All the Times I Tried to
Julia Halprin Jackson
for Scout
I was four years old when I sent my best friend up an apple tree in my backyard to fetch a tutu from my parents’ upstairs balcony. The door was locked and she got stuck ten feet off the ground, standing on planks of wood as wide as her stocking feet.
That time the photographer from AYSO soccer bullied me into smiling for our team photo when I was five. It didn’t work. You can find me in the back row, face red from crying, hugging my mom’s thigh.
Once, while waterskiing with my family on the Sacramento River, my dad backed over the ski rope, which forced our boat to take on water until we were up to our knees in it. We had to bail water out of the boat’s belly using upturned Tupperware while my dad swam under the boat with a bowie knife to unearth the rope. I was ten.
The year we went to Yom Kippur services and came home to find that my cat had stolen into my brother’s bedroom and decapitated his pet parakeet. We knew something was wrong when we found a trail of green feathers down the stairs and out the back door. I followed my brother’s sobs outside, whispering “Josh, it’s the Day of Atonement. You must forgive!” as he threw rocks at the cat.
In eighth grade a boy asked me to slow dance. He was shorter than me and had a name like Brad or Todd or Blaine. I kept looking behind me because surely he meant someone else. He had found me during the eight terminable minutes of Savage Garden’s “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” I only lasted a few bars before my childhood caught up with me and I fled, embarrassed, to the girl’s bathroom, where I stayed until the song was over.
And then there were the thousand tiny apocalypses of February 10, 2001, the day I learned I’d be taking insulin daily for the rest of my life. Rain pounded outside the hospital window as I stared out at that very same Sacramento River, water of my youth, and wondered how many carbohydrates were in the dozen cookies I’d eaten the day before. 5’8”, 113 lbs., I never really saw how skinny I was until I developed photos from that final week of oblivion—dressed in glittery silver for a high school dance, my collar bone stylishly gaunt. A few fucked up cells and my body felt like someone else’s. At 16 I secretly wondered what, if anything, my body was good for.
And all the times I moved: to Santa Barbara, to Spain, to San Francisco, to my hometown, to San Jose. The time I got lost on private hunting grounds on the Spanish coast where I’d wandered, lost and alone, practicing French under my breath until the landscape became familiar again. Or that snowy day years later when Laurel and I had to push a car uphill in the Andes so I could return to Santiago in time to make my flight. Or when Ryan and I camped in Lake Manawa, Iowa, where we found people masturbating and taking meth in the campground bathrooms and were surrounded by so many mosquitoes that we had to zipper ourselves inside our tent at 5 o’clock.
The day he gripped my hand after we’d danced to “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot (Part II)”—him in his gray suit, me in the shimmery white dress, rings newly on our fingers. I’d had to stay calm the day before as well, when we learned that my 91-year-old grandfather had died in his sleep. My father later said this was his way of joining us on our wedding day.
There was the day I first learned I was pregnant, heart at my throat, and every doctor’s appointment thereafter. The startling six hours of labor, the moment I first met that loud and unafraid girl. I realized, then, that it wasn’t calm I was seeking so much as the promise that together we would make it, maybe even thrive.
How could I stay calm that November night in 2016 when our country began to reveal its ugly entrails, when every night thereafter I’d go to bed thinking, how will I explain this to my kid. We had stayed up late to watch the results roll in, my six-month-old in her HRC onesie. I broke down and called my die-hard liberal mother, who answered the phone with an uncharacteristic chill. “He won’t win, will he?” I asked. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. We all know what happened after that. What keeps happening.
And then there was the day I lost you. At 20 weeks, I’d chosen to ignore your erratic movements, the eerie stillness. You were a sharp change from your sister, whose gender, we once joked, was “hockey player.” There are moments of that week that come back in shudders—the storm clouds gathering above our persimmon tree, the last walk your father and I took while we still hoped you would one day exist. How was I supposed to stay calm when my body had betrayed me, again? How should I have told that 16-year-old voice to stay quiet, that this wasn’t my fault, that these fucked up cells are different from those fucked up cells, that it wasn’t something I ate or a vitamin I should have taken or some exercise I should have skipped? What was I supposed to say to my three-year-old? How do I explain the random cruelty of biology? After, we adopted a rose in your name and on the day you should have been born, we visited it for the first time. It was hot. We had forgotten to water it. The rosebush looked thin and malnourished alongside all those beautiful blooms in the city garden and yet underneath it all, something blossomed. I liked to think it was you.
That was over a year ago. Since then: a pandemic pregnancy, punctuated by masks and hand sanitizer, the surprising and joyful entrance of your brother three weeks early. Wildfires, viruses, social distance, civil uprising. The world has cracked humanity open to its core: What is essential? Who are we when we are alone?
You know, now, that this is an abbreviated list of all of the endings and beginnings and starting-over-agains. Someday I’ll share with you a catalogue of the joys, the triumphs, the hard-won victories of parenting, working, writing, searching always for the right way to say it all. Until then: Stay ready, stay open, stay with me, but don’t, don’t stay calm.
Julia Halprin Jackson
Julia Halprin Jackson is the co-founder and publicity director of Play On Words, a collaborative literary arts series. She contributes to San Jose State University's alumni magazine, Washington Square, and writes fiction and nonfiction when she's not wrangling two small children.