Tiny Beautiful Things (35 page)

I think I am going to go through with this, so I don’t know what my question really is. I guess I just want to know how people negotiate all this shit, and how I am supposed to be okay. Thank you
.

LTL

Dear LTL,

I said yes to this gig immediately. Within the hour, I realized I’d made a mistake. I was way too busy to be Sugar. The job pays nothing. I earn my living as a writer. Mr. Sugar also earns his living as an artist. There is not a steady job, trust fund, savings account, retirement plan, parent willing to pay any portion of our preschool bill, free babysitter, not-maxed-out credit card, employer-paid health insurance policy, paid sick day, or even a middle-class childhood between us. Between us there are only two beautiful children and ten mountains of debt.

I can’t work for free.
I can’t work for free
. Of course I can’t work for free!

That was the mantra screaming through my head after I agreed to be Sugar. So, an hour after saying yes, I composed an email saying I’d changed my mind. The unsent email sat on my computer screen while I paced my living room thinking about all the reasons that it was perfectly unreasonable for me to write an advice column for no pay. Every reason was punctuated by a silent exclamation point. I had other writing to do! Writing for which I was being paid! Writing that would need to be pushed aside on a weekly basis so I could crank out a column!
And what was a column anyway? I didn’t write columns! I didn’t know anything about giving advice! Plus, there were my kids! I was stretched thin already, my every not-writing moment consumed by caring for them! The whole Sugar idea was ridiculous from the start!

And yet I could not bring myself to send that email. I wanted to be Sugar. I was intrigued. Sparked. Something powerful overrode all the silent exclamation points in my head: my gut. I decided to trust it. I gave Sugar a shot.

I thought of this when I read your letter, sweet pea. It made me think about what’s at stake when we ponder a gig. About what work means. About the fine balance of money and reason and instinct and the ideas we have about ourselves when we imagine we can be “meta” about our bodies and lives and the ways we spend our days. About what’s at work when we attempt to talk ourselves into things we don’t want to do and out of things we do. When we think a payoff comes from being paid and a price exacted from doing things for free. About what morality is. And who gets to say. What relation it has to making money. And what relation it has to desperation.

Your letter unsettles me. There is the husband predictably casting his decision to deceive his wife as a benevolent one. There is your naïveté about the logistics of prostitution—which is the correct term for the act of providing sex for money. Even if you refer to it as a rendezvous. But most of all there is you, dear fathomless bird of truth, telling me exactly what you know you must do. And then turning away from it.

You don’t need me to tell you whether you should accept this offer. You need me only to show you to yourself.
I am theoretically pro-sex, but I’ve never really enjoyed it
, you write.
Every time I think about him touching me I want to cry
, you
say. Do you hear that? It’s your body talking to you. Do what it tells you to do. Be its employee. It doesn’t matter what your head is working out—the monthly grand, the uncertainty of unemployment, the meta/feminist gymnastics. Putting faith in that stuff might pay the rent, but it’s never going to build your house.

We are here to build the house.

It’s our work, our
job
, the most important gig of all: to make a place that belongs to us, a structure composed of our own moral code. Not the code that only echoes imposed cultural values, but the one that tells us on a visceral level what to do. You know what’s right for you and what’s wrong for you. And that knowing has nothing to do with money or feminism or monogamy or whatever other things you say to yourself when the silent exclamation points are going off in your head. Is it okay to be a participant in deceit and infidelity? Is it okay to exchange sex for cash? These are worthy questions. They matter. But the answers to them don’t tell us how to rightfully live our lives. The body does.

There might be women out there who can fuck men for money and be perfectly fine, but you are not one of them. You told me so yourself. You’re simply not cut out for the job. When it comes to sex you say that you have “all sorts of ugly issues” and that you “know we all do,” but you’re wrong. We all don’t. You do. I once did. Not everyone does. By generalizing your problems regarding sex and sexuality, you’re running from yourself. You’re covering your wounds with a classic it’s-okay-if-I’m-fucked-up-because-everyone-is-fucked-up canard. It’s a lie you’ve told yourself that has flattened down whatever hurts.

But what hurts remains. Something inside of you that has
to do with sex and men needs to be healed. And until you heal it you are going to have to open and patch and cover and deny that wound over and over again. This job offer is an opportunity, but not the sort you think it is. It’s an invitation to do the real work. The kind that doesn’t pay a dime, but leaves you with a sturdy shelter by the end.

So do it. Forget the man. Forget the money. It’s your own sweet self with whom you must rendezvous.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

I could be worse.
That’s one of my father’s favorite sayings. Whenever we heard a story about a man beating his children, murdering his family, locking them away:
I could be worse.
It was as if the mere existence of vileness and depravity could exculpate him of any wrongdoing
.

He never hit my mother or me. He didn’t rape me or threaten me. These are the first things that come to mind when we think of child abuse. But while my mother would have left him if he’d lifted a hand against me, words—painful, horrible words—were allowed. Instead of bruises and scrapes, I suffered from internal pain. My father is a narcissist: controlling, vain, volatile, and charming. If I wasn’t cheerful enough, he didn’t want to look at me and I was locked in my room for days; if I made a joke, he’d yell and curse at me for being insensitive. My room was my sanctuary, my books my closest friends. I could never be perfect enough, and yet I tried so hard to make him proud, to make him care. He was my dad, after all
.

I never had anyone to talk to about it. I couldn’t fully trust my friends, and my mother was too busy pacifying my father to realize how much it hurt. My mother and I were the only ones
allowed to see that side of him. Counseling was out of the question, and extended family visited seldom
.

He disowned me twice. They were over small things, slight disagreements that led him to denounce me as his child. When he decided that everything was fine again, I was expected to accept his change of heart—no apologies (unless they were mine), no further mention of the incident. Each time, I let my mother convince me to give him another chance
.

But three months ago he went too far. He betrayed my mother, and in trying to support her, I was subjected to an angry diatribe. I was a fucking bitch for finding out about his infidelity. I had no right to invade his privacy
.

This time, I disowned him. I moved out (at twenty, I’d been staying at home for the summer). I’ve ceased all contact. And though my mother is more understanding of my position than she once was, she’s still trying to fix that broken relationship. While I know I could live happily without my father, and that I’m stronger than I’ve ever been since he’s been gone from my life, it’s like I can never fully escape him. My mother constantly talks about him, how he’s changed. She wants to know when I’ll be ready to be around him again. It’s hard to explain that I really don’t feel anything anymore
.

In spite of my mother’s claims, my father is still trying to control me, still so consumed by his image that he disregards my feelings. He found out that my therapist—an understanding, kind, and sympathetic counselor—was a woman he worked with and insisted I stop seeing her. Yet another attempt to keep me isolated, away from any outside support. Still, my mother is pressuring me (sometimes unconsciously) to make it work. But I no longer trust him, no longer trust my judgment when it comes to my father
.

We will never have a good relationship, but is it right for me to sever it completely, Sugar? So many people insist that family is too important, that it is my duty to forgive the man that gave me life. He’s the only father that I have. But is it worth the pain, the self-doubt, and the depression?

Could Be Worse

Dear Could Be Worse,

No, maintaining a relationship with your abusive father is not worth the pain, the self-doubt, and the depression. In cutting off ties with him, you have done the right thing. It’s true that he is the only father you will ever have, but that does not give him the right to abuse you. The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.

Your father does not currently meet that standard.

I’m sorry your dad is an abusive narcissist. I’m sorry your mother has opted to placate his madness at your expense. Those are two very hard things. Harder still would be a life spent allowing yourself to be abused. I know that liberating yourself from your father’s tyranny isn’t easy or uncomplicated, but it’s the right way. And it’s also the only way that might
—just might
—someday lead to a healthy relationship between the two of you. By insisting that your father treat you with respect, you are fulfilling your greatest duty, not only as a daughter, but as a human. That you stopped interacting with an abuser as powerful as your father is a testament to your courage and strength. You have my respect.

I haven’t had parents as an adult. I’ve lived so long without them and yet I carry them with me every day. They are like two empty bowls I’ve had to repeatedly fill on my own.

I suppose your father will have the same effect on you. In some ways, you’re right: you probably won’t ever “fully escape” your dad. He will be the empty bowl that you’ll have to fill again and again. What will you put inside? Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time. There is absolutely no way around them. By cutting off ties with your father, you incited a revolution in your life. How now are you going to live?

I said you were strong and brave to stop communicating with your father because you did something many people can never do. You set a boundary. You decided that you will not be mistreated and you acted upon that decision. That choice was born of anger and hurt. The territory beyond it is born of healing and transformation and peace—at least it is if you’d like to have a smashingly beautiful life.

What I mean to say is that you’ve left your father, but your relationship with him isn’t over. It will take you years to fully come to terms with him (and also with your mother, by the way). There is so much work to do that has to do with forgiveness and anger, with acceptance and letting go, with sorrow and even perhaps a complicated joy. Those things do not move in a direct trajectory. They weave in and out of each other and wind back to smack you in the ass. They will punch you in the face and make you cry and laugh. You say you will never have a good relationship with your dad, but you don’t know. You will change. Maybe he will too. Some facts of your childhood will remain immutable, but others won’t. You may
never make sense of your father’s cruelty, but with work and with mindfulness, with understanding and heart, you will make sense of him.

I hope you have the guts to do it.

After my mother died when I was twenty-two, I wrote a letter to my dad. I hated him by then, but there was a bright crack in my hate that had been made entirely by my mother’s love, into which my father could have slipped if he’d changed. In the letter, I told him my mother had suddenly died and also that I had always hoped that someday we could have a relationship. I said that in order for me to do that, he first had to explain to me why he’d done the things he’d done when we’d been together.

Sometimes I imagine my father opening that letter. It was twenty years ago and though just about everything in my life has changed in those twenty years, my imagining of my father receiving the letter with news of my mother’s death has not. In my mind, he cries softly at the news. He realizes his three children are now orphans and here’s his chance to make things right. Here’s his chance to be our dad. It’s not too late. We need him now.

But he didn’t realize that. Instead, he got drunk and called to say that I was a lying bitch and that our mother had tainted our minds and turned my siblings and me against him. I hung up without saying goodbye.

Seventeen years passed.

Then one day the phone rang and there it was: my father’s name on the tiny screen of my telephone.
He’s dead
, was my first thought. I believed his third wife was calling to tell me that. I didn’t pick up the phone. I only watched it ring. I listened to the message a few minutes later.