I’ll call her Minty*. Minty is one of my oldest friends. I met her freshman year of college in a filmmaking class. She was petite, with short dyed hair, an edgy punk wardrobe and round black glasses. She exuded cool confidence and drove a jeep. She was also the wealthiest person I’d ever met. From the beginning of our relationship I felt inferior in every way—I was poorer, less put together, was terribly insecure and had thicker ankles. To make matters worse, Minty was decisive, discriminating and quiet. Into her silence I would decipher all sorts of terrible judgments about myself.
My assumptions were sickeningly confirmed on several occasions. There was the time Minty hung up on me when I failed to rent a video camera for her class project. And the time she extolled the many virtues of a mutual friend—a beautiful and creative anthropology major—and I squeaked to her pathetically, “What do you like about me?” It took her so long to come up with an answer that every second of waiting drove me insane. Finally she declared: “You’re honest.” It felt like a consolation prize, without the consolation.
Yet it’s true. I am honest. Painfully so. A friend read my Toronto piece recently and while she appreciated my candor, told me that I am way too hard on myself. She pulled me into her arms and hugged me tightly. “I hear that a lot,” I said, enjoying her embrace. To myself I thought, this is why I drink.
It was at Minty’s New Year’s Eve party that I met Mr. Miller. Minty’s boyfriend and Mr. Miller grew up together. Their parents went to college together. Minty married her boyfriend. I married Mr. Miller. By 1995 we were entwined as family, spending many summer weekends together in the Poconos where both our in-laws owned cottages in a small lake community.
The emotional poverty of my childhood directly opposed the material wealth of Minty’s family, which included lavish parties, country and island homes and the finest clothes and cars money could buy. I copied her style in both dress and decor, hoping to become whole and worthwhile like I imagined she was. I wanted to turn into her, since I hated myself with so much enthusiasm.
Now, writing it down, I shudder at the memory. It’s so childish and creepy, false idol worship. And it’s so sad—all that exhausting self-loathing. So much time and energy lost running away from one’s shadow.
But you can’t change the past. You can only learn from it if you’re willing.
There were so many times I fell short in Minty’s eyes, and each blow destroyed me as if she were my father wielding his belt, or my sister clucking disdainfully at me, or my brother tricking me. The dynamic we shared mirrored my shame history, but it must have also mirrored her own too. We were similar in many ways—we had similar complaints against our fathers, our upbringings, our losses, but even her losses topped mine—multiple house fires, a relation killed in 9/11, bouts of infertility...
And then came what everyone thought to be Minty’s biggest loss. In 1996, the year after my wedding, Minty had her first child, a son. He didn’t talk or walk until well after most kids do. He flapped his little hands when he sat in front of the television. Even though he was sublimely adorable, with curly brown hair and ice blue eyes, something was not right. Another mutual friend had read An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sacks. Before he was two, she proclaimed that Blue Eyes had autism. Told me in serious tones at one of Minty’s parties.
A little while later, Minty and her husband were finally forced to admit it was true—something was undeniably abnormal about their son.
It turned out the little boy had Fragile X Syndrome. Blue Eyes would need round the clock care. He would not toilet train in any typical time frame. His parents cleaned up after his accidents at eight, nine, ten years old… His intellect would forever be stunted, frozen. There would be no regular school, no regular friends, no work, no wife, no children of his own. Two years later Minty had a second son—a beautiful blond, typical child—who would grow up in the shadow of his big brother with so many special needs.
While Minty was elbows deep in diapers, therapies and doctor’s visits I was discovering my calling as a writer. My first batch of essays chronicled what I called my oversexed and unsupervised adolescence during the asymmetrical 1980s. The first piece I published described a party I’d had in high school, where a huge group of uninvited boys stormed my mom’s Chicago apartment. Their unofficial mascot was a kid with cerebral palsy, who they got drunk and locked in my bathroom. Once they finally left I fucked my best friend’s crush. Then, in the middle of the night, sitting on the toilet in my bathroom and reeling with shame, I noticed there was a hole in the wall the exact diameter of a boy’s head.
I sent the piece to a few friends to share my good news of achieving published writer status. Minty was one of those friends. But her response nearly destroyed our friendship. Where I took everything she said or did personally, it turned out she did the same. She called me disgusting and maligned my character from more than a decade earlier. I read her email with my heart pounding. But what does it matter, she wrote, when I have a retard for a son.
I cried for days. And then like I am programmed to do, turned on myself. I doubted my own goodness, value and worth. Perhaps this was the treatment I deserved, and maybe I didn’t deserve respect, courtesy or oxygen. I started declining Minty’s invitations—first to her father’s island house, and then to her family’s farmhouse, and finally to her sprawling suburban home.
In 2004 I gave birth to Miller Jr. It was the first time in my life that I had something Minty wanted. Riches beyond compare. Minty’s oldest son, in that silver lining way, gave me the room I needed to heal from my envy. All the jealousy I’d felt dropped like a curtain falling. And from that empty space, the first seeds of compassion were planted.
Over the next decade I saw Minty sporadically, when our schedules brought us both to the Poconos. By now she had bought and decorated her own beautiful cottage. We’d talked through as best we could the blow-up over my essay, and eventually, with the help of therapy, medication, diet and exercise, I learned how to wade back into a relationship of sorts.
But random comments still destroyed me, as if I were compelled to see myself as a monster through her eyes. If Minty said something glowing about say, Jennifer Aniston as she leafed through an Us Weekly, I would take it as a personal attack. If she walked into the kitchen while I was mixing myself a drink I’d suddenly feel guilty—as if I were stealing or vandalizing. Every encounter left me a neurotic wreck.
And then came Minty’s next loss—the biggest loss any parent will ever endure.
Blue Eyes was decisive just like his mother. He had things he hated, like the Happy Birthday song, and things he loved, like dressing up like a doctor every Halloween, and waving to passing cars.
It was during one of these car watching sessions in the Poconos that Blue Eyes died a few weeks ago. He was sitting a safe distance back from the road in his lawn chair flashing the peace sign at passing traffic when a large pickup truck lost control and veered off the road at top speed. Blue Eyes was pronounced dead on the scene, his father holding his hand as paramedics worked on him in vain.
How could I not soften toward her—a fellow mother I’d known for thirty years—during such an enormous tragedy. When I first saw her after the accident we held each other and wept. She said, “I’m so happy you’re here,” and despite the sadness I was elated to hear it. I squeezed her tighter and cried into her hair. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” I said, which quickly morphed into, “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there more…” She quietly answered, “Another time.” And I felt that old stab of shame again.
Minty didn’t love me the way I longed for, but she did love me. She showed it by inviting me, by welcoming and including me. And I wasn’t the only one she lashed out at. She did it to everyone close to her. Minty could be a bitch, it’s true, but I was a bigger bitch—to myself surely. And maybe to her.
In my self-imposed exile from Minty I stagnated—in depression and anxiety, deprivation and self-pity—but I had also thankfully grown wiser. If I could now see my own worth and humanity through a laundry list of flaws and failings, surely I could see hers—without resorting to worship or envy.
And so,
I’m so sorry Minty, for shielding myself from you. For breaking away from you. For simultaneously glorifying and vilifying you. And I’m so sorry to myself for doing the same. And I look forward to lighter days, more accepting ways, and to spending more time with Minty in her grief, and in, I hope, her happiness.
👯♀️
Minty is right about you being honest. This is very noticeable in your writing, as is courage, demonstrated in your willingness to reveal your true self, warts and all. These qualities make your writing compelling, and your openness and vulnerability make you eminently likable.
The threads of time are woven around us as we sleepwalk through our lives. Binding our oldest friends to us even as we dance to our own music in the same ballroom. And, if we're lucky, we will hear a note or two of their songs through the rhythm of our lives.