On Siblinghood, or Why I'm Happy for My Nephew Today

The end of February has always meant a slew of birthday celebrations. My mom, my brother, and my grandma filled the last three days of that month. Now Gare is the only one I have left, so this year has been a little sad for me. At the same time, I recently got the happy news from said brother that I will be an auntie a second time. Yes, my darling beloved nephew Jameson is about to get his first sibling. So on the occasion of Gary Stewart Jr.’s 45^th birthday, I’m realizing how lucky I am to have him and reflecting on what this means for young J.

I’ve extolled the virtues of only childhood often, and not just because both my nephews-in-law, Owen and Wes, and my step-niece Kenison, are only children. As a younger sibling, I experienced many of the typical japes and hurts that one can expect from the elder, some of which I’ve blocked from memory I’m sure. I retain the memory of Gare practicing his golf swing on one of my baby dolls for instance. And I am to this day self-conscious of eating in front of people (not just my husband, whose misophonia makes the sound of chewing intolerable.) When I plotted to run away to my grandparents’ farm in the twilight hours, he drew me a map. But I also remember consistently and intentionally making his life difficult, mostly through tattling. He shot a dark-eyed junco with his bb gun once for instance, and I just couldn’t wait to tell our mother. She didn’t even have time to take her coat off. And over a junco, a twittery ugly bird that looks like a lump of coal in the snow, he lost his only gun.

Gare with Tucker's young usurper Bailey

Whoever and whatever the newbie is, I feel for Jameson. Imagine: you are the center of your parents’ and grandparents’ lives. All their love and attention is focused squarely and generously on you. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, that love and attention is cut in half…half! For a while, maybe only a third remains, because in the beginning, this usurper is helpless. Now mom and dad aren’t as available, aren’t as responsive to your every desire. This interloper is cuter, newer, and in some cases, suffers from some health problem that makes them a constant concern that never goes away, and you all have to make sacrifices. You were top dog and now you’re second fiddle. This Funny or Die video featuring James Franco and his little brotherDave comes to mind.

Dan's sisters, the lovely twins Jen and Jodi

Dan's gorgeous sister Morgan

But since my mother’s death I’m realizing that having siblings isn’t about enriching your childhood, it’s about enriching your adulthood. I don’t know how I could go through this without Gare. After mom passed, and I sat numb and gutted in the hospice room, my brother’s silent arrival was like a shot of morphine. Never have I been so relieved to see someone in a suit. Because as supportive as Dan was and has been, he could never know what I’m going through like Gare can.

And that’s the point. When you get older, your sibling is the one friend who knows you like no other possibly can. I don’t mean feelings and so forth, because the Stewarts don’t really do that. I mean that only your sibling knows details about you the way a good fiction writer knows her characters. I remember all Gare’s school pictures, in which he often looked stoned, though he wasn’t. I remember the feathered 80’s hair. His first car: a red Ford pickup. That he played Star Frontiers and wrote his own comic, a parody of Star Blazers, about the space wars with the cootie empire. That, for whatever reason, he had perfect attendance all through high school. That, like me, he body-rocked while laying in bed. (I thought it was just the two of us that did that for a long, long time. What a relief that it’s actually a thing, which I found out when I was 30.)

I tell my students to imagine their character’s childhood bedroom. Gare had set up an entire Star Wars universe in his, complete with the Death Star and the Degobah System. I often played there instead of my own room: played school with his action figures (Obi Wan was the teacher of course) and listened to his tapes, the Cars and ZZ Top weirdly. A lot of brothers wouldn’t let their little sisters play in their room. A lot of brothers wouldn’t have anything to do with their little sisters. But Gare let me be the girl character (fur coat-clad bimbo usually) when he played big time wrestling with our cousins. He taught me to clean fish. To dribble and shoot a basketball. To tell time and count by fives (because that’s how clocks were.) We stayed up late on Christmas to prove Santa wasn’t real and let our old people know the jig was up. We made tapes, a sort of podcast for the 80’s, of  our own radio show on a station we called WButtFartee (WBFRT?).

Brother from another mother: my stepbro Brad

Now, when Gare and I get drunk together, I feel like a child again, and I remember what it was like to be happy – the kind of happiness that a childhood in the country creates, especially a pre-internet, pre-cable country childhood. With a sibling, there are images, things you recall that no one else can imagine. The sound and smell of those old dome popcorn-makers. The smell of the inside of the tent we slept in on the lot next to our house. The smell of our grandparents living room. Grandma’s talcum powder. Algae. Fishing lures. The sounds of Space Invaders and Galaga. Nose plugs. Playing baseball with sprinkler heads for bases. New asphalt. Things from trees that stick to your feet. Giant beach fires fueled with gasoline. The sound of water lapping against barrels under a raft. Making ice balls by dipping snow in a little whispering brook. Waiting for the bus in the dark. Tall trees in the wind. Stepping on a stump buried beneath sand in shallow water. The chill when you catch a snake slithering past on the surface. The fumes from a speedboat engine. What a vrusk and a yazirian are. What a wave motion gun is. What a bullhead is.

Gare rocks the party

As brothers go, I was lucky. Gare had an ATC that he used to pick me up from the bus stop and pull me in a sled in winter. The first time I rode a motorcycle, guess what I thought about. He showed my writing to my cousins who then tried to get me to sign off on it. Flattering. And now I’m a writer. When he left for college I was glad at first. For one, the magic room was mine. The entire top floor and my own bathroom! But when my parents divorced and my mom and I moved, I became terribly lonesome, and I wished I had the partner-in-crime that only a sibling can be. It took a while before it occurred to me that we probably had similar lonely experiences in high school. We both skipped our senior proms. We both liked to party…just teenage painkiller-seeking. When I was in Battle Creek, Gare sent me the most awesome mix tapes. To this day, Judas Priest’s “Turbo Lover” and Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil” make me smile. And “Still Loving You” by the Scorpions. Gare called that tape “Bad Ballads.”

I guess what I hope for Jameson is that he will be half the cool brother that Gare was, to whoever it is that comes along. I hope that when he’s had it up to here with the insufferable little turd, that Gare and I will serve as an example of how precious and wonderful it will be, when he’s grown, to have that person in his life.

Happy birthday Gare! I love you!

I Went Down to the Demonstration to Get My Fair Share of Abuse...

2011

Freezing in Madison four years later

Thanks to the wonderful invention of Timehop, which reminds you daily of your past postings on social media, I have been reminded that, at this same exact time four years ago, I was protesting the policies of Governor Scott Walker just as I am now. For the second time in five years I am marching around campus trying unsuccessfully not to make a spectacle of myself, traveling to Madison on a cherished Saturday and freezing my ovaries off and growing sore from holding a sign up in a blistering wind. Considering the success of the last round, those who stand on the sidelines (even the ones who aren’t flipping us off and calling us whiners and booing) might rationally ask, Why? Why do it?

On UWM campus 2011

Valid question, since I think that Walker sees those protests, and his administration’s response, which was to tell tens of thousands of public workers to go fuck themselves, as a badge of his fitness as a conservative republican ideal. Never has it occurred to this man that nearly half of the state trying to recall him (pretty harsh I’d say) might be a wake-up call. That maybe he should talk to these people, try to meet them halfway, reassure them that he wants to be a good governor to them too.  No, he’s patting himself on the back and gunning for the presidency, fueled by his status as a governor who takes chances and “makes hard choices.” In other words, that he looked tens of thousands of union workers and teachers in the face and told them to eat a bowl of dicks is a GOOD thing.

Madison 2011

I won’t go on about the issues, since most people reading this know exactly what I’m talking about, but the basics are this: four years ago, benefits were cut for state workers, and public unions were stripped of most of their collective bargaining rights. (They snuck some right-to-work legislation in very recently, so unions in Wisconsin as a whole are about to take a huge dump.) Now, the proposed budget looks to cut $300 million from the UW-system of universities. This is all in the name of what the Governor labels a “budget crisis,” and falls in line with the conservative rhetoric of debt, to which we all seem to bow down in abject fear of what will happen to the children… blah blah blah. (I have a whole set of issues with debt as an all-encompassing excuse to cut everything in the world, but that’s another post.)

Molly: the palm tree thing is in reaction to a Fox news report which depicted our protests as violent by using footage from a Florida protest in which palms could be seen in the background.

But for those who don’t understand why I can just cut out of my office hours and march around in the cold, why I am fighting a fight that I’m destined to lose, why I am holding up badly made signs and chanting like an asshole, annoying the people in the union who are just trying to buy a crappy overpriced poster for their dorm room, who think Jeez doncha have anything better to do? To those folks I say, yes, I have plenty better to do. I don’t enjoy this shit. Who does? This past week in Madison I managed to stand up for 45 minutes before the cold became unbearable. My eyebrows froze and my skin stung like hell. I was too freezing to even chant, much less hold up my sign in the frigid wind. I didn’t like it four years ago, even though we had the support of most public unions, which made quite an impression on everyone but the person it was supposed to. Driving on I-94 in perilous icy conditions is not my idea of fun, nor is packing into the smelly capitol and standing all night when I could be sleeping and watching Netflix.

Kerry

Danny the angry bird

I do it because I feel I have to. This isn’t political for me. For some it might be. Protests are maybe a place for some to shout out sound bites and slogans reinforcing the progressive agenda. But this isn’t about being progressive or liberal for me. I am those things, practically a commie in fact, but that’s nothing to do with it. The breaking of the public unions is the beginning of a trend that will result in lower pay and benefits for many of the kinds of jobs middle classers like me do. Because of Act 10, I pay more for my much needed health insurance, and if I don’t get enough sections, I may not get it at all. The bill took money right out of my pocket. This budget proposal will take more. Maybe eventually end my job altogether. If someone told you, “The state owes money to somebody, and of the options we have available, we’ve chosen that of paying you less and maybe laying you off” don’t tell me you wouldn’t say anything.

Milwaukee march

Yes that's Jesse Jackson

More than that, this latest legislation feels a whole lot like an attack on my work. I sense this ugly downturn in the way we value education and educators. This should scare students, but they are young and it seems like most of them have no idea what’s going on. It scares me, because in a world where college is just a job training center, where the humanities like creative writing and ethnic studies are deemed obsolete garbage, I have no place. I trained for many years to be a writer and a teacher of writing and literature. The product I offer is intangible and maybe that makes it hard to quantify its value. But it was my dream. It’s who I am. If it disappears, I will no longer belong to this world. I will have no more to offer it. That’s sad isn’t it?

And now again 2015

For those who would spit on us and call us whiners furthermore:

1) Fuck you, okay. I pay taxes too. Could contribute more if I made a little more money. That revenue disappears if my job does. As you lick Scott Walker’s vinegary nuts in thanks for saving our children from the imaginary number, remember that cutting budgets means cutting jobs, and the income tax revenue that comes with them.

2) I am not sitting in some ivory tower, smoking a pipe and philosophizing with other elites over brandy and lattes or whatever the hell you imagine. I wouldn’t compare myself to Bob Cratchit, but I do work hard, and I believe in the service I provide to my students. I’m sick of people telling me my job isn’t valuable. I fill my classes every semester. People want my product, and I should have a right to make and sell that product.

3) Protesting means that we recognize our letters are going to be ignored, and our votes aren’t really worth anything. So now we have to be a nuisance. I hear the young ones talking about riot and revolution, but I don’t want that. I don’t want violence and fire and prison – that’s what revolution means, dudes. What I want is for people to get wise. To stop this anti-worker, anti-education shit before that becomes necessary. Because if it becomes necessary that means I might go to prison, and I am pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy that.

4) We aren’t whining. If we sat in our offices like good little slaves, just waiting to be robbed of our access to wealth, and then complained after the fact, that’s whining.

5) Man, fuck you.

An Open Love Letter to Dan

On this Valentine’s Day, my husband, Daniel John McBee, drove us to Madison so that we might protest the proposed budget cuts in the bitter cold. After about 45 minutes standing in the UW-Madison Library Mall, I could stand no more (-11 degrees dude) and he drove me home. He’s not an educator, but not only did he don his snowsuit and make the trip with me, but he spent hours constructing wind-proof signs for us. His featured a pretty awesome photoshop of Scott Walker's face on John Blutarsky's body – his idea.

Frankly, I always thought a man this supportive, creative, and selfless was too much to ask for someone like me. Even when I was young and pretty, I didn’t know I was, and the reality of my disability and its effects on my appearance constantly loomed over my confidence. I struggled with unrequited love in high school and college, unable to approach the men who I liked and unwilling to accept those who liked me (even the cute ones.) When I finally blossomed into sexuality, it was late, and I still couldn’t find myself connecting to anyone for any length of time.

I had was familiar with this concept of love – read, watched, was told of many iterations of the idea. I saw my mom marry twice and then three times. Saw her identity morph around each new love in a way that I think made me hesitant, though I was happy she was happy. (I am somewhat possessive of my identity – it took so long to embrace it.) I saw my father weep and grieve the loss of his first marriage only to be made sublimely happy in the second, and in quick succession. None of it seemed to fit the concepts I’d been exposed to. I never knew what to look for, although everyone kept telling me that surely I would “find” it if I wanted to.

After a two-year relationship during which I felt angry and unloved most of the time, I began to toy with the idea that “love” was a figment of our collective imaginations. You said it to a person, performed it in your actions, but it wasn’t a “feeling” as such. You could love your family, your cat, a song, even a friend, but the idea that there was this person who, out of billions worldwide, who not only made you feel this certain special thing, but felt this certain special thing about you, was ridiculous.

Years of fruitless and disappointing dating when I moved to Milwaukee did not disprove this theory. At one point I made a pact with a male buddy that if we were both still single at age 40 we’d go ahead and marry each other. (He's married now, too - man on the right below.) I began to think I didn’t really want a permanent relationship. Surely if I’d wanted a man, I’d get one. My ongoing single status was a choice, I realized. A selfish choice that I made to spare my own happiness. I’d met plenty of inspiring, beautiful, powerful, feminine and completely happy women at that point who had never married and likely never would. I guessed I could take the same route.

But there was this problem of intimacy, and my overwhelming desire to share it with someone possessing a penis and testicles. I’m not proud of it, but it happens to be something I can’t do without. For that reason I delved into the world of match.com and after one rather disheartening experience after another, cancelled and switched to Okcupid, which was a least free of charge. (See my profile photos below.) This lead to more disappointment, and by the time I accepted a brunch date with a man named Dan I was actually hoping I wouldn’t like him. I kind of felt that the entire male gender could be flushed down the toilet and the world would be better for it.

Dan was this guy who was into grilling, and I was looking for advice on how to grill pizza. He was relatively decent-looking, and never once asked if I would like to ride his cock. He worked with homeless people. Like mine, his profile was understatedly cheeky and had no misspellings. After a few casual, brief messages, he asked if we could meet. I was lukewarm about the idea, but at least he wasn’t pushy. On the phone, he had a very high voice and talked a lot and loudly. I found myself rolling my eyes a bit. But brunch couldn’t hurt, and what was I doing on these sites if not fishing for a free meal now and then?

I didn’t dress up or look my best. I wore sneakers and I think my jeans were dirty. I was late. No fucks given in other words. Dan was waiting for me at the bar in Lulu’s. He was cuter in person. Very cute. Never thought I would think that of someone with a beard. He wasn’t as annoying as I predicted. He had opinions though. He wasn’t boring. He took me to look for my Halloween costume.

Fast forward. I vowed I wasn’t going to sleep with guys right away any more, and Dan was respectful of that. One week does seem like right away, I know. But you should know we saw each other five times in that week. It was that fast.

 

There isn’t really a narrative about love I can think of that matches what I experienced with this man. I felt something happening, but I didn’t know how to articulate what, and I still don’t.  I had never so looked forward to seeing a person in my life. I had never been so excited for a phone call from someone. Never felt so comfortable with someone else’s body. I mean we were farting on each other before the end of a month.

I don’t feel so much that I changed as a person, but I think I came to appreciate the person I was more through Dan’s eyes. I love Dan because he makes me love myself. After we had fights 1-? my love for him didn’t diminish. It hasn’t diminished as we’ve nested and the sexy part has waned. It just gets thicker and thicker. It surrounds and envelops me more and more. At first, it felt like I was going crazy. I actually entertained the notion that I just imagined him. Sometimes I still think he’s my imaginary husband and I’m actually living in my apartment alone, buying myself flowers and eating those frozen pizzas myself.

 

 It was such a strange and otherworldly feeling that I wrote a poem about it, which was published in Ellipsis: Literature and Art. Mainly it’s about the way I felt, which was that I was actually losing my mind. I think maybe it was like that because Dan made me see my flaws and all the parts of myself that I hid from – my disability, my past emotional issues, my idiosyncrasies – as somehow beautiful and sacred.

 The truth is, I never thought anyone could compare to my father and my brother. But Dan invites that comparison. I’m constantly proud and awed by the work he does, his humor, his ability to be himself without slavish regard to societal conventions, his devotion and genuine interest in my feelings. Of course he has flaws – Gary Stewart and Gary Jr. have theirs too – but I’m angry at him very infrequently. I never feel like I hate him. I had previously thought that constant rage was a given. You couldn’t be with a man and not spend most of your days boiling with anger and/or annoyance. Such is apparently not the case. Even after four years of marriage.

 

Dan and I married in Las Vegas in a small ceremony before our siblings and a couple of friends. The wedding felt like hardly the point, but weirdly we were both nauseous with nerves beforehand. What has followed has been a difficult time for both of us. Our financial situation is constantly in turmoil, and I’ve had an overabundance of death in my family lately. I am fighting depression and so is he. But the sweet feeling I get from seeing him come home, getting a text or call, looking forward to a trip together, any chance to spend time with him even doing nothing, is as satisfying as ever. It’s as if nothing can unravel that joy…the knot keeps getting tighter.

 So, for Dan, my love and my happiness, I donate a short-short I wrote about our engagement to this blog. I thought about getting it published, like I did with “Fatal Vision?”, but now I think I’ll keep it. Enjoy. (I love you Danny!)

I Said Yes to All

Was it two hours seven minutes from the time on Thursday that the ring was brought home to the time it was given? And was the explanation for his absence believable? (A client with chronic flatulence. Likely story.) And was it that which gave him away or the invitation to the Milwaukee Domes on Saturday? (The very place you might expect to be proposed to, hopefully in some humid, flower-veiled corner away from screaming kids.) Did you make love not long after you knew? (Actually, as a child I would have loved the giant glass orbs – inside a garden, a jungle, a desert. He must have known that.) And was your hair matted now as well as dirty, bent from a pony tail and greasy from spin class sweat? (And my makeup smeared over my face like a contrail. Wearing a pajama top and bottom – not matching.) And did you look forward to your dreams, while he sat frantically awake and asking strange questions? (What if I proposed to you while you were taking a crap? What if I were taking a crap?) And did you explain that you have no fantasies about proposals, didn’t cut out pictures in magazines of your future wedding, like some girls did. (What if I had married earlier? Would I have maybe met the one I love so much, later, when the shadows grew long anyway?) And did he believe you, eventually, and did you feel it coming? (He was wearing a KOSS promo shirt and a pair of boxers with reindeer on them. It’s late March… going out like sweet little lion.) And did he run, not walk, into and out of the bedroom? (I was laughing, because now it was a surprise again.) And did he get down on one knee and place the sparkly, gleaming, special thing on your finger? (He pulled it out of the waistband of his shorts. He also had on mismatched socks. He is beautiful.) And did you want to hug him forever? (Like always.) And was it like always?