By February 2012 I was illustrating for them. The title of the show was "I hate you" - The theme was about animosity within families, and the story was Good News Versus Bad News (also called "Love and Baseball") by Erin Barker. " In it, a daughter has to deal with hate and love in her own family when she learns the truth about her mother’s pregnancy. Read the story in comic form below.
"When I was twelve my mom told me she had something she wanted to talk to
me about. My mom and I didn't have a lot of talks. I loved her very
much, but she was sort of an intimidating figure. She
was one of those very busy corporate working moms with
the beeper and the pants suit and
the rolley suitcases. She shouted important things into phones a lot
and she was away a lot on business trips."
"But
she sat me down in the living room and
she told me that she was pregnant.
It
was kind of weird the way she said it, almost like she wasn't that
happy about it."
"It'd been about eight years since my brother was born, but even I could remember how excited everyone had been, how everyone had suggestions for names, how all the grandparents flew in from out of town, and how a day barely went by that we didn't get some massive delivery – a big bunch of congratulations balloons or a giant stuffed animal."
"But
no balloons came this time. Not even any cards."
"Still,
I was very excited. I hadn't expected that I would ever have another
sibling after my little brother. And
I was optimistic that maybe this time I'd get one who could catch a
baseball."
"I
told everyone the good news. My
teachers, my
Girl Scout troop, everyone
at church, our
next-door neighbors, the
kid who mowed our lawn. And
they were all just as delighted as I was."
'Oh
my god, I'm so sorry.'"
"And I didn't know what that meant. Until
one day when my dad took me out for ice cream.
When
I was a kid, my dad was my best friend. He’s the type of dad who
would read to us every night before bed and listen very seriously to
my thoughts on the Roald Dahl masterpiece James and Giant Peach
and the film version’s inherent inferiority. He was the one who
taught me how to throw a baseball and at one point really believed he
could teach my brother the same. The one who told my brother and me
that Darth Vader had to wear that suit because he’d been injured in
a car accident and so we’d better always wear our seat belts unless
we wanted to end up like him. (Imagine
my disillusionment when I saw the Star Wars
prequels seven years ago.)"
"So, since my dad and I were so close, I could recognize his MO by now. Every time he has bad news he takes us out for ice cream. Don't ever go to the Coldstone Creamery with my dad. Just don't do it,"
"unless
you want to find out your grandpa died or
your dog was put to sleep or
your nanny was fired for stealing your mom's jewelry."
"So
we get our ice cream of doom and then my
dad tells me, 'The
baby your mom is pregnant with is not mine.'
And
I can see him looking at me, to see if I, at twelve years old,
understand what he's saying."
"As
it turned out, I had conveniently just learned what sex was,
in
science class at school, when my teacher forced poor Craig Burkin to
read it aloud from our biology textbook. I still remember the exact
words, as read in Craig's shaky, giggly voice..."
"Yes,
the word jiggles was used. Even as a twelve-year-old, I was like, 'I
really feel like jiggles is not the right word to use in this
context.' Jiggles is a word that is neither sexy nor scientific.
Probably the only place you should find the word jiggles is a Jello
commercial.
But
anyway the point was I did understand exactly what was going on here.
I
can see how hard it is for my dad to say these words and I know that,
as much as he didn’t want to tell all those other people, I am the
very last person he wanted to tell.
Then
he says, 'Do you know who the father is?'
And
I realize with sudden clarity that I do know. That I have perhaps
always known, but not admitted it to myself until this exact moment.
'Andy,' I say, and my dad nods."
"Andy
was my mom's coworker, this British guy about ten years younger than
her who would take her and me and my brother on little trips and buy
us all expensive presents. He'd even, oddly enough, gone to church
with us. I’d thought he was our friend.
I
realized now that I had been wrong and that I’d been stupid not to
realize it. And as a result not only had I failed to prevent this
disaster – and like every child I truly believed in my heart that I
could have, with a well-timed tantrum or the
right number of slammed doors – but I had made it much worse
for the one person who deserved it least, my father.
For
months, I had been coming home and saying, "Dad, look at the
awesome Lego castle Andy got us!" I’d been calling him to say,
“Dad, guess what, I taught Andy how to play baseball!” never
noticing the tense silence that would follow on the other line. Not
to mention I’d publicly humiliated him by telling everyone in town
about my mother's pregnancy. I was racked with guilt. And I was no
longer excited about the new baby."
"Soon
after this, my mother moved out and bought a house down the street
from my father's, because the neighborhood didn't already have enough
to talk about. My brother and I were supposed to go down there on
some days when she was in town.
One
weekend I got there and there was a cake on the table and my mother
said to me, 'Andy and I got married today. Do
you want a piece of wedding cake?'"
"No,
I did not want a piece of the cake of lies.
A
few weeks later, I came over and was surprised yet again, this time
by the presence of a strange pink baby, who I was told was my new
sister."
"'Do
you want to hold her?' my mother asked.
No,
I did not want to hold her. I didn't want to look at her. This baby
had broken my father’s heart. I loathed this horrible creature, and
I always would, I decided then. I made a commitment in that moment to
hate this baby, for the rest of my life, possibly longer.
There
was just one problem."
"I
don't know if you've ever tried to hate a baby … but it's real
fuckin' hard.
Because
everything they do is fuckin' magical as shit.
And
this was especially true for my sister, Emma, who had a little
Pebbles Flintstone ponytail on her head. Every
night she refused to go to sleep until I'd come up to her room and
sung her the same song, every time, "Shoebox" by the
Barenaked Ladies, which is actually kind of an inappropriate song to
sing to a little girl since it's about statutory rape, but she'd
heard me playing it in my room once and that was what she wanted, so
who was I to argue."
"And
soon, I found myself bonding with my mother, for the first time in a
long time, over
our mutual love for Emma and
our mutual hatred for the Teletubbies."
"Eventually,
all my anger fell down like dominoes. After I forgave my sister, it
was easier to forgive my mother. After I forgave my mother, it was
easier to forgive myself. I never quite forgave Andy, but that was
okay.
It
turned out, to no one’s surprise, that his stay was only temporary
anyway. He met another married woman with children and
started going to church with them. And presumably started this story
all over again."
"As for my father, I never needed to ask for his forgiveness to begin with. It was always there."
"Emma
is fourteen years old now and she’s gone from Teletubbies to
Twilight. Clearly she’s a girl with
questionable taste. Probably in a few years she’ll be reading Dan
Brown novels. But despite that, we’re still great friends,
and because we have her, I can’t regret anything that happened."
Although,
she never did learn to throw a baseball.
ILLUSTRATOR'S COMMENTS:
In choosing my style for this project I tried to channel Quentin Blake a little (Roald Dahl's illustrator). I wanted to use a spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment line quality so I drew each character over and over again until I could capture their look in just a couple strokes. This gave it a calligraphic look that I'm very proud of.
Here are some photos from the show:
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| Here's a shot of Erin performing the story. |
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| They sold some of the artists' books at the show. |
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