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For every woman who has ever had to be brave. And for the folks in the world who make a choice to be helpers.
In fact, on career day in kindergarten, I famously announced my goal of growing up to be the Tooth Fairy. Which I still think would be a great job.
I don’t remember this part, but according to Hernandez, the whole time, I was shouting, “Touch me again, douchebag! Touch me again and see how long you live!” He did not touch me again.
IT WAS MY mother. On the phone. “Thank you for answering,” she said. I closed my eyes. “It was an accident.”
“You’ve got to move on.” “You moved on with a new wife. I can’t get a new mother.”
You’re certainly not the first firefighter to ever get in a fistfight.” I saw the corner of her mouth trying to avoid a smile. “Though you might be the first lady firefighter to ever pummel a smug politician to the ground.”
“And don’t talk too much, either. Remember: What women think of as sharing, men see as complaining.”
“Until you’ve proved yourself, yes. Because there’s no faster way for you to go down in flames than to screw one of the guys.” “Just hypothetically,” I said then, already knowing the answer, “would the guy go down in flames, too?” The captain took off her reading glasses and gave me a look like, Please.
“Just be a machine,” she said. “A machine that eats fire.”
That’s how life is. Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.
She was still the person who’d left us. She was still the person who had disappeared when I really, really needed her. She was still one of the greatest disappointments of my life.
Of course, our parents get an extra dose of importance in our minds. When we’re little, they’re everything—the gods and goddesses that rule our worlds. It takes a lot of growing up, and a lot of disappointment, to accept that they’re just normal, bumbling, mistaken humans, like everybody else.
My mom had married my dad, she’d once told me, because he’d told her she was fascinating. “Who doesn’t want to be fascinating?” she’d said. But they weren’t much alike. She was a dreamer who had trouble keeping straight what day of the week it was, and he was a high school math teacher with a buzz cut—all practicality—who coached basketball. Still, he was kind, and fair, and loyal.
“Love makes people stupid,” I said at last, hoping to cut to the chase, “and I’m not interested in being stupid.”
“Women especially,” I added, not bothering to hide my impatience. “It makes them needy and sad and pathetic. And robs them of their independence.” “Independence is overrated,” my mom said. “Love is overrated,” I countered. Then my notes from Captain Harris popped into my head, and I added, slapping the banister for emphasis, “Love is for the weak.”
“Choosing to love—despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love anyway … That’s not weakness. That’s courage.”
“Sounds like you just threw down a challenge to the universe, lady.” I narrowed my eyes. “What does that mean?” “It means,” she said, looking a little triumphant, “that you clearly, obviously, any second now, are just about to fall in love.”
Eight one-hand pull-ups in quick succession. And then an extra one for luck. At the end, I dropped down and landed in a crouch. Then I stood and took a minute to walk off the burn in my shoulder. When I turned around, no one had moved. The guys were just staring at me, mouths open. Then they broke into applause. And started handing me money. Which felt like a pretty good start to the day.
“Women,” my dad would say scornfully. “Preaching to the choir, buddy,” I’d say, only half joking. “Women are the worst.”
Of course, I knew I was going to beat Tiny. I’d been raised by a lonely, divorced basketball-coach father who had no idea how to talk about his feelings. Shooting hoops in the driveway was our only means of communication. For a while there, my ability to shoot hoops in our driveway was my dad’s only reason to live. Possibly mine, too. I was fucking fluent in basketball.
“Tell me you don’t have a puppy in your arms.” “I don’t have a puppy in my arms,” he said from behind me, pleased with his own restraint. “Good, because—” “I’ve got him in a basket.”
“I always kind of thought that forgiveness would come with time,” I said. “That the bitterness would slowly fade like a scar until I couldn’t even really find it anymore if I looked. But that’s not what happened. It didn’t fade. It hardened. Other things around it faded, but the memory of the day you left is still as sharp as if it just happened. I can still see your car pulling out of the driveway. I can hear the pop of the tires as they rolled over those seeds from that Chinese tallow tree. I can see the side of your face, absolutely still like a wax figure as I banged on the window. I can
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“Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.”
“Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened. Flawed, I thought. Okay. Check. “And then there’s a third part,” she went on, “probably the hardest, that involves trying to look at the aftermath of what happened and find ways that you benefited, not just ways you were harmed.”
So good.
I also taught him not to look into his critical patients’ eyes. Pro tip. “Why not?” he asked. “It haunts you,” I said, shaking my head a little. “It just haunts you.” “You mean, if they don’t survive.” “Once I’ve left the hospital,” I said then, dead serious, “I always tell myself they survive.”
“You’re tough and strong and capable and totally fearless…” I waited. “But I wonder if you need a hug.”
“Stick me with all the needles you want, pal,” I said then. “But if you try to hug me? I will kick your rookie ass.”
“Whatever he saw out there, it wasn’t Hanwell the firefighter.” “What did he see?” “He saw me holding a sexy drunk girl who was all legs and hair.”
That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: how we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.
“It’s more a shift in thinking than anything else. You have to think about the person you’re angry at—in this case, your eight-year-old self—and try to be compassionate with him. Empathy soothes anger, you know,” I said, suddenly feeling very wise. “Then you have to work to find some good things that came out of what happened, even despite all the bad. And then you have to decide to let it go.”
People who wanted to wrestle with complicated emotions became therapists, or poets. People who wanted to keep things simple became firefighters.
“Here’s what does matter: What this guy is doing is wrong. You can’t do what we do and see the kind of suffering we see every damn day and still want to create more of it in the world, can you? You can’t do what we do for a living and not know the simple difference between right and wrong. That’s what has me so, so pissed. We’re supposed to be the heroes. We’re supposed to be the helpers. The caretakers. The good in the world. What the hell can I believe in, if I can’t believe in you?”
The sight of him there, in the doorframe, felt like salvation. I wanted to grab onto him like a life preserver in an empty ocean. Instead, I made myself keep treading water. If I stopped, I’d never start again.
It’s amazing how brave you can be when you feel safe.
🩷
The rookie was leaving, my mother was dying, and the world was full of monsters. Good things didn’t last, people hurt each other every day, and nobody got a happy ending. But that night with him made me see it all in a new way. All the hardships and insults and disappointments in life didn’t make this one blissful moment less important. They made it more. They made it matter. The very fact that it couldn’t last was the reason to hold on to it—however we could.
Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn’t to never feel hope, or bliss, or love—but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came. The answer wasn’t to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could.
I thought about my mom saying, Love makes you stronger. And then I couldn’t help but understand—clearly and brightly and inescapably—right there in the middle of it all, that I loved Owen. I loved him. And it wasn’t stupid, or girly, or a waste of time. It was the thing that was going to save his life. I was going to get him out of here. Or die trying.
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I wasn’t sure if he deserved my compassion, but I did know I wanted to be the kind of person who would offer it. It’s not the easy moments that define who we are. It’s the hard ones.
“I made it from the applesauce top,” he said, meeting my eyes. “It might be a little sticky.” I held very still. “What’s this for?” He held it up. “I promised myself that if I lived, the very first thing I’d do was ask you to marry me.”
I do it because I believe that human connection is the only thing that will save us. I do it because I believe we learn empathy when we listen to other people’s stories and feel their pain with them. I do it because I know for certain that our world has an empathy problem with women, and this is one brave thing I can do to help fix it.
But when I get home, Owen is always there, waiting for me. He makes sure he has dinner ready—something warm and soothing and buttery. On those nights, I play with our kids and kiss their chubby little bellies until bedtime, and then he takes them up to their little attic bedroom with pom-pom curtains and tucks them in. When he comes back down, he brings me a blanket and a mug of tea, and we sit on the sofa and talk about the day. He tries his best to make me laugh. Sometimes he gives me a foot rub with lemon-scented lotion. Sometimes we watch bad TV. He can’t fix it, but he tries to make it
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Now, it’s not just me baking cookies alone. Now, I always imagine my sixteen-year-old self there, too—right beside me. When the cookies are ready, we pull them out, sit side by side on the sofa, and eat them—still warm and gooey—and drink glasses of ice cold milk. Sometimes I put my arm around her. Sometimes I say compassionate, understanding, encouraging things. Sometimes I lean in and promise her with all the conviction I possess that what happened to her won’t destroy her life. That in the end, she will heal, and find a new way to be okay. She never believes me, but I say it anyway.
I guess it really proves the old saying: “The best revenge is marrying a kindhearted guy with a washboard stomach who brings you coffee in bed every morning.” Wait—is that the saying?
