I’m Special (2 page)

“Nothing, Dad.”

“I'm telling Ryan that it's okay to be gay.”

“Ryan's gay?” His face turned ghost white. Visions of his youngest son vogueing to Madonna and having anal sex danced in his head.

“No, I'm not. I promise!”

“Would it mean anything if he was?” my sister huffed. “I mean, I'm bisexual.”

“You're what?”

“Yep.” She smiled defiantly. “I have a girlfriend named Sky.”

“Wait a second; I thought you had a boyfriend named John.”

“I do. It's called being in a polyamorous relationship, Dad. Haven't you heard of it?”

“Oh Jesus. What is this bullshit? I'm going back to bed.”

My father is a giant liberal teddy bear, but it's obvious that he comes from a very different generation than ours. When he decided to have kids, I don't think he even considered the possibility of having a bisexual polyamorous daughter and a gay son with a disability. We are modern as fuck.

My older brother, Sean, is also a textbook Millennial, but instead of changing his name and dating five people at the same time, he decided to take advantage of the invention of the Internet by making a porn website. When he was nineteen years old, Sean was broke and lived in a dilapidated apartment in Skid Row, a less than desirable part of LA, with limited career options. Then, in a moment of sheer desperation, he started a website that catered to his strengths, which happen to be finding the most disgusting pornos on the Web and editing them into disturbingly funny viral videos. His website is like Funny or Die but with homeless people fornicating in motel rooms set to a Björk song. It's absolutely disgusting, but in four years, he's managed to become a twentysomething millionaire. Welcome to America, babe!

And then, of course, there's me—the baby of the family and the most Millennial of them all. In the last few years, I've managed to make a career out of writing about being a hot mess, which is great but also not so great because I really
would
like to be stable at some point. Here I am, a person in my late twenties, and sometimes it feels like I'm so far from having my shit together. And I mean that literally. I do not even have my own feces together.

Allow me to explain. Recently, my mom, sister, and I decided to go to Montreal so we could eat bagels and create new painful memories together. I love going on vacation, even when it's with my family. The only downside is that I get severely constipated. When I was in the fifth grade, my brother and I went on a school camping trip to Big Basin for five days, and by the end of it, I hadn't taken a single shit. When we got home, my brother and I raced to the bathroom, and after we both finished doing our business, my brother looked at me and went, “Jesus. You didn't poop the entire time, either?”

Nothing's changed since then. It took three days and one unsavory experience of eating the disgusting Canadian delicacy poutine for my body to finally be like, “Okay, I feel safe enough to go number two now. Let's go!” As I raced to our rented apartment three blocks away from the restaurant, my mom and sister trailed behind me, stopping to take pictures of things white people like to immortalize on vacation, like street art, trees, and sidewalks. I was in the throes of pooping by the time they got back, and instead of leaving me to it, my mom knocked on the bathroom door.

“Ryan, are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” I replied, my voice strained. “Be out in a minute.”

That was a lie. The second I heard this poop smack the toilet water, I knew I was in deep shit. I got up and took a long breath before looking at my creation. It was huge. There was no chance in hell this sucker was going to make it down on its own, but against my better judgment, I decided to flush it anyway. You know when a poop is so big it doesn't even move? That's what this one did. It stayed exactly where it was, practically giving me the middle finger. Panicked, I muttered under my breath, “Holy fuck.”

“What's going on in there?” my mom yelled through the door.

“Nothing, Mom. Just go away!”

“I'm coming in!” I scrambled to put my pants back on. When she entered the bathroom, she plugged her nose and screamed at me, “WHAT IN THE HELL DID YOU DO?”

“I clogged the toilet, but it's fine! I'll just use the plunger.”

I looked. There was no plunger.

“Uh-oh.”

My mom let out an exasperated sigh and made her way over to the toilet. She then took one look at the damage and said in all seriousness, “Honey, I didn't even know it was possible to have a poop that big.” Part of me was flattered because it sounded like a compliment.

A few moments passed before my mom snapped into problem-solving mode and found some gloves underneath the sink.

“What are you doing?”

“There's no way that's going to go down. I need to take parts of your poop and put it in a trash bag.”

“WHAT?” I exclaimed. “No, Mom—please don't do this. There must be an easier way.”

“There isn't!”

“Well, at least let me do it!”

“No; now move over!”

There's really no way to accurately explain how it feels as a twenty-six-year-old when you see your mother grab pieces of your poop and put it in a trash bag. Look, I am realistic about my goals as a human being. I know that growth doesn't happen overnight and that everyone's definition of what it means to be an adult is different. But by now I really thought my mom would have nothing to do with my poop. After all those years of providing shelter and cooking and caring for me, the least I could do for her is take care of my own literal shit.

But I can't do that. I can't do anything. My mom and dad raised three children, each one more special than the last, and this is what they've ended up with: a rich pornographer, a polyamorous Hula-Hooper, and a constipated mess. And although my family feels unique, I know we're not. In fact, I would put money on it and say that most of your parents would scoop up your shit out of a toilet if they had to. That's just the way things work now. This is what happens when you're a part of a generation that's raised by parents who don't want you to ever know struggle: you get a bunch of people in their twenties who never bothered to figure out how to live.

Most people my age were born under joyous circumstances: surrounded by family in the delivery room, someone gleefully capturing the birth with a video camera while everyone else crowds around the elated mother as she greets this blob of flesh for the first time. My birth, on the other hand, was an American Horror Story. The second I came out of my mother's vagina, I was blue and my brain was dying from lack of oxygen. The doctors told my parents that they had no way to predict the extent of my mental and physical impairments. There was no celebratory cake, no tender kisses—just pure “what the fuck just happened to our lives?” panic.

For the first few years, my parents lived in constant agony, not knowing if I was going to end up a total vegetable, let alone what other problems I was going to have. I didn't start walking until I was almost four years old, but apparently I've always been verbal. “You'd talk to anyone,” my mom tells me. “You wouldn't shut up. It was hard to find it annoying, though, because it meant that your brain was actually working!” Gee, if you think about it, cerebral palsy is an ironclad defense for being a pest. “Mom and Dad, you need to put up with me because I could've been the human equivalent of a blank page!”

I wish I could say I was an easygoing, disabled butterfly who understood all the hardships my parents faced in raising a child with cerebral palsy, but I wasn't. In fact, I tortured them. They just made it so easy for me—especially my mom. “Ryan, let me wipe your face. Ryan, let me tie your shoes. Ryan, let me climb into your lungs and breathe for you because the thought of you having to do anything at all brings me such great pain.” My entire generation was put under the care of a bunch of adults who would gladly frame their child's first solid bowel movement and shower them with accolades any time they didn't scream “FUCK YOU!” in their faces, so obviously the natural inclination was doubled when my mom gave birth to a kid who actually needed her permanent attention. I was fucked! She was fucked! My two siblings, who had been the king and queen of the castle until my high-maintenance ass showed up, were fucked!

Fearing that my mother and I were going to turn into a modern version of
Grey Gardens
, my father took it upon himself to become the anti–helicopter parent. With my mom, I always found a way out of doing something I didn't want to do, but my dad's bullshit detector was indestructible. He was immune to my manipulation and made sure I couldn't get away with anything, no matter how hard I protested or made my limp more pronounced. But whenever my dad laid down the law, my mother would try to lift it immediately. Take chores, for example. I'm pretty spastic, so sometimes when I would do something like use a broom at seven years old, I'd make an even bigger mess than there was to begin with. Instead of letting me just give up on it like everyone else would, my father would make sure I learned how to do it right—that is, until my mother would come waltzing in.

“What is this, Dennis?” my mom would bark, her face melting into a pool of sympathy as she saw me hopelessly trying to clean up something I had spilled on the floor.

“I'm teaching him how to use a broom, Karen!” my father would yell back. “He doesn't know how. Can you believe it?”

“Mommy,” I would whimper, “I can't do it. It's too hard, and Dad won't let me go until it's finished.”

“Did you hear that, Dennis? He can't do it! Now stop making him feel bad and let him go!”

“Yes, he can. He can't just walk away from everything without trying,” he'd yell. “Ryan, focus on the broom!”

“Ryan, come to me!” she'd beckon, her arms outstretched. I'd move toward her.

“Don't even think about it, mister! Get back here right now.”

“Don't listen to Daddy. Come to me!”

Sometimes my father would win and successfully force me to finish the chore. Sometimes he'd lose. No matter the outcome, though, my parents would end up furious at each other. Would you be surprised if I told you they filed for divorce when I was eight? No, of course you wouldn't, because everyone's parents are divorced now. Save for the occasional memory of my parents fighting over me, I don't even really remember mine being together. All I know is our family was in trouble before they'd split—we'd filed for bankruptcy and our house was in foreclosure. It was a place we were never able to afford, nestled in the hills of suburbia with a deck in the backyard that overlooked a sprawling barranca. We moved there because my sister was getting teased in our old neighborhood and my parents wanted to live somewhere she could make friends. It may seem like an extreme reaction to bullying, but this is a normal thing to do now. A child gets teased by her neighbor, so her parents sell the house and move into one they can't pay for. Duh.

I love my mom and dad, though. So much. My mom, in particular, was just born to be a mom. She's that good. Even though I've been financially independent from my parents for years, my mom and I share a bank account so she can write my checks and make sure my bills get paid on time. She also handles my taxes and deals with any issues I have with my health insurance. I tell myself that I let her do these things because it makes her feel needed, but I'm also just a spoiled brat who's used to having things done for him. And you'd think with all this codependency I would be calling my mom 24/7, but I'm not. In fact, when we do talk, the conversation usually goes something like this:

“Hi, honey,” my mom coos into the phone. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I say curtly. “Actually, I'm, uh, really busy. What's up?”

“Oh, just doing some housework. So today I was at the post office and this annoying woman was in front of me with a package, and you wouldn't believe—”

“Mom, I have to go. Sorry.”

“What? Why?”

“I'm swamped with work,” I tell her. I'm actually Googling pictures of Kirsten Dunst and Jake Gyllenhaal from when they were a couple in the early 2000s.

“You can't even talk to me for a second?”

“Uh, no.”

Then she starts to sound sad and then I get annoyed that she's sad and the conversation ends on a sour note. Then the strangest thing happens. I become racked with guilt and immediately want to call her back to say, “Oh my God, Mom. I love you so much. I'm sorry for that last conversation. Please finish your story about the woman in the post office. I must know how it ends!”

How does one go from feeling complete annoyance to overwhelming obsession in the click of a dial tone? A lot of my friends also have the same kind of contradictory relationship with their parents. We're
obsessed
and can't live without them. We're so happy that we have perspective now and can apologize for how badly we treated them when we were teenagers. But,
oh my God, they're calling me and I just can't deal with hearing their voice right now. I really was just looking forward to having an easy day with no drama, you know? Love them so much, though. I hope they still keep calling me so I can ignore it and feel loved!
My mother is my lifeline and I love her a scary amount, but sometimes when I talk to her, I can't help but feel like it's going at the pace of a Sofia Coppola movie.