You could tell that my dad never fully recovered from that loss (and it wasn’t his last). My sister and I called him “sad dad”—underneath the exuberance there was a towering melancholy. I sometimes told people my dad reminded me of Robin Williams, and they would assume I meant the drive to entertain, the old showbiz patter. But it was really that ever-present Pig-Pen cloud of kind-eyed sadness.
My dad had four wives; my mom was the last. I think about how much faith it must have taken to keep going—to insist, over and over again, “No! I really think it’s going to work this time!” Plenty of people are irretrievably jaded after one divorce, let alone three. My dad went for it four times, and the last one stuck. You could frame that as irresponsibility or womanizing or a fear of being alone, but to me it was a distillation of his unsinkable optimism. He always saw the best in everyone—I imagine, likewise, he stood at the beginning of every romance and saw it unspooling in front of him like a grand adventure, all fun and no pain. “Oh boy!” I can hear him saying each time. “Isn’t she just terrific?” The idea that a relationship is a “failure” simply because it ends is a pessimist’s construct anyway. Dad loved lots of people, and then found the one he loved the best.
It made sense that he was so drawn to magic and escapism, just like me. His life was beautiful and marked with loss; maybe not more than anyone else’s, but when you only expect the best, heartbreak is a constant.
My mom, by contrast, never liked fantasy. When I was little, this made as much sense to me as not liking gravity, or Gordon from Sesame Street. “I just like things that are true,” she’d say. “Strong people fighting against the elements.” I grilled her so often on why she wasn’t obsessed with dragons LIKE A NORMAL PERSON that it became kind of a catchphrase in our house—strong people fighting against the elements.
That made sense too. My mom’s parents came from Norway: Grandma Clara first, the eldest of ten, when she was a little girl and the family homesteaded in North Dakota. We visited the old dirt farm once during a family reunion: just a hole and the remnants of the foundation and some dead grass and the big, red sun. In summer the North Dakotan prairie is flat and brown. In winter, flat and white. “The elements,” I imagine, had a seat at the table like family.
When the Depression hit and my great-grandparents just couldn’t feed so many mouths, they shipped eighteen-year-old Clara back to Norway to raise two of her little sisters on her own. While Grandpa Rechenmacher’s early death shaped my dad’s life like a tide, absent mothers tugged on my mom’s side. My great-aunt Eleanor, one of the little girls sent off to the old country, requested that “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” be played at her funeral, and it was.
Clara met and married my grandfather, Ole, who grew up on a farm called Gunnersveen, just down the lake. His father died in the flu pandemic of 1918, when Ole was nine. “The boys didn’t have much of a childhood,” my mom told me once, when she e-mailed to scold me about washing my hands during the 2009 swine flu scare (subject line: “GERMS!”*). In 1945, during the Nazi occupation, Grandpa Ole and his brother were among twelve resistance fighters who skied out into the dark hills to retrieve packages parachuted by an Allied spy plane—bundles of weapons, radio equipment, provisions. Strong people, elements, blah blah blah, the whole thing.
Ole and Clara married and moved to Seattle and raised seven children; my mom, Ingrid, was number six. Clara kept house—canning fruit, sewing the family’s clothes, a pot of coffee perpetually perking for anyone who dropped by—and Grandpa Ole was a carpenter, never quite mastering English because, privately, he always just wanted to go home. They took in strays; sometimes as many as thirteen people lived in that three-bedroom, one-bath house; the kids shared beds and bathwater. “My trick was to help my mother in the kitchen,” my mom always says when someone compliments her cooking. “It was hard to get one-on-one time otherwise, she was so busy.” (Maybe that’s why my mom stopped at one child herself.) She speaks of the cramped chaos with pride. Her ability to get by is part of her identity.
My mother is aggressively competent. She was an RN for forty years—yes, she will look at your infected toe—and her rigid expectations about the Correct Way to Do Things border on disordered (motto: “If you clean your bathroom every day, you never have to clean your bathroom”). When she and my dad fell in love, he was playing the piano in bars every night, living off credit cards, occasionally accepting gin and tonics as currency, and had decorated his apartment entirely in zebra-themed bric-a-brac—due, no doubt, to some passing, impetuous whim. (“Hey, zebras are trick!”) By the time I was born, a few years later, they were financially stable, he had a day job at an ad agency, and the zebra merch was limited to one vase, two paintings, a set of directors’ chairs, and a life-sized F. A. O. Schwarz stuffed zebra named Simon. You know, a reasonable amount.
He wrote a song for my mom called “I Like You So Much Better (Than Anyone I’ve Ever Loved Before)”—“Time was I took a lot of chances/on passions and romances/but you’re the one who helped me get my feet back on the floor/That’s why I like you so much better/than anyone I’ve ever loved before.”
Dad was the entertainer, but I’m funny because of my mom. She has a nurse’s ease with gallows humor, sarcastic and dry; she taught me to cope with pain by chopping it up into bits small enough to laugh at. (My dad would go full Swamps of Sadness when anything went wrong. If the printer ran out of toner, he couldn’t speak above a whisper for days.) When I was little, a neighbor opened a small temping agency called Multitask and, in an early stab at guerrilla marketing, purchased a vanity plate that read, “MLTITSK.” Around the house, my mom called him “M. L. Titsky.” Later, just “Mr. Titsky.” Empirically, that’s a great riff.
Once, at a block party, she forgot that Mr. Titsky wasn’t actually his name, and introduced him as such to a new neighbor. Mr. Titsky, it turned out, was not a comedy connoisseur.
My dad took care of unbridled enthusiasm and unconditional encouragement—everything was “Killer!” “WowEE!” “You can be anything you want to be!”—while my mom’s role was, “Not today,” “Hmmm,” and “Not if you don’t learn how to balance a checkbook.”* In fact, she recently told me that part of her parenting philosophy was to make sure I knew I couldn’t be anything.
“Well, you can’t,” she said. “I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”
If my dad supported us with words, head in the clouds, my mom supported us with structure, roots in the ground. That degree of harmonious opposition has to fulfill some cosmic archetype. (Not that my mom would allow such arcane silliness to be discussed in her house.)
Between those far-flung poles—escapism vs. realism, glamour vs. austerity, wild hope vs. Nordic practicality—I grew.
People say to me all the time, “I couldn’t do what you do; I couldn’t cope with trolls,” but it’s just part of my job. I bet they could if they had to.
Once in a while, though, I wonder: Is it more than that? Did I somehow stumble into a job—one that didn’t even exist when I was born in 1982—for which I am supremely, preternaturally suited? I do fight monsters, just like I always dreamed, even if they are creeps in basements who hate women instead of necromancers in skull-towers who hate lady knights. Without my mom, would I have the grit to keep going? Without my dad, would I have the idealism to bother?
The Day I Didn’t Fit