Saturday Mornings at Ponderosa

One of my favorite memories is when I got to go out Saturday AM, with Jen and Steph.  I had never been to a restaurant.  I had been to a few banquets but that was hours long, buffet, open bar, tables so large, several kids fell asleep beneath one table - not at all like table-service in the morning 

I didn't know we order drinks first.  I tried to order a plain hamburger when Jen interrupted me and said to the server, "we'll both have a hot chocolate with whipped cream".

When they arrived, I thought they were ice cream sundaes.  Jen said she wanted more, so the waitress squirted whipped cream so high, right there at the table.  I had never seen a sundae irl, I had never seen whipped cream before.

I still love it when she requests whipped cream on her virgin strawberry daiquiri.  Each time Jen orders, Steph gives her a look of, "better be careful with all that dairy".

context not excuses

When I reveal my my Shakespearean origin story, it’s not to pass blame or punish through shame. Two things you should know up front:

1. I will never punish anyone for anything. This is a problem, but not one I care to fix.

2. They’re my parents. At the end of the day, no one loves me more than they do - and I can’t love anything more than I love them. You should have seen my occlusion, posture, and strong feet when I lived with my mom.

Here’s the truth: my parents’ culture could have easily committed infanticide. They let me live. They fed me. They housed me. Not because it was easy, but because they’re softies - the kind who still dream and hope and wish and believe in the unknown. If I had an autistic kid, completely deaf in one ear and halfway to legally blind by age five, I’d do a better job at inclusion and accommodation. But I also have no social capital at risk.

My autism has decreed that shame is a scourge.  It's not bc I haven't lived much life, it's quantum thinking.  Shame warps natural selection, tilting it toward the sneaky. Not clever, not cunning - sneaky. The kind of people who’ve already decided they’re destined for the middle, and that their only way forward is by staying two steps hidden. I’ll participate in shame after someone teaches me how to avoid it and I choose it anyway - because I want shame. Until then? Pass.

And here’s the hinge - my parents’ big life change started with about three drunken seconds. That’s it. Three seconds that shame then stretched into a lifelong, life-rearranging saga for six very important stupid-beautiful adults and their teenaged kids with plans of their own.

Immigration? Straight-up hellish. Designed to traumatize. America greets immigrants with fear and hostility when those who emigrate are the most hippy dippy, starry-eyed dreamers.  Employers sell the American Dream — rugged, resilient, rebellious — but the arrival is a slap: designated scabby kung fu geisha, eyeing the dulcet Audrey Hepburn. Imagine the whiplash.

American legacy maxes out at four generations. I hate moving after two years; I resent having to learn a new grocery store. The soft-handed Ahns had lived in the same golmok for four thousand years before landing in 1984 New York. Try raising a fussy baby in that.

can I wake up now?

My life isn't real. It's one of those life lesson dreams.  In my real life, I'm the stepmom, and I'm horrific, afraid of a 3yo for staring at me when I crash out.

I promise I've learned my lesson.  I'll be a good stepmom. Please, enough of this.  I'll give her back!  I promise, when I wake up I'll detox the child of sugar and send her back to her real mother.

Please no more.

why are you here? go away.

I'm sorry I didn't get the hint.  You were patient, tactful, kind.  The more you frowned, furrowed, persed, ignored - the more I stayed.  I see how you could believe me rude and disrespectful.

I'd received that look always, since birth.  When i started school and teachers smiled with soft eyes bc I walk into a room, I came home and asked Steph what their faces meant, bc she made me repeat for hours "no one loves me like my mother".   Steph said they were making fun of me for being fat and weird.

When I saw Bok once a year, I thought my aunt was making fun of me for being fat and weird. 

Every giant party I was forced to attend in scratchy clothes around touchy strangers, when I found Dad's face he turned perpendicular to me. If I shifted into his view, he interrupted his own conversation to roll his eyes and gesture to have one of my cousins take me on a drive until I fell asleep.

My point of reference was fucked.  Now, I've got flip books and posters of facial expressions I stare at.

I'm very sorry.