chosen family
"Sometimes I feel like a guest without a host," I said to my best friend's baby brother, and then I joked, "a ghost."
After a pause he murmured "it's my mother's house."
Whoops. "I know," I said in a rush, "I just mean you'll have to pick out your own bath towels." I looked around the guest room. "I can dress your bed for you," I told him.
"Jenny," he said, chuckling in disbelief, "you don't have to make up the bed for me."
It had not previously occurred to me that trying to be less of a total ghost might come off more like a hostile takeover of a house that is explicitly not mine. I cringed. "Right," I said, "of course," and I started backing out of the room.
A couple days later, the professional photographer walked in for holiday photos. Everyone was dragging their feet getting dressed up. "You're the one who wanted pictures of everybody," my friend told her mother, who, at that particular moment, seemed the most pressed. The photographer directed everyone to scoot the couch to one side.
I busied myself with other tasks. Then I found myself stopped in the entryway, admiring everyone.
"Oh, that's my best friend from childhood," my best friend from childhood had just said to the photographer. I blinked as I tuned in. The photographer had turned her head; she was now smiling at me in greeting, her expensive camera in her hands, its lens pointed toward the family posed before her. She seemed perfectly nice.
"Hiiiii," I said to her, one awkward hand lifted like "stop right there," a warm holiday version of "kill me now." Of course the photographer had needed to know who the hoverer was.
She turned again to focus on her work, and I baaaacked out of the room: no need to create further confusion as to whom is a family member and whom is not.
I walked down the hall and faceplanted in bed. Had I really not been involved in family photos for so many years? I pushed myself to think. I had, hadn't I, but I'd always been posed with someone else's kids like a prop, as if I couldn't be photographed unless I had a child in my arms, a stake planted in the ground—an actual anchor baby, a tenuous potential connection to the other people pictured in other photos.
I sadly suspected there was very limited evidence of my existence in other people's photo albums, as if I'd died in my 20s. Not that people have physical photo albums anymore. Ah! A wave of self-pity washed over me as I realized I'd gotten the kids CampSnaps for Christmas. Hadn't I wanted to grant them the gift of self-authorship, an autobiographical narrative told in consecutive frames? Hadn't I? Was I in fact attempting to photobomb their photos? Like a phantom lurking in the background? I thought, then, about my penchant for selfies, which I always feel embarrassed about posting online—except I'm not sure there'd be any solid evidence of the continuation of myself otherwise.
When my parents died, I'd experienced a certain grief at the sight of my own school photos, those portraits with the marbled backdrops: I recognized they weren't of any particular significance to anyone left on Earth. Then those photos had been stashed away, along with anything else that had mattered to my parents. I did have photos of deceased relatives in our starter home, but almost all of those had been mailed on to me much, much later, a sort of photographic estate sale. One other photo, framed in a cheap thing, had been printed off Facebook instead.
And wasn't I always ducking out of others' photos anyway? I hate photos and I hate how I look in them. I'd already talked to my best friend about this—about being terrified of being somehow recognizable, a liability, in other people's photos. Well, I needn't have worried so much about being recognizable, least of all to myself. But at some point I'd seemingly agreed with the consensus decision that my very presence posed a danger to others; I'd been complicit in my own self-erasure.
I passed out from grief, as can sometimes occur wrt bedroom faceplants, and I woke up a couple hours later, still feeling like a pissbaby. I hadn't figured anything out in my sleep which, in middle age, feels exactly like a hangover.
But everything normalized and I achieved a sort of internal homeostasis in the following days. I did wince and suck air through my teeth, though, when a child referred to me as "Aunt Jenny," and I glanced around the room to make sure it wasn't bothering anyone. I privately shared my alarm later on.
"Embrace it! Lean into it!" my best friend told me.
"Okay," I said uncomfortably. I was uncertain. I had disappeared from this family and then that one, in a way that is impossible for children to understand or reconcile. I was stressed.
"You're really two peas in a pod," she told me, of the child who had cast me in an aunt role.
"I now know how my grandmother felt about hanging out with me," I told her. "I'm finally experiencing it from the other side."
My grandmother had been the only one who'd seen me clearly, so of course I'd wanted to live with her as a 6-year old. She was devastated to learn this, after I was already an adult. ("It seems I was presented a false choice in childhood," I explained to my best friend; I'd been told that my grandmother didn't want me moving in. All these belated revelations had raised very real questions about certain interfamilial conspiracies and allegiances, but the parties in question are all deceased.)
But I imagine our relationship would've been much different if I'd lived with her, I reasoned to my friend aloud. And anyway, every little kid wants to live with their grandma or grandpa. I said something, then, about having the copious free resources to attune to kids when you're not obligated to do the thankless hard work of actually parenting them. ("I was always so scared of snapping at a child," I told my best friend.)
I received a camera for Christmas. I received a lot of things—a sort of overcorrection in favor of the interloper and now I was feeling perfectly mortified about it—but I especially received a digital camera, a darling featherweight slim jim that weighs nothing and takes up no space at all.
I briefly fell asleep, right after drinking a latte. I had a Westworld sort of nightmare, in which I was unable to tell animatronics from human actors, or resort spaces from motorized soundstages. For a chunk of the dream I was being chased around a very big boat. Finally I was cornered. The dream had culminated in my being unable to stop vomiting up worms. I woke up feeling weird; the sight of a late-afternoon double rainbow had me feeling even weirder. Still, I took a photo of the meteorological phenomenon with my new camera.
I spent some time hiding at my desk. I shared with some friends what was bothering me, kind of. I had something to eat. Then I apologized to the group text for being so anxious and agitated and unchristmassy.
"This is what Christmas is all about," one of my dearests reassured me.
I wracked my brain as to what she might've meant.
"Family and chosen family!" I answered after a short pause. "Aww."
"I'd choose you hot babes again and again and again," I messaged after another short pause.
I thought to myself about the people I'd choose over and over again, which was excruciating, and I started to weep.
Out in the living room, I gazed upon my best friend's mom admiringly as she was headed to bed. She asked me what I was looking so teary-eyed about. At this point I was fully recovered from earlier, so now I was annoyed.
"I'm not teary!" I said. "I'm happy!"
"About what?" she whispered.
"You," I finally said.
She smiled. "I like having a roommate," she said.
"I do, too," I said. After she left I whispered to myself, "I try to be a good one."
I plunked down beside my best friend's baby brother. I fiddled with the stuff on the table. I noticed the paper plate and metal fork beside him. "Are you done with those?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, and as I reached for them, "but you don't have to clear my plate for me." He is a wonderful feminist.
I paused before snatching it. "Oh, you know," I said as I stood up, "I love doing it until I have to do it, and then I hate doing it." I smiled evilly at him before gleefully shepherding the plate to the trash and the fork to the sink.