You have always found yourself fascinated by home videos of you as a child, the carefree curiosity you seemed to so easily carry as a chubby, dimpled toddler who did not think of Milestones or of Matter but simply of Moments upon Moments. You want to write and you want to create but you find yourself dejected, fearful that you will never be able to recapture the imagination you had as a five year old.

There is a psychological theory that says that time appears to move faster as we age because life is all about ratios. One year to a four year old may make up a quarter of her life, but a year to a middle-aged mother is but a 40th of the life she’s lived overall. Moments become more and more fleeting. You can’t stop time from lurching forward and you grow older and realize that your mind is just as foreign to you as anything else, but maybe that strangeness is something to embrace.

We talk about the wisdom of age and maybe no one wants to watch the lines etch into their own skin but sometimes we wish we could skip ahead and understand what it all meant without needing to deal with the frustrations of the clichéd ‘journey.’

With just shy of two decades under your belt, you somehow are already weary. You find yourself so easily frustrated by experience, by your naiveté, understanding that you will never truly understand until years later, and now you must simply hold tight and ride out the pleasure and pain because it is all about making important mistakes and it is also about Experience with a capital “E.”

The future is distorted by expectation, the past by the fallacies of our own memories, and the present simply by our simple struggle not to trip, to stay standing. Big events are never how we expect them to be. We tack an arbitrary significance to moments and milestones, not understanding at the time how they may or may not stay with us, shape us.

Like how your father dies and the mourning doesn’t feel so bad until months later, when you understand that the initial weeks were infused by a kind of anesthesia to cover the shock.

Or how when you lose the loft you grew up in, your childhood home you think you will think about it and miss it more than you do. You think the same thing about Berkeley when you leave, that changing schools may be the Right Thing, but that it will also be hard. It isn’t hard. You find yourself sliding in and out of places much more easily than those around you.

Or how you were always an anxious child but never expected it to build up and hit you as hard as it did that summer; how you never could fathom being someone entirely unable to pull yourself from bed in the morning, an existential depression pressing down on you from all sides. How you never believed that 5 mg daily of a serotonin reuptake inhibitor could pull you out of it, alive and stronger.

Or in the way your virginity seems inconvenient and identifying until you stand, without it, under the florescent lights of a dorm room bathroom in an over-sized t-shirt, feeling utterly unchanged.

Or how you have your heart broken for the first time and it is just as destabilizing and humiliating and cliché as you always expected it to be. But how you find yourself somewhat relieved though, if only slightly, to know you can feel and hurt in a way you didn’t know you could. That people don’t seem to be as ephemeral to you as places.

All these things happen to you the year you are eighteen and it isn’t until 2012 rolls in, until you still find yourself writing “11″ at the ends of your dates still, that the only steady thing you know is your own heartbeat. You lose your baby teeth, your father, your childhood home and your innocence; you gain inches. You gain humility and you gain perspective. The world does not end beyond your peripheral vision, the way it did so simply when you were a child. Life doesn’t march in time to a metronome, and maybe sometimes the milestones come at you all at once. Growing up is hardly a linear function.

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At the fresh, nubile stage of 17 weeks knocked up, here’s what I know about pregnancy and Facebook: people expect you to announce that your womb is occupado, get your 87 Likes and ‘OMG Congratz!!!!’ comments; then sit down, shut up, quietly grow a human being, and don’t mention it again until it pops out. Any further commentary is considered obnoxious, intrusive, boring, and will inevitably elicit comments from your friends about how you’re turning into one of “those” moms who spew endless nonsense about their pregnancy/kids on social media.

(Let me say, for the most part, I’m onboard with this. There’s nothing I hate more than “Facebook Moms.” In fact, I hate moms on the internet as a whole. In fact in fact, I hate most moms in general but that’s like, so another story. The point is, we don’t need to know about little Johnny’s bowel movements or how “F-ed up” it is that they didn’t get put in gifted classes when everyone totally knows they’re soooo scholastically advanced. We don’t give a crap. We don’t. Not at all.)

For some women, creating and raising a needy little human being is the goddamn pinnacle of existence. It’s all they ever wanted and they feel all “whole and happy” or whatever when they finally get sperminated. And hurray for them, seriously. My sappy fucking heart cries giant tears for my baby-hungry friends when they finally get a FetusFriend inside of them. That’s your pot of gold and I’m genuinely thrilled for you.

For others of us, we have slightly more complicated relationships with procreation. For some of us, we are an ever-bubbling hotbed of conflict between an acute awareness of our natural inclinations toward things like babies and motherhood, and all of our other ambitions. I mean, we’ve got lady parts, we’re built to do this birth thing, and as part of being smart, evolved, fully conscious women, we know better than to suppress those parts of ourselves. Our feminist foremothers, blesstheirhearts, thought we needed to stomp out our ovaries to call more attention to our brains. And GOD BLESS them for the strides they made. It’s because of them that we now enjoy the confidence to say “Hey, we don’t have to deny our inherent femininity, to masculinize ourselves in order to be on the level with men.” Thanks to the Gloria Steinems of yesteryear, we no longer need to emulate men just to not be seen as less than them. Enter the newest generation of women; trying to mix Bra Burning, Power Suits, and the Cult of Domesticity and it’s getting. freaking. messy.

So back to that conflict. There are the natural instincts as females that we no longer feel such a social compulsion to suppress, and then there are those “other ambitions.” By that, I mean… christ, all of it. The freedom to pursue whatever exciting, inspiring opportunity that comes into range; great jobs, traveling opportunities, late nights with friends, random summer flings, self-indulgence, and a million other possibilities that get the Ambitious Girl out of bed in the morning, even on the worst days. Make no mistake, there are inspiring mothers all over the place who still seem to take advantage of these opportunities, and the idea that you are “different, uniquely capable of having it all” is the fun lie that many first-time mothers tell themselves in order to embark upon motherhood without mourning the loss of this unfettered freedom. But let’s be honest: the minute you truly commit yourself to another human being, and that completely autonomous part of your life is closed, things change. And when you get pregnant, you realize that no boyfriend or husband or partner, no matter how committed to them you are/ were, was or is NEARLY as big of an attachment as this new person. You start to understand selflessness and obligation and true, unending commitment. For some of us, this is absolutely terrifying.

There are different ways to handle that terror. I guess some people do just become crappy mothers, brushing off their kids and continuing to live a life not too dissimilar from their pre-baby existence. I won’t speak too much to that, other than to say that it’s a fat, sad bummer, for the kid and the mom. But for the more conscious among us, being less than thrilled about losing a certain amount of freedom doesn’t equal a future as negligent parents (in fact, I would argue that having the self-awareness and respect for yourself to appreciate the live you have, and allow yourself to mourn the things you are giving up really just frees you up to move forward and appreciate the new things your gaining, and become excited about the new experiences you’ll have with less resentment for what you’re leaving behind. But maybe that’s just me. (It’s not; I’m totally right.))

The truth is, we wouldn’t be the badass women we are if we didn’t approach parenthood with the same ferociousness, dedication, love, etc., that we bring to all of our other pursuits. The assumption that women who have mixed feelings about motherhood will make bad mothers is this weird new kind of sexism that I didn’t know existed before. And largely, women are executing it against each other. It’s curious and sad. Wouldn’t it be preferable if we could all be honest that our generation of women is more complex in our expectations for our lives, and if we could be supportive of each other as we navigate the evolving reality of that, if we could be honest as we feel all the very many feelings that come with trying to “have it all”?

The trade-off, for many, is worth it. It’s why women have babies in the first place, even the highly motivated ones who are driven by their careers and creative/ social/ politics/ whatever-other interests. The ones who didn’t play a lot of “house” growing up, and dreamed of more than getting married and having babies. (Let me be clear that I don’t see ANYTHING wrong with those being your big goals. That was my mother’s biggest goal and I count my blessings everyday that a woman of her talent, intelligence and capability chose to apply all of that to shaping tiny humans, including me.) The ones for whom life would’ve been full and thrilling without kids too, and for whom the idea of being one of those boring moms who talks about her “wild youth” isn’t an option. It is no longer an either/ or situation for us. For ambitious, independent women, having kids can’t be about surrendering your life, as was sadly the case for many previous generations of women. Now, it’s about integrating motherhood into our lives, and recognizing that fulfilled, productive, happy, well-rounded and taken care of parents make for BETTER parents, and provide an infinitely better example for kids in terms of what their future can be like.

Having other ambitions besides breeding doesn’t make us monsters. And talking openly about our complex, complicated, frequently-changing and (duh) sometimes hormone-fueled feelings about motherhood and pregnancy does NOT make us unstable, ungrateful, or unfit as mothers. It’s honest. Furthermore, becoming mothers doesn’t nullify us as being anything else. I had unprotected sex, not a lobotomy.

I’m considerably younger (although I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not THAT young anymore) than my friends with kids. And of my un-childed women friends, most are a lot like me: busy with a million things that light up their hyper-motivated little hearts, devoted to experiencing and learning as much as possible, and having, like, feelings with the people they love. When the ones who choose to do so start having babies, I can only imagine that they will feel a lot of the things I’ve been feeling. I do hope they feel less ostracized for openly expressing those feelings. I hope that more women feel more comfortable talking about the not-so-Hallmark sentiments about becoming a mother, and I hope that the people around them will see that not as a mark of instability and unpreparedness, but as a sign of self-awareness and proactive processing of some seriously heavy stuff. It’s a major life change and, ya know, it can get #dark. I hope as my friends go through this, and all awesome, independent women (I’m not talking about the baby crazy, can’t-cum-unless-I-imagine-I’m-getting-fertilized women) everywhere go through this, that people will rally around them and applaud their honesty and outspokenness.

Pregnancy is beautiful and magical and makes you a glowing beacon of life… for some women. (I currently want to vomit on those women but for the sake of fairness, I’ll squeeze out a “good for you.”) For others of us, the first several months of pregnancy are achy, filled with migraines, fitful sleep, raging mood swings, and oh yeah, that “glow” is really just sweat from the four times we’ve thrown up today. And all of this while trying to process an unexpected distance from your kid-free friends, a complete restructuring of your life, the impending prospect of having horrible, primary-colored kid crap in your apartment, and a loss of autonomy to a degree that your friends with their rustic, twee outdoor weddings can’t possibly understand.

So that’s the deal. If you see me having a moment of frustration and expressing that on Facebook, hey, stuff happens. I assure you I’m not the only pregnant woman to think “Oh my christ, this fetus is the goddamn devil and I’m ruining my life and selling out by having it” only to be talking excitedly about baby names an hour later. We get to be scared. We get to be apprehensive. We weren’t waiting around for a baby to fill our lives because they were already full. We get to mourn the loss of our single lives because they were fabulous and we get to be excited about our future lives with babies because we are strong, adaptable people who will make those lives fabulous too. But the confidence isn’t unwavering. And the process isn’t easy, or consistent or flawless, and I am also hereby declaring that it will not be silent either.

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There is a photograph on the wall of my bedroom now, nearly hidden by crumpled parking tickets and pictures of twenty-somethings holding red plastic cups. In it, six children sit in the unfinished frame of a house, perched high between four trees, sneakered feet dangling down. In the middle are two girls, one in a Winnie the Pooh sweater and one in a bright pink t-shirt, their middle arms wrapped tight around each other’s backs. Their smiles push their apple cheeks up into their eyes, and the girl on the left has a gap where one front tooth should be.

The picture was taken fifteen years ago by some nameless, faceless grown-up standing below, and it shows the neighborhood kids of Center Drive in what would soon be the first tree house on the block. The girl in the green with the missing tooth is you; the one in the pink is me.

My family moved next door to your family when we were four. As my father’s ancient black pick-up truck pulled up to our new house, squished in the cigarette-scented middle seat I saw you at the top of the driveway: sun-bleached hair stuck out like straw from underneath your helmet, and you straddled a mud-caked pink tricycle as if we had kept her waiting.  “Hi,” you said without preamble as I hopped down from the passenger side. “We’re going to be friends.”

You came inside that day, and we ate Spaghettios and peanut butter sandwiches at the bare kitchen counter, stacking tiny noodle circles on the tines of our forks and speculating about the contents of the cardboard boxes that filed past to the hallway. When your mother came to collect you, you hopped off her stool and gave me a ceremonial hug. “See you tomorrow!” you shouted as you were whisked out the door.

It was two years — of preschool and playgrounds, REC soccer and learning to ski, matching striped leggings and a shared guinea pig — before the construction of the tree house began, the culmination of months of begging and promises of responsibility. Ground was laid before first grade started: you and I watched, sandy heads capped with child-size hardhats and waists ringed with miniature tool-belts, as our fathers stripped branches and sanded plywood through the humid New England summer.

Months later, the tree house was finally finished. We climbed the steps for the first time on one of those late August evenings that seem never to end. It was perfect.

The tree house spanned the line dividing your backyard from mine, and narrow and perilously tall stairs led from the pine needle-covered ground to a slate-gray porch roofed with asphalt shingles. We gripped the railing as we climbed up, peering in the Lucite windows before we unlatched the door. Inside was small and square, and we separated to explore every corner, running our hands along walls painted the yellow of an almost-ripe banana. We jumped on the set of white bunk beds that stood against the back wall, nestling into faded floral cushions that I recognized from your mom’s old lawn chairs, and we stared up at the filmy fabric that hung from ceiling beams as we pondered the tree house’s possibilities.

We quickly moved in our most important possessions, heaving small suitcases filled with board games, temporary tattoos, and Disney movies up the stairs. When the school bus dropped us off in the afternoon, we flung our backpacks through the door and raced to the backyard, scaling the stairs with more bravado each time. Inside the tree-house, we were outside the reach of parents and siblings, school and schedules. Inside, we created worlds of make-believe: grocery stores and restaurants, witches’ covens and fairy empires. We stood on the porch at dinnertime, bracing our arms as we leaned over the railing, to yell at our mothers: “Just five more minutes!”

As we grew older, the stairs became creaky and uneven, and we walked more gingerly, conscious of added inches and the weight of breasts and hips. We still escaped to the tree-house after school: armed with peanut butter sandwiches and diet sodas, we lay on our backs on the floor and talked about things not safe to say outside. Inside, we shared stories of first crushes, first kisses, and first sips of beer. We wondered how to use a tampon and, later, how to use a condom. We fled there when my first boyfriend broke up with me and when you found out your grandfather died. If the floor held years of dirt, nail polish, and crumbs, the walls held years of secrets.

My family moved again fifteen years later, when you and I left for college, and it was not packing a bedroom into boxes or saying goodbye to a familiar street that was most difficult. The new owners of my house, the family who would pad along its hardwood halls and plant its gardens next, distrusted the ramshackle cottage balanced in the trees in the backyard.  They didn’t see its magic, only the cracks in the wood and the spider-webs in the corners.

The day they tore the tree house down, you and I stood below, much taller and older than we had been when we first saw it go up. We watched men in hardhats with tool-belts drive machines, yellow like the walls inside, into the posts that supported the tree house. The porch fell first, its spindly railings fracturing as they hit the ground.  The sides collapsed more slowly, sinking towards the middle as the roof weakened. A flutter of curtain peeked through a splintered window as the structure finally gave, and you and I held hands to press back our tears. The teenager in me scoffed at my nostalgia, but I ached for the girls who had grown up in this house in the trees.

We live miles apart now, you in a city twenty minutes from where we grew up and I in a southern college town. We can no longer meet every day after school, and when we visit each other, the white walls of our new apartments bear little resemblance to our first home in the trees. We talk often, though, and on the phone, my back pressed into the floor with my feet propped on my bed, I swear sometimes I can feel the thin carpet of the tree house under me and smell the pine outside my window.

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I woke up this morning wanting to go home. I want to see wide open skies, and rolling hills, and bathe in the scent of freshly cut grass streaming in through my open car windows, one of the sweetest smells there is. I want to drive out Dogleg Road, across 40, and up the gravel driveway of the house where they sell the very best sweet corn, Silver Queen, on the honor system. I would eat half a dozen ears myself for dinner, with a side of sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese spiked with chives from the yard. I want to keep driving, all the way to the Lake, and find the bar still standing and Jerry still working the Pit. I want him to make me a burger with mushrooms and onions and special sauce, layered with fat summer tomato slices, but this time when I eat it I want to know that it’s the best burger I’ll ever have; I didn’t know it back then, or I’d have ordered one to go. While the band plays a cover of Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, I want to tap the long-legged, sad-eyed waitress on the shoulder and tell her that she won’t be here long; this is a layover, not a stop. I will fold twenty bucks into her hand so she’ll remember me.

I want to go to my grandmother’s house, not the one she lives in now but the one she lived in when I was a kid, right down the street. I want to help her water her garden, the sharp green smell of tomato plants everywhere. I’ll rest my feet in the shallow little pool set into the rock garden, a metal basin painted flaking cerulean blue. I will pop the buds of those waxy blush-white flowers and watch the ants crawl out, like I did every summer, but this time I’ll commit their image to memory so I can find and plant these flowers myself as an adult. I will know the secret, that adulthood is coming to take me somewhere else, far away from all of this, but I won’t know yet that salvation hurts sharply, sometimes.

I want to take the baby to the Dairy Isle for ice cream one more time, like I did every day that summer we spent together when I was 17 and she was 4, 5, 6 months old. It was so hot I never put her in anything more than a diaper, and still our skin stuck together wherever we touched. I’ve never had ice cream that good, vanilla soft-serve with a chocolate shell, the sharp relief of stepping back under the cool canopy of the trees, a smidgen of ice cream passed on my finger into her peony mouth. I want to see it all with the eyes that don’t yet know how shabby our surroundings are. I want to whisper to her, in the long afternoons before her mother gets home, as we sit in front of the one window air conditioner listening to Pink Floyd, that she will go the furthest of us all.

I want to be back on my grandparents’ boat, eating a turkey sandwich with bread-and-butter pickles and sharp mustard and Havarti, with a towel wrapped around my wet bathing suit, my shoulders warm from the sun. I will make my Gram promise that in the morning, we’ll get up early and take the dinghy to the marina where they still make homemade cinnamon donuts, just the two of us, and that I can be in charge of the motor. I want to anticipate the boat ride to the winery across the lake the way I did before I knew that something wasn’t right about combining children with all that drinking. It was exciting and beautiful to me once, and I want to be back there, under that sun, just for a day.

I want to stop by my aunt’s house and watch an impromptu party bloom around me, one cousin with a six-pack, one with deviled eggs, three with new babies, aunts and uncles and folding chairs and barbecue smoke. I want to stand in the kitchen, wrapped in the warm chaos of it, washing vegetables from someone’s garden while the bigger little kids chase the dogs underfoot and someone squeezes by to check the oven. I want to see the faces of people who have known me since before I knew myself, and pinch the cheeks of the looming, F150-driving men whose diapers I once changed and whose little-boy tears I’ve kissed away. They have their own babies now, and we will never know each other, really. I won’t even register as the kooky aunt who lives in a far-away city; I’m too far gone even for that.

This nostalgia creeps up on me, a yearning for a time that may not have happened, a place that might not have really existed even when I was there. In the belly of that yearning is my real wish: to be a different person right now, with my own house and my own backyard and tomato plants and my own family and friends coming over to grill and eat pasta salad and watch the kids run around catching lightning bugs while the grownups play old songs on the stereo. Even that word, stereo, makes my heart seize a little on days like this. We would have lanterns hanging in the trees. Baby, get me some more ice, please. I want a kid of my own, holding the lightning bug jar, smelling like grass and clean sweat and joy. Of all the lives I ever imagined for myself, expat and city girl and strident leftist and bohemian, I could never have predicted how much I would crave the simple things I ran away from, nor how hard it would be to find them.

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You were the cool kids. The ones to whom both physics and jurisprudence didn’t seem to apply. The ones who escaped the cruel hand of fate that turned my friends and I into awkward, gangly and acne-ridden middle schoolers as soon as the clock struck 11 years of age. The ones who had parents who worked late, the ones who would smoke regs on someone else’s patio after school, dispersing like refugees from a trampled ant hill as soon as they heard a key turn the font door, laughing, tearing off on Toy Machines and BMX bicycles, utterly invincible. You ran our hometown, all cotton-mouthed and all youth. You had older siblings, ones who would purchase you malt liquor and bottles of peppermint Schnapps without thinking how the high gravity would wreck your fragile, inexperienced bodies. You would throw up and hook up, even when we were 14. You snuck into R-rated movies without paying, clubs and bars without being of age. You threw parties the likes of which I still to this day have only ever witnessed in teen comedies. I wanted to be one of you so bad that my awkward, teenaged body literally ached. Hell, I worshipped you. And after all this I can safely say: My mom was right about you.

When I got to college, you were still there. You were there, but different. Natural selection had pared you down to only the brightest and the most capable. The ones who could come to class on two hours of sleep but still make the grades to get a scholarship to state college or the ones who had enough sense to get the hell out the suburbs and join the big show. When a new town leveled the playing field and wiped the slate clean, many of my friends joined your ranks. It was a tabula rasa of coolness, and everyone who benefited either formed bands or lived with them. They became the people who made beer runs at 1:50 and partied until the sun came up. They no longer walked; they swaggered. My mom could always tell when I had spent too much time with them, when my childhood ambitions had swelled to become an unstoppable force that disallowed me from trying — still, vainly — to join their midst. It was like she could smell the booze over the telephone or sense that the lilt in my voice indicated the waning hours of a kegger-turned-weekend-bender. In my heart of hearts, I knew she was right: My mom was right about them, too.

And her. I once thought she was the greatest thing that had ever happened to 16-year-old me. Her, the one with the pill problem and the deadbeat dad, came into my life when I least expected it and turned my existence upside down. She became the terministic screen that ordered my whole life, and I would have done anything to keep it that way. She, the one who showed me Larry Clark movies and had a Cutlass that always reeked of Turkish Golds, was the subject of innumerable fights in which I thought I was on the side of passion, freedom of choice and young love. If I couldn’t fight for that, I thought, how could I ever fight for anything? I remained her advocate and biggest fan. Although the watchful eye of parental authority kept us apart, I thought nothing as pithy as sleep could bar me the chance to see her. The window screen of my childhood bedroom is still broken as a testament to this.  To admit I was wrong would have been to admit that I, too, would become a slave to paradigm of my parents’ loveless marriage, and that I would never understand a single pop song, so long as I lived. She, at one point, bore the sole burden of allowing me entry into romantic and artistic understanding. As much as it kills me to say it now, my mom was right about her, too.

And it’s not just that, for all of my trying, for all of my pitiful and fruitless attempts, you have given me only misery, embarrassment and rejection. It has nothing to do with their empty countenances, the ones that projected trust, commitment and friendship without belying addiction and shame. Likewise, it has nothing to do with the fact that just that she broke my heart so bad that I have yet to fully recover, even though a veritable lifetime has passed since our paths have last crossed. It’s been way too long for me to still be bitter about all of that.

It’s just that I see all of them. Around. Sometimes I see them over the holidays when I come back to this place of bad memories, and they’re the hostesses at restaurants I used to work at to put gas in my crappy Mazda. When I walk up, I see their drooping eyes flicker like yellow and distended half-moons of vague recognition, although we never acknowledge each other. Sometimes they drive by my house and rattle my bones with the loud bass that emanates from the cars they’ve been driving since their 16th birthdays when their moms, the ones who worked all those nights, bought them. Some of them have broken marriages, kids. Some live a life that that I fetishize and reject when I’m stoned and watching Teen Mom 2 with frozen pizza detritus dangling from my lips. I see their Facebook statuses about repossession, their stony-eyed glares when I go last-minute Christmas shopping, and I see the final shows of their bands — the ones everyone knows are breaking up due to drug problems, although the common and accepted story has something to do with “artistic differences.”

And it’s not that I’m judging anyone, although it seems that way. I know it does. And it’s not like I’m having the last laugh, scoffing from atop my high horse as I ride off into a sunset of success. Lord knows I have my fair share of faults, too, and that the concept of success is about as hazy in the world we’ve inherited as so many other things are today. I’ll be the first to say it: Life is hard, setting priorities even harder. The temptation to “live fast and die young,” as the cliché goes, is very real, and I wanted it to be the right answer so badly for so many years. I’m lucky as hell that I’ve escaped that mindset without too many indelible regrets and that I have nothing that tethers me to my mistakes and forces me to take responsibility for them. I’m only left to reckon with the casualties of an adolescence that demanded coolness and the realization of just how lucky I am to have escaped the arbitrary hand of fate that decides who takes the fall for all sorts of youthful folly. My mom was right, but I never listened anyway. Now that I’ve made it through those years, I’ll do all that I can to let her think those lessons never fell on deaf ears, even if they initially did.

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I sleep with a plush rabbit called Tubby, although to describe him as plush is a stretch; he is more worn, like an overused dishtowel, or a well-loved sweater — thin, transparent, and drooping from its owner’s shoulders. His eyes, once solid black, are now chipped plastic white discs looking out from a head that hangs limp off a turtle-like neck. He is really more an exercise in negative space than a rabbit, having now formed to the curves and contours of my torso where he spends his nights, folded into my abdomen. I am 31-years old.

My father gave me Tubby as an Easter gift in 1982 when I was one. Too young to remember the day I like to imagine my father walking into my mother’s house without knocking [Hello?], keys to his Lincoln Continental in one hand, fresh toy in the other, unwrapped because where would a man realistically obtain paper to wrap a gift for his illegitimate child. His wife? I’m sure my father gave me other gifts and toys before he started simply slipping me folded 20-dollar bills, but Tubby is the only item I attach to the memory of his handouts.

According to his original tag Tubby is of an ilk called “Playful Pets” made by “Dan Dee Imports” out of Jersey City (U.S. Copyright Reg. No. VA38 – 217, 1980). The front of the tag features a photo of a robust stuffed toy with full white cheeks, a bulbous pink nose, and taught limbs that protrude from its round belly — a likeness virtually unrecognizable from Tubby’s present state. The tag folds out into a two-page booklet that informs me my purchase was designed to give me years of joy and pleasure (which it has), and also that its materials meet or exceed all government safety requirements. On the opposite side there are cleaning instructions, but I am fairly certain the rabbit has never been cleaned.

I had many toys and stuffed animals growing up, but Tubby reigned without question over the others — my confidant, my right-hand man, the only one worthy of sleeping beside me. Over time our relationship inspired within me a kinship with all rabbits. I deplored the animated children in the Trix commercials for depriving the cartoon rabbit of his sugary cereal. I read and re-read Margery Williams’ devastating book, The Velveteen Rabbit, feeling perhaps my first empathy with the young boy forced to part with his germ-infested toy and fearing I would one day have to part with an equally infected Tubby. I am convinced that book also prompted a series of re-occurring nightmares in which my entire family was in a spaceship spiraling uncontrollably toward the sun; the only thing that would save us was sacrificing Tubby by throwing him out the window into the fiery flames. I always refused and we would begin to burn right before I awoke in a sweaty mess of sheets.

My family treated Tubby like an ordinary member, speaking directly to him, asking how he was feeling, how his days went. I don’t recall dubbing in a voice for his response; we simply accepted his placid expression as contentment. Every Easter until I was about 11 or 12, the entire family celebrated Tubby’s birthday by dressing him in a custom-tailored suit jacket and singing Happy Birthday around a pair of homemade cakes in the shape of two rabbits—one chocolate, one vanilla—nestled in a bed of coconut shreds food-dyed to resemble green grass. No one present considered this ritual abnormal or emotionally counterproductive. Even my older brothers in their cynical mid-teens offered Tubby birthday wishes and shared in the celebration. Tubby, silent and docile, watched from a chair as we sat around the dining room table eating cake in his honor.

Other than Easter Tubby didn’t do much. I never dragged him around the house or brought him out in public like some other children did with their coveted animals and dolls and blankies. Tubby remained mostly in the privacy of my bed. Ours was arguably the most intimate relationship I had growing up. Tubby has spent more nights by my side than any other creature. He has seen me piss myself, vomit all over myself, cry myself to sleep, wake myself up laughing, stay up all night reading; he remained through the chicken pox, several cases of strep throat, and later a blood clot in my lung; he was there the night my mother tried to kill herself and the night my eighth grade crush succeeded; he saw me discover my first period, find my first orgasm, lose my virginity. When I showed (introduced?) him to my current boyfriend I warned: this is what you will look like after you sleep with me for thirty years.

I realize sleeping with a cherished childhood toy after the age of fourteen might raise a red flag. There has to be some identifiable stunt in my emotional growth that allows such an attachment to persist. I have met other adults who hold onto such comforts—withered blankets or similar animals whose innards have long ago clumped into tumor-like stuffing clusters under their frail faux fur coats. One of my friends has a 4′ x 5′ wall portrait of her teddy bear (Huggy) constructed entirely of little metallic stars. We all seem like functional members of society, but I have little perception of how we appear to others — naïve? sentimental? callow? I don’t see much difference between Tubby and an orthopedic pillow; we have a history, yes, but his purpose in my bed is now primarily to support my body.

There is a bit of anthropomorphizing occurring, of course. As a rational human being I know Tubby has no actual feelings at stake, but a superstitious sliver of me believes some of my excess childhood emotion and sentiment seeped into his polyester pores and burrowed there, sort of like a poltergeist. When I stare hard into those scratched out eye-buttons I see something alive, even if it’s just my own blurry reflection.

If I wanted an easy explanation for my affection I would say the rabbit filled some absence in my life where a father should have been, but I want to give Tubby more credit than that Freudian shortcut. I’d rather see Tubby as a symbol for how I don’t give a f-ck, and how I can choose to hold onto something just because it feels good. We are taught to let go of things at certain times, move on, grow up, but when I look at Tubby I am reminded of the unselfconsciousness of childhood, a careless disregard that fades with maturity. I suppose I see some merit in holding onto that uninhibited joy, even if only in the nocturnal curve of my torso.

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Your parents have moved down the coast to a place where it’s always summer, even in the winter. Three days before Christmas and you’re eating seafood at a sidewalk café, the ocean breeze combing through your hair like fingers attached to hands attached to someone who wants you. It’s 81 degrees and this is their home now.

You like the house. It sits on an Edward Scissorhands block with manicured bushes and pastelled neighbors, 70-somethings trapped in ‘70-something. The bathroom is dressed in coral and always smells like sunscreen. You used to stay in houses like this, houses with seashells sitting on windowsills, houses with beach towels in every closet. You stayed there for a week, maybe two, and then you’d return to the pavement, and the subways, and the river. You’ll return to all of that again, but your parents will stay behind this time. This is their home now.

And how can that be? Because you’ve never left smudged fingerprints on the walls, and you’ve never hidden a report card in your pillowcase, and you’ve never sat in the driveway waiting for some boy to pick you up, some boy whose name you’ll forget in five years. You’ve never slammed any of these freshly-painted doors, never screamed or cried or muttered I hate you I hate you I hate you under your breath knowing no one will hear you while secretly hoping someone does.

You’ve never thrown a baseball through the window and you’ve never stolen pulls from a cigarette in your bedroom, you don’t even have a bedroom here. You’ve never woken up in the middle of the night for a snack and turned on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries to watch while you were eating it, and you’ve never become so afraid during that hour that you sat upright in the eat-in kitchen until the sun rose, you’ve never done that here. You’ve never snuck out and you’ve never snuck in because you can come and go as you please, you’re a guest now. This isn’t your home, but it is theirs.

At five in the afternoon you walk in perfectly straight lines, up and down and in and out of the grid their house sits on and you’ll smile and you’ll wave whenever someone drives by because these people are your neighbors now, somehow, by extension. A guy wearing a pale blue t-shirt with jagged edges where the sleeves should be grins at you from the window of his white truck and you won’t feel excited to see someone your own age as much as you’ll mourn all of the times you flew down here to visit your grandparents; you played mini-golf and fell in puppy love with some kid playing a hole ahead of you [every single time; always a different boy] and he was wearing a baseball cap and sun-cloaked skin and you wanted to kiss him before you knew what it could mean, what it could do. You could fall in love anywhere, with anyone, when you were little. As the guy in the pale blue t-shirt sails by and makes a left onto your parents’ new block, you don’t wish you could kiss him; instead you wish you didn’t know exactly what you like, you wish you were indiscriminate so that you could like anything.

The sun goes down and leaves bales of cotton candy in its wake, pink and blue streaking across the sky like a welcome banner for newborns. It’s a boy and it’s a girl, you think, clouds are mostly white where I live, you think, where is my home now? You wonder.

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You’ll probably never be invited to our family dinners. That is, because they don’t really exist. Dinnertime in America and so many other cultures from Asia to Africa is synonymous with family bonding. Its purpose, besides the obvious fundamental self-serving nourishment, is to connect with those closest to you. Enrich your body, enrich your soul. Dinnertime used to be a big deal in the eyes of my father, but those eyes have changed drastically over the past decade. New family means new traditions and the exoneration of past activities tied to an old, unwanted life.

Everything came in twos. Suddenly there were two houses I had to live in. Two weeks spent at each before the cycle repeated. Both of my parents got remarried, twice. My father had a second set of children. And I was now secondary in his life. Numbers — we all identify by them — age, cell phone digits, social security number — and as far as technology goes, we cannot live without them. Yet the last place you should have to live as a number is within your own family.

But this is what happens when you’re no longer part of a nuclear unit. When that has exploded into a messy disarray. And suddenly you find pieces of yourself no longer fitting where they once bonded so easily before. When glue is not a permanent fix. When you realize that your mother can only support you emotionally, and your father can only support you financially. When you realize you serve as a reminder of a failed pastime, a mirror of your mother, an unwanted ball to juggle. It’s a lot like those 50,000-piece puzzles that no one wants to finish because it’s frankly easier to leave the difficult ones off the table completely.

So you turn to the artificial, the television. But there were no butterflies leading me to an adytum of refuge, no talking fairies flying me to an alternate carefree dimension. And this is where I wish someone would have warned me that Disney doesn’t always get things right, or “get things” in general.

Hakuna Matata — I used to repeat it over and over again. After all, it means no worries — for the rest of your days. But this sublime adage was met not by a dissipation of concerns like it purports to do. It rather came to symbolize another myth, lie, subtle lesson of my not-so-childhood.

I grew up fast, but even so, I couldn’t see then like I do now. It’s similar to that feeling of wearing contacts for the first time, when everything comes into focus, but you are still not able to change the way you were blinded before — by innocence, age or ignorance. I wish I could have gone up to my father and said stop, you’re going to hurt me, far more than you could ever imagine or ever intend. But he will anyway, because all along I was never enough, he always wanted more kids, a trophy wife, a trophy life.

And her. She came into my house as my babysitter, and a year later, she’s planning its demolition and reconstruction. And when she tore down those walls, the only walls that kept me safe, that gave me some freedom and distance and belongingness, she tore down the last piece of my puerility. I was a woman far before my body printed the words in red blood.

And that house, the money, the kids, all that wasn’t enough for her. So she let the liquid valor flow — from the bottle to her mouth, from her mouth to her words and from her words to my heart like arrows of ice, or isolation — and if that was her aim, she most definitely succeeded.

And this is what I call the onion life, and I quote from Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha “…peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.” One facet of life after the other, slowly being taken away. That is, until you’ve reached the lowest layer and realize you’ve just got to work with what you have left before it’s all gone. My rawest self, exposed, showing nothing but my bones, was my impetus to be better, study harder, and be someone important in this world. And gradually the worn away epidermis is built up once again, replaced with thicker, stronger, more resilient skin.

You slowly begin to laugh, instead of wince, that you have a nephew the same age as your half-brother. And you smile because you realize you’re not a house built on sand slowly sinking by yourself, rather you do have all of these people — however random and discordant — that support you. And you accept that your father is incapable of showing love but he means well and he’s slowly realizing his mistakes; he’s trying. Even though he cannot remember the title of your job and botches it on the Christmas card, at least you were in the card this year.

You move past the jealously blocking you from whole-heartedly loving your decade-plus younger half-siblings who get iPads for holy communions and laptops for 11^th birthdays. You start to connect with your double-decade older step-siblings over surfing, tattoos and other things you thought they were too old to relate to. And sometimes it takes a death in the family or a serious health complication for you to see that it’s better to walk with these people in the dark than to walk alone in the sun.

You realize you didn’t ever want or need half of the things you were envious of anyways. You realize that without everything that life so violently threw at you along the way, you wouldn’t be where you are or who you are today. Your morals, your attitude, your direction, are all a result of the variables and numbers in the equation of your unbalanced childhood. You come to find you will attempt to solve for x or y or z your entire life — trying to fix the inequality, solve the problem. But it will never balance completely, because life will continually fill its spaces with numbers and letters, people and problems, but we change, we grow, we deal.

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In the pink bathroom, my father lathers his face with shaving cream, watching himself through the fog of the mirror. He smells of salt and still bath water. He looks like some merman deep under the ocean’s peel. Reaching over to me, he turns my face to him, pulling my chin in his direction with his clean hand. He streaks shaving cream round my cheeks, lips. The smell rides through my nostrils, almost like chlorine when you first take a dive.

In the mirror, I look ridiculous. My peach fuzz peaking out from underneath the foam. My father is in his briefs, pulled all the way up to the belly button. I’m in boxers. I have one chest hair, maybe. My father’s skin is suede, with a belly grand as a globe, proud. I can count my ribs. I close my eyes, and wait.

My father takes his razor, and swiftly guides it from the top of his cheek, and down. It reminds me of lawn mowing, of him going back and forth in the summer heat, dripping sweat. He always smelt of gasoline when he would wrap his hands round the door knob to go back inside the house.

“J, it’s that easy,” he says, as he dips his razor into the running water. The entire bathroom looks like it’s blushing. Even the sink was pink.

The razor has two blades. My father holds my face, and puts the razor to my skin, and goes through the motions. As I look at the mirror, blood slides down from the top of my cheek.

“F-ck. I nicked you, J.”

He grabs a wash cloth, and tries to stop the gush. I can feel the warmth of the blood, slowly traveling down my skin, mixing with the shaving cream. It stops eventually, and he continues on, plucking the fuzz above my lip, the few chin hairs.

I wash my face and the water’s cool and my skin is soft. My face looks different, I think, without the hair. I try to imagine that this meant I was a man, or becoming what I thought my dad wanted me to be.

My father begins to take a piss while I am still in my bathroom. His briefs to his knees, and I turn away, and leave the bathroom, wondering if this was his “I love you.”

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We drove fast in cheap cars. We wanted more than anything to stay friends until we all died. We wanted to do everything we could to make ourselves feel like that was going to happen. None of us knew what we wanted after we left. We all knew we wanted to leave. But there was no career talk, or even real talk of college. All we wanted was to live as much as we possibly could. As much as we possibly could before we got old.

Phonecalls picked up by a mother, who would call out a name, and then we would meet at Mike’s house, or somewhere else, and make phonecalls to other groups of friends until we had a place to meet everyone. There were buyers. There were ditchbanks and rocks to throw at the sky. There were flashes of thunderstorms in the east. And “what time do you have to go home?” Talk about not liking girls, but still always talk about girls.

It was us against everything. Against the adults. The older kids. The younger kids. Against age. Against time. Against not having enough money and not being able to really work for it, but not really wanting to work. Always music and always loud. If we couldn’t change the landscape where we lived, we could change the way it sounded.

When joy turned to hostility one of us would fill up with enough angst to infect the rest and then we became vandals. If we couldn’t choose where we lived, we could choose to destroy it. The less power we felt we had over our own lives the more destructive it got.

When we weren’t smoking cloves or breaking things we were playing driveway basketball or video games in someone’s basement when the winter forced us in. By then homework was only done when it couldn’t be avoided. Those with understanding parents didn’t have to lie to hang out. At least not as often. We got f-cked up. We got caught. Some of us were better at running from busted parties than others.

Whenever I was alone I wondered if anyone else felt the way I did. Then we got together and worked it out until we all felt the same for at least a moment. That’s what we were always trying to find — that moment when we were all feeling the same thing. It wasn’t the only good time in our lives, but it was one we went through together. We were hopeful. Idealistic. Sure we could do a better job with the world if they would give it to us. We’re all different now, scattered around the planet, but we’re also still alive in that place — every time any of us go back, we go back to what we were when we all lived there.

We were young enough that friends still meant play. Before real failure. Before big relationships went bad. Before anyone quit, or got killed. No one had done anything yet they couldn’t take back or fix. We tried on bigger ideas like loyalty and honesty, but what we really meant was solidarity — we just didn’t know that word yet.

When it was the best it meant the rumor of a party, a lucky shirt and hat (girls were so unknowable to us then we resorted to superstition) all of our friends in good humor. Then the party came together with enough alcohol and our people and no cops. It was good to the point that everyone, even the nice ones, stayed out past curfew. No one was going home. No one wanted to miss it. The party was home, the world we wanted, and the people we needed were there.

We didn’t want to go to heaven, we’d have to die first. The world wasn’t anywhere we believed in or wanted part of, not with all of its messed up adults and real problems we knew we’d have to deal with anyway — we were smart enough to see that coming. We just had now. We had the houses of friends whose parents were out of town and left them to us. That was as close as we would ever get to building another world, and for a few hours when we were seventeen it was enough.

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