Everything Happened | vol. 190

NO THANK YOU

Desi turned five last month. Separated from him by hundreds of miles and the threat of viral spread, our families opted to really flex their e-commerce muscles in celebration. A small ransom of toys and books arrived on our stoop, a magnificent haul that he tore into with mastery. I watched him slice through Amazon smiles and decorative paper like a focused prep cook.

It was a great birthday but the next morning I woke up and became aware of a soft, internal ticking: it was my personal thank you note meter, my tell-tale heart. The ticking will become louder and louder until I’m driven to the brink. And the only way to make it stop it is to thank the birthday benefactor in writing via US mail.

I’ve been writing thank you notes since I was not much older than Desi. The morning after Christmas or a birthday, my mom sat me down at the kitchen table with her black leather address book, a stack of stationery, and a roll of stamps. I was careful to not smear the ink with the meat of my palm, careful to land the licked stamp square in the top corner of the envelope. When I dropped the finished notes into the mailbox and raised the flag, I was free. Free to go play now that I’d finished my chore, but also free in the knowledge that I was good. I was a good kid and I had a paper trail to prove it.

As a little kid, it was easy for me to be coded as good. I was precocious and polite. My friends’ parents liked me and I didn’t struggle to sit still in class. But I was also myself. I talked out of turn, I blurted out the answers without raising my hand. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for a laugh. No one questioned my goodness, though, even as I sought attention in increasingly disruptive ways. After all, I was still a little white girl in the suburbs who wore her hair in two braids and took piano lessons after school. Virtue was presumed of me.

As a teenager, my affections turned to freaking out the squares. I wore torn clothes and spikes. I started cutting class. My mom and I engaged in a cold war where she would disappear clothes of mine she found distasteful (a t-shirt of the band The Suicide Machines comes to mind) and I would recover the items and wear them again without acknowledgement of their theft. I still wrote thank you cards whenever I could, gripping the pen with my inky blue Wet ‘n Wild-lacquered nails. Etiquette was the framework that I could flex, subvert, and navigate to prove that I was well-raised. If my relatives were spooked by a little dark nailpolish, well, that was a matter of taste. By being polite, I was invincible, free to carry on as a dirtbag.

By my mid-twenties, I began to wonder where my life as an alt hero ended and my life as a regular loser began. I’d dropped out of grad school, was crashing with my boyfriend because I was broke, and had returned to waiting tables at the restaurant where I’d worked in college. On days I didn’t have a morning shift, I might wake up at 1 p.m. spooning a box of Cheez-Its that I had no memory of buying. I would haul myself to the bathroom to wash the vinegary dive bar stink from my skin, only to see in the mirror that there were orange crackers stuck to my face. My life looked like the establishing shots of a film about someone whose life is a mess. But there was no rising action on its way to deliver me somewhere better.

In this dirtbag state, I went harder than ever on thank you notes. I probably made it weird actually. It was me in grown-up drag. I remember once writing one to my friends’ parents who had hosted us in their gorgeous downtown loft so we could better view the July 4th fireworks. I wasn’t even sure if these people knew me by name, and here I was groveling because of their polished concrete floors and cheese boards. I ultimately never sent that one.

I got lucky; it didn’t take me long into adulthood to realize that “getting your shit together” is not a fixed state and you can’t control what people think of you. You get a great job but then you hate it, or you lose it. The person you married can’t get their addiction under control. Or in my case, a pandemic craters the already tenuous job sector that generates 100% of your family’s income because a real estate ding dong was elected to own the libs. And sometimes, nothing catastrophic happens, you just change your mind about what you want!

After I had my first baby, we received such a landslide of gifts that being gracious became impossible. I hadn’t even figured out how to set my baby down to cook a meal; I was not keeping on top of my correspondence. I sent a text or email quickly while the baby was nursing if I remembered, otherwise I just let the love and well wishes swaddle me like cotton wool. I was truly busy for the first time in my life, not merely overscheduled or “stressed.”

I felt like I was running a small cafe or a hobby farm. There were so many things that had to happen every day, whether it was raining or I was in a bad mood or I’d had an annoying meeting at work. And the next day I had to wake up and do it all again. Time to make the donuts. I had nothing to prove. I was proving it all to myself every day by virtue of getting through it. I still write thank you notes and I like doing it, but it’s not consistent. I’m more likely to send a text with three green heart emojis. I believe it was self-care queen Thomas Aquinas who said, “A gift is freely given, and expects no return.”

After Desi’s birthday, I got up to my old bullshit. He can’t write sentences, but he can sign his name. I wanted him to dictate the message to me, sign his name himself, and draw a picture. I set out five blank cards in a row so we could knock it out assembly-line-style. I kept the TV on. It was going to be no big deal.

I set us up to fail by waiting to do it until it was almost his bedtime. He fought me on signing his name, then he started signing it poorly on purpose. I noticed how irritated I felt that his fuck-you signature made him appear like less of an advanced writer. My five-year-old.

Just like Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” there was an unreliable narrator operating here. I had been telling myself that Desi was spoiled and this was training him to feel gratitude. But really, wasn’t I just doing PR for myself as a mom?

I still think my kid is spoiled and I have no idea what it will take to foster a more gracious spirit in him. But for now, it’s not going to be forced thank you notes. I believe in my own goodness; I hope for my son that he always believes in his.

yr mate,
Evie
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