So we're in the middle of the 2nd Story Festival, and recently Metromix on CLTV stopped by and did a little interview with me and our producer, Nick. Apparently this airs tonight at 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 and midnight.
For those of you who haven't seen 2nd Story, it's important to note that we tell stories in wine bars. Which is why I'm drinking during this interview--not because I'm a lush or anything.
The fact that Nick and Pogo's glasses are full and mine is empty--that's indicative of me being a lush.
Last December I told this story at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I was almost eight months pregnant, and the story’s about how when I was nineteen I saw a psychic who told me there was something wrong with my reproductive system. “Broken,” she said. I’d never told that to anyone, partly because I felt like a jackass for even going to some store-front charlatan and partly ‘cause I didn’t want to jinx myself: as soon as you say it aloud, it’s going to happen, right? Like when I said that my puppy was SO good, he only chewed HIS toys, and when I got home that night he’d eaten Christopher’s iPod.
Anyhow, I felt pretty damn powerful, standing in front of that crowd at the MCA with my big ol' stomach, a big SCREW YOU to the past decade of that woman’s words buzzing in the back of my head. “Obviously, she was mistaken,” I said, all sarcastic, Caleb kicking the hell out of me (this was before he showed up, before we met him and he became Caleb. Back then we called him The Ninja. Or Goose, as in “Talk to me, Goose,” from Top Gun, back when Tom Cruise was cool).
So imagine how hilarious it was to find out, a few weeks ago, that I have to have surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.
F’ing PSYCHIC.
ONE
When I was eighteen, I stayed in a tent on Martha’s Vineyard with some squatters. I was there for the weekend with a friend and I met one of them, Kevin, on the beach. It was so beautiful—the sand hot beneath my feet, my hair tasting like salt after swimming, the blue blue ocean blending with the blue sky so you didn’t know where one finished and the other began and, okay, fine, there may have been mushrooms involved and blah blah he invited me to stay with him, which to my naive mind meant, “at his apartment,” but, no, he and some friends had pitched their tents in the middle of the woods and had been there for two months. I should point out that A. I was young and green and starved for adventure and B. Kevin was very good-looking. Anyhow, I went back to their “camp,” and that night we all sat around the fire cooking green peppers on sticks. Like marshmallows. There were maybe ten of us—Kevin, his friends, and various people they’d found on the beach, and one of the guys, Eric, looked at me over the joint he was rolling and said, “I have a glass testicle.”
Can you imagine how I’d react NOW to such a line? While I'd like to say something very caustic, it'd probably be more like, "Oh my gosh are you HITTING on me!" because when you've got an infant it's easy to forget that strangers may find you attractive, plus these days I'm in bed by eight so I can't imagine even being somewhere where such a line would be delivered, at least not without Christopher with me, and were some guy to approach me we'd probably both start giggling uncontrollably. But back THEN? I wanted to be cooool, and there was a LOT of pot, and Kevin was VERY good-looking. “Really?” I said to Eric, and he started telling me how he lost the testicle in the first place which, now, fifteen years later, I wish I’d been paying attention ‘cause it was probably a BITCHIN’ story (regardless of whether or not it was true) but I was too busy trying to focus my vision on something stationary. And, of course, looking at Kevin. He was VERY good-looking. I do remember, at one point, watching Eric talk—he had red hair and a splotchy beard, was very dirty (not sex dirty, dirty dirty. He lived in the woods) and very animated, his hands dancing all over the place—and I thought: What if his glass testicle, like, breaks? And later: That would, like, SUCK! and then, hours later: Is just one testicle enough?
This is what I thought of when my doctor told me about this cyst. It’s pretty big, apparently, and while she thinks she can just go in there and remove it, there’s a chance it’s wrapped around my ovary and she’ll have to take that out, too.
Since we’ve had Caleb, everyone and their mother has asked me, “When are you having the next one?” and I’ve been all hahahahahaha—BITE ME because the first two months of this little boy’s life so thoroughly kicked my ass I didn’t know if I could handle a round two. But he’s THREE months old—those first two months were like five thousand years ago—and now? Now it's so good that sometimes I can’t breathe. He knows me, and he giggles and bounces and reaches for me, and you can see his little brain working in the crazy, scrunched up faces he makes, and I know that I would do this again and again, no matter how hard, just for those little faces.
So when my doctor said I might lose an ovary, my mind immediately went here: I won’t be able to have another kid. Which is ridiculous, I know. I’ve got TWO ovaries. TWO! And the medical odds of getting pregnant are just as good with one (per my doctor when I started freaking out in her office). I just need to be realistic about all of this.
But people. Realism has never been my strong suit.
TWO
I wasn’t going to blog about any of this, no way no how. Ovaries are on the list of THINGS THE INTERNET DOESN’T NEED TO KNOW, right up there with the color of my puke after that night in New Orleans. But then I read this entry on dooce, about how she gets flack for writing about her daughter, and the thing is, in those first two months of Caleb’s life, I went back through dooce’s archives and read everything she wrote about Leta’s birth and the immediate thereafter. Those stories helped me through some pretty intense moments by either making me laugh, showing me how great it was going to be if I could just hold out a little longer, or making me feel like I was part of this network of women in the thick of it, who know that while motherhood is the greatest of all joys, it’s also the greatest of all WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING HERE.
This is why I tell stories. This is why I read books—to learn about different lives so I can see how similar we really are. To connect with people. To, maybe, make one-ovaried women everywhere feel a part of a greater something (I’m hearing the Superfriends theme playing in the background right now. Anyone?).
THREE
My doctor drew a picture to explain what she’d be doing: here is your uterus. These are fallopian tubes. This is your right ovary (she drew a blob the size of a dime), this is your left (this blob was the size of an orange). I had Caleb in an ergobaby front pack during this discussion and he was fast asleep, his face squashed into my chest. In the past, I’ve been a fairly paranoid person (Christopher is reading this thinking, FAIRLY? Or else he’s thinking, Are you REALLY writing about your ovaries on the INTERNET? Or else, Way to go, baby, I’m making you a KILLER martini when I get home. Or two or five). In the past, I dealt not-so-well with the stress. Had I been looking at pencil sketches of my inflamed ovary BEFORE Caleb, it might’ve induced a heart attack is what I’m saying. But now, with this baby breathing into me, everything is calm. Everything is relaxed. I’ll get the cyst out next week, it’s all good, my kid is healthy and my husband is hot—life is pretty goddamn good.
And that psychic? She can go fuck herself.
I’ve never told this to anyone—I don’t just mean to a roomful of strangers, I mean ANYONE, not even my husband, mostly because the whole thing is so completely ridiculous but also—I was scared I might jinx myself, like even whispering the words would screw me in the greater cosmic order.
Okay, here goes: When I was nineteen years old a psychic told me my ovaries were broken. Clearly she was mistaken—the proof is right now kicking me in the bladder and if I can get through this story without stopping to pee than I deserve a standing ovation, people—anyhow, the ridiculous part is: I’ve been walking around for over a decade wondering WHAT IF. What if I can’t have a kid?
It’s a completely irrational assessment—all my goods are in order, medically speaking. In fact, when I was twenty-five and especially poor, the doctor at the free clinic suggested I sell off my eggs. “You’re an ideal candidate, Megan,” she told me. “White, blonde and healthy with a graduate degree, you could ask top dollar.” I was on the table in the paper robe, no idea how to respond ‘cause 1) there were so many things wrong with that comment I didn’t know where to begin 2) I’m never sure how to talk to doctors when I’m naked and 3) I didn’t think my “top dollar” eggs worked because of some two-bit storefront psychic which is so STUPID! I don’t even believe in the paranormal. The astrological. The Universe has a greater plan for us all blah blah take a bath and get a job, that’s what I always thought. Until I sat across from that frizzy-haired bitch of a gypsy who told me I’d never have kids.
I wound up there because of my college roommate, this seventeen-year-old deadhead fuitloop who played Indigo Girls on repeat. Also, she owned a drum. With which she went “drumming,” I’m telling you, the girl was a 3D stereotype: Birkenstocks—check—gauzy skirts—check—homeade beads of femo clay—check—in her dred locks—check check.
“I’m Nancy,” she said the day we met, both of us lugging suitcases into the dorm, “but you can call me Persephone.”
“No I can’t,” I told her, ‘cause if I did I’d asphyxiate on my own vomit. This was a phrase I used often at nineteen, always with a scoff after the “vomit”, like I’m gonna asphixiate on my own vomit SCOFF. I’d learned that word from the movie Heathers, where Winona Ryder is all dark and angsty, with too much eyeliner and Sylvia Plath? I wanted to BE the Heathers Winona Ryder, which meant a girl like me and a girl like Nancy sharing a dorm room was enough to “fuck me gently with a chainsaw.”
For six months I endured her tarot cards and rain sticks, the Celtic runes and power crystals and ying yang balls, dream catchers, hemp African handbags Vegan cookies wheatgrass and alters to Shiva but the absolute WORST was: she had a dirty boyfriend. Not dirty like SEX dirty. Dirty like the man didn’t believe in showering—something about natural human oils and masculine essence—bottom line: he stank, plus he and Nancy had these ridiculous conversations like, “I love you Persephone.” “I love you, too, Dawid”—he’d changed the v in David to a w ‘cause of some Hebrew Sun God or whatever, I don’t know, and he’d say, “Not only do I love you, Persephone, you ARE love,” and she’d say, “because of you,” and I’d puke all over myself ‘cause dorm rooms at BU are like two feet wide so my bed was practically on TOP of them which, it turns out, Da-WEED would’ve actually been down with ‘cause he was one of those dirty Free-Love hippies, like we should all love each other and take off everyone’s pants! Turns out there were all sorts of girls on campus who not only did he love, they WERE love, and when Nancy found out that precious fact, she played Tori Amos for two straight weeks.
Which made me want to die.
This is how I wound up at the psychics. Had I been in my right mind, it never would’ve happened, but I was so brain-dead from the “But what if I’m a mermaid in these jeans of his with her name still on ‘em” that when Nancy lifted her face off the tye-dyed tapestry and said, “I need to know if we’ll still be together in another life!” I said, OKAY FINE!—without knowing what I was getting myself into.
The place was called Spiritual Energy Readings—some Sherpa friend of Nancy’s told her about it —and it was the laaast place I’d expect to connect with the greater power of the Universe. There were no candles. No bead curtains. No crystal balls or black cats or bloody chicken bones, just a second floor storefront not unlike the crack houses on Law and Order: nasty carpet, a couple folding card tables, and a blinking neon sign that said FORTUNES BY CONTESSA.
I shot Nancy my are you fucking kidding me look, but when faith in the Earth Mother’s Taurus was wavering in someone else’s Libra, the hippie requires a guide to again find her spiritual path. The fact that Nancy’s guide was not the Crystal Goddess of the North, but rather a short, fat, forty-something woman with frizzy hair, too much jewelry and a Led Zeppelin T-Shirt was irrelevant. Nancy took one look at Contessa, and burst into tears.
Contessa nodded slowly and lit a Kool. “Ah,” she said. “You have problem.”
Nancy’s red puffy eyes widened in amazement: she actually thought this woman had just stared into the very depths of her soul. “I DO have problem!”
Of COURSE you have problem! I wanted to yell, but was, of course, too busy asphyxiating on my own vomit so instead I watched as Nancy crumbled into a lawn chair, dropped a twenty on the folding table and spent the next half hour feeding this little Orc of a woman all the information necessary to guess her whole life story, as in:
“I just miss him so much!”
“Ah, there is man.”
“There IS man!”
“And this man … he has left?”
“He HAS left!”
“There is other woman?”
There is seven other woman at last count, I thought, but Nancy was crying again, getting snot up in her dredlocks. This went on for a long time: I remember Contessa chain-smoked Menthols. She excused herself twice to answer the phone. She dealt a tarot deck with the same speed and efficiency as my cousin Paul the poker shark, and somehow—in the end—she made my squirrely-ass roommate feel better.
“I don’t know how to thank you!” Nancy gushed, reaching into her free-trade purse for more cash. That’s when Contessa lit another Kool and pointed at me.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You come,” she said.
“No thank you.”
“I said COME.”
“And I said NO.”
Looking back on it now, I wonder if she DID have some kind of psychic gift—or maybe her other job was bartending and she could just read people really well, whatever the case, she leaned back in her chair and said the one thing in the greater Universe that could’ve made me stay: “I see. You are afraid.”
Had someone told Heathers Winona Ryder she was afraid, she’d of made them drink Draino, and while I was not YET that tough, I was on my way, dammit, no way no how was I afraid. I sat down in the lawn chair and took a Kool out of that pack, I used HER zippo to light it, and dragged deep. I was going to say BRING IT ON CONTESSA but I didn’t smoke so instead I concentrated on not coughing.
She looked at my palms first, and gave me the usual: you’re strong willed, you’ve traveled far, you’ll give the world great things blah blah it was textbook predictable: I kept expecting her to bust pout with, "There is great curse on your family, come back with two thousand dollar and I lift it with the innards of goat." It was when she switched to the tarot cards that things got weird: she spread five out in front of me—cups, wands, knight of something, I don’t remember—she stared at them for a really long time, and then she said—
“Oh.”
It’s those single syllables that’ll kill you: Your dentist says OOPS. Your pregnancy test says PLUS. Your psychic says OH.
“It could be nothing,” she said.
But I looked at her face and I knew it was something.
I thought of Heathers Winona Ryder, at the end of the movie when she’s all strong and tough: she wouldn’t just sit here. She’d grab a switchblade out of her Doc Marten and slam it through this woman’s hand. Then she’d say something very witty and obscene involving household appliances and get the hell out of there, down to the sidewalk and back into the world where free will reigned and fate didn’t reside in some fifty cent novelty store crystal. Stand up, I told myself, stand up and get out of here ‘cause you don’t believe in this stuff anyhow—but the thing is, all of a sudden I did.
I imagined all the things that could be behind that OH—like maybe I’d die tomorrow, maybe I’d kill someone tomorrow, maybe everyone would be killed tomorrow over something I said or did or thought—"TELL ME,” I said to Contessa, and it wasn’t me being tough, it was me being scared.
I don’t remember exactly how she said it—something about my middle or my insides or my “lady parts”—but she did use the word BROKEN. She said, “You are broken.”
Had this woman been my doctor, then the fear I’ve been carrying around for the past decade would be logical. I could understand that panicky WHAT IF feeling as I held my friends’ new baby, or whispered with my husband about our Someday Far off in the Future Children or, seven months ago, taking a pregnancy test in the public restroom at the Uncommon Ground. Maybe some of you have had that experience? Waiting the three minutes between peeing on the stick and your whole life changing?
As the first minute passed, I thought about myself at nineteen: I wore Doc Martens and Fishnets, I lived in a different place every six months and I THOUGHT I knew everything. Now, I have a home, a husband I’m so crazy about I can’t even breathe sometimes and I’m SURE I know… one or two things.
As the second minute passed, I thought about how I wanted this kid so fuckin’ bad I could probably explode this bathroom with the sheer power of my brain: bricks would fly off the wall, plumbing would rip up from the floor and I’d be left sitting on the toilet amidst the rubble and dust, staring at that little plastic stick.
It was after the third minute, though, that I got it—Nancy and Contessa and crystal balls and all of it—because in spite of all my non-belief, there must really be some greater power in the Universe. The proof is right now kicking me in the bladder.
My stepbrother Greg and sister-in-law Mary just had a little girl, Olive, which A. makes me officially an Aunt (which I never knew I'd be, 'cause I'm an only child, and Christopher is an only child, but this is 2008, and there are all sorts of definitions for family. Blood or marriage or years or love, and, yes, when my friends get around to having babies I'll have nieces and nephews all over the place [I'm not going to call any of you out, like I'm your mother saying WHERE ARE MY GRANDCHILDREN, but you know who you are coughcoughdialottamandajeffmichael whoops! Apparently I DID call you out! My bad!], but Olive is officially my first and B. I get to buy cute little girl clothes (NOT pink, Mary, I know) (Dear Children's Fashion Designers: What is UP with all the cute girls clothes and not so much for the boys? Can you please make something that doesn't have a soccer ball or a truck stenciled on it? Thanks very much) (that said, I might have accidentally bought these for Caleb which he can't wear for a year at least, but, I mean, come ON! Are you DYING of the cuteness?).
Dear Olive,
You live far away in Portland, so we can't rush over to give you kisses, or smoke cigars with your dad, or hold you for a while so your mom can take a nap (or drink a martini or two or five. Later, of course, when she's ready). But know how much we love you, and how excited we are to meet you. Maybe at Christmas we'll get you and Caleb lots of cardboard boxes from the grocery store and build some forts, and when you come to Chicago we'll go to Baby Loves Disco. I know your dad said I have to keep Caleb away from you (since you two aren't related by blood, and your dad doesn't trust boys because he's a boy himself. Also, he's from Alaska, and is going to be one of those big scary dads with a shotgun telling you you can't date til you're thirty [I know a thing or two about having a dad with a shotgun, Olive. Your Grandpa Darc once passed out this sheet titled Application to Date My Daughter (although, in his defense, the guy he gave it to was pretty nasty), and he once took your Uncle Christopher out "rabbit hunting." What I'm saying is, if your dad won't let that boy you like--the one with the dreamy eyes--talk to you on the phone or make you mix tapes, you call up Aunt Megan and I'll tell you how to sneak out the back window, 'kay? Don't tell your dad I said that. Don't tell your grandpa I said that, either) but that's not for many, many years, til the two of you are big, listening to awful pop music and ignoring your parents, and there's all sorts of fun we'll all have between then and now. I can't wait to get started!
Tell your mom to be nice to herself, okay?
Much love,
Your Aunt and Uncle and Caleb (Caleb can't talk yet but if he could he'd say you're a doofus).
So Friday I told a story at the Goodman—
Context for the above sentence:
Friday was Looptopia, an all-night arts Festival in Chicago’s downtown loop district. It’s supposedly modeled after those White Night parties in Europe, where there are bands and street performers on every corner, and all the businesses stay open and put on some sort of show, just art art art all the time, trippy wild art involving lots of costumes and floats and glow-in-the-dark stuff, sort of like a Redmoon spectacle (Dear Redmoon: I really miss your Halloween parties in Logan Square, with the fire dancers and face paint and puppets and beautiful, creepy craziness. Can you start doing those again? I’d really like Caleb to experience them. Thank you) but multiplied times 100,000 people all night long.
(Was Looptopia like that? I’m guessing no—I can’t really judge, since I just wandered around til about ten. What I saw was ONE: Rain. Rain that fell like a faucet, and, at one time, fell HORIZONTALLY. Not particularly conducive to an outdoor arts fest and TWO: High school kids hanging out past their bedtime. Granted, were I still in high school, I‘m sure I would’ve loved Looptopia. I could hang out ALL NIGHT LONG! In URBAN OUTFITTERS! And SMOKE CIGARETTES! And get so-and-so’s big brother to buy me vodka and mix it with Red Bull in front of the Walgreens on Washington and Dearborn! And make fun of the art! And make fun of other PEOPLE! And feel totally in my element ‘cause there were a thousand other high school kids JUST LIKE ME EVERYWHERE I LOOKED! What I DIDN’T see a lot of was ART, so I got bored pretty quick and met my friend Aimee for a drink. Had there been more time, we would’ve checked out some specific shows (I heard the Game Show Show from Strawdog was amazing, and the Miss Looptopia Drag Pageant). But there wasn’t more time, because we had to get to the Goodman).
This year, 2nd Story was invited to perform at The Goodman Theatre for Looptopia—specifically with material related to The Goodman—so Ric and Miller and I wrote some stories with DJ Miles Beyond. And had a blast. Stories, wine and a thousand people? Come ON.
Emotional response to the above sentence:
THE GOODMAN THEATRE! ME! THAT PLACE IS LIKE, CLASSY! REAL ACTORS ACT THERE! IT’S FANCY! I WEAR PAJAMAS MOST DAYS AND EAT PEANUT BUTTER!
Continuation of the above sentence:
So anyhow, last Friday I told a story at the Goodman. It was about how, ever since I played Jet Girlfriend #4 in West Side Story in high school, standing at the back of the stage watching Maria give her final monologue, I wanted to be an actor. But since I’m not any good at acting, I dated actors instead (true story, folks. OH SO TRUE).
The Goodman drew up a little program for the event, and asked me the title of the story. This was tricky because I suck at titles. In the end, it was Becoming Maria, though what I wanted to call it was MEGAN MAKES A VERY GREAT ASS OF HERSELF. ON PURPOSE, OF COURSE, BUT AN ASS NEVERTHELESS. Because in this story, I sang lots of show tunes, yes, and I can’t sing for shit, no, but the real moment was my performance of Maria’s final monologue. First of all, I don’t DO monologues. Second, Midwestern white-girl me has no business touching a Latina anything, so it ended up being me doing Natalie Wood doing Maria, which means it was horrible and campy and stupid and great. I anticipated the crowd staring at me like I was absolutely insane, so the line immediately following Maria’s monologue (“How many can I kill, Chino, and still have one bullet left for me?”) was, “The crowd stared,” ‘cause I thought it would be funny that they’d be staring and then I’d say, “They stared,” ha ha ha ha!—yeah.
Except they didn’t stare.
They cheered.
And, finally, after years of adolescent angst and twenty-something masochism, I’ve learned the joy of self-deprecation.
ME: So what are you going to do this year?
CHRISTOPHER: ???
ME: When you were twenty-six, you started your own business and had a kid.
ME: When you were twenty-five, you got married and bought a house.
ME: When you were twenty-four, you got a dog and a grown-up job.
ME: When you were twenty-three, you finished college and spent the year in Prague.
ME: What are you going to do this year, now that you’re twenty-seven?
CHRISTOPHER: (thinks) I’m going to relax.
