peripatetic (ramble)
Most of my writing comes from my 1.7-mile walk home from work at night:
On my mother’s side of the family, there is a sort of casual tradition about using variations of Mary in the girls’ names. (Mom’s side is Catholic & abundant with girl-children.) I always liked this tradition because it was unspoken and unofficial, just a thing that began to happen, and nothing really special (fairly common for Catholics). There aren’t specific lines of names that have to be followed; they just end up getting borrowed and switched around.
Mary Cecilia was my great-grandmother, and Mary Eloise was grandmother. Mary Stephanie is my aunt and Suzanne Marie is my mom. She named me Stacey Marie and another daughter Jamie Suzanne. Mom seemed to name us flippantly; there were no deep underlying meanings (so I’d been told). Grandma suggested Stacey and Mom thought it was pretty. I hated it for a long time because I thought it sounded too girly, but it is derived from Anastasia and it means “resurrection or rebirth” and I liked that (I was an springtime baby so it was appropriate); Marie means “sea of bitterness” which I didn’t used to think applied but I’ve grown into it. My sister Meggie was named after the character in Thorn Birds which my mom liked a lot but I wasn’t allowed to watch or read due to the risqué content; when I later found out the plot of the story I thought it was a pretty badass namesake. Except for Meggie, the rest of us have somewhat ambiguous names: Stacey, Carrie, Jamie — perhaps not popular for boys as much as girls, but possible. Steven would’ve been Stevie if he was born a girl. Mom was reserving that name (her father’s name) for a son and when he was finally born (the fifth child after four girls) it was a surprise. We used to call him Stevie anyway when we were little, just to fit the rhyme & rhythm of the rest of our names. I didn’t used to always feel like I fit in my family (teen angst, I suppose) and wasn’t interested in these details until I became pregnant myself. Then I started to feel more connected and homesick. I gave my birthdaughter the middle name Mae and then her adoptive parents gave her the middle name Marie.
When I was growing up, I never realized that I came from a line of comparatively Strong Women because I didn’t know that “traditional gender roles” were even a thing. When I was born, it was decided that since mom made a larger income, she would keep her job and Daddy would be Mister Mom. He did the cooking and they shared the chores — Mom has some OCD tendencies about Her Things so I think nobody else was allowed to touch some of them, like the ceramic trinkets in the Living Room (which was to be lived in under no circumstances whatsoever. We weren’t well-off by any means, but the furniture in that room was nice once and despite cat-clawing and dust buildup and kids breaking the rules, it is still there mostly for looking and not using). Mom jokes that she can’t cook; she’d burn a pot of water if she was left in the kitchen. She’s in charge of the finances and the important business phone calls and arguing with debt collectors. She’s the one who taught me the “envelope method” of saving money — when I was a kid, this was the plastic bag method, as I only had change from my various neighborhood business endeavors. She taught me how to write checks and have a bank account.
Mom & I share the same initials and she would bring me presents from her office job, tablets and pens with “S. M. Piotrowski” letterhead. I liked to play office and I would set up a desk on the porch stairs with my tablets and pens and a little calendar and some toys, all lined up and organized. I grew up learning how to be in charge of myself and my effects without having to be specifically taught; this was the way things were. I grew up knowing that you damn well better be able to take care of yourself because there is no guarantee that anyone will ever help you. This is partly from my family and partly from a working class history and partly from Pittsburgh. Daddy’s favorite piece of advice to my whining pleas was “nobody said life was fair.” Sometimes this sounds like a bleak outlook, but to me it’s more like a “prepare for the worst and hope for the best” way of life, and also it gave me strength to know that I can always rely on myself even if everything around me fails. When I was a kid, I would beg my parents to let me do some of my own chores — I wanted to be in charge of my own laundry, for one, and there was a certain amount of head-butting about these sorts of things because we are all stubborn and have our own way of doing things, so while I could be taught how to wash clothes and bake cookies, I still had to be supervised to make sure I was doing it The Right Way. This attitude has its downside, because my hard-headedness also makes me have to do more than my share sometimes. I’ll drag Colby to the laundromat with me, but I’m not so sure I trust him to wash and fold the clothes the right way, which is cute and humorous but also a hassle. He’ll clean the house but I’ll still go around afterward to straighten things The Right Way, otherwise I will have a constant minor anxiety.
Daddy told me that he met my mom over the CB radio. His handle was Summer Breeze and she was Boo! (Sometimes he still gets her spooky toys named Boo! for their anniversary or her birthday, both of which fall in October.) He said that when they met, she wore an Army jacket and combat boots and he liked her because she was a realist and tough. (Mom told me she had a “hippie phase” in dress only since she was a little too young to really get into the hippie thing when it was happening.) They were together for seven years before they got married. Once I asked Mom how Daddy proposed to her and she said he really didn’t; eventually they just started talking in terms of “when we’re married…” like it was the logical next step. Daddy grew up in his father’s bar — I also spent a lot of time in bars when I was a kid, eating peanuts and playing video poker, and I still love the smell of piss-stale beer and broken air conditioning, but that’s another story and another side of the family entirely — and later Daddy had his own apartment, I think. Mommy lived at her parents house while she was in college. After they married, they lived in Mount Oliver for a while and were able to save Daddy’s entire paychecks every week for a year to put towards a downpayment on the house in Carrick, which was where I grew up.
I only remember my parents arguing once — really arguing. I was really little. I think it was about money. While they fought, I scooted back and forth across the kitchen floor, crossing the tense space between them and giving alternating hugs. Or at least that’s how I remember it. Mommy & Daddy were never overtly aggressive, nor were they overtly affectionate or romantic. Even with the kids, if Mom used baby-talk, it was with sarcastic undertones, like we all knew it was ridiculous because it’s okay to talk to a kid like a person, really, so she just joked about it. When we were learning to talk, my parents would use some of our mispronunciations and codes long after we had mastered the language: Grandma became Mugga and ketchup was always “keppage.” I didn’t know that “dippy eggs” meant “eggs over easy” until I was a teenager and tried to order it in a diner. It was rare for them to actually scream at us kids but when they did, it would stop us right in our tracks. I wish I had a yelling voice like that sometimes, authoritative and in control when necessary, but I get nervous and whiny and nasally instead, but you’ll catch hell if you call me a nag.
I grew up in a tough love household and I still think that is okay, or at least it worked out for me. My favorite Dad memory is still the way he would take care of me if I fell down and got scraped: “You’ll live,” and then play connect-the-dots with iodine drops on my bloody knees. When I go a headache, he’d say, “Really? I’ve got five of them!” (for each child, of course) and hand over the aspirin. We didn’t say “I love you” very often. Even now, when I live so far away, I can call my mom and talk for an hour and if we say I love you at the end, it’s in a silly falsetto, “talk to you lay-toirrr!” It feels weird to say I Love You because I guess we don’t really have to. We kind of just know. Colby’s immediate family says I Love You a lot and I thought it awkward at first, and he thought it equally weird, when he’d visit with me, that no one says it in my family’s house. There are six people in that house (or eight, when we visit) and we grew up fighting to carve out spaces in shared bedrooms, mumbling and snapping and cackling and interrupting one another but somehow all taking turns to be heard.
Even though I’ve experienced a number of different types of intimate relationships, my as-yet-unattainable standard is a marriage like what my parents have. It’s not all cupcakes-and-rainbows, it’s not all lovey-dovey cutie-poo. It’s just a team. They just share everything and they figured out what arrangement works for them and they are just there with each other and also in their own spaces; Daddy has his tool-room and Mom has her office desk area, and they have Grown-Up Talking Time over coffee after dinner every night and then do the dishes together. Easy. They support one another but no one is ever keeping score. I still keep score and I don’t know why; after nearly five years, I still know in the back of my mind the imbalance of dollars borrowed versus dishes cleaned and certain shitty times outweighing the good moments. A friend of mine who has been married for 10 years told me near the beginning of my relationship that if you can survive the first five years, the rest is likely to work out. There were a lot of times I called bullshit on this but lately I’ve been approaching Calm and Stability and it’s a little scary. I question myself and wonder if I’m Just Settling For, but then I don’t really think so. I think it would be scarier to consider having to ever start over with building trust and secrets and jokes with anyone else. Five years can be a long time, especially when it’s from age 23 to 28 and 26 to 31.
Part of my family mythology is about how my Grandma on my Mom’s side died from taking care of Pap. I tell the story this way because it happened out of nowhere; she had a brain aneurysm. She thought it was a headache and went to get aspirin, so I was told — and this was 10 years ago so maybe it is inaccurate but now it’s what I know — and she collapsed. I saw her body in the hospital, curled up like a bird and skin yellowed like paper. It was the first time I’d ever seen a dead body. I never saw my mom cry and I didn’t want to cry, but I did during her eulogy because the priest talked about how she used to sew clothes for her children and her grandchildren. I remember how I still wore the skirts that she made me even as her vision was failing and the stitches would unravel; I didn’t care if the elastic was too loose because all the tags said “Made with Love by Eloise.” She took care of Pap mostly by herself while his mind was slowly fading. She didn’t want to put him in a home because she was afraid if they couldn’t pay for it, they would take her house, and that house was important; Pap was able to save up for it while working in the coal mines and having to live in company housing. He grew all the trees in the backyard from saplings and built a greenhouse and later, one of the trees was tall enough to hang a swing for the grandchildren. She took care of him because she was stubborn and prideful, as we all are, and didn’t want to ask for help. There was a story about how my aunt stopped by to visit and found Grandma trying to help Pap get out of the bathtub. She had been trying for hours but didn’t call anyone for help, even though one of her daughters lived a few houses down and the other a few streets over, but she knew she could do it herself even if it took all day.
I grew up with these female role models who were hard and lined and worked and were realistic and down-to-earth, and part of me is that way with a vengeance yet part of me is extremely poetic and romantic to a fault. I had a few phases where I worried about boyfriends and why my hair won’t stay straight, but mostly I grew up with a mom who just didn’t give a shit. She teased me when I tried to do make-up but she and my aunts always said, you don’t need to wear make-up to look good, so I like make-up for occasional theatrics but it feels gross to consider dealing with it every day. Mom thought leg-shaving was stupid and would only shave if she was going somewhere fancy and wearing a dress, because sometimes you just gotta play the game.
None of these women were martyrs yet that idea got tangled in my mind somehow because I met a lot of people — mostly boys — over the years who just didn’t know how to take care of themselves and my natural inclination was to pick up the slack because if I don’t do it, it won’t get done right, if at all. And every time I would get it into my head that “what did I do to deserve this?” there would be Daddy’s voice, “No One Said Life Was Fair” and I would oscillate between feeling like a badass and feeling like a weakling. I didn’t grow up thinking that running a household was Women’s Work because in my family, it was very obviously teamwork divvied up by skill level and time available, and I didn’t understand why that didn’t work out the same way in my own relationships. I still don’t fully understand that line between “helping out” and “being a doormat,” but I’ve gotten better at it. Every therapist I’ve ever seen told me I have issues with boundaries and I didn’t even used to know what that meant.
Because I used to think this was a “punk” thing for a long time. There were boys who refused to get jobs but since I didn’t want to squat anywhere, I would work and pay the rent and say, you can go squat if you want to but I want a heater in the winter. And then it was, “but I want to live with you!” Boys who would get a job but quit after day one because someone told them what to do, or the work was too “degrading.” And there were boys who claimed the title “artist” and said they “don’t fit in” to society and therefore can’t find work. I knew this was privilege, a privilege to coast along couches and borrowing other people’s cell phones and internet and credit card numbers — I’ll pay you back! — because they still wanted to use those things even though they didn’t “need” them enough to pay for them. I thought I was jealous at first, that these boys could float along on their egos and always finding a girl to have sympathy and drive them around places and put them up. I began to feel expendable because I knew that if I put my foot down and demanded half the rent, they could and sometimes would just piss off into the next waiting pair of arms. I hate this even more because those arms have sometimes been mine because I’ve believed that stuff. Even though I am also an artist and I would dream of having all the hours to myself with no schedule and no obligations, even though I also have social anxiety when dealing with customers, even though I am an anarchist, baby, and I don’t want to have a boss — I gotta Play the Game because I don’t expect anyone to pick me up and call me an angel genius and pay for me to screw around with writing and art all the days while they go wash dishes for a living and try to make an album in the meantime. Oh, call the wahhmbulance! (Except not, this is a real thing that is real!)
This is why I didn’t like to travel. I became an asshole when I was a travelling punk even though it was only for a few months. I said mean things to my parents about their boring life of supposedly-unfulfilled dreams because I didn’t recognize that they actually accepted and enjoyed what life brought to them, even though it wasn’t Permanent Vacation. I latched on to my partner’s at-the-time holier-than-thou veganist ways because it was easy to be vegan when you shoplift in a different town every day. It was easy to be anti-capitalist if everything you owned was stolen or donated or dumpstered. It was easy to feel like the world is magical when you don’t take the time to involve yourself in any stable community and you don’t have to hang around the bad parts of town. I liked the myth of the troubadour back then, the wandering poet that people throw money at because you are the embodiment of their dream of freedom. And then I hated it. I called bullshit on the fact that my partner and I even dared to embrace poverty as if it was a choice. One time a lady took us to the bank and gave us a hundred dollars and I was overwhelmed about The Kindness of Strangers and later I realized what a sham I was, an able-bodied young white individual simply choosing to expect that strangers would be obligated to throw money and food and car rides at me because I decided I didn’t want to have a job, I decided that singing a song or having a conversation or just breathing entitled me to an eight-hour right from Bumblefuck, Ohio, to New Orleans in a Hispanic truckdriver’s big rig. He had kicked a bad habit and was working to prove himself and save money so that he could see his daughter again. He was named after an angel. Maybe sometimes I performed a service; maybe some of those conversations were therapeutic — you can tell anything to a hitchhiker because you’ll never see them again — maybe some of the on-the-spot songs we made up for passers-by were entertaining, and maybe the zines I gave out were enjoyable. But mostly it was a racket. These days, I can’t stand to read travelling zines. I hate all that crap about the freedom of the open road and the magical naked swimming in state parks and the epic conversations and getting pissed off at trains that are too fast, as if everything in the universe is supposed to fall down at your feet because you have named yourself a Wandering Philosopher. I don’t care, travelling kids. Feeding the hungry will dismantle The System much more than drinking a 40 on a speeding train.
I am graduating this year after spending 10 years in and out of college. The degree might not get me a better job. I might end up typing and/or dishwashing and/or coffee-slinging and I’m considering that, given my age, it might be possible to Settle Down and Raise a Family on this income, with this lifestyle, and it might be difficult but it won’t be impossible or traumatizing. When I gave my daughter up for adoption nearly six years ago, one of the reasons was because I hadn’t finished school and I had a shitty part-time job and was practically living on a couch and felt like a complete failure at life not to mention emotionally unstable and in a relationship that was unsustainable. I thought that I would Get My Shit Together real quick and all of a sudden be A Grown-Up, but now it’s six years later and really, the only thing that’s changed is my attitude and my age. I don’t care if I never have a car and ride public transit and bicycles forever. I don’t care if my future kids have to show-and-tell that Daddy plays in an unsigned band and Mommy is a typist and occasional photographer for the next forever, and they draw funny pictures and write funny stories and look silly and tired and harried but patient and maybe happy and comfortable, too. I think about my parents, and how my Dad was going to school for drafting and he became a stay-at-home dad instead and so used his construction skills on home improvement and repair, and Mommy went to school for Psychology and later a Master’s in Information Sciences and she worked in an office for 20 years before they downsized her. And then they went into debt and ran out of unemployment and then finally re-entered the workforce at entry-level jobs despite their excessive qualifications. It didn’t matter, because they were working for more important things, and their dreams could be fulfilled outside of their professions. I could type dictations or sell coffee or wash dishes for the rest of my life and it’s not the end of the world because there are More Important Things to Do outside of work. I don’t expect the Ideal to fall into my lap; I expect to work with what I have and make something Ideal out of it.
