-meaning question, but it’s also unanswerable. Far is not the opposite of close, I realize, but all I can think to say is, “We were close and we were far.”
My younger brother, Sam, and I grew up in California. My parents are both Bostonians and the oldest of five, and our nuclear family is the only contingent on either side to have made a home outside of New England. Consequently, my grandfather was not a part of my day-to-day existence; he wasn’t someone I ever expected to be at my recitals or school plays (although he and my grandmother did fly out to watch me ham it up as Mame in Auntie Mame when I was in 10th grade), and I never spent a Christmas with him.
But Sam and I did spend every June counting down the days until we would fly to Boston for the summer’s end. We could never sleep the night before a flight to back east, and we would squeal with excitement when the Super Shuttle pulled up to our house in the darkness of 5 a.m. to ferry us to the airport.
My friends would brag about their upcoming family vacations to places like Disneyworld and the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and I just remember smiling and feeling sorry for them. This was partly because my mother was (and remains) exceptionally vocal about the repulsiveness of popular, commercial vacation destinations, but mostly because I knew that Disneyworld couldn’t possibly hold a candle to what we had in New England. And so much of what we had was about Grandpa and his brilliant, hilarious clan of Brodericks.
I loved going back east because I felt special there. Special, wanted, and important. As far back as I can remember, my grandfather—a genius by virtue of his Harvard graduate degree alone in my eyes—seemed genuinely interested what I had to say. He loved dissecting people’s motivations and internal processes. Even as a child, I knew that Grandpa was interested in my experience of the world and that he took me seriously. And I was definitely a little girl who wanted to be taken seriously.
I never had to hustle for my worth with him or prove that my opinions and experiences were worthy of serious consideration; this was a given. As an adult, I’m still trying to figure out what real intimacy actually means, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with being seen—really and truly seen. Being seen by others is fundamentally all we want as human beings, and Grandpa always made me feel seen. If the speeches at his memorial this weekend were any indication, he made everyone feel this way.
So where do we go from here? What does my grandmother do when she wakes up each morning to an empty space in the bed next to her? How do I accept that the absence I feel isn’t just the result of allowing too much time to lapse between visits, but rather the result of a final, permanent shift?
I have no answers. This is all new to me. Death in the family is, for the most part, new to me—I’m lucky this way. I suppose I should spend some time being grateful that I still have three more grandparents who are alive and kicking…or at least pantomiming some version of kicking. I am grateful for this. I really am. But still, nothing about this feels okay. We are now in after. It’s uncomfortable. Unacceptable.
I’m terrible with endings, conclusions, goodbyes, partings, closing arguments, and letting go as a general practice (ask anyone), so I think I’ll end by saying thank you.
Thank you for making me feel like the most interesting person in the entire world every single time we spoke. Thank you for teaching me to appreciate a well thought-out garden and Eames chairs. Thank you for the childhood games of Keep Away and the force-feedings of classical music. Thank you for telling Grandma that you were struck by how beautiful I grew up to be after our visit last spring. She told me. I cried. Thank you for all of it. To borrow from your own words to my father just before you left us, I’ve enjoyed it all.
Issuing a quick bulletin here to see who and what is out there—hope this finds all of you in great health and high spirits. The holidays are almost here, eh? My, how the year flew by!
Let’s start at the beginning: my name is Rachel, I am 31 years old, and I am looking for a boyfriend. I think. That’s the thing—I am dreadful at allowing myself to be vulnerable and don’t necessarily know the difference between codependency and emotional availability, so I just as likely might not be looking for a boyfriend. Truth be told, it’s hard to say if I will fall in love with you then watch you freeze over and start responding to my texts/pleas for connection with “k” or ifyou will fall in love with me then feel me slowly lose all respect for you. It’s a toss-up. 50/50 shot either way—we might as well give it a go.
Friends have suggested that I write out what I’m looking for. An “ideals” list, if you will. Hashtag relationship goals. First, let’s start with the “musts”—the non-negotiables. You must be an age-inappropriate, cisgendered male whose childhood was heavily taxed by his mother’s emotional neediness. You were always there to clean up mommy’s emotional spatter, and you now associate a woman’s needs with complete & utter suffocation. All signs point to “run” with you, and I love that about you—that shit keeps me alert.
You are funny. You are dangerously funny. Cutting, observational humor lights me on fire like nothing else. If you can think of better responses to my own anecdotal quips than I can, I am in trouble. This basically guarantees that I will follow you around like dopey puppy and metaphorically piss all over the floor every time you look at me. You will own me. You will think I’m funny, too, but not funnier than you—and you will never, ever let me know that you admire my humor. (You won’t let me know most nice things you think about me, so why start there?)
It’s probably of note that you are not a “relationship guy.” No way. I don’t like relationship guys. I like “Let’s just see where this goes” and “I really just try and live in the moment” guys. Your tribe really gets what life is all about! Why commit to anything when you can meet your own immediate, surface-level needs right fucking now? I get it. I get you. Let’s do this.
I’m a quacky little duck in Echo Park Lake, and you’re the guy in the douchey, vintage fedora casually tossing breadcrumbs at me on a Sunday afternoon. I’ll never know when the crumbs are coming, but when I have to fight with all of the other filthy ‘hood ducks for a stale end-piece, I will feel that much more like a swan when I emerge victorious—soggy, sorry-ass return in beak.**
(**Actually, I recently learned that ingesting bread crumbs creates irreversible intestinal blockage in water birds, which ultimately leads to a very painful and shit-filled death. But I mean, whatever—I’m grateful for what you’ve got to give.)
Enough out of me. The point is this: I love you. I already love you for everything that you are and, more importantly, for everything that you are not.
I have been writing your name in the sand for years, and I can’t wait to meet you.
#TBT to 2/2/97, a.k.a. my 13th birthday, a.k.a. the time in my life when I wore oxblood Doc Martins every day and posted open letters to Courtney Love on my Geocities (or was it Angelfire?) site, which was coyly called “Pigtails for Rachel.” I can remember feeling pretty damn on top of my game that night. We had just returned to my parents’ house from the “dinner party” I threw myself at Il Fornaio (because what 13-year-old desperately trying to be a 30-year-old wouldn’t want to ring in her teen years with eight of her closest girlfriends and a classy-ass plate of capellini al pomodoro?), and I had on the best outfit I had ever assembled. Or close to it. Micro-mini vintage polyester slip. Docs with special-occasion silver shoelaces. Slightly padded bra that I begged my mother to buy me for an hour straight at Macy’s on Lake. Urban Decay lipstick & nail polish in “Gash.” Gwen Stefani wore Gash—she said so in Seventeen Magazine.
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Make a wish, they said. I mean, because that’s what they say on your birthday. I’ve always been someone who believes in the power of wishes and candles and concentration and moments of silence (light a candle—any candle— in my face, and I’ll get Fiona-Apple-on-a-rainy-day reflective on you faster than you can say “Shadowboxer”), and I remember running through the feels so hard when this picture was taken. I had been drinking for one year, bleeding for two, and hating myself for at least ten—all things that I was pretty sure made me a Very Modern Woman in the eyes of the world. Because women drink and bleed and hate their bodies. Obviously. So they told me to make a wish, and I wished for a different body and for a boy to fall in love with me. And in this moment, the moment captured in this photo, the moment before I blew out my candles, I knew that I was wishing for all the wrong shit. I have always had enough education and enough self-awareness to know that I am wishing for all. the wrong. shit. And yet I have held my breath and wished for it all anyway, year after year. I’ll be 32 in February. We’ll see. #throwbackthursday
I Still Read Your Horoscope 