Dysons Make the Best Dance Partners

Fifteen years ago the flashbulbs would have been blinding and the results would have remained mysterious, but in the age of instant gratification and digital cameras, my mother was able to have her photo taken over and over. And over. And make immediate demands for deletion.

No, it wasn’t her surprise birthday party; it was my sister’s. While Mandy was having a day at the spa, her husband transformed their home into a cocktail lounge, suited with candle light, high-boy tables, waitresses, hors devours, and a bartender serving pear martinis. There a was gusto of surprise, a toast in her honor, a cake of fondant frosting shaped like something I cannot exactly recall, dancing, slideshows. The works.

And there in a corner, while my sister was off downing martinis and thanking the waitresses like she’d just been handed an Academy Award, a group of about six of us were standing around my mother in the kitchen giving her a sundry of instructions on looking casual, while my friend Stephanie fired off the camera. Some guests thought she ought to tuck her bangs behind her ear, while others thought she should try smiling with her mouth closed next time. About every five shots, we stopped to review the results.

It wasn’t going well.

I believe that was about the eleventh time my mother decided she was going to pursue EHarmony or match dot com, and wanted “help.” “Leesha, tell me which site I should go with— which is the best one,” she inquired, in that junior high best-friends-forever tone I hated? It was painful. Hearing the slightest utterance from her on the topic made me want to slit my wrists for ever mentioning the mere existence of the World Wide Web to her. But the damage was already done. She’d been on and off dating websites before, but hadn’t found any success. And by success I don’t mean that she didn’t meet the man of her dreams; I mean that she wasn’t able to wrangle a single online date.

She’s my mother. She’s my mother and I know she’s got some crazy goin’ on, but she's attractive, so I half wondered what kind of crazy emails she might have sent to prevent a solitary outing. Not one date? Did she tell them that she liked to eat onions whole, eat them like apples? Did she tell them how she spoke in tongues on occasion or mention her bladder surgery? Her unusually sized colon? These are things my mother casually slips into conversation among friends, but I suspected she had more sense when it came to dating,

Once upon a time, she had the luxury of luring in her prey with side-long glances and giggling, and then later she would unleash the wacky-town, but with the new age of cyber dating, I wasn’t sure how she’d been trying to bait them. Surely she was still saving crazy for after the meal—I mean, she’s nutty not dumb. I really wasn’t sure of her escapade details and the more I thought about it the more I realized I didn’t want to know much beyond the fact that she had a profile already circulating on www dot something or other dot com.

One thing I knew then and still know to be true today is that my mom’s got game. And I know this from seeing her in action with a number of my former male acquaintances. It was at my sister’s graduation, from about 5 yards away, that I noticed my mother making a pass at a guy I happened to be dating. That was the first moment I realized she had some moves and simultaneously came to understand that there was a new set of rules unfolding between us. She leaned into to him slightly when she smiled, touched his arm, and spoke in a murmur of coy, enchanting tones that I could barely overhear. But I heard enough. At the time I was both enraged and amazed, and as I stormed toward them I duly noted her posture. Touch his arm. Giggle, don’t laugh. He is the funniest person in the room. You are not.

I no longer had the luxury of compartmentalizing the images that come to mind with discovering your mother’s poly-blend panties tangled in the bed sheets as a kid. She liked to get hers. And when I saw her ask my date to dance at a wedding, I knew nothing good would come of it. Still, I watched from the bar, where I was taking shots with the groom’s men, keeping my eye on her, noticing how her arms worked around his waist, how easily they found their way under his suit jacket.

My mother is an attractive woman. I’m not crazy about the highlights that her hairdresser talked her into, and I’d tone down the mascara, but for the love of GOD could we not get a single decent photograph? Over and over again, Stephanie snapped pictures and every single one was just as bad as the last. She cocked her head to the side so that she had six chins, one eye was half closed, and appeared to be rolling back in her head. Or the whole thing was a complete blur.

“Deb, what’s the problem here, are you wasted?!—open your eyes,” Steph said in a moment of amazement and indignation at just how long the process was taking. Steph had promised all night that she’d get some great photos of my mom, and the anticipation had been building.

“No, Stephanie, this always happens to me—my eyes always end up closed—I’m trying to keep them open,” she explained in a voice that revealed that she felt somewhat foolish.

It was true. Common knowledge too. My mother was basically incapable of having her picture taken. Even as a kid I recognized the pattern. Wedding photos, baptisms, prom pictures. Her eyes were always at least half closed with a wheezing look like she was about to sneeze, complicated by the awkward cock of her head that added about twenty pounds. It never really mattered much to me, because I knew what she looked like, and besides, it was funny. But I was becoming more and more sure by the second that this picture situation was really the problem with her online dating snafu. After round ten of takes I realized what the problem was.

“Okay, Mom, I have just cracked the code to your existence of bad photographs.  Everytime, right as she's about to take the picture, you start bobbing your head like some invalid giggling at a cartoon. It's not like people are actually going to see a silent film of you—it’s a fucking picture. Why are you pretending to laugh?  Smile. Look at the camera and don’t move.”

My siblings and I really beef up the language for our parents’ sake. It’s part of what we determined to be their lives’ sentence. We drop F-bombs on them like it's Armageddon. My mother sometimes enjoys it, because she likes to think that we see each other as equals that way, but in mixed company our language works to mortify her quite well, and then she retaliates.

“Fuck you, Alycia!” Our friends just stood back and watched the scene play out. It was really nothing new.

“Well, Jesus Christ, Mom, people have been doing this for a fucking century and somehow you haven’t caught on. I’m trying to help you here—When you get your picture taken, it’s a few easy steps: Hold still, open your eyes, and smile. That’s it. "

It was the truth, damn it—That wasn’t a good freeze-frame look for her. She stared at me with her pissed off face, the one with empty threats written all over it.

All four of us kids dished it out to my mother on regular basis, like she was Joan Crawford getting roasted on Comedy Central. If she did it, we were going to make fun of it. I gave my mother shit and as far as I was concerned it was nobody’s business.

She rolled her eyes in her head  in resentful surrender and said “Fine, Alycia!” She then stood against the counter with a wine glass up near her chest and flashed her gleaming teeth as Stephanie took one more photo. “Fucking happy,” she asked me? She then turned Stephanie’s camera around and showed us the results.

And there it was. The picture. “See, mom, I told you! This is gonna get you some tail. Don’t you wish I’d realized this ages ago?” I say things like this ironically, which she never really seems to catch onto, but she was beginning to recover from the blow now.

“You know... I do,” she said, not allowing any bit of our previous exchange to overshadow her more recent satisfaction.

My sister at this point in the party was stammering blissfully over from the bar with a new drink in her hand, “Ohhh… Mom, you’re getting glamor shots,” she crooned, but didn’t stop for a reply, working the room, moving through the crowd. I love seeing my sister in that state. She’s a happy person, allows herself to love life, and on the rare occasions that she is drunk it’s as if every good thing she did in her life coalesces to allow for her own private Hollywood evening. That evening was especially such.

My niece who had recently turned three was running through the house all afternoon waiting for Mandy’s return. Reese was at the age when she’d discovered the concept of relationships, still wanting to marry her father and grow up to be her mother. The minutes before Mandy's arrival, she had worked herself into a frenzy at how overjoyed Mandy would be to see us all here. So that I could distract her from the hubbub of setup, I sat her on the bathroom counter with her feet in the sink while I pretended to apply eye shadow to her lids and then smudged lip-gloss onto her little bow lips. She firmly instructed me to close my eye shadow and blush compacts so that they wouldn’t get ruined, just as my sister, her mother, would have told me to do also, appalled that my makeup was in complete disarray.

The clearest memory I have of my own mother from childhood is her putting makeup on in the bathroom. She would stand at the vanity with the drawer to the right perpetually opened, practically spilling with lipstick, plastic eyelashes, and liners in an array of colors. She had a white cotton dress she wore often, with a pattern of red, velveteen ferns covering it, and a plastic red belt that cinched at the waste so the fabric clung to her hips. In retrospect she was one sexy bitch. When she moved to her bureau to put on earrings and perfume she would look into the mirror and smile at who she saw, delighted, as though she came upon an old friend by surprise. It was a smile that passed from her face quickly and was flanked by regular discontent that welled up from a place I knew all too well.

I love my mom. I love my mother. I’ve been known to tell people this for no apparent reason. I can't help myself, and when I make the statement out loud I hate how it rings, how it sounds like I’m denying a crush on some guy in the room, though I’ve clearly been flirting with his disaster all evening.

My brother, two sisters, and I tell each other this often in the aftermath of a major mom bitch session, “Ohhh… You, know, I love mom though….”

“Me too…” someone else will say in response. But no one has any intention of releasing her from the sentence we've given.

Her second ex-husband was among our favorite topics to reminisce over for entertainment and torture, and about twice a year she’ll scream at us, “All right fine. I was a terrible mother. But am I ever going to be off the hook for Kent?!”

“No,” we unanimously reply. Kent would always be free game. The four of us had been known to berate our mother to near anxiety attacks over her loser ex-husband. On one occasion we broke her down into a teary eyed defense during a friend’s Christmas party, amidst an audience of smiling bystanders. And we felt no remorse. We stood there drinking our hot ciders, munching on a variety of holiday sweets and laughed, until my brother, said “dude these peanut butter balls rock,” and we moved on with the conversation. People honestly seemed to find it funny, otherwise we  might have stopped.

Mandy will on occasion say something later like, “Do you think we were too hard on mom?

To which we all respond with a resounding, “Nahhh...” And this is enough to assuage any tinge of guilt.

I love my mother. But at this point in my life she feels more like the new kid who I’m chaperoning around the heartless halls of a junior high school than she feels like a mother. I’m not sure when we went from her telling me if I didn’t get up for school she was going to dump a bucket of water on my head, to me explaining why I did in fact think she should break up with her boyfriend who recently spent time in prison for being part of a Mexican drug cartel. "Okay, Mom, I'm only gonna tell you this one more time...."

I often wish I could live her life for her. If I could, I would not eat the entire onion before leaving for the movie theater. I would not have a fourth glass of wine, or even a third. I would not choose my father again. And again. I would break up with my boyfriend. I would tell my boss to fuck off. I would pull myself up and stop pretending. I would do all the things that some days I don’t have the strength to do for myself.

As a child Mandy and I used to sit in the stairway with my mother while she told us about her pregnancies, how she grew up near a swimming hole, how her first day of kindergarten went, her wedding day. And she told us over and over that we would have happy lives full of love. And I knew she meant that we would have lives different from hers. And I believed that.

There are days I’d like to set her hair on fire and call it an accident, but I love my mother. And sometimes I see her in myself, as she chuckles with her head cocked like a deranged bird dog and still wonders how her photographs never come out quite right.

By this time, Mandy had begun her latest dance routine with the Dyson vacuum, straddling it like a stripper pole in rhythm with Queen, martini in one hand, and an upholstery attachment raised to her mouth in the other. My sister is beautiful, happy, and on that evening only Queen could do her joy justice. As the Dyson began to take on an identity of its own, I noticed my mom staring at my sister and laughing. Her temporary photo-op fan club had broken up into smaller groups, joined another cocktail table, stepped outside for new conversation, the vacuum was transforming into a mechanical bull, and judging by Mandy's gyrations, the party was only getting started. I had the urge to tell my mother then that she would have a life full of love, say that she would make herself happy, tell her to, but rather than bust up the party, I laughed along with her from across the room.

Plan B

The conversation ended when a former poetry professor of mine, with whom I share a casual, yet fatherly, student-instructor relationship, asked me, “So you’re willing to let someone stick a needle in your vagina to get your eggs and then sell them for a back-up plan—BUT you’re not willing to initiate the first kiss with someone you just shared four hours of conversation and beers with?” Good question. 

It was a good question because I knew the answer. And somehow over time I managed to back myself onto a mental treadmill where I’m currently mourning the missed opportunity of selling my eggs.

That was supposed to be my Plan B. The thought process started benignly enough, after my friend Stephanie’s son, Tyler, had just gotten home from the hospital where he received stitches. He returned tired but triumphant, spinning in circles while Stephanie hollered at him to stop. It was the kind of amusing circus you would expect, and amidst the commotion I heard Stephanie tell her husband, “Leesh doesn’t even know if she wants to have kids.”

Whoa…Back up the truck!

I didn’t like the sound of that. Not wanting children and not having them are very different things. The latter just sort of happens to you quietly over time, like a sunburn, while the former is something that you make a conscious effort toward—which makes you categorically seem like the kind of woman who lounges in her sister’s back yard on Saturdays, asking her nephew to go grab her another watermelon wine cooler. I can see myself now, spreading a film of sunscreen onto my self-tanned legs.

No, I didn’t like the sound of this statement—me not wanting children. So I carefully corrected my friend , “Actually, I just don’t know if I’ll have them—it’s not that I don’t want them—I just might not have a chance to.”

“Why?”

Why? I know I’m not ancient, I’m successful in my career, and I fancy myself a fairly decent catch, it’s just that at some point talking about a house, kids, and a husband starts to make me feel like a bartender who says he’s saving for medical school.

I do realize that with the developments of modern medicine and the feminist movement I can in fact carry out the task of having a child without a man on hand. My friend Melanie has reminded me before that I’m just as well off to go for parenthood alone, because the “roosters rarely stick around to roost.” This doesn’t seem like new news, and I admire women who choose to brave it alone, but I find the idea of willfully putting myself into those circumstances sort of unthinkable.

For a number of reasons.

And it’s nothing to do with who I am. I’ve had people tell me I’d be a great parent and friends tell me I’d be a terrible mother. I don’t’ think much of those statements because I’ve never been convinced that personality or disposition alone makes a person more or less likely to be a suitable parent. Perhaps naively, I’ve always considered it a mixture of self-respect, circumstance, and chance. Where are you at in life, what kind of kid are you going to produce, and how will the likes of that person acclimate to the world you’ve created for them? It’s really a toss of the dice. What do I know, though? It’s just a guess.

With that in mind, I’ve always thought it best to try to create at least decent circumstances before I have children, that way I’d have more to work with when it comes to the chance part. The ingredients for the decent circumstances being: two sane and amiable people who have enough money to take care of a third person; health insurance; a car with less than 100,000 miles; a savings account with more than three digits; a mortgage; and all my credit cards paid off.

The last item of credit cards took so long to accomplish that I really haven’t gotten around to a few others, but I sold my ’97 Chevy about two years ago for a CRV, with AC, currently under the 100,000 mark. And the mortgage thing seems far less important in light of the recent housing meltdown. I’m doin’ all right, but this matter of two sane and amiable people is one that’s rather difficult to get around. It all begs the question: How much can I really negotiate with myself on this?

I draw the line at single parenthood. It’s a tough job—and I’m not going to pretend for even a second that I want or am able to do it. I don’t care if the rooster stays to roost at my house or not, at least my way I can garnish his wages and get the weekends off.

So when Stephanie looked at me confused and asked “why” I paused. With only mild annoyance. She loves me. She wants me to know a piece of the joyful mayhem that she has. Would I trade her? In a second. But I have to consider the possibility that it’s the not the hand I’ve been dealt. I’ve settled into thinking that if it happens great, and if not I’ll figure some other spectacular thing out. A Plan B, like vacationing. So I tell her, “You know, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to, I’m 32 and after 35 my chances will become more abysmal by the second.”

“Oh, GOD, Leesh, I hate when people say that about fertility and age.” Yeah, well I hate it too, because it reminds me of the statistics I heard on NPR. I realize that 32 is the new 15, but you can’t argue with science. It’s out of my hands.

Instead of going that route I explain, “I’m not saying it’s too late now, or that I can’t. I’m saying that I might not get to.”

“Well if you’re really worried about it, then freeze your eggs.” Well, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t really “worried” about it. My thoughts were less along the lines of sticking a needle in my ovaries and more along the lines of either happening upon pregnancy at 38 or jetting off to Nice with my younger Latin lover and renting a convertible. One does not seem worse or better than the other. Simply different. Okay, maybe at this point in life I would prefer the kid, but who am I to balk at a beach vacation? I don’t like to force things.

Still, this notion of frozen eggs appealed to my interest. Not because I would actually do it, but because… I might consider doing it… later. Or something. Or sometime. Or never. But I like to know my options, have a Plan D to my Plan C. So I nod my head a couple times and weigh the possibility.

Once I was in the privacy of my own couch I opened my laptop ready to begin some research. I’ve been known to Google everything from how to make candied yams to how do know if your new boyfriend has erectile dysfunction. Still, I recognized that I was crossing over to a new domain when I typed the words “cost of freezing eggs” into the Google powered search box and was met with a deluge of online resources.

I managed to piece together some common themes that I decided could be considered fact based on the fact they reappeared in virtually every article. Turns out the initial “set-up” fee for this hullabaloo, by my estimation, is no less than $10,000, on the low end. And then you’ve got to factor in the yearly storage fee to keep them frozen, which is around $500 a year—sure, that’s less than a storage unit but I’m not looking to keep my eggs at a motel six. Nor am I thinking that the actual retrieval of my eggs is one of those services that you go with the lowest bidder.

I closed my computer still not quite close to being sold on the notion, nonetheless considering its possibility, and a little taken aback by the cost. That night I dreamed that I was fishing my invisible ova out of the toilet with a gold fish net and dropping them in an ice cube tray, warning my roommate to only use the ice from the clear tray not the blue one. She thought this was completely normal.

With the clear head that comes with a morning shower, in between shampoo and conditioning, I remembered my fallback financial plan for everything. How had I missed this before? Sell my eggs. Sell my eggs so I can pay to harvest and store some other eggs. I mean, really, it’s one-stop shopping. And selling my eggs had been in my back pocket since I was eighteen.

It was in my Bio 102 class, ignoring the lecture and reading the Collegian classifieds that I first came upon the advertisement. “No Job? Need Money? Sell Your Eggs!” And this became my Plan B for a number of circumstances.

At 18 it was, “What if my car breaks down and I can’t get to work?” I’ll sell my eggs. (I discovered selling my plasma instead.)

At 22 and uninsured it was, “What if I get appendicitis and I’m drowning in medical bills?” Hell, I’ve got all these eggs I’m not using.

At 26 it was, “What if I get pregnant and my boyfriend leaves me abandoned, with nothing but a lousy masters in poetry and some crappy nonprofit job to support his bastard child?” Well, I guess I’ll have to buckle down and sell a few of these here eggs.

It sounds bad, and I get the miracle of alife, but at those particular moments in my own miraculous life, it seemed necessary to have a back-up plan in place. This one seemed good enough and required no immediate effort, but apparently there was one piece of information I neglected to notice—and that little fact was the age limit. I was informed by a friend the following morning via Facebook a message.

It read “Sorry to report most places/people won't buy eggs from women over thirty.”

What the fuck? Everyone knows 32 is the new 15. Sure maybe I had fewer eggs left, but only by a handful, and we all have something like 300,000 anyway. Could my viability be less than even I realized?

I did my own investigating and apparently I could sell my eggs in India and I was still good to go on selling a kidney—oh, and my hair—but sure enough, across the reputable board no one wanted my eggs. I suppose you could find a buyer if you were out there marketing them on your own and willing to sell at a discount. Craigslist? Basically, though, the clinics that post their ads on the internet and college newspapers don’t want your stinking eggs at 32.

It was odd to know that my once industrious safety net for the sundry of life’s catastrophes was pulled out from under me, and E-baying my eggs was the nearest Plan B for bearing children that I could come up with at the moment. It really just put me back to my previous fallback plan of driving along the coast of France as a cougar in a souped up convertible. That was fine and well, but part of me started thinking that the beach Plan B could just as easily slip away. Possibilities in general were beginning to seem ephemeral, which left me feeling blind-folded.

It was really bothering me. I explained the whole crazy saga to guests over drinks at my friend Brian’s 31^st birthday party. They’re all friends, so I was in good company. Overall, the dilemma was met with surprise over the age limit on egg sales, and somehow that topic spurned Brian to ask how my match dot com date went the week before. He loves my dating stories— well, he both loves and hates them. He loves to be aghast at them, and I enjoy his astonishment. This particular date was leading nowhere of interest though. I enjoy telling tales of some my worst and most odd dates, but those that have no build up and end blandly I like to avoid.

“Oh, it was a bust, after four hours and a lot beers he didn’t even kiss me goodnight, and no kiss is the kiss of death,” I told him matter-of-factly.

“What? Why didn’t you just lean in?”

Oh, Jesus. I could have sworn we’d been through this before. I do not, under any circumstances, ever dole out the first kiss. Never have. Never will. I wait it out. It’s worked so far. I think. I don’t like to establish too much control at the onset. I need to maintain an ambianse of casual, don’t-care, indifference. I have a whole series of reasons that I explained to Brian, again.

And then I was stumped by the question that ended our conversation.

“So you’re willing to let someone stick a needle in your vagina to get your eggs and then sell them for a back-up plan—BUT you’re not willing to initiate the first kiss with someone you just shared four hours of conversation and beers with,” my poetry professor asked?

It was a good question. There are days that it seems like life is just happening around me and I wonder if the sum of my existence has become a series of back-up plans and excuses. And how do I say out loud that I don’t know what my Plan A is anymore? I don’t know if I forgot, gave up, or even had one in the first place.

So instead of explaining, I did the next best thing, and smiled like I’ve learned to do when feigning social graces, lifted my two-buck chuck and said, “Absolutely.”

And that’s the thing about Plan B—it’s easier.