I met Auntie Rose when I was four or five. She had to be 184 years old, give or take 100 years. Old was ancient to me, like the pyramids, dinosaurs, and God. Auntie Rose lived next door to my mom and my mom’s three kids of which I was firmly in the center. My older brother and my baby brother were my orbit. My dad was a satellite across town while my mom was the moon, sleeping during the day and shining somewhere far from me at night. It wasn’t a world with cohesion, just one with intense gravity.
We lived in apartments with too many kids and too few awake adults so anyone who took an interest in me became family. That was how a stranger named Rose became Auntie Rose and her husband (by association, not at all earned) became Uncle John. And I loved her. She was sweet to me and had a soft lap. She made me eggs some mornings when my mom wasn’t all that aware of my grumbling tummy. She asked me about things like hopscotch and fights with my brothers and my wishes to be the President and a country music singer, dual careers that felt realistic and achievable.
There was another ancient woman on the premises that everyone called Granny. Now Granny really was the oldest person alive, of that I am certain. I don’t have the Guinness Book of Records to prove it, but my memory filed her away as the oldest person ever and I still hold every centenarian up against her. Granny played solitaire, smoked cigarettes, watched daytime television, prayed the rosary, and made cookies. Auntie Rose visited with her several times a week for many years and I would trail over after her. Granny had one of those little plaques with wooden blocks that spelled out JESUS if your eyes adjusted to it in just the right way. I thought that was brilliant. I would let my eyes go in and out of focus while tracing the lines, amazed that blank space could become something else if you saw it the right way. Auntie Rose’s words and Granny’s cigarette smoke would waft around me as they talked about nothing that actually interested me, but held me just the same. I thought Auntie Rose and Granny were actually related. My mom let me know years later that they were not. I guess I was making chosen family for as long as I had the ability.
Auntie Rose wasn’t my neighbor for long, but while she was, she likely heard a lot through the thin wall that separated her home from mine. My mom’s boyfriend, my future step-father, wasn’t a kind man and expressed that loudly in all sorts of ways. She didn’t like him which made me like her more. She also didn’t like her own husband much. I could tell that right away. I could give or take him. He was silent and sullen. She did something that no ancient person ever did in the 1980s: she divorced him. And then she moved away.
Auntie Rose kept coming back to visit Granny, though, so I didn’t lose her. It was one of those visits when something shifted that never shifted back. It was a moment I remember so vividly and so clearly you would think something traumatic happened. It wasn’t traumatic, though. I had been in the living room, talking to Granny. Granny asked me to go give Auntie Rose a vase as she was in the back room doing some kind of rearranging of a closet for Granny. I walked down the hall to the bedroom and there was no Auntie Rose. Then I heard her call from the darkened bathroom that had the door wide open. “Need something?” I walked toward her and then froze when I heard the unmistakable sound of urine hitting the water of a toilet.
She was talking to me. While peeing. And can you even? I could not. I froze and felt my stomach hurt. I said, “Uh, no. Nothing.” I set the vase on the bed and hightailed it out of the apartment, confused and disoriented by the whole experience.
There is such a fragility in early childhood, a constant reckoning with the stimulus all around. A sense of awe or mortification seem equally in reach at any given moment. I had been awed so much by Auntie Rose’s unfailing kindness and love that mortification had an easy entry. She had seemed above need, above doing anything so base as having to use the bathroom. I never forgave her for being so very human when I had cast her as Love.
That memory was created when I was eight-years old and I must think of it at least once a month with a very specific trigger: embarrassment on behalf of another’s humanity. I feel the burn of embarrassment the most intensely when it’s my own humanity revealed at the most inopportune time.
There’s a great scene from a mediocre show that also occurs to me frequently alongside this memory. The show was Nurse Jackie and the scene depicts a conversation between one of my favorite fictional TV characters Gloria Akalitus and a second character named Dr. O’Hara. Gloria Akalitus is the head of an overtaxed ER. She is every medical administrator I have ever met with a wonderful, lovable, terrifying personality. Dr. O’Hara comes upon Gloria eating and says, “I don’t think I have ever seen you eat before.” Gloria’s response is, “I like to hide my humanity. Or at least keep it to a minimum.”
Why is admitting we are human the hardest thing we do all day? Feels like it has something to do with the red rover game between capability and vulnerability that plays throughout the entirety of our living.
So what didn’t match up for the eight-year old me that day? Was it that she was in the bathroom with the light off? Was it that the door was open? Was it that it was unexpected? Or was it just too human?
It was being confronted with base need where strength and comfort had been the only resident prior. It made everything feel a bit more fragile in a world that already wasn’t sturdy. I am thankful for that moment now. I know it’s a weird thing to be thankful for – someone using the bathroom with the door open. I am, though, because it serves me. It pops up when I want to run like my young self did. It presents itself when another’s humanity feels far too real or when my own feels far too ugly. I pause now instead of run. I remind myself that we are all just humans working out our needs the best we can. I remind myself of my own capability and of yours. And, most of the time, I stay.
I imagine if I hadn’t run that day then Auntie Rose would have likely finished her business, washed her hands, and come out of the bathroom to take the vase from me. She likely would have had a kind word for me as she often peppered mundane moments with affirmation. I would have likely returned to Granny while she played her millionth game of solitaire and smoked her millionth-and-one cigarette. My stomach would have settled and cookies would have been consumed. Life would have simply continued.
I don’t know what it is about being human that sometimes makes the stomach hurt and causes us to flee, but I do know that most of us have moments that feel too naked and real. May we not change them or run from them. May we wait them out and see what happens. May we accept our need as fully human. May we close the door when we go potty.
“Red rover, red rover, send acceptance right over.”
