Pregnant in a Pretty Red Dress

on my Tiny Love Story in NYT, Dorothy Allison, and the end of times

In the spring of 2015, I was enormously pregnant with what/who would become my third living child. Other than oversized t-shirts, a floral red dress was my only outfit. I washed it every night and wore it every day. On one such day, I got an email from my grad school mentor, inviting me to dinner that night with Dorothy Allison.

I didn’t want to go.

My very first pregnancy had resulted in a stillbirth. The following pregnancies were a raw space of profound fear (are they like that for everyone?). I wanted to hide. I wanted to punch time into passing faster. This, my fourth pregnancy, was harder than the others, too. At the almost-geriatric age of 29, my hips ached, and the spinal deformity I was born with shot numbness and pain down my legs where it ricocheted off the soles of my feet and back up to my hips when I walked. Because I had a five-year-old and three-year-old at home, and I was working and going to graduate school…I walked a lot.

I wanted to do anything but sling my giant belly around a tiny restaurant that I could barely afford in front of a literary celebrity.

The night of the dinner, I waddled - epically. Like, I’m convinced Colin Farrell found a secret video of me from that time and used it to prepare for his gait in The Penguin. So, I composed an email to gently decline the offer to embarrass myself in front of one of my heroines, but at the last minute, I watched my ex-husband lay on the floor clicking through his phone, our two young children crawling around him, and I thought, fuck it.

I didn’t recognize Dorothy at first. Everyone looks different from their picture on a book jacket, but she talked just like she wrote, just like my family and all the people I grew up loving. She told my my dress was real pretty and sat across from me. I looked down at my huge belly and tried to find a way to shove it under the table so I didn’t use it - and my dress - like a second plate. I wanted to tell everyone that I was freezing, miserable, nervous, hungry without enough room in my stomach to ever feel full before my baby kicked up toward my throat. I wanted to overshare about my life, to tell them that none of my underwear fit, so I was wearing pajama shorts and tall socks under my dress to approximate underwear. I wondered if Dorothy was one of those southern women comfortable using the word panties - something I could never bring myself to say about a garment that covers the most hardcore parts of my body. I decided I wouldn’t judge her if she used the word panties because she’d written some of the most important books in my life.

Someone asked me if this was my first pregnancy. I resisted the urge to explain my stillbirth, the two successful pregnancies, how I didn’t really love my husband, how I just wanted to have a family and a home to prove that I was worthy of a family and a home but really to prove to the new humans I’d built that they, among a half dozen generations of Deep South addicts, were inherently worthy of a family and a home.

Dorothy ordered trout, so I ordered trout, even though I didn’t know how to eat it. I ended up with a mouth full of bones. She used the edge of her knife to pull perfect little chunks of white meat out, then scooped them up with her fork. I tried to copy her. She asked, “What do you write about?”

I told her I was writing a memoir that reads like a novel about my wild, generationally poor family to show readers exactly how a promising young person turns into a “Florida Man.”

“Now that’s a book I’d read tomorrow,” she said.

“I might need a week or two,” I said.

It has been nine years.

If you tell me someone you love passed, I will probably blurt out the only truth I actually know (for sure): Death is fucking horrible.

The capacity to be gentle about death was burned out of me when I watched my dad die when I was fifteen. Then my grandma. My cousin. Some friends. My baby. And on and on.

I believe most of us spend our lives trying to control and/or rebel against loss. People who find their way to mega power positions seem to understand this mechanism to a scary degree - and they use it to keep us busy, distracted, and scared. I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know what to do about the apocalyptic futures we’re grappling with in the slow crawl toward January. I just know that loss sucks. I believe a lot of folks in the US have a real hard time sitting with the potential for loss until it knocks us on our asses. I don’t think the dismal political atmosphere we’re experiencing is a necessary ass kicking or a purge or that we deserved it. I don’t think we live in a just world. I don’t believe we have much control at all.

I do believe that the surrender to chaos is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful parts of being human. I believe that awe is everywhere and always available to us. Loss, to me, is how we crack our whole hearts open for awe.

I was in Kauai recently, and a rooster that my cousin and I unofficially named Mayhew woke me up at 5am every morning. On one such morning, I walked to the beach, and like twenty roosters (Tayhew, Bayhew, Dayhew, Rayhew, etc) spread out over a few miles of shoreline took turns screaming at the sunrise/the universe/each other. A few years ago, I stayed in a town where the dogs howled a chorus at the coming moon. I love these riots of nature, how they slam me out of loss and into the moment I’m actually experiencing.

I didn’t publish my book before Dorothy died.

I stopped sending my work out entirely for about five years. I didn’t want to admit my divorce or the fact that even before the divorce, my ex husband was almost never in the same room/home/mindset as me and our kids.

I didn’t want to admit that I’d failed to provide my kids with an unbroken home. I wanted to control my white trash narrative, wanted to make everyone believe that I believed in some kind of irregular bootstraps bullshit, like the American Dream doesn’t have to be a knock down drag out come apart over money and fame, that you don’t have to be special to feel whole, but your labor can mean something if you make your labor mean something to the people you love.

My oldest kid is the same age I was when I lost the only real parent I ever knew. I’ve spent the last nine years trying to control and/or rebel against my position as the only real parent my three kids might ever know.

I keep forgetting and remembering and forgetting to surrender to the chaos and awe. I believe that this particular texture of surrender is the only path to figuring out exactly how to never surrender about what matters.

My three dogs howl together when an ambulance passes, not the moon. Mayhew and all his rooster pals holler with their whole bodies, all day and sometimes at night, over and over and over. After I returned to Seattle, a “bomb cyclone” dropped freezing water and wind through the city. I woke up the next morning to a surprise day off work and a surprise (bucket list!) acceptance to Tiny Love Stories in the New York Times, about gender fluidity and me and my kid, something I sent to them before the first week of November, before I remembered to be so deeply afraid to be a body in the world. The title story is “Humor to Counter Despair,” but mine is, “The Awe of Unknowing.”

It’s easier to soothe ourselves if we can rest in knowing or planning or controlling. It’s tough to face that the only things we really know are how much we don’t know and how temporary all this is. Temporary can also mean precious.

I have no craft to offer this round, except for maybe something about roosters and howls, the collective holler, how despair and joy can happen at the exact same time, especially if we’re singing about it with someone else right beside us.

I feel sad that Dorothy Allison passed. I feel real lucky to have hung with her long enough to learn to eat a fancy fish, to hear her say nice things about my writing and my poor, weird family. The baby was born a few days after that dinner, but I felt too attached to the dress to give it away. I kind of hated the pattern, the style, but having that one thing to wear, a dress almost everyone complimented even though it cost $7 at the goodwill - it made me feel safe in the most unsafe time. So, I cut the dress into napkins. Over the last nine years, I’ve thrown them away, one by one, tattered and soiled.

Nostalgia is a haunting, and everyone and everything we’ve lost is a space cut out of our world that we can hold onto or scream at with our whole body.

Wherever you’re at with it, I hope you find your pretty red dress, too.