Maybe it wasn’t wrong to set boundaries. But I knew that my feelings would be intolerable. I kept thinking, My mother is going to die someday. I would die too. Dr. Mahjoub couldn’t stop death. What did she really know?
At our last session, she’d encouraged me to learn to “parent myself.” Amidst the Mahjoubian elephants, this idea seemed positive, doable, maybe even fun. I was going to speak gently to young Rachel, tell her that everything was going to be okay in hushed, empathetic tones. I’d be a mother to me.
Then I left the office and thought, Wait, what am I supposed to do? Something about self-soothing, offering up compassion for the young Rachel who lived inside of me. But I hated that young Rachel.
Young Rachel was always getting excited and then being popped like a balloon animal. She was always being deflated. She wanted too much. This week, young Rachel wanted a little acknowledgment from her mother.
I had just been chosen by a low-trafficked entertainment blog as one of 25 young female comics to watch. When I’d texted the link to my mother, she wrote back: How did they find you?
A few minutes later she followed that up with: Can’t opem link
And then: I hope there’s nothing embarrassing in it
And then: You didn’t embarrass me did you??!
Dr. Mahjoub said that if her daughter came to her with that kind of news, she would be incredibly proud.
“My daughter is only eleven,” she said. “But I only hope that she can one day have your success.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” I said. “It’s a blog.”
It seemed strange that mothers like Dr. Mahjoub existed in the world—mothers who supported their daughters. I felt jealous of her daughter, that she got to have a mother like that. I told Dr. Mahjoub I hadn’t expected fanfare from my mother. But I’d thought she would at least be a little bit proud.
“You were going to the hardware store for milk again,” said Dr. Mahjoub.
“Well, maybe just a tiny bit of milk,” I said.
“That’s the problem,” she said. “You have to expect nothing.”
Expect nothing. The simplicity of that directive, its bare-bones, self-contained power was intoxicating. Expect nothing. It was so clean, so potent.
It was a phrase you’d associate with a person who didn’t need anything from anyone; a closed system, an automaton. I wanted to be that person. I wanted to be that automaton.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try it.”
“Try it,” said Dr. Mahjoub.
“Okay!” I said again. “Why not?”
I left the office feeling strong, hopeful, a bit high. I kind of sashayed across the parking lot. Expect nothing. Why expect something if you could expect nothing?
In my car, I texted my mother.
Hi. I will not be reachable for the next 90 days. Thank you.
She wrote back immediately: What are you talking about?!?
Sorry, I replied. Unavailable.
Then she called.
“I’m detoxing,” I said.
“What do you mean, detoxing?”
“From our relationship,” I said. “It’s emotionally unsafe.”
“What do you mean, emotionally unsafe?”
This was the thing about boundaries: they made sense in therapy, but when you tried to implement them in the real world, people had no idea what you were talking about. Or, deep down they knew exactly what you were talking about and immediately set to work reinforcing their case of denial.
“So I’ve been a terrible mother,” said my mother. “I guess I’ve done nothing right.”
I could feel her opening an emotional spreadsheet that began with the womb. This was why I never confronted her. Now we’d have to go traipsing through it together, cell by cell, until I retracted everything.
But what if I just refused to traipse?
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
I closed the spreadsheet.
CHAPTER 5
This Show Sucks was a Silverlake comedy night started by my ex-boyfriend from college, Nathan. In Madison, Nathan always drove us to and from open mic night at a bar called Blind Willie’s Hideaway. I began dating him by default when one night, in his car, he put his hand on my thigh and I was too hungry and tired to deal with moving it. I ended things a few months later, when I got the energy to move it.
Nathan had achieved quick success in LA and was now in his first season hosting a Comedy Central show called Assplainin’, an Internet meme-based charades game. He never came to This Show Sucks anymore, but he had them book me every week—even though it was obvious I didn’t fit in with the regular comics on the bill.
The other comics emanated Moon Juice, organic lip tint, and cocaine, whereas I used only cancer-causing cosmetics and sweated Coke Zero. They wore ugly clothes on purpose: mom jeans, dad sneaks, serial-killer glasses, neon visors. I maintained a uniform of all-black everything, the bulk of it from Saks Off Fifth. I was an alt JAP; they were just alt.
The crowd was mostly tourists. They loved it when I said shit like, “I’m thinking of freezing my eggs at a fertility clinic in Beverly Hills, so my eggs can live in the 90210.”
But if thirty people laughed and three people didn’t, those three were clearly the most important. I wanted to write the kind of mixed bangers that tickled the out-of-towners while simultaneously signaling a scathing core of outré cred to the comics. My newest bit was about natural disasters.
“Anyone here from the East Coast?” I asked.
I was met with cheers from the crowd, a scowl from the light dude.
“Why do you guys know more about our weather than we do? My mother texts me every day from New Jersey about my impending death. ‘You have now entered the dry season! The Weather Channel said someone in Pasadena just lit a candle! Be careful!’ ”
The mother part was sort of true. It had only been a day since the detox began, and I was now receiving cautionary weather missives in rapid-fire succession:
Just read about the Santa Anas on Yahoo! Remain alert!!
Earthquuke in Mojave Desert!!! 1.6 Did u feel it??
Tsunami warning in effect!! Do NOT sleep on the beach!!!
I tried to give the crowd a version of my life seasoned with enough “but really it’s fine” bravado to make the underlying desperation that compelled me to stand there in the first place seeking validation from strangers a palatable experience—delightful, even! When they laughed at my sort-of truth, I felt the thrill of being sort of seen.
My college degree was in theater. I’d started as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, spouting feverish diatribes about the dramatic arts as an agent of social change, inspired by a hot streak of high school roles as Abigail Williams in The Crucible, Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, and Sheila in Hair. This was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and I was going to usher in the new era.
But by the time I completed my first year, I’d learned two things. One was that I wasn’t quite as talented as my high school drama teacher, Ms. Dannenfelser, seemed to believe. Another was that I fucking hated theater people. I hated the way they enunciated every consonant, even offstage. I hated their studied, deliberate movements, the idea of the self as craft, the body as instrument. By my third year I was only hanging out with the props people. I began doing open mic stand-up comedy at Blind Willie’s Hideaway to take the edge off my dead dreams. I was good at comedy, or at least the patrons of Blind Willie’s thought so. After the artifice of theater, I wanted something real. Drunk laughter felt real. I decided that after school I would move to Los Angeles and pursue it.