From the time she was little, my mother knew she wanted to be a mom. But that didn't stop her from having other ambitions. She went to school and received her bachelors and masters degrees before marrying my father.
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On a hot summers day in June 1955 Molly, an unmarried mother, began bringing her child into the world. She cried bitterly whilst pleading to keep her child. There were no words of sympathy she was told simply to go home and forget all about it. As Molly’s child was taken from her she vowed never to forget.
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Evening drains quickly on the day that Tevin leaves. I arrive home from working at the brewery to a letter from my grandmother in which she has folded a cut out copy of the Lord’s prayer. Though I read the letter only minutes ago and was thus informed, I can no longer remember from where she cut the blessing.
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Just eight minutes, but it felt like forever. I sat there dumbfounded wondering if that really happened or if I was so drunk I had imagined it. I was sixteen years old at a party. Like always my boyfriend and I were in a huge fight, so I was flirting with a guy he hated.
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I am getting ready to travel again because my husband is living in Copenhagen for work. People describe our situation as “so cool.” I wish they would stop. There is nothing cool about a long distance marriage. And I’m certain the “so cool” people have never donelong-distance with a spouse working twelve hour days in a time zone nine hours ahead. These are people who have never spent a significant amount of time on a plane going back and forth. Our family planning has been suspended. My life has become a waiting room in perpetuity.
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When I first began to tell people about my plans to take a solo trip to Iceland, I was met with a lot of surprise, and even a little resistance. I expected some of this. Almost as soon as I announced that I had booked my flight, people began to voice concern over my traveling alone—a young woman—to a foreign country.
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The woman sits crossed legged on the shore of the silent lake on a crisp spring morning. The lavender mist hovers above the water, as she watches a flock of brown and black birds bob along the surface.
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Most of us have scrolled past this quote on Facebook or Instagram. You may have liked it or re-posted it. If you are the strong one then you know how painstakingly true this is. Like, ugh. Why is there so much truth in this statement? Somehow the people around you have created the idea that you have traveled through a magical parallel universe that rendered you emotionally void. No feelings, no heart, just empty.
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So, the title is self-explanatory. However, this is a memo to all the up-and-comers and even those who are afraid of being told not to speak up.
Or maybe, I am just an asshole and want to set the record straight as a woman working behind-the-scenes in the entertainment world.
Oh, wait…
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My Intro to Theater professor laughed and pressed his thumb and forefinger against his lips. I imagined that in an earlier generation he would have paced around the classroom chain-smoking. I wondered if he could tell if I was the kind of person that watched that kind of garbage.
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I met my boss downtown yesterday. She asks me to do that every once in a while. I like her. We’ve known each other for a long time. Shared the trenches on many occasions. She wanted an opinion on an expensive top. I was just getting out of yoga and wanted to go home. But hell, I met her. The top was pretty. “Get it, it’s beautiful,” I told her.
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A few months ago, I was given a seat from an old movie theatre. The theatre was called The Regent, and it was the one my parents bought in 1949 when I was five. When it closed six years later, I never gave a thought to what might happen to any part of it—the projectors, the screen, the seats—but then, over fifty years later, I happened to hear that a small local museum was mounting an exhibit about small-town theatres. I contacted the curator, and told her what I could about our theatre.
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The photo stopped me dead in my somewhat-mindlessly-scrolling tracks. I’m sure everyone does it, no matter what’s going on in the world; at some point, after reading so many headlines and seeing so many shared posts, even the most devoted activist and supporter sort of tunes out.
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“Actually that is part of a whole therapy method: dialectical behavior therapy. I want you to do DBT when you finish up the program here. I think it’s really going to be a good next step for you.”
Those words were from D, the lead therapist for my intensive outpatient program at my local psychiatric hospital. A single assignment, and that statement, started me down a rabbit hole of online reading and research that ultimately brought me to where I am today.
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I used to view the world only in terms of how it related to myself. What I could see of it, gain from it, and change of it. All my time and energy used to go into making plans for myself and improving who I was. Then I became a mother and everything changed.
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In early 2013, when my partner and I had just moved to LA, we found out we were pregnant for the first time (totally unplanned!). I was working on a small stipend in which over 75% of my income was going towards the rent of a furnished 400 square foot studio apartment; while my partner was living in a city an hour away in his first year at graduate school, also living on a stipend that was mostly going towards rent.
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Four years ago, after a long day of teaching kindergarten, I sat down, opened my laptop, and wrote the words, “Bristol Ray did not exist.”
In a few weeks, those words will be printed in a book—my book—called Unregistered.
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On those rare occasions that I venture out into the world and interact with other humans, common courtesy makes people ask how I’m doing, but I never know how to respond. I’d say “I’m tired,” but my mind says I haven’t the right, haven’t earned that descriptor. When ‘tired’ is for marathon runners or physical laborers, when ‘exhausted’ is reserved for working 100 hours a week or a harried mom of 3, I’m not allowed to be tired. When the adolescent me had aches, they were ‘just growing pains;’ when youth me was feeling down I got reminded that there was ‘nothing to be sad about;’ and teen me falling asleep in class was labeled ‘bored’ at best or ‘lazy’ at worst.
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When the opportunity presented itself, I just stared. He didn’t love me, didn’t even lust after me, not like I lusted after him. He wanted another. He wanted Rose, all pretty and preppy and blonde, smiling all the time, so English, so Protestant, so Ontario.
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She was proud to be a redhead. She was proud to have been a grade school teacher. She was proud of the work she did as a waitress to support her three children when her husband went to fight in WWII. She was very outspoken. Her stories always had a moral, her jokes did not. “Have you heard the one about the fool who needed some shade? So he stood under a horses’ tail!” She was proud of the poetry she could recite from memory
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