Holiday cards. It’s not something I have ever given much thought to particularly since it wasn’t a tradition in my family. My mother still laments that our only family portrait shows me, barely three years old, staring unenthused into the camera in my father’s arms. I’m wearing the same velvety Christmas dress as my sister, age eight, who is more than capable of standing and posing without assistance.
“We need a new family portrait,” my mother says when my sister and I are thirty-five and thirty years old respectively, gesturing to the old picture hanging in the foyer.
“Sure, one where Anna once again refuses to smile,” my sister says.
“I’d smile…” I mumble, more concentrated on watching a Little House on the Prairie Christmas Special.
Never once in my life have I felt truly destabilized which I think is a fairly rare thing to be able to say. What I mean by that is that I’ve never felt like I was out of options, that I had nothing to fall back on, or that I was alone. When I got injured playing sports, there was never any doubt about whether or not I’d be able to get the surgery or if I’d be able to play again someday if that’s what I wanted. When moving to New York to pursue my ambitions, I was bankrolled by my parents who took care of tuition and housing. A little while after graduation, at a time when I lost my main gig and it became apparent that I couldn’t keep up paying rent, I was able to pack up my few belongings and move to someplace much cheaper with all I’d been able to save and even if I hadn’t, there was always the option to show up back home.
When the government ordered the immediate shutdown of my entire industry in one afternoon, I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew that pretty much no matter what happened there was no scenario where I’d end up on the street or end up hungry unless COVID truly was the end of the world. While once entering my twenties I was loathe to use my safety net, I always knew I had one. And because of that, I was able to take a whole list of risks which just so happened to pay off. And here I am. Selfmade? No, I’m very much still a work in progress, but even that has been a team effort.
This safety net didn’t didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the result of a few generations' worth of relentlessly seeking out stability and a fair amount of luck. Education. Increasingly higher paying job categories. Marriage. The same is true for my friends. The only difference is that they are replicating the pattern while I’ve seemingly left it behind entirely.
During our first holiday season as thirty-year-olds, I open my mailbox surprised to see things other than junk mail. What I find instead are two greeting cards. One from Molly and one from Sadie. Both posing with their males of choice with a rabbit (Molly) and dog (Sadie) propped between them. And even when I meet up with each of them at separate times with flickering Christmas lights draped all over the brunch place each of them chose to meet at, bringing their males along because they assumed they were invited, they frame everything happening in their lives as “we.”
“We’re thinking of moving to Pennsylvania.”
“We’re looking into adopting another dog.”
“We’re planning a trip to Barcelona.”
And in the greeting cards too, while the message was written from my friends specifically to me, they are signed as a pair.
“From Molly and Kevin.”
“From Sadie and Ben.”
I stare at the letters intently on my couch. I am alone but I do not feel lonely. I just feel surprised. I had never witnessed my two oldest friends referring to themselves as anything other than individuals. It would’ve been “I’m going to the beach with my parents” or “I’m going to my grandparent’s house for New Year's.” And if they really were going to change that pattern, I did not think it would be because of two enduringly unremarkable men.
“We were talking about you today,” one of the nuns I was living with for the time being said to me. “You are a strange girl. Thirty years old. Traveling all over the place. You should stop, stay still enough for a man to find you,” she said with a smile. It’s well-meaning enough and I’m not exactly looking to argue with a nun by pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of the conversation.
As a person for whom Star Wars had a profound impact at a young age, it shouldn’t be surprising at all that I developed a preference for celibacy and military structure. Or at least, a loose appearance of military structure. Truth be told I’ve always had a bit of an attitude and the older I get, the more I’m likely to question instructions that I don’t personally think are a good idea. However, I do enjoy having a clear purpose on a team with equally clear goals.
“One shot, one kill,” I’d think to myself at the top of each lacrosse game, band performance, or filming day for our school broadcast.
The Jedi lived in their temple. The imperials lived on their star destroyers. The rebels lived in their barracks. There was no concept of a work-life balance because for these three highly featured factions, work was life and your team was your family. That’s probably a contributing factor as to why I didn’t bristle in the slightest at the prospect of touring for a living. Just like in Star Wars, I’d be sleeping in bunks stacked three high completing missions at each destination. Sure I might not be pouring my heart out to my coworkers, but ideally they’d be reliable when it came to getting the job done and conversation over Chinese food would be easy.
“I miss my husband. I just want to be cuddled so bad!” one of the dancers says one morning on the tour bus, catching me very off guard. It never occurs to me to think if others are dating or married. I forget that dating and marriage are a thing most of the time. It’s so far off my inner idea of a natural trajectory that when reveals like this are made I’m equally shocked each time.
“This has shellfish in it. Make sure it doesn’t kill my boyfriend,” a woman on the audio team says after looking at the catering spread for the day. I look at her in confusion.
“Matthew is your boyfriend?”
“Yeah?” she responded as if I asked her if the earth really wasn’t flat.
“Since when?”
“Since before the tour. It wasn’t obvious?” I start playing their interactions back in my memory.
“No, it wasn’t obvious at all.”
At one particular group dinner on one particular tour, a group whose ages ranged from twenty-two to thirty, everyone pulled out pictures of their partners and passed them around the table. I figure it’s because most of the people on this tour are very new to touring and haven’t been at it for close to a decade like I have. And it wasn’t surprising at all when, for the men in particular on this tour, their girlfriends dumped them halfway through our voyage across the continent.
“Congrats,” I said to the gloomy trio a few days later, “this is sort of like a roadie rite of passage.”
My aunt on my mother’s side is the only relative in living memory who never married. Some would say she has a very miserable dry-humored personality. I think she’s just a little prone to theatrics and did everything in her life she set out to do even if some would describe it as being low in ambition. She did a couple years of college but never finished then had a career as a government secretary until the second she was legally allowed to retire. She told my mother that she knew from early on she never wanted to marry because she observed their parents. My mother didn’t have any negative memories about her parents but the two of them are five years apart which seemingly gave them much different experiences. However, it is my aunt who was the primary caretaker of their aging mother, a relationship of very high friction up until her death at which point my aunt’s regrets but also relief started to set in.
My aunt has been proposed to a few times but has said no at every turn. Once was just a few years ago and she told me her reasoning.
“He wanted me to move to Virginia to join his church. But I said heck no! I’ve got my church sisters up here. And he expects me to leave them for what? Marriage?”
And it’s true. Since retiring, my aunt has been involved in the community full time typically through church functions. She has a group of women all aging with her who take each other grocery shopping, to doctor’s appointments, to apartment viewings, casino nights, concerts, etc. It’s all exceedingly normal even though my own parents view it as abnormal or even sad.
“I have such a talented granddaughter,” my grandmother says to me after I finish assembling her new TV stand and take out all her trash. It’s not unusual for me to take over these types of tasks whenever I’m home giving my father and his siblings a break. “But I’m still waiting for you to dress more prettily,” she adds, eyeing my arrangement of denim and flannel.
It turns out that unlike in Star Wars, an employer referring to their employees as family is considered a major red flag… or at least, a different type of red flag than embedding yourself into a fascist regime, terrorist organization, or warrior cult. It’s simply not compatible with the way corporations are run and the same even goes for smaller companies. It’s because of the “we’re a family” mindset that a former employer I considered a reliable counterpart presented me with a freakishly unusual contract designed for him to extract money from me even when I was doing jobs for other people. More recently, the “we’re a family” mindset was the introduction I got to a company that perhaps treats their employees the worst out of anything I’ve ever seen in my life. And for my friends who have dedicated close to a decade of their lives serving one corporate employer, just like that they’re gone in massive rounds of layoffs, their entire lives uprooted… save for their males of choice at home who join them in their critique of capitalism while simultaneously proposing a marriage contract.
Not ignoring the importance of stability, I still believe that women are encouraged to view themselves through their relationships with others while men are more so encouraged to view themselves through their own interests and accomplishments. So I’m biding my time. As described in Fondness: Speaking on Friendship, I’ve met a handful of people for whom the natural next step feels like stating out loud a mutual understanding that we work well together and could perhaps make a team of some kind. Maybe that is a foolish thing to feel but I believe that it does take a decent chunk of a lifetime tackling your own adventures before it becomes even remotely appropriate to profess this type of thing to a friend in a culture where that’s just not what people do, where that’s just not what it means to find stability. Someday, maybe, but since I’m not motivated by sex or limited by the logistics of a desire for childbirth the type of peace and stillness I imagine in my later years is only possible in my later years. Not now. Maybe after I retire just like my aunt. Who knows, by that time people like Kevin or Ben might be long gone. Men tend to die earlier.
I’m pleased to report, nonetheless, that at thirty I have gone ahead and created my first real home away from my original home. I have furniture - inherited, new, and used. My apartment is decorated with all the things I like too. Bookshelves line the walls surrounding a table where I enjoy writing like I am right now. A spare bed usually covered in pillows could also be used, I imagine, if a woman I come to know needs some space and time to find some stability of her own. Out in the main room are even more bookshelves holding records, collectibles, and sheet music within reach of my piano and guitar. The artificial fireplace still emits real heat when I want it to, the glow soothing as old cowboy shows play on the vintage-inspired TV set deep into the night, season’s greetings cards propped up on either side of the screen.
It feels right setting this all up only over the past several months. A second earlier might’ve felt like too much, too heavy. I’m used to being able to jet off wherever to live out of a suitcase for a year at a time. I’m set to leave this place again in the morning, actually. But it feels good knowing this is all here. It feels like, just maybe, I’m not giving up on stability after all.