Sheri Holman - Eat the Day

 

“Does any human being ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute?” This is about the only line that I can remember from Our Town, which was the brief highlight of my very short but heartfelt theatrical career. My junior year of college, I got to play Emily. She was just a normal girl who knew exactly how her life was going to go, until she unexpectedly died in childbirth. And for the whole third act of the play, she found herself in a cemetery full of folding chairs. [audience laughter] I was acting the hell out of this part. I believed in it completely. And our final night, we got a standing ovation. I looked out into the audience and the 11th or 12th row, I saw my mother. My mother was sobbing hysterically.

 

And of course, I was secretly delighted by this, because we live to torture our parents, right? And so, here I was, you know success. I looked out and she was sobbing and sobbing, and she was still crying at the end of the play when I came out to give her a hug. And she was still crying, I was like, “Mom, it was just a play.” And she was like, “Don’t you ever die on me again.” I promised her I wouldn’t. [chuckles] My mother was with me through all of these amazing milestones. She always used to say to me, whenever I would panic her like this, she would say, “I’m going to get my revenge when you have children of your own.”

 

And so, she was with me for the birth of my daughter. And two years later, a little less than two years later, she was with me for the birth of my twin sons, Linus and Felix. This was probably the most poorly timed pregnancy ever, because their due date was the exact day that my third novel was supposed to be published. I had this elaborate book tour planned. My mother and my aunt came along to each take a six-week-old baby. They carried these babies while I sleep-deprived, gave readings up and down the East Coast. I would sit in the back of this minivan, and I would have one baby on this boob, and I would have another baby on this boob and I would nurse them in the back of this van.

 

It was while I was nursing, my sons that I started to notice that something was a little bit unusual about my son, Linus. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but when babies nurse, they gaze up at their mothers like this, with this love, and you have this amazing connection. My daughter had gazed like this, and Felix had gazed like this. But Linus, when he was nursing, he would look off and away. It struck me as very odd. I couldn't think of why a baby wouldn't look at his own mother. And I thought, could he be autistic? But I knew that it was way too early to diagnose something like that. My mother noticed it too, and she's like, "Yeah, you should check that out."

 

And so, we got back after the book tour to Brooklyn, and I went to the two-month well visit for my son. The pediatrician took a look at him and he's like, "No, no, he's fine. You're a new mother, you're anxious. Maybe he's a little behind, but don't worry about it. Bring him back in a month." But something told me, no, something's just not right. I remember that night so vividly. The whole family was sitting in the kitchen and it was my husband, myself, my daughter and Felix was in his little bouncy chair. And Linus, who had his shots where he was pale and he was in the baby swing and he was swinging in the dark in the living room.

 

I could see him through the archway in the darkness, and he just felt like he was on the other side of a divide. He felt like he was swinging away from me. I got this just horrible pit of the stomach feeling. I was like, “You know, fuck that doctor.” [audience laughter] And so, I called her back the next day and I was like, "Listen, I really want to get him checked out." She’s like, "All right. Well, get his eyes checked before we start doing neurological testing." So, I made an appointment with an eye doctor. 

 

This was the winter. All of a sudden, New York City was hit with this terrible blizzard. It was 2003, December 5th. The whole city was snowed in under this horrible blizzard. And here I was going to take this three-month-old baby on the subway in a blizzard, because I had a bad feeling. But I went ahead and I did it. I got to the doctor's office and they dilated his pupils. The doctor got very quiet, and he disappeared into the back room and he came back with a business card for a man named Dr. Abramson, who was the world's leading specialist in retinoblastoma, a very rare kind of cancer. And he said, "Your son has a massive tumor on his retina of his right eye, and you need to get it treated right away" and a week later, we had started chemotherapy. 

 

I never knew a child so young could even get cancer. I’d never heard of anything like this. So, my husband and I went into straightforward battle mode. It’s like, we were going to take care of this, we were going to be in control, we were going to do everything that we could. We went to Sloan Kettering every three weeks. They would gas him, they would examine his eye, they would find a new tumor. We’d go back three more weeks, they’d gas him, they’d examine his eye, they’d find another two or three tumors. It was ultimately 13 tumors in all. 

 

I kept looking for answers is like, “What could cause something like this?” I would ask the doctors, is like, "What caused this?" And they’d say, "Nothing caused it. It's a random mutation." But I couldn't believe that. Clearly, it wasn’t my son’s fault. He was three months old. He hadn’t smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. He hadn't been lying in the tanning bed. Something must have caused this. It must be me, because I was his mother, and it was my job to protect him. I had failed at the one job that a mother is given, which was to protect my son. 

 

It was about this time that the dirty diapers started. When my daughter was little, we had this beautiful house in Clinton Hill, and it had a front porch. One morning, when she was maybe seven or eight months old, I came out and I almost tripped over a dirty diaper rolled up on the welcome mat. I was like, “Uff, some random piece of garbage. It’s Brooklyn.” So, I picked it up, and I threw it in the trash and didn’t think anything more of it. A couple of days later, I came out and there was another dirty diaper that was right on the welcome mat. I’m like “Mm, this doesn’t feel so random anymore” [chuckles] Maybe another week would go by and then another dirty diaper. I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from and who I’d made an enemy of. 

 

And then, I remembered that our babysitter had gotten into some turf war with another babysitter on the playground. [audience laughter] I was like, “All right, this is a language I don’t even speak, I’m not going to get stressed about it. But now, it came when my son was sick. I walk out with the double stroller and I almost tripped over another dirty diaper again. And this time, I just lost my shit, [laughs] I’ll be perfectly honest. I was like, “Who is out to get my family?” The dirty diapers kept coming and I couldn’t figure out who it was. 

 

About the same time, my daughter, who was three years old, started to get weird on me too and she wouldn’t go into the boys’ bedroom. Every time she is going to the boys bedroom, she’d point at the closet and she starts crying and she’s like “A bad na lives there. A bad na lives there.” And Na was her three-year-old word for bird. She’s like “There’s a bad bird that lives in that closet.” And so, I’m freaking out. It's like, diaper is coming, there’s a bad bird that lives in the closet, my son has cancer. So, I did what any rational mother would do. [chuckles] I went to Chinatown and I bought this enormous plastic dragon that was so big I'd seen it in a store. And I thought, this somehow will protect my children, because this is fierce looking motherfucking dragon. [audience laughter] And it's like, "This should scare the blackbird in the closet.” 

 

So, I hung this dragon over the crib. And the very next day, [chuckles] I walk into the boys’ bedroom and the right eye of that dragon is on the floor. And Ella says to me, she's like, "The na picked it out." And I'm like, "Get a grip on yourself.” I got a hot glue gun. I put the eye back on. [audience laughter] I went to bed. The next night, Ella comes screaming into our bedroom with a doll that she has that she's been given for Christmas. And she's like, "My doll's eye is missing. My doll's eye is missing." And the right eye of her doll was gone. 

 

My husband, who's not superstitious at all even, he was freaking out at this point. He went under her bed and he found the right eye of the doll. It was under her bed. And so, by this time, I'm like, "I am reaching out to anybody." I reached out to a neighbor who is very well versed in the art of Santeria. [audience laughter] And she's like, "Oh, yeah, somebody's got it in for you. You have definitely been cursed and you need to get a priest in here and exorcise this house. You need to sleep with Bibles in the window of the boys’ bedroom." But I'm rational and like, "I'm not going to go to some punk ass botanica and Park Slope or on Smith Street." It's like, "I'm going to go to the Sloan Kettering of Botanicas." 

 

So, I get on the number two train and I go straight to Flatbush. [audience laughter] I'm walking around, looking for-- I don't even know what the hell I'm looking for, but it's like I find this botanica and it's like love potions and money powders and the candles of the orishas that are masquerading as Catholic saints. I walk in there and there's this guy that's sitting behind a wall of bulletproof glass, like it's a liquor store. [audience laughter] And chuckles] What I remember about him, he had these blue white eyes that were like, cloudy with cataracts. He was eating from a styrofoam bowl of cup of noodles. So, he's slurping these noodles.

 

I walk into this-- [audience laughter] I walk in and I'm like, "Excuse me, someone has put a curse on my house and my family, [audience laughter] and I need something to fight back." [audience laughter] He just looks at me and he nods. He nods at the shelf that's like down below. It's all these brown bottles of something called La Bamba. I look at it. It's like, it's floor wash. It's like, "What are you taking me for, a chump?" So, I turned back to him. I was like, "No, no, no. I don't think you understand. Somebody is waging supernatural warfare [audience laughter] on my family and you're trying to sell me floor wash? I need something that will fuck somebody the fuck up." [audience laughter] 

 

He looks at me and he leans in. I come up to the bulletproof glass, it's all scratched up, and he says to me, he's like, "Lady, if somebody's trying to put a curse on you, why don't you go home and figure out what you did to deserve it?" And I was like, "Okay." I paid for the La Mamba [audience laughter] and I left. He'd hit it exactly on the nose, because he'd spoken to me my exact fear. What had I done to deserve it? And not what I had done to deserve my own bad luck, but what had I done to bring this down on an innocent baby? 

 

I went home and I poured that fucking La Bamba all over my front porch. I'm mopping it in the middle of the night. It's like stripping the paint off my porch. [audience laughter] I'm thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves and how random everything is and how random bullshit comes for innocent children every day all over the world. And earlier, I'd connected the dots and I told myself a story that saved his life. It got him to the hospital and it got him treatment at a time when he could have died. And then, later on, in all the agony and the fear and the despair and the guilt, I told myself another story and I connected the dots in another way that made me to blame. I got to a point as a mop in that [laughs] fucking porch and it's like, "Why do we tell ourselves these stories and why do so many of our stories slip into ghost stories?"

 

I realized the only control I had over this situation, my own personal Santeria, was to let go of the story that I needed to tell myself and live more, like Emily had said, in our town, to realize life every, every minute. When I woke up the next morning, it was like a bright and beautiful and clear winter day. Ella started talking about the black bird and I'm like, "Let's go to the playground." We went outside and it was a beautiful day. And I said, "You know what? Let's eat this day. Let's eat it. Take this perfect day. Who knows how many of them we're going to get? And take it inside you and let's chew it and let's swallow it, so that we can have it for later and it can always be with us."

 

We started to eat the day, my family. And one day, Ella walked in to the boys’ room and she's like, "That Na is gone." I already knew that Na was gone, because I'd felt it and I'd felt this dark spirit lift from our house when I stopped connecting the dots. I thought about the only other line that I remember from our town, something that I always thought was so beautiful. I think about it every time I try to tell a big story. I realize what we really need most often are just postcards, just moments. 

 

There was a beautiful moment in our town before Emily died and found herself in a cemetery when she was falling in love and somebody sent a postcard to her fiancé to be his little sister. I think of it addressed to my son, Linus. And it goes, "Linus Redmond. 364 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. The United States of America. The planet Earth, the solar system, the Galaxy, the infinite, punishing, most merciful mind of God.” Thanks.