Plan B (8 page)

 

S
ometimes, if you are lucky and brave, you can watch someone who's met with serious illness or loss do the kind of restoration that I suspect we are here on earth to do. If you've ever seen David Roche, the monologist and pastor of the Church of 80% Sincerity, you may have already witnessed this process.

David and I met years ago through a friend we had in common. The first time we spoke was on the phone, and we talked about God for half an hour. David mentioned that he had a facial deformity, and I thought, Well, whatever, and we talked some more. Then he came to my
church, and it turned out he had one of the most severe facial deformities I'd ever seen.

He was born with a huge benign tumor on the bottom left side of his face; surgeons tried to remove it when he was very young. In the process, they removed his lower lip, and then gave him such extensive radiation that the lower part of his face stopped growing, and he was covered with plum-colored burns.

David is fifty-five now, with silvery hair and bright blue eyes.

I first saw him perform at a local community center, at a benefit for refugees in Kosovo. He was wearing a plum-purple dress shirt, which exemplifies the tender and jaunty bravery I have come to associate with him. He stepped out onstage before a hundred grown-ups and a dozen children, and stood smiling while people got a good look. Then he suggested we ask him, in a conversational tone and in unison, “David, what happened to your face?” When we did, he explained about the tumor, the surgery, and all those radiation burns.

He told of wanting to form a gang of the coolest disfigured people in the world, like the Phantom of the Opera, the Beast from
Beauty and the Beast,
Freddy
Krueger, and Michael Jackson. They'd go places as a group—bowling, or to a makeover counter at Macy's.

“People assume I had an awful childhood,” he continued. “But I didn't. I was loved and esteemed by my parents. My face may be unique, but my experiences aren't. I believe they are universal.”

Wouldn't you think that having a face like his totally messed with his adolescent sex life? Of course it did, he said. And he was stocky, too, a chubby little disfigured guy. But these things were not nearly as detrimental as having been raised Catholic, having been, as he put it, an incense survivor.

As he told his stories through a crazy mouth, a jumble of teeth, only one lip, and a too-large tongue, David's voice sounded not garbled but strangely like a burr, that of a Scottish person who'd just had a shot of novocaine.

“We with facial deformities are children of the dark,” he said. “Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: we can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society, and even to God.

“All those years, I kept my bad stories in the dark, but not anymore. Now I am stepping out into the light. And this face has turned out to be an elaborately disguised gift from God.”

David spoke of the hidden scary scarred parts inside us all, the soul disfigurement, the fear deep within us that we're unacceptable; and while he spoke, his hands moved fluidly in expressions that his face can't make. His hands are beautiful, fair, light as air, light as a ballet dancer's.

He described his first game of spin-the-bottle, when the girl who was chosen to kiss him recoiled in horror, and he said to her, debonairly, “You know you want me.” Then he admitted sheepishly that he didn't actually say that for twenty years; but in soul time, it's never too late. He told of loving a teenage girl named Carol, of how it took months to ask her out, and that when he did, she accepted. They went to the movies and afterward sat on his front porch; he kept trying to put his arm around her but couldn't quite do it, so they talked and talked and talked. He wanted to kiss her but was too shy to ask; he was afraid it was like asking her to kiss a monster. Finally she said, “I need to go home now,” and he said, “Carol, I want to kiss you,” and she said, “David, I thought you'd never ask.”

That was a moment of true grace, and from this experience, he built a church inside himself. There is no physical church, but his own life: both his performances and his work teaching people to tell their stories, their marvelous, screwed-up, and often hilarious resurrection stories. Voilà: a church.

“We in the Church of Eighty Percent Sincerity do not believe in miracles,” he said. “But we do believe that you have to stay alert, because good things happen. When God opens the door, you've got to put your foot in.

“Eighty percent sincerity is about as good as it's going to get. So is eighty percent compassion. Eighty percent celibacy. So twenty percent of the time, you just get to be yourself.”

It's such subversive material, so contrary to everything society leads us to believe—that if you look good, you'll be happy, and have it all together, and you'll be successful and nothing will go wrong and you won't have to die, and the rot won't get in.

In the Church of 80% Sincerity, you definitely don't have to look good, but you
are
supposed to meditate. According to David's instructions, you sit quietly with your eyes closed and you follow your breath in and out of your body, gently watching your mind. Your mantra
should go like this: “Why am I doing this? This is such a waste! I have so much to do! My butt itches. . . .” And if you stick to it, he promised, from time to time calm and peace of mind will intrude. After some practice with this basic meditation, you will be able to graduate to panic meditations, and then sex fantasy meditations. And meditations on what to do when you win the lotto.

When David insists you are fine exactly the way you are, you find yourself almost believing him. When he talks about unconditional love, he gives you a new lease on life, because the way he explains it, you may, for the first time, believe that even you could taste of this. As he explains it, in the Church of 80% Sincerity, everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with a shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. Instead of beating yourself up because you feel it only fleetingly, you should savor those moments when it appears. As David puts it, “We might say to our beloved, ‘Honey, I've been having these feelings of unconditional love for you for the last eight to ten seconds.' Or ‘Darling, I'll love you till the very end of dinner.' ”

David has been married to a beautiful woman named Marlena for the last few years. After listening to his lovely words, his magic, this doesn't seem at all strange. There
he is, standing in front of a crowd, and everyone can see that just about the worst thing that could happen to a person physically has happened to him. Yet he's enjoying himself immensely, talking about the ten seconds of grace he felt here, the ten seconds he felt there, how those moments filled him and how he makes them last a little longer. Everyone watching gets happy because he's giving instruction on how this could happen for them, too, this militant self-acceptance. He lost the great big outward thing, the good-looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brilliant mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue eyes, those beautiful hands.

The children, sitting in the front rows, get him right away. Maybe they don't have so many overlays yet, of armor and prejudice, so Spirit can reach out and grab them faster. Maybe it's partly that they're sitting so close, but whatever the reason, they gaze up at him as if he were a rock star. “I look different to you now, right?” he asked the kids that first time I saw him, when he was almost finished, and they nodded, especially the teenagers. To be in adolescence is, for most of us, to be facially deformed. David makes you want to help him build a fort under the table with blankets, because it looks like such fun when
he does it. He builds the fort, and then lets you lift the blankets and peek in, at him and at you. You laugh with recognition, with relief that your baggage and flaws are not vile, unmentionable. It's like soul aerobics.

“I've been forced to find my inner beauty,” he said in closing. “Doing that gave me a deep faith in myself. Eighty percent of the time. And that faith has been a window, so I can see the beauty in you, too. The light in your eyes. Your warmth. So thank you.”

There was thunderous applause, and he bowed shyly, ducking his head and then looking up, beaming at us all. He held his palms up as if about to give a benediction. His hands caught the light like those of the youngest child there.

 

I
need to put in a quick disclaimer so that when I say what I'm about to say, you will know that the truest thing in the world is that I love my son more than life itself. I would rather be with him, talk to him, and watch him grow than do anything else on earth. Okay?

So: I woke up one morning not long ago and lay in bed trying to remember whether, the night before, I had actually threatened to have his pets put to sleep, or whether I had only insinuated that I would no longer intercede to keep them alive when, because of his neglect, they began starving to death.

I'm pretty sure I only threatened not to intercede. But there have been other nights when I've made worse threats, thrown toys off the deck into the street, and slammed the door to his room so hard that things fell off his bookshelf. I have screamed at him with such rage for ignoring me that you would have thought he'd tried to set my bed on fire.

He is an unusually good boy at other people's houses. He is the one the other mothers want to have over to play with their children. At other people's homes, my child does not suck the energy and air out of the room. He does not do the same annoying thing over and over and over until his friends' parents ask him through clenched teeth to stop doing it. But at our house—
comment se dit?
—he fucks with me. He can provoke me into a state similar to road rage.

I have felt many times over the years that I was capable of hurting him. I have not done this yet. Or at any rate, I have only hurt him a little—I have spanked him a few times, yanked him, and grabbed him too hard. Through grace and great friends and sobriety, I have managed to stay on this side of the line, sometimes by the skin of my teeth, and, I should add, so far. But while I honestly grieve
for injured children, I know all too well how otherwise loving parents have not been able to toe that line.

It's godawful to get so mad at your child. It's miserable whenever it happens, but at least it makes more sense when they are babies and you are awake night after night. When Sam was a colicky baby, it was one thing to discuss my terrible Caliban feelings with friends because I was so exhausted and hormonal and clueless as to how to be a real mother that I believed anyone would understand. No one tells you when you're pregnant how insane you're going to feel after the baby comes, how pathological, how inept and out of control. Or how, when the child is older, you'll still sometimes feel exhausted, hormonal, clueless. You'll still find your child infuriating. And—I will just say it—dull.

A few mothers seem happy with their children all the time, as if they're sailing through motherhood, entranced. But up close and personal, you find that these moms tend to have little unresolved issues: they exercise three hours a day, or they check their husbands' pockets every night, looking for motel receipts. Because moms get very mad; and they also get bored. This is a closely guarded secret; the myth of maternal bliss is evidently so sacrosanct that we can't even admit these feelings to ourselves. But when
you mention the feelings to other mothers, they all say, “Yes, yes!” You ask, “Are you ever mean to your children?” “Yes!” “Do you ever yell so meanly that it scares you?” “Yes, yes!” “Do you ever want to throw yourself down the stairs because you're so bored with your child that you can hardly see straight?” “Yes, Lord, yes . . .”

So let's talk about this.

One reason I think we get so angry with our children is that we can. Who else is there that you can talk to like this? Can you imagine saying to your partner, “You get off the phone
now!
No,
not
in five minutes”? Or to a friend, “Get over here, right this second! The longer you make me wait, the worse it's going to be for you.” Or to a salesman at Sears who happens to pick up a ringing phone, “Don't you
dare
answer the phone when I'm talking to you.”

No, you can't. If regular people spotted your hidden, angry inside self, they'd draw back when they saw you coming. They would see you for what you are—human, flawed, more nuts than had been hoped—and they would probably not want to hire or date you. Of course, most people have such bit parts in your life that they're not around to see the whole erratic panoply that is you. But children, my God—attending to all their needs is so
physically and mentally exhausting and unrelenting that our blow-ups may be like working out cramps in our legs.

The tyranny of waking a sleepy child at seven a.m. and hassling him to get clothed and fed in preparation for school means you're chronically tired, resentful, and resented. In this condition, while begging him to put on socks, you are inevitably treated to an endless and intricate précis of
Rugrats
.

This is how Sam started telling me about one ten-minute patch of school day, while I was trying to watch the news: “So Alex says she didn't draw it, and then she goes like she did draw the picture herself, and then he goes like, ‘Oh yeah,' and then she goes like, ‘Yeah, I asked her to but she said I had to,' and then he goes like, ‘Oh, yeah, riiiight,' then I go . . .”

I am not an ageist: If, while I was watching the news,
Jesus
wanted to tell me in great detail how he runs the fifty-yard dash, I'd be annoyed with him, too: “See, most kids start out like this—the first step is a big one, like this—no, watch—and then the second is smaller, like this, and the next—no, watch, my child, I'm almost done—so see, what I do is, I start like everyone else—
watch
—but then my third step is like small, and the next one is bigger,
so like, this P.E. teacher who sees me do it goes, ‘Whoa, Lord, cool,' and then she goes . . .”

People who don't want children roll their eyes when you complain, because they think you brought this on yourself. The comedienne Rita Rudner once said that she and her husband were trying to decide whether to buy a dog or have a child—whether to ruin their carpets or their lives. People without children tend not to feel very sympathetic. But some of us want children—and what they give is so rich you can hardly bear it.

At the same time, if you need to yell, children are going to give you something to yell about. There's no reasoning with them. If you get into a disagreement with a regular person, you slog through it—you listen to the other person's position, needs, problems—and you arrive at something that is maybe not perfect, but you don't actually feel like hitting the person. But because we are so tired sometimes, when a disagreement starts with our children, we can only flail miserably through time and space and the holes between; and then we blow our top. Say, for instance, that your child is four and going through the stage when he will wear only the T-shirt with the tiger on it. With a colleague, who was hoping you'd come through with the professional equivalent of washing the
tiger T-shirt every night, you might be able to explain that you were up until dawn on deadline, or that you have a fever, and so did not get to the laundry. And the colleague might cut you some slack and understand that you simply hadn't had time to wash the tiger shirt, and besides, it's been worn four days in a row now. But your child is apt to—well, let's say, apt not to.

They may be drooling, covered with effluvia, trying to wrestle underpants on over their heads because they think they're shirts, but in the miniature war room of their heads, children know exactly where your nuclear button is. They may ignore you, or seem afflicted by hearing loss, or erupt in fury at you, or weep, but in any case, they're so unreasonable and capable of such meanness that you're stunned and grief-stricken about how much harder it is than you could have imagined. All you're aware of is the big windy gap between you, with your lack of anything left to give, and any solution whatsoever.

Friends without children point out the good news: that kids haven't, thank God, taken all their impulses and learned to disguise them subtly, because it's wonderful for people to be who they really are. And you can say only, “Isn't that the loveliest possible thought you're having?” Because it's not wonderful when kids ignore you, or are
being sassy and oppositional. It's not wonderful when you're coping well enough, feeding them, helping them get ready, trying to have them do something in their best interest—telling them, “Zip up the pants, honey, that's not a great look for you”—and then, under the rubric of What Fresh Hell Is This? the afternoon play date calls and cancels, and there's total despair and hysteria because your child is going to have to hang out alone with
you,
horrible you, and he's sobbing as if the dog had died, and you're thinking, “What about all those times this week when the play dates did work out? Do I get any
fucking
credit for that?” And it happens.
Kaboooom
.

It's so ugly and scary for everyone concerned that—well. One of my best friends, the gentlest person I know, once tore the head off his daughter's doll. And then threw it to her, like a baseball. I love that he told me about it when I was despairing about a recent rage at Sam. While I'm not sure what the solution is, I know that what doesn't help is the terrible feeling of isolation, the fear that everyone else is doing better than you.

What has helped me lately was to figure out that when we blow up at our kids, we only think we're going from zero to sixty in one second. Our surface and persona are so calm that when a problem begins, we sound in control
when we say, “Now honey, stop that,” or “That's enough.” But it's only an illusion. In fact, all day we've been nursing anger toward the boss or boyfriend or mother, yet since we can't get mad at nonkid people, we stuff it down. When the problem with your kid starts up, you're really beginning at fifty-nine, but you're not moving. You're at high idle already, yet not aware of how vulnerable and disrespected you already feel. It's your child's bedtime and all you want is for him to go to sleep so you can lie down and stare at the TV—and it starts up. “Mama, I need to talk to you. It's important.” So you go in and muster your patience, and you help him with his fears or his thirst, and you go back to the living room and sink into your couch, and then you hear, “Mama? Please come here one more time.” You lumber in like you're dragging a big dinosaur tail behind you, and you rub his back for a minute, his sharp angel shoulder blades. The third time he calls, you try to talk him out of needing you, but he seems to have this problem with self-absorption, and he can't hear that you can't be there for him. And you become wordless with rage. You try to breathe, you try everything, and then you blow. You scream, “Fucking dammit! What?
What? What?
Can't you leave me alone for
four
seconds?”

Now your child feels infinitely safer, much more likely to drift off to sleep.

Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does.

The fear is the worst part, the fear about who you secretly think you are, the fear you see in your child's eyes. But underneath the fear I keep finding resilience, forgiveness, even grace. The third time Sam called for me the other night, I finally blew up in the living room, and there was then a great silence in the house, silence like suspended animation: here I'd been praying for silence, and it turns out to be so charged and toxic. I lay on the couch with my hands over my face, shocked by how hard it is to be a parent. And after a minute Sam sidled out, still needing to see me, to snuggle with me, with mean me, needing to find me—like the baby spider pushing in through the furry black legs of the mother tarantula, knowing she's in there somewhere.