Proof of my efforts exist, though: there’s an anthropological field guide the size of the old New York City phone book inside my head, filled with all the “faces” and “looks” she made over the course of my lifetime, and hers: dog-eared, with Talmudic-length interpretations and annotations scrawled in the margins, it’s the homemade version of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Like the real one, my collection of deconstructed facial-muscle contractions and gestures had expressions universal enough to make labeling easy—especially the negative ones: the “majoring-in-art-history-won’t-get-you-a-job-with-benefits-but-a-teaching-certificate-will” face; the “what-will-become-of-you?” face; the “I-don’t-understand-why-you’re-still-not-married” face; and the “I-don’t-like-your-husband” face, to name only a few. But while monkeys and humans use the same muscles to laugh and show rage, I’d bet my door-stopper-size tome that monkey-mothers are physically incapable of the faces human mothers make when their daughters’ lives don’t go according to plan. Expressions of maternal disappointment are luxuries of domestication, not the wild, and their variations are infinite. There isn’t a book—real or fake—big enough to contain them all.
For years, I opened mine to the same page and pointed to the one unidentified, uncaptioned look I could never get past: my mother, head tilted, brow furrowed, facial muscles a patchwork of bemusement, confusion, and disapproval. Sometimes she just gave me the look; other times she added a verbal component: “You’re so weird!” But whatever the delivery, I always got the message: no matter what I said, no matter what I did, my mother didn’t “get” me. Anyone who reads or watches the news these days knows that there are far worse things to overcome than not being completely adored by your mother, but being told you’re weird at a young age almost certainly guarantees you’ll feel weird as an adult. Some children grow stronger in the broken places, like bones; others grow sadder. I did both.
One day, when I still lived in New York and worked for Black Bear, after a meeting with a boss who didn’t get me and couldn’t stand me, Glenn followed me back to my office and poked me.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“The way she looked at you!”
I shrugged. The boss had looked at me like I was incredibly weird. So what else was new?
“She looked at you like you had a bird on your head!”
I looked at Glenn like she had a bird on her head. Because I finally had a caption—the “there’s-a-bird-on-your-head” face.
No longer would I strain to describe the look to therapists—the people I paid never to look at me like I had a bird on my head. No longer would I think feeling like I had a bird on my head was all in my head: my mother had looked at me that way my whole life. And who, frankly, could blame her? At four, I’d admitted to a fear of clouds; at seven, to a fear of carbonated beverages. Her face worked overtime during my teenage years: at fifteen, I’d convinced my parents to let me spend a semester at a friend’s high school—in Holland; at seventeen, I was still taking—and trying to get gym credit for—weekly pantomime classes. By the time I reached adulthood she could have used a face-making double: Gary and I got married two years after having Teddy instead of before he was born; I waited until my children’s books were out of print before finally getting an author website and blog to promote myself. Nothing I did made sense to her, which never made sense to me.
* * *
To be fair, sometimes nothing I did made sense to me, either. Like when Gary and I moved back to Boston, where I’d grown up, and where my parents still lived before they both got sick. Though it was initially Glenn’s idea because of her transfer there, and though Gary had agreed—he’d loved Boston when he went to Berklee and always wanted to return to New England eventually—the secret fantasy of living close to people who didn’t get me was wholly mine. Sure, it would be great to move someplace where a friend was already waiting, but it was more than that. Facing your demons was what emotionally secure people did, and in a strange case of mistaken self-identity, I thought I was one of those people: I’d survived a lifetime of my mother’s “what-will-become-of-you?” looks and somehow managed to couple and procreate; I’d earned a living without the teaching certificate she’d always urged me to get as an insurance policy against failure; an animated PBS series had been based on my first book. Hadn’t I earned the right to take my L-shaped fingers off my forehead? Freud said there are no accidents, and my move home proved him right: for all my weirdness, for all my insistence on doing things my way, it turned out that I was completely normal at my core:
I wanted to make the bird on my head disappear. I wanted my mother to like me.
The Forehead
I’ve been friends with Sari Epstein, a creativity-life-coach-guru with a national following, for less than a year. And by “friends” I mean only on the Internet. But it’s been an important friendship to me—and by “friendship” I mean me following Sari Epstein on social media—reading every word of her creativity-life-coach-guru updates, taking screenshots of every one of her creativity-life-coach-guru photos so that I can creep on them for extra details you just can’t get without the creeping. My feed on each social media platform is full of active creative-types, constantly and shamelessly self-promoting themselves, posting about their daily output: their word counts, their book deals, their bookstore appearances, their downward facing dogs and yoga handstands. I would be doing this, too, if I had any creative output, or could do yoga, but nothing ever happens when I open a new notebook and uncap a pen. Whether it’s in the morning, or the afternoon, or at night before bed; whether I’m home alone with a few minutes in between Well/er pieces, or out at a coffee shop, happily eavesdropping and people watching for inspiration; the same paralysis sets in. My mind goes blank. It seems I am closed for business up there, too.
Maybe that’s why I become secretly obsessed with Sari Epstein: her workshops and weekend retreats promise those who attend will magically rediscover their creative spark. Could this be my answer? I’m still not sure.
What I am sure about is that something is off with Sari Epstein’s appearance. I’ve known this for a while, but it isn’t until I show a certain picture of her to Glenn—who knows everything about everything—that the mystery is finally solved and it all falls into place. We’re at our favorite restaurant, Shepherd, in Harvard Square, sitting near the windows, when I show her Sari Epstein’s luminous Ali MacGraw–like head shot on my phone. Glenn puts her hand over her eyes and squints like we’re on a beach at high noon.
“Oh my God,” she rasps. “The glare off that forehead!”
I laugh slyly and sip my double decaf latte with whole milk slowly, trying to make it last. I have absolutely no business ordering a $5.25 drink with so little income, let alone the full-fat version, but I would rather die than drink coffee with skim or low-fat milk, and I can’t order nothing. Ordering nothing makes people uncomfortable. Why should Glenn have to breathe in the fumes of my failure when all she wants to do is distract herself with some cheap laughs about someone’s too-big forehead?