But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.
I’d spent my life telling myself I didn’t need a mommy or a daddy. But now I was beginning to realize that this hunger isn’t childish—it is a universal, primal need. We all want to be taken care of, and that’s okay. The woman who appears to me when I meditate, in her soft, baggy clothes—she isn’t quite the same as a parent, and she never will be. But she takes me into her arms and whispers, “I want to love you.” I lean in and let her.
CHAPTER 35
Learning to need a family—to rely on them and give myself to them—was a skill I had to learn in order to date Joey.
Christmas was approaching, which meant that Joey and I needed to go to the mall (a sweater for his mom), Best Buy (a drone for his dad), Forbidden Planet (comics for his brother), CVS (a Whitman’s Sampler for his grandmother), Verameat (jewelry for his youngest sibling), and Sur La Table (cooking stuff for his other brother). And that was the bare minimum. We’d need to pick up at least ten other presents for aunts, uncles, and significant others along the way.
The fact that I was shuttling around town, spending my hard-earned cash on mom sweaters, was strange to say the least…because I had always hated Christmas.
I endured my first solo Christmas my senior year of high school after my dad left. I drove to a Christmas fair downtown and bought a hot dog on a stick. I stared at couples riding a snowflake-festooned Ferris wheel, children laughing on a shiny green Christmas train. And I thought, You all are so fucking stupid. Reindeer are stupid. Associating snowflakes with Christmas in California is stupid. Capitalism in general: STUPID. On my way out, I passed a street vendor, stole a large inflatable Santa (inexplicably attached to a stick), and proceeded to cry in my room for the rest of the night.
* * *
—
For a few years, I spent Christmases and Hanukkahs with friends’ families, but even though they were all very welcoming and kind, I couldn’t help but feel out of place. I’d watch loving parents catch their children as they passed through the kitchen and pull them into a hug. They’d whisper, “I love you, mijo,” or “When did you get so big, bubeleh?” They’d savor well-worn family stories at dinner, and afterward, my friends would jump into cuddle puddles with their siblings on the couch. It was all so beautiful. And it was excruciating, because it wasn’t mine.
Eventually, I stopped attending entirely. I tried to pretend that Christmas wasn’t real. I’d work, or paint, or watch DVDs, or take a hot bath. I’d treat myself to an elaborate meal or bring cheesecake to the dudes at the halfway house across the street in exchange for loosies and jokes. But eventually, at two a.m., I’d find myself listening to Death Cab’s “Someday You Will Be Loved” on repeat.
Christmas got way better when shrooms came into the picture; everyone else was celebrating Jesus, but I was the one getting really spiritual. Still, I tensed up after Thanksgiving, changed the channel if I heard “The Little Drummer Boy.” Took the long way to avoid seeing too many Christmas lights.
* * *
—
But all of that changed when I started dating Joey. Because Joey really, really loves Christmas.
We’d been seeing each other for only a few months when the holidays rolled around. I told him, “I’m not really into the Christmas Industrial Complex because that shit is for people with families.” He nodded, listening, but was suspiciously quiet. When I next visited his apartment, it was decked out—a pot roast on the stove, lights, garlands, and a bare tree next to a box of his parents’ ornaments. It was like I’d wandered into a Lifetime Christmas movie, and even though I usually turned my nose up at these things, there was something different this time: I wasn’t walking into someone else’s Christmas. It was all just for me.
A few days later, he handed me a hot chocolate and took me to a neighborhood famous for its Christmas lights. And a week after that, on Christmas Eve, he insisted I come to Queens for his family’s two-day Christmas celebration. When I arrived, his family smiled and introduced themselves to me, hugged me hello…and then his dad immediately brandished a wet, briny bag.
“Do you know how to make clams?”
“Um…yeah? Like, clams with white wine and garlic?”
“I dunno. Clams. I picked these up, no idea what to do with them.” He dropped the bag into my hands. “Here, you make ’em.”
It was the craziest Christmas I’d ever crashed. There were no quiet, warm snuggles while the parents took the food out of the oven in a timely manner. Instead, his little sibling started yelling that nobody understood them, his father went on a rant about the lamestream media, his mother couldn’t find her glasses and shuffled around bumping into things, the eggplant was embroiled in chaos and drama, and the dog shat on the floor. No, that last part’s not true. Since the kitchen was under construction, the dog shat on the enormous cardboard mat that was the floor. Instead of wiping it up, they cut a square around the poop with an X-Acto knife and kept moving. There was no room to be socially awkward because most social rules were out the window—and around the corner and maybe a few neighborhoods away. Because of the remodel, we all had to sit on the floor around the coffee table in the living room to eat, but the food was plentiful and good, and his family was hilarious and loving and so excited I was there and repeated it hastily every time they passed me on the way to clean up the next mess.