June 19, 2011

“Don’t Feed the Monster”

“My sister loves me,” I repeat to myself despite the fact she has punched me in the stomach. Again. The first time was at her daughter’s birthday party, and it wasn’t a metaphor. At the bowling alley black-lit with glowing neon cut outs, the disco ball spun and glinted a Saturday night vibe one late Sunday afternoon. People I mostly didn’t know milled around in borrowed shoes, mingling and drinking fruit punch from plastic cups. There, next to the door, sat a fold out table piled high with presents and the soon-to-be offensive sheet cake with cursive lettering, “Happy First Birthday!” in confettied bright blue.

“Will you hold her?” my sister asked.

Handing her daughter off to me and dashing away to swipe up some possibly malignant punch across the room, my sister left no instructions. And being a childless aunt, I did my best to bounce the birthday girl up and down as she began to cry, realizing she was abandoned with an unqualified substitute.

Desperate for a cure as her whining increased, I tried something stupid: I dipped a small finger into the white frosting and brought it to my niece’s lips. It was her cake, after all, and why have a cake for your birthday if you’re not going to at least taste it. Granted, her tooth count left much to be desired, and I’m not sure she was cognizant of the difference between regular food and this special cake thing, but it made perfect sense to me.

A pink polo and white chino shorts blur came rushing at me, and I did what anyone would do: I pulled the baby closer to my body to protect her from this meteor-like object that was on a collision path toward us, would surely throw me off balance, and send my ass in a trajectory that made the slightly flawed sheet cake into a bull’s eye. My sister’s right fist stopped short of planting all the way into my belly before she snatched her child from out of my grip, causing the cries to become ever-more strident.

“She can’t have sugar,” my sister snapped, her face screwed up, contorted in anger.

“I didn’t know.”

That first time, she subsequently forgot it ever happened, then made me feel like a crazy person for even suggesting it. But I was there. I know what went down, and my sister has not been gentle with me in the interim. Which is why I was already wary when her daughter’s ninth birthday approached and my niece informed me that I was assigned to “watching the kids.”

“But what if I want to be one of the kids?”

“You can’t. Well, maybe you can. I’ll have to ask my mom.”

It was a sign, so when the evite came, I knew I wasn’t getting asked to a party—I was being enlisted to work for birthday cake. Did I say that whenever I get especially crazed about wanting babies of my own and wondering if I’m too old to start looking for husband number two to father those children, it’s usually because my sister has said things along the lines of, “you’d better get serious if you want it to happen,” and “you’re not getting any younger, you know.” Of course I know. So this is the drill: I freak the fuck out until one of my friends talks me down from the I’m-losing-it ledge of trying to figure out my entire life in one afternoon.

“Don’t listen to your sister,” my friends say, and I eventually return to the present and loving-what-isness.

Anyway, my niece who is a bit of a worrier of things big and small, expressed some concern about the fact that my husband number one disappeared.

“I miss him,” she supposedly said to my sister. “You aren’t going to divorce Daddy, are you?”

I get it—her best friend’s parents also recently divorced, and my niece is feeling anxiety about the stability of her own life, yada, yada, yada. I feel her, really I do, but my ex is not coming back from the other side of the world to ease her pain, especially since his constant remarks about her had to do with spoilt brattiness and her abundance of hugs for everyone but him. He thought she hated him.

The other week, I brought my new beau to a family gathering. After seeing us together and hearing he has two children, her concern surfaced again, and rather than correct her daughter, rather than disclose to her that her very own daddy was also previously married, rather than allow me to tell her the truth, my sister, in her infinite wisdom, instructed me to divert.

“If she asks about your boyfriend or your boyfriend’s children, ask her a question back..”

“Why?” I asked dumb and unsuspecting. “I’m the fun aunty. I’m the aunty who tells the truth.”

“No,” she said, firm. “You’ve become the evil aunty who took away two children’s daddy.”

Forget that I am completely paranoid about meeting these two children whose father has been divorced for two years because their mother cheated on him. Forget that I have absolutely no experience with motherhood, or that I suddenly have been rethinking this desire for children based on these insecurities. Forget that my logic follows this arc: if my niece, who I’ve known her entire life and have always been loving towards can label me ‘evil,’ that these two strange children will hate me grows ever more likely.

Instead, let’s focus on the fact that my sister has managed to punch me in the stomach yet again, and it hurts. I spent an entire eight hours of my life worrying about all this kid stuff, finally feeling as if I’d rather walk away than risk it. I had to call my mom, who talked me out of it.

“It’s not true. Don’t even think about it,” she told me.

And it was great advice—when I allow the monster of my insecurities space, it breeds and grows. Just like joy and happiness, whatever I put my energy into takes over, infusing my life because my perception is 100% of my truth. I have to trust that I’ll meet his kids when I’m supposed to, that my neurotic niece loves me, that my other nieces and nephews love me, that I am good with kids.

Forming boundaries is also part of the monster starvation diet, which means I will not be attending my niece’s birthday party, and it’s quite likely I won’t be missed. The twelve or thirteen other nine year-old girls will most definitely take most of my niece’s attention. I’m not trying to punish my sister or my niece. I’m not trying to do anything but protect myself from getting punched again, figuratively or literally.

But there’s something I need to say to my sister, who consistently takes any commentary that’s not cheerleading, morphs it into criticism, then redirects it into a full-scale defensive attack, much like that first real punch she doesn’t remember. I need to tell her that this is my life, that though I want her in it, I won’t hide my boyfriend from her daughter just so she can feel secure in a world full instability, full of divorce. It’s not fair. But like having my cake and eating it, too, perhaps that’s part of the insane reason why it can’t be which I still don’t get. All I know is when I was a kid, birthday cake made everything better. All I know is it makes no sense to have cake if you’re not going to eat it. Besides, monsters don't even like cake, do they?