A Memoir

About a year ago I took a communications class that was a survey of all sorts of different types of writing. One of them was a memoir. I wrote this for the assignment and my teacher was pretty thrilled with it but I never really considered publishing it anywhere. Nevertheless, now that I have this outlet I figured I may as well share it. Here goes!

“Everything is going to be different starting that fatal day,” I said to my mother amidst a river of tears that today I wish had been loud enough to make the words incomprehensible. 9-years-old and unsure what fatal meant yet sure that the birth of my brother would be the end of my world, I told my mother angrily that, “I hope the baby isn’t born.”

“What is the matter with you, Tanya?” she pleaded. “This is completely unlike you. What are you afraid will be so different? Does it have to do with Stef?”

Stefan, my mom, and I had been best friends as long as the three of us had been in grad school, which, from my perspective, was my entire life.  While most children spent their pre-double-digit days having play dates with peers and swinging on monkey bars, my playground was the 4th floor biology department in Richards Hall of Northeastern University. It speaks immensely of my mom and Stef that only now, at 20, do I realize the abnormality of my circumstances. The pair did everything to provide me with some degree of normalcy; the former worked tirelessly to satiate my needs on a graduate student’s salary and the latter integrated me seamlessly into an environment so blatantly inappropriate for a child.  Because of my age, I didn’t understand the importance of my mom’s contribution, but Stef’s role was tangent and irreplaceable.

My legs always dangled three feet off the ground as I swung from side to side in my swivel chair at the lab bench next to Stef. While he would spend hours hunched over his experiments trying to answer some scientific question or another, I would sit dutifully next to him -- my miniature fingers swimming in oversized sea-green latex gloves and a sharpie in hand -- ready to label a test tube at moments notice. This was a crucial task that I had been awarded and I had to take it seriously, Stef told me. The slightest contamination or mislabeling and the experiment would be a dud. So there I sat, sure that my critical scientific contribution would someday lead to a cure for cancer. “6-year-old Genius saves us all,” the headlines would read.

When he wasn’t furthering me on my path towards the Nobel Prize in Science, my time with Stef was spent in a variety of equally entertaining ways. For most, Battleship was a board game made by Milton Bradley. For me, it was a battlefield drawn on a piece of graph paper by Stefan Girgenrath -- a welcome break after hours of hard tube-labeling work. Why play real soccer when you can play penny soccer right in the hallway? But more than participating in his innovative approaches to conventional pastimes, I looked forward to our occasional outings to the North End, where he lived. My lilliput hand in his giant German one, we would venture to those cobble-stoned streets that were saturated with the smell of fresh bread towards our hole-in-the-wall pizza shop, Georgios, always stopping at the questionable swing set in a back-alley on the way.

My own father was not a part of my life, although anyone who saw Stef and me together wouldn’t have known it.   He taught me, encouraged me, entertained me, and protected me. He was my dad, in every sense of the word, and I was determined to make it official. 

When I was 8-years-old I triumphed. Stef proposed to my mom in Dunkin Donuts with a rolled up straw wrapper for a ring, and for the next few months I could be heard singing “Going to the chapel and they’re gunna get married,” relentlessly.

 A week before the wedding, Stef and I were walking across the bridge outside of the university’s parking garage in a rare silence. The deafening roar of the commuter train that was passing underneath us allowed me an extra moment of preparation before voicing my bold thought. When the train’s thunder became a distant rumble, I stared down at my prized pink Lion King high-top sneakers and said timidly, “It’s going to be cool when I start calling you Dad instead of Stef. Maybe I’ll mix them and call you ‘Stad’ for practice.”

“Whatever you say, Stanya,” he said with a laugh and a relieved sigh that told me I wasn’t the only one waiting to have that conversation.

The wedding went off without a hitch in October, and by the first week in September our new family had already established its first tradition, Sunday brunch at IHOP. These outings, to my little mind, were proof that everything had gone according to plan -- me, my mom, and my dad were just like any other family. On our seventh or eighth homage to the pancake warehouse, my mom snatched away that sense of accomplishment. As I waited not-so-patiently for a stack of pancakes too big for my stomach, she turned to me and said, “I’m pregnant.”

If it had been a movie, her words would have been followed by the sound of hundreds of dishes breaking in the kitchen. I felt like a two-year-old whose parent had grabbed a small Lego out of my hand, completely disregarding the painstaking effort it had taken to obtain the toy in the first place. I wasn’t sure at that moment what toy I felt I had lost, but I was determined not to give it up without a fight. Then, as if she hadn’t already said enough, my mom added, “You’re going to have a little brother. Isn’t that so exciting?” Excitement was the last thing from my mind, and I made it my mission that day to make sure everyone was in the boat with me. 

My dad was spared from the hostility since he had to go work that day, but he was the only one. “I hate your stupid baby. He’s ugly and I’ll never love him,” I told my aunt savagely about her newborn. I castigated my grandparents for doting so much attention on the new addition to the family. “He’ll never be as good as me,” I exclaimed to them desperately. When it became clear that no amount of scolding was going to subdue my behavior, I was sent to my room a crying wreck. When my mom came to me calmly with a white flag raised, I slashed it down with the most malicious comments I made that day. I shouted choruses of “Everything will be different,” punctuated with statements like “I hope the baby dies.”

 “Nothing will change, nothing is going to be different,” she yelled out of exasperation. “Are you afraid of not getting enough attention? Of not being the only child? We’re not going to love you any less. What could possibly be different?”

“What don’t you understand? It will be different because that baby will be dad’s real baby. He will have to love him more than me,” I finally disclosed after hours of hysteria. With that thought and the last tears I had left to squeeze out, I fell asleep.

I was woken up by a gentle shake in what felt like the middle of the night. I closed my eyes tightly and pretended to be asleep, not wanting to hear anything else my mom had to say. “Hey Stanya,” came the unexpected voice of my dad. Still unsure if I wanted to give away that I was awake, I let out a soft snore. He saw through it, and within a few seconds I was fighting for breath as he tickled me relentlessly. “Alright I’m up, what?,” I demanded while catching my breath.

“I heard about your day,” he said. Although he said the words pleasantly, I was immediately consumed with embarrassment. How stupid I had been to even think I could compare to his own child. He would be nice about it, but I knew he was going to tell me that it would be different, that it had to be. He would say it wasn’t my fault, and that we could still have fun together, it just wouldn’t be the same as his son. I braced myself as he opened his mouth and said, “You should know you’ll always be my first born baby.” Eleven years later, there has never been a day when I haven’t felt the truth of those words.