Laundry and Innocence
Today I found your hat that’s been missing for two days. It was on the floor of the shower, which means that neither of us have bathed for a while. I smelled your hair last night and can confirm. Time is so slippery and you’re already so stretched – where to put all the necessary rituals after your homework, after your dad, after meltdowns? I worry I’m failing in teaching you structure and healthy daily habits.
This morning you were being such an angel: making yourself boiled water for oatmeal, slipping a slice of bread into the toaster oven, sopping up your messes with a sponge. You approached the sink.
“Why are there so many dishes stacked up?”
“Why are we out of forks?”
“Do you know I need laundry?”
“Do you know the toilet is broken? Where all the water comes down around the perimeter like a waterfall – that’s not happening anymore and so it’s just all full of stuck poop.”
“Okay.“
“Okay.”
“Ugh. Okay.”
A shot of untenable electricity runs through my sternum. A wound spilling from my throat.
“Can you just focus on getting ready? I can’t troubleshoot and problem solve while we’re rushing to get out the door.”
I race around the kitchen turning knobs off and on, trying to make your lunch from ingredients I never thought I’d consider feeding another person – but I just really want you to eat. So, I’m burning frozen pot stickers while you happily eat a pack of instant oatmeal and I surf cupboards in a panic for a single-use package of pirate booty and a single-use package of seaweed. This is easy to justify as a healthy lunch, because one is crunchy and one is green. I stuff the environmental implications into the same place where concerns about 5-G and toxic mattresses live – a facet of my brain where there are simply no more resources and “it’s probably not fine, but it’s fine,” is the monologue on loop. My socks are wet from splashed water and I’m juggling a thermos that used to have a lid I cannot currently find.
“I’m putting this in your lunch without a lid, because, well…there isn’t one here so I guess SOMEONE forgot to put it away.”
You say nothing. I flood with regret and am still spilling over several hours later when I realize I shamed you for something that’s probably my fault. Like being late. Like gathering doom piles. Like garbage in your closet. How does a parent ever really repair?
I ask you to communicate with such grace and care, and then I fumble in this way that will leave you with the need to unpack the dynamics via years of therapy and psychedelics that’ll keep you searching through rubble for meaning. I love you, but my mom loved me too, and we all know that is not enough.
The kitchen table is a mountain. Its peaks and valleys are made from jewelry materials: baking trays full of amethyst points that could fill a palm, chunky black tourmalines, small, round, color-saturated jewels, and an array of giant cicadas with 6” blue and brown wings outstretched, their preserved smell of rancid nuts and faint ammonia permeating the air. Rotting oranges sit in a nearby bowl, flanked by a mess of copper and silver chains no longer tidily housed on spools. A stray green oversized container of blowing bubbles completes the still life. You remark that there is nowhere for us to eat.
Last weekend I was at the Marin Arts and Crafts Show with my jewelry: sculptural, wearable spells made from the sprawl of table materials coated in thick metal, and emblazoned with precious and semi-precious rough-cut crystals and faceted gemstones.
I brought the gold display case from our living room – gilded shelves lined with glass, and a beautiful windowed door I propped open but that could close with a real skeleton key. Everyone thinks it’s a vintage French piece, but if you look closely you notice the decorative engravings are six-pointed stars and that it’s probably from Southeast Asia or somewhere in the Middle East. I bought it for $150 from a man on Craigslist five years ago for my birthday even though I couldn’t really afford it. Everyone stops to admire the curio cabinet and inquire about its origins before asking if I make the dresses on the mannequins too and if not, where they can find dresses like that. “I think I could find something like it on Amazon,” they say to their friend while walking away, purses swinging behind them.
I sit in a tall, collapsible director’s chair in an opening between the gold case and my display tables, practicing deep slow breaths and imagining my feet as roots connecting to the ground. My toes are weaving threads into the center of the earth and breathing themselves – like water through channels, like mycelium under the forest floor – because the anxiety in my chest has been threatening to strangle me for hours and I think this might help.
I must stay open to strangers so I can sell something, but with every interaction, my body constricts a little more. I think about all the crappy jewelry people make that sells out within minutes of them posting it on Instagram, and I think about how I’ve poured my root forces into this work and am now begging for someone to put a nickel into my mouth. I bite the inside of my cheeks until I can taste metal and look up to comments of slowed passersby.
“Wow! You’re so unique.”
Thank you.
“Keep being you! How cute. How wonderful.”
Thank you.
I try to stop saying thank you because somewhere I read that this releases a potential buyer from completing the circuit and if they were wanting to buy something from you and you say “thank you” preemptively, they feel the transaction has been completed and will leave without any of your jewels. So, I try to shift the language but nothing feels like a fit.
“Is that a wig? No? Oh goodness. I was sure you had on a hair piece.”
Much appreciated.
“Well aren’t you just a work of art yourself?”
What a high compliment.
Wry forced smile. A car parks on my chest. A festering wound opens.
The words are all genuine, but make me feel more othered than usual. I begin to write them down so I don’t gaslight myself out of understanding what really happened when I later fall into a hole. Gold letters dropped without thought from silver-lined mouths all seeking their next prey. They feel entitled to strip the meat from my body – ravishing and consuming the parts they want to be closer to before spitting the gristle out as they saunter toward the exit without caring to sew up the flesh. They sniff me out and watch me dance or turn into a fawn.
“You’re so creative. WOW!”
Thank you.
“You sure really dance to the beat of your own drum, don’t you?”
Thank you.
“Where were you before Halloween when I could’ve used some of this stuff?”
Working in my bat cave with the rest of the undead. We only come out unexpectedly. I just say it in my head.
A man approaches and looks at me with elevator eyes, using his finger to trace me up and down. “You don’t mind if I take your picture, do you?”
I force a smile, wondering what he’ll do with it and why I didn’t ask or say no. He’s the sixth older man who’s done this and the sixth older man I’ve said yes to. Why am I so compliant in these situations? Why does everyone feel they can take a part of me here and why am I allowing this without getting paid?
A woman strolls by slowly.
“Wow! STEAMPUNK!”
My work is not steampunk. I only say this in my head.
Another woman stops dead.
“Is that a wig? No?” She tries to touch my hair. I wince and she leaves without further words or eye contact.
Two women in their early 60’s gander at my display and speak to one another, avoiding my gaze.
“They are NOTHING like me. But they’re all amazing.” One looks in my direction with a friendly tilt of her head. “Amazing! Thank you!”
Thank you? I’ve always hated the word “amazing.” It’s what a person says when they feel obliged to offer a compliment but aren’t actually moved enough to produce real words.
More passersby offer objectification shrouded inside compliments that are actually transactions steeped in class dynamics that announce: You were born to struggle. You don’t belong here. We will caress your back while calling you names and withholding food, so you’re left in a state of stark confusion, so blurred by the dissonant coupling of actions that you feel eager to please, but also stolen from, confused, and starving.
“I wish you luck!”
Thank you.
“Gosh those look SO GREAT ON YOU with all your tats. Can I take your picture?”
Sure.
“I wish I could wear something like that, but it would just look stupid on me.”
“I wish I could wear something like that but I’m not brave enough.”
“Gosh. You are so brave.”
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
A 50-something woman who’s wearing a sequined hat and floral romper with Crocs and who I imagine shares my family sentiment of “go big or go home” picks up a piece of pretty yellow apatite on a long rolo chain, shoving another woman aside so she can look in the mirror while holding the necklace to her chest.
“NOPE!”
She turns outward to strangers passing by.
“Sometimes you just know. NOPE!”
She lays the necklace back down with the chain crumpled, and walks away without acknowledging me.
A man in his early 60’s stops and stares.
“Well! You’re sure well decorated aren’t you? Can I take your picture?”
A group of three women in their early 50’s stops to peruse. One of them turns to her friend and says, “I mean, it’s totally great.” She looks at me. “Not my style! But GOOD FOR YOU!”
“Keep making!”
Should I?
In the background, a 30-something year old dude is singing covers of Tom Petty and Coldplay. He’s pretty good except he can’t hit the high notes so instead he just draws them out in really long, unstable waves. It’s louder than the versions of soft rock he was performing yesterday so at least it’s not dead air space, but I don’t think anyone is feeling inspired.
I get home and I can’t do the dishes for days. I feel like I’ve been physically assaulted but there are no marks and no perpetrators, only strangers who gave me a lot of compliments.
I can’t clear the mess from my table, because part of me thinks I should still keep making for the holiday season, and part of me imagines throwing it all out the window – a burning effigy marking a failed creative life. I’m worried about paying our rent. I can’t respond to texts or take a shower. I’m eating sugar which I never do, no vegetables, and raiding the cupboards for stale seaweed in single use packages that I should be saving for your lunch.
I peel myself off the couch long enough to vacuum your room so that it’s not covered in cat litter when you get home. I miss you so much while you’re gone. After a weekend at your father’s house, I can’t be too sure how many pieces you will be in when you arrive.
I show up at the elementary school pickup parking lot and hop out with the dog, who is going absolutely insane because he hasn’t seen you all weekend and was basically neglected both by me because I was either busy or depressed and also by the dog sitter, who essentially left him crated for two days while not returning my texts.
You walk past without looking me in the eye and go to the other side of the car.
“Uhm. Hello?”
Nothing.
“Can you come over to this side of the car and say hello to me and Gizmo real fast? He’s being bananas. I think it’ll help him calm down and also I want to say hi to you.”
No response.
You get in the car and jerk your seatbelt across your chest, slamming your head repetitively into the headrest behind you. I pull the car over. You break down crying.
“Just leave me alone! I wish you would never get out of the car! Everyone thinks you’re weird and ugly and you are so so so embarrassing!”
You wave your arms and mimic me opening them in a welcoming stance with a sour face. I do the absolute wrong thing and take it personally and lose my temper and tell you to never say such things to me ever again.
The car is heavy – thick and loud with both of our emotions – but otherwise quiet the rest of the way home. I remember how full the sink is and how full the table is and realize I have no idea what I’m going to make for dinner and worry because I don’t know how to mitigate all the high intensity while running a household and caring for basic daily needs.
A week later, I’ll have coffee with my bestie Syd and talk to my therapist and try to photograph some of the jewelry that didn’t sell so I can list it on my website. I’ll fix the dishwasher and load it, call the landlord about the toilet, and find your hat in the shower. I’ll make you shower. Somehow, I’ll pay our rent. I’ll keep failing. I’ll keep going.
I’ll hope you learn the rituals that will lift you, and leave the ones with a stranglehold on our lineage. I’ll find a way to continue living in the world, where it’s so hard to survive and to feel a place of belonging. I’ll feel restored when I’m unshowered, dressed strangely, racing on the freeway getting you to school five minutes late again, because you’ll suddenly exclaim from the backseat, “RAINBOW!” and I will remember your innocence, and my own.
Cover photo by Sana Saidi on Unsplash
About the Author
Chrystal Sunshine is a queer, witch, single mother, arts educator, designer, and marketing maven living in Oakland, who has a penchant for colorful plants and tender metaphors. Her writing unpacks transgenerational stories of trauma, identity, class, and the re-visioning of possible worlds. She has been published in Passage & Place: An Anthology of Letters, Essays, and Visual Art by Both Free-World and Incarcerated Queer Writers/Artists, and she is currently working on a creative non-fiction manuscript.
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