“What’swrongwith me?” I said. “Fuck you, dude. I’m having ababy.”
At another point Martyn and I decided we wanted a mirror to watch the birth together. The nurses found one for us, but the second we looked, we both started screaming. That was the end of the mirror experiment. (British pop star Robbie Williams once joked that witnessing his wife giving birth was like watching his favorite pub burn down.)
About eighteen hours later, our little mama came out. For the first time in my whole life, I didn’t care what I looked like. I didn’t careabout anything. I wanted my baby on my skin. I wanted to pull her out—which I did, by the way, by her shoulders—and put her directly onto my chest. I didn’t care who saw my no-nipple, scarred-up tits. Didn’t care. I wanted my child’s skin on my skin.
Then I noticed one of the nurses crying as she looked at my bare chest.
“Are we doing this now?” I said. “Please don’t feel bad for me. We’re all good here.”
And we were.
Sadie is a teenager now. Every Cinco de Mayo I wish her a happy birthday, and she throws something at me. This is fair: who wants to imagine their mother saying “Chop-chop!” in a borrowed hot tub before heading upstairs?
She has genetically and otherwise adopted much of my approach to life, though. She wears T-shirts that say things like
IMILFS
I’ve told her she can’t wear that outside our house, but I don’t think she listens to me.
I’ve never known or felt or shared love, orbeenloved, the way I have been since that beautiful child was born. Even though we have our ups and downs like any family, there’s such an extraordinary connection between us. And I’m a damn good mom—that’s really all that matters to me. Have there been times I’ve failed? Sure. But Sadie and I always come back from it.
The other day I was dropping her off at school when she announced, “I don’t want to get out of the car.”
“Why?” I said. “You can’t miss school today…”
“No, Mom,” she said, “it’s because I’m having such a great time with you.”
My love for Martyn LeNoble is cellular. In fact, the love that I have for this man is deeper than I’ll ever be able to adequately convey.
He is my family. And his family is my family, too. I once went to their house in the Netherlands, and his father was blasting Elliott Smith, all by himself, cooking—he’s an incredible chef.
“Do you want me to turn this down?” he shouted over the music.
“Are you kidding me?” I shouted back. “You’re blasting Elliott Smith. This is my happy place in life.”
I love these people.
When Martyn and I got married on February 23, 2013, in my house, it was a small group: me, my friend Rachel as my maid of honor, and Martyn’s friend Vincent as his best man. My friend Kathleen McNamara, who’s a minister at Agape, performed the ceremony. My mom was there, as well as Marlon, Martyn’s daughter from his first marriage, and little Sadie.
I came down the stairs to the song “Save Me” by Aimee Mann.
I had suspected I could never love anyone, and yet here I was.
SIXTEEN
WHO DO I THINK I AM?
AFTERSADIE’S BIRTHI stumbled upon something that would forever change my perspective about my dad.
Paul Applegate, my paternal grandfather, had lived in Pennington, New Jersey, on a beautiful property that had rolling hills and rabbits and birds and deer and the occasional bear. Paul was a heavily tattooed steelworker who would eat bologna sandwiches with mustard and always had a frosted-glass mug in his freezer. He’d fill those mugs with cranberry juice and 7UP and share it with me—to this day I love a cranberry juice and 7UP in a frozen glass. Growing up, I thought my paternal grandfather was so kind. His house felt like family, felt like home. I loved Paul so much.
During my trips to the East Coast, in addition to seeing my mother’s family, we’d also head deeper into New Jersey to stay with Paul and his wife, Olive. Olive was not my father’s mother—my actual grandmother had died mysteriously early in my father’s life. Olive, whose special-needs brother lived with her and Paul, never wantedmy dad around, so Bob Applegate was raised by Paul’s mother, his paternal grandmother. One day, when my father was seven or eight years old (as he remembers it), Paul’s mother just nonchalantly announced over the breakfast table that my father’s mother had died.
As I grew older, it pained me to learn that my father hated his father: I loved Paul so. I never really understood what had happened to cause such a rift. I had heard various stories about my paternal grandmother but could never get the same story twice. My father’s childhood had clearly been toxic and complicated—the casual nature of how he found out about his own mother’s death was an indication of the neglect he suffered—and he had spent so much of his life in pain. He would make up memories of his early life to cope, to the point that I don’t think he ever really knewwhohe was—not really. He used to say he’d never evenmethis biological mother. This was not true strictly speaking, but perhaps it was better than the reality. His grandmother told him that his mother had died in the street, beaten to death outside a bar.
My father didn’t even know his own mother’s name. In 2011, my half sister would eventually get ahold of a copy of my dad’s birth certificate and was able to tell him that his mother’s name had been Lavina Shaw. Beyond that we didn’t really know anything.
And then, as was so often the case throughout my life, a TV show changed everything.
