| |  | | | | September 12, 2017 | Letter No. 103 | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
Fall has always been my most favorite season. I like the clothes: Corduroy! A jaunty beret! With my short hair, it's very Liza Minnelli circa 1966. I like the seasonal beverages, even if we tend to cruelly shame women for their pumpkin-spice connections. I like that the pressure to go outside and be excited about it has abated. I am not a "lifestyle-y" girl. I never buy flowers. I don't have cute napkins. I use my tub as a laundry hamper. But the fall season is the closest I come to festive and the closest festive comes to me.
And this week, as I'm the only woman in New York praying for a sudden downturn in temperatures, we usher in a rather festive partnership with Cole Haan. For the next six weeks, the company will be presenting Lenny content through its "Extraordinary Women" campaign. This collaboration began with my nonviolently attacking "the tyranny of the stiletto" to a lovely Cole Haan marketing gal and unloading emotionally about how I felt about the Internet's demand that all public women know how to wear seven-inch heels. "I look like a newborn giraffe!" I cried.
What began as my raging overshare became a thrilling collaboration when we learned that Cole Haan is spending its fall season focused on the concept of extraordinary women and what makes them so (spoiler: It's not their ability to strut in heels). At Lenny, we celebrate the everyday extraordinary. A huge part of our mission is to remind our readers that just by daring to live on their own terms, they are breaking the mold. And that their stories — even the quiet, quotidian ones — have the power to connect and unify, to soothe and inspire.
In fact, in this issue, I get surprisingly fresh inspiration from Jenni, the woman I thought I knew everything about, when I grill her about the challenges of a side hustle, what made her want to take the leap and start Lenny, and what advice she'd have for women going into business with their best gal.
So if you want me, you can find me in my thermals, waiting for the first orange leaves to fall, reading Lenny in real time alongside the rest of you. Since the season where I fully quit leaving my house is upon us, I need my weekly influx of voices that challenge, tease, deconstruct, and demand. That, to me, is truly extraordinary.
Love,
Lena
In this week's issue:
—Lena and Jenni discuss starting a business with your best friend.
—Elizabeth Greenwood reveals what she learned from cheating on her boyfriend while researching a book about faking your own death.
— The Nanny costume designer Brenda Cooper shares all the show's sartorial secrets.
—Maisy Card writes about how her Jamaican mother came to terms with her American boyfriend.
—Alice Driver reports on human trafficking and migrant mothers at the US-Mexico border. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | | | | | How Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner Became Best Friends and Business Owners | | | | By Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner | | | | | | |
We spend a lot of time together. Like, a whole lot. When we're not working, we're chilling, and when we're not chilling, we're texting. (It's not for everyone; Lena sometimes wonders if it's even for Jenni. The invention of the text message was not good for Lena's clinically diagnosed OCD. "Hello? Hello? Answer me!! Are you SAFE?!") But it's an inextricable part of how we run our business and our lives.
Deep personal engagement + nonstop commentary on the happenings of planet Earth x putting writing first = Lena & Jenni's proprietary mix for professional success.
So when the idea of interviewing each other about starting a business with your best friend emerged, we wondered how much there was to say that we hadn't shared already. After all, keeping our creative relationship fresh is a big part of the reason we pursued the side hustle known as Lenny.
But it turns out that when the audio recorder came out, with it came some hot new info. For example, Lena was surprised and inspired by Jenni's take on the "having it all" dilemma, while Jenni didn't know about Lena's long-held dream to be a drama teacher for tweens (that's in the outtakes, where Lena also wonders if "bed tester" is a job).
Our biggest hope is that when you read this, you don't take it like a line-for-line blueprint for your business endeavors. Rather, we want to be an example, letting you know that the passion — and shared connection — of two women is an unstoppable force. In the last seven and a half years, we have been through a stunning array of work disasters, family breakdowns, personal faltering, health crises, and even moments where we didn't quite know how best to hold the other up, or whether we had the strength. But the love and power that sparks when two women see the world through the same pair of glasses? Well, that's incredible, and it keeps you coming back, with more power than you knew you had. LYLAS.
Lena Dunham: You're a busy woman, a working mother. When you said, "We should have a web presence" and we came up with the idea for Lenny, what made you go, "Yes, that's a good idea, that's how I should be spending my precious time"?
Jenni Konner: I just felt like you needed a platform — we both did, but you especially — that was more than 140 characters. Girls could speak for itself, but at the end of the day, you needed to be Lena Dunham and not Hannah Horvath. You have such a strong political voice and a fierce feminist agenda; we didn't have the time to wait for books to come out or your mayoral campaign. We just had to get in there.
LD: People talk a lot about side hustles. At this point it's confusing: what is our front hustle and what is our side hustle? I think our main mission will always be to do what we started with Girls, which is to make really strong narrative content. Lenny and our other projects support that. I wonder how you think about the concept of a side hustle in your life and how you decide what to center for yourself. How do you split your time?
JK: I think you're right when you said it's hard for us to figure out what is a side hustle and what is just a hustle, because it just depends on the day.
LD: One of the big fears that a lot of people, particularly women, have when starting something like a side hustle is: How am I going to do this and continue to be engaged with my day-to-day work, and continue to be a parent, and continue to be a partner? How do you talk to those women who had a big dream, but also a fear around that dream?
JK: Whenever someone says, "How do you balance it? How do you give as much love to motherhood as you do to work?," I just think that, for me, as I grow older, what I'm trying to do rather than balance it, is come to terms with the fact that there is no balance. When I'm at work, there's a good chance that I'm not doing my best mothering. When I'm doing my mothering, I'm probably not doing my best job at work. For me, the best thing is just to try to accept that and not feel so much guilt and shame around it.
LD: You and I have an interesting story, which is that we became business partners as we became best friends because we were introduced through work. A lot of people share their primary passions with their closest friends but also feel afraid to begin an endeavor with them because they're afraid that differences in managerial styles will create a riff. At the same time, who better to start a business with than your best friend, because presumably you guys have similar dreams and agendas. What would your advice be to a woman who wanted to begin something like what we've done with the woman who's closest to them in their life?
JK: I don't see any downside to starting a business with a friend, because the most important thing in the way we work is our communication with each other. We had already honed how to get through a drama or a crisis or a little decision or a big decision.
LD: I think the biggest thing when people ask me about working with my best friend, they ask, "How do you and Jenni keep it going on a day-to-day basis?" The most important thing is rigorous honesty. That honesty doesn't have to be unkind. Honesty can just be a commitment to keeping it real every day.
JK: Part of that is, we both have to indulge each other's desires and meet somewhere in the middle. That way, we both get what we want or we both compromise.
LD: When you think about our audience of women, how would you define what is extraordinary about them? How would you discuss that everyday remarkable that we're reaching for with Lenny?
JK: When we started Lenny, we always said we wanted to push the ball forward for women. I think our writers are extraordinary for sharing their stories. But it is also about creating a community of women.
LD: People talk a lot about Lenny's being political, that we interview lots of female politicians, and we talk about the right to choose, and we talk about real, quantifiable political change in this country. To me, one of the most political things Lenny does — and one of the most political things that you can do in general — is that it centers women's stories in a way that is giving them the same essential importance that we've always given to men's stories. The fact is, we give a lot of time and space to men's stories of war, for example, but the things that women experience every single day, the small plights and challenges that come with being female, need to be centered too. We need to understand why it's as amazing to survive a miscarriage, or start a small business with your friend, or notice a need for a library in your neighborhood, as it is to go out and do this wild empire-building. We need to understand how impactful these small shifts can be, too.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jenni Konner thinks she may have invented the term "front hustle."
Lena Dunham added in "back hustle," but it's not as good. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | What Cheating on My Boyfriend Taught Me About Men Who Fake Their Deaths | | | | By Elizabeth Greenwood | | |
In the middle of reporting my book on death fraud, I got caught cheating on my boyfriend.
I'd been pursuing the question for years: can you disappear in the 21st century? I had interviewed dozens of devious characters — privacy consultants, fixers who forged death certificates, life-insurance fraudsters — and I thought they had taught me the most important thing about faking your death: how to cover your tracks. I just didn't know I would end up applying this lesson to my own illicit affair.
In my reporting, I had investigated all forms of digital footprints — IP addresses, pinging cell phones, surveillance cameras capturing your image at every turn. In accordance with what I had learned, I erased all the incriminating emails from my drafts, sent, and inbox folders. All but one, which blatantly outlined a plan for a rendezvous. I had deleted all call logs and texts. Except for those few phone calls I forgot about.
Worst of all, I hadn't considered that you can still get busted in the most analog ways. So when my live-in boyfriend stumbled upon my most deranged lovelorn musings in a journal I had left out, it was evidence so anachronistic, so juvenile in its sloppiness, it hadn't occurred to me to better obscure it. Ink on paper was what tipped him off, spurring him to comb my phone and computer for traces of what else I'd left behind.
At this point in the story, armchair analysts will speculate that I wanted to get caught. Maybe in the grand cosmic scheme of things, some part of me did. My boyfriend and I had been together for six years and lived together for three. We shared a rating system based on New York City mayors ("Is this shirt Giuliani or Fooliani? Dinkins or Stinkins?") and had adopted a Jack Russell–Chihuahua mix. We'd both recently turned 30 and had vague plans for what our wedding might look like — a taco truck and lots of dancing — but no hard plans for when that might take place or what we envisioned for the future. We'd grown comfortably into something between friends, roommates, and canine co-parents, so deeply ensconced in each other's lives that imagining an alternative seemed impossible.
But hurting the person I lived with for the happiest years of my life? Being thrown out of our home after he made his discovery? I had envisioned a slightly more graceful exit. The morning I left, the sun was just beginning to tinge the sky violet, and I walked away with our dog and a haphazardly packed suitcase of gym shorts and high heels.
For years, I had been interviewing men who had made great messes of their lives (pseudocide seems to be an almost universally male phenomenon — or maybe women do it just as much but don't get caught). Typically, when these guys get the idea to fake their deaths and then actually execute the plan, they are backed into a corner. They've cheated, they've lost millions of dollars of investor money, or they're attempting to shirk their debts to creditors by taking an easy way out. These are guys who make fools out of the family members who mourn them, who attempt to outsmart law-enforcement agents who are paid thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to search for bodies that never appear. And these guys often have a tidy excuse for why they've done it. I just couldn't get over the hubris it requires: to think that you can get what you want and get away with it at the same time.
I was at a writers' residency when I met him. He had been a favorite critic of mine for years, and I knew he lived nearby. I also knew he was married, and I had no other motive in mind (swear to goddess) when I shot him an email, asking for his literary insight. He drove over to the big white house that same afternoon, and we drank tea on the wraparound porch. The interview went well, my recorder and notebook out the whole time, though none of my notes made it into the book. He was, coincidentally, the precise demographic of the person most likely to fake his death: a middle-aged, middle-class, white, heterosexual man with a family. I felt pleased that I had met him, that I had made what might one day turn into a strong professional contact. I didn't think anything of it beyond that.
A few days later, he emailed me and suggested a walk. When he led me out to a sun-dappled field at the height of fall foliage and asked if he could kiss me, I probably shouldn't have been taken aback. I had been naïve enough to think that we would just be friends, that he could be interested in me as a platonic and intellectual equal. I made some resolution in my mind that this could be a litmus test that would help me figure out how I really felt about my boyfriend. We kissed. Looking back, it's painfully obvious that simply setting up the experiment gave me the answer I needed.
So we commenced what was intended to be a contained, three-week fling — one that would run the course of my residency. For him, a midlife crisis with an unthreatening nobody who would make him feel important. For me, a wildly affirming seal of approval that this person, who I thought was so brilliant, also thought I was at least a little brilliant.
While we were sneaking around, I found myself thinking a lot about a question I'd been asking since I'd begun my book. Where is the best place to disappear? While you'd think that a town out in the boondocks could get you good and gone, really, it turned out that the likelihood of running into someone you know was that much greater. We were always looking for places to hide.
I often shook my head at the people I interviewed, men who not only faked their death but also often philandered, and here I was, doing the exact same thing. Our affair was supposed to expire when I returned to my life and to my boyfriend in the city. But it didn't. The writer and I continued to see each other whenever he had to come to town. Though my dalliance lasted only six weeks before I got busted, I never thought I'd be someone for whom commitment would be a problem. I considered myself an honest person, with integrity. Now I was seeing how quickly those categories can crumble, and how it didn't happen out of malice. It just happened, through human weakness and self-absorption that I'd previously condemned.
I thought about a conversation I'd had with two private investigators in Manila, about the men they chased, men who faked their deaths because they had a girlfriend on the side, or a second family. "Why don't they just get a divorce?" I asked them. They joked that it was because the men were afraid of their wives. While I still contend that playing dead instead of dissolving a marriage is a bit extreme, I was beginning to understand. Inventing a new, separate self, while radical and deranged, is more appealing than confronting the mistakes the old self might have made.
What I had never been able to get my head around, though, is the way the fakers could compartmentalize their indiscretions. One father who had staged his death in a kayaking accident had determined that he didn't need to let his adult sons in on his plan because, as he explained to me, they were busy with their own lives and wouldn't miss him. Before I knew it, I was advancing the same rationalizations, a similar cockeyed logic to justify my cheating. I would be happier having this thing on the side, I thought, and also exceedingly guilty, so I would heap more affection onto my boyfriend. Everyone would benefit. How could I make out with another woman's husband? Simple. She was merely theoretical to me. A ghost. I absolved myself of responsibility in that department (save the pangs that popped up — serving Thanksgiving dinner to my family in our apartment, having drinks with my friends while constantly checking my phone for messages) more seamlessly than I felt comfortable with.
Keeping a secret always closes you in on yourself. But, as I had told the writer, I felt something expanding within me, too. I know now what it was. It was empathy. I saw for the first time how easy it is to continue making a mistake you know you are making. I could no longer look at the subjects in my book with the same derision. When I had gone astray, it closed off my relationship, but it eventually opened me up to a new honesty.
Privacy consultant Frank Ahearn had always called the death fakers who got caught "morons and idiots." I laughed along. But now I felt like both a moron and an idiot. "Learn from this," my boyfriend said when he told me to leave. I did learn. I learned just how hard it is to cover your tracks in the 21st century. I learned that I am not cut out for the sly skulking around that disappearing requires.
I also learned that you can hold two contradictory ideas in your head and that they don't cancel each other out. I loved my boyfriend. I felt love for the writer, too, or something like it. I wish I had stayed. I'm glad I got caught. And I didn't toggle between these ideas. I held them simultaneously.
Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud, which recently came out in paperback. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | The Lenny Interview: Brenda Cooper | | | | By Alex Ronan | | |
A decade ago, when Brenda Cooper went in for career day at her son's school, she brought in some skirt suits, colorful vests, and purses from The Nanny, assuming none of the kids had ever heard of the show. But all the girls came running up to the front of the class to profess their love for Fran Fine; turns out, they watched The Nanny on Nick at Nite. As a child of the '90s, I grew up using my allotted 30 minutes of TV time to watch it too. TV execs wanted to make Fran Italian so she'd be more relatable to middle America, but the Jewess from Queens, or "the flashy girl from Flushing," as the tagline went, prevailed. We loved her because she was unlike anyone else on TV.
If The Nanny was the I Love Lucy of the '90s, in color instead of black and white, it was Cooper who brought it into bright, sequined, and often clashing color by way of her costumes. She created the Fran Fine Formula (more on that later) and helped shape the characters by way of their daily dress. After four seasons on The Nanny, Cooper left to have a child. But a year later, she was back in the TV world as a host on E!'s Fashion Emergency, one of the first big makeover shows. Since then, Cooper has worked as a stylist, costume designer, and personal color expert, which means she advises individuals on what colors suit them best.
Though the show isn't streamable anywhere (help, Netflix!), Cooper's costumes have reemerged thanks to the @WhatFranWore Instagram account. (I hoped to speak to both Drescher and Cooper, but the former was doing her Cancer Schmancer Cabaret Cruise, and when I suggested we speak in the weeks following, her PR agent said, "Thirty minutes is a pretty long time.") When I called Cooper in July, she'd just gotten back from a seven-city European tour for the TV show Better Late Than Never, which required 40 suitcases' worth of clothes for guys and still found her chasing down white underwear in Stockholm. On the phone, she's warm and funny, with an unexpected and very posh British accent.
Alex Ronan: How did you end up doing costumes for The Nanny?
Brenda Cooper: I was pursuing an acting career, and that going nowhere faster than the speed of light. So I was trying to figure out what to do, and I've always been good at putting clothes together. I got a job at a fashion-consulting agency, and my second client insisted on introducing me to a Hollywood costume-design agency. I didn't think they'd talk to me, but three days later I had a job as a costume assistant, and three years later, I was walking up onstage to get an Emmy for The Nanny. I met Fran Drescher on the set of a show called Princesses, where I was a costume assistant, and she told me,"If I ever get my own show, I want you to be the costume designer." A year later, she sat next to a CBS executive on a plane, pitched him her idea, and it became The Nanny.
AR: What did you want to do with the show, costume-wise?
BC: With Fran, I wanted you to know who she was before she even opened her mouth. I was dressing the entire show, so that's like 50 to 60 outfits a week. I needed a system of dressing to simplify things, which was how I came up with the Fran Fine Formula. I started off with a black silhouette: so a black turtleneck and a black short skirt, black opaque tights, and black high-heel stilettos. Then I would add color to it. Nothing would ever come from a store and go on camera without being altered in some way to accommodate her character. We'd shorten skirts to make them sassier, pull in tops to make them more form-fitting, and often swap out the buttons for more impact. It was a jigsaw puzzle of possibilities. You get into a rhythm. Monday morning was a production meeting with the latest script, then we'd shop, prepare, and sew in order to fit all the actors on Wednesday. Any changes to costumes would happen on Thursday, and then Friday, the show would get shot in one evening in front of a studio audience.
AR: You did a really good job creating style lineage with Fran's mom, Sylvia Fine, and her grandma, Yenta. How did you go about dressing them?
BC: Can I just tell you something, Alex? It was so organic. Completely intuitive. It wasn't something that I really thought about. I just did it. Renée [Taylor, who played Sylvia Fine] still tells me the story of when I had her in the fitting room the first time. The first thing I handed to her was a corset. She looked at it, and she goes, "What's that?" I said, "A corset." She goes, "Who would wear that?" I went, "You would wear that!" She was a little resistant at first, and then she put it on. Now, she says, "I didn't know who my character was until you dressed me."
AR: What a huge compliment. When I was watching The Nanny as a kid, I had no idea Fran was wearing so much designer clothing.
BC: Nobody knew it was straight off the runway. I mean, it wasn't straight off the runway. Often, I was shopping at Neiman Marcus, grabbing Moschino, Todd Oldham, Nicole Miller, and mixing thrift-store pieces in. I had a budget, and it wasn't a big budget either. I remember once I had this Dolce & Gabbana vest that I had paid like $1,000 for, which was a lot back then. It was all brocade and velvet, but I couldn't make it work anywhere. Then there was an episode with Twiggy as a guest star getting married. Fran was a bridesmaid, and so I cut off the sleeves of a long-sleeve lace leotard with a ruffle cuff, added them to the vest, and then made a long velvet skirt to go with it. That outfit looked amazing.
AR: The Nanny had so many guest stars, from Pamela Anderson (playing Fran's nemesis Heather Biblow) to President Donald Trump (playing himself, of course) to Jon Stewart (Fran's love interest, until it was revealed they were cousins). Did you dress the guest stars too?
BC: Sometimes I did, but often they came with their own stuff. When Patti LaBelle came on the show, she was supposed to bring her clothes, and she didn't. She shows up on set with nothing, and we were shooting in two hours. So I just got into my car, ran into Beverly Hills, and found a dress at Neiman Marcus, then I went to Loehmann's and found a Donna Karan skirt. I turned the dress into a shirt, cut out the center of the skirt to make it a '50s, hostess-style skirt, and put silk pants underneath it. I had to literally sew Patti into it because it was done so fast, but she looked like a million dollars. She loved it so much that she took it. It was a huge compliment that she kept it.
AR: Were there things you kept?
BC: I bought copies of my favorite pieces, things like the Moschino black patent-leather heart-shaped purse, or the striped Moschino vest from the pilot episode. But when The Nanny finished, what happened to all the rest of the clothing was so painful.
AR: I'm scared to even ask …
BC: Each of the studios has a central wardrobe department. So, the Nanny collection just goes to wardrobe and gets mixed in. Then you go in months later on another show, and one of your babies is just on a rack. But a few years later, Sony sold the clothing. I think they sold it all to a thrift store. That was so hard to hear.
AR: That sounds devastating. But maybe there are real-life Fran Fines who started building their wardrobes with castoffs from the show?
BC: Yeah, I guess that's possible. The clothes are gone, but what I love most is people talking about how her character and style inspired them. I've seen so many Instagram posts and gotten so many notes saying "Thank you, her confidence really inspired me when I was having a really hard time with my self-image." Nothing could make me happier, because besides looking good, it's always about self-esteem.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Alex Ronan is a writer living in Berlin, mostly. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | "You Think You White" | | | | By Maisy Card | | | |
"Are you ashamed of me?" my boyfriend asked me in bed one night. He'd introduced me to his parents after we'd been dating for months, and then he'd expected to meet mine. "You'll meet them," I promised, trying to sound enthusiastic to hide my own doubt.
Three months turned into six, and we decided to move in together.
"Do your parents even know I live here? Do they even know I exist?" he said, searching my eyes for an answer that would no longer leave him baffled.
He and I are surprisingly compatible despite having entirely different childhoods. He grew up in a white middle-class family in one of the wealthiest towns in Bergen County, New Jersey, where he spent his youth doing things I never did: playing tennis, cooling off by the town pool, going on family vacations, having birthday parties.
I grew up in a poor immigrant family in Queens. When I was five, I came to America from Jamaica with my mother and brother. My father had come a few years earlier, but by the time we reunited, his visa had expired and he was living undocumented. When I was young, I hardly ever mentioned him to people outside our family.
From my parents, I learned that you protect your family by isolating them, guarding them fiercely from the people outside your world. They couldn't seem to forget their life in Jamaica, where they'd lived in homes with verandas enclosed in iron grillwork that barricaded their families in each night.
When I talked boys with my parents, it was always as part of an inquisition or an accusation. "You have a boyfriend!" my mother shouted at me, the red blood vessels showing in her eyes, when a female friend gave me flowers for my birthday in ninth grade. If I complained about why I couldn't do something all my friends did, her response was, "You think you white." When I got accepted into a magnet school in Manhattan, my experiences started diverging more and more from those of my parents. My mother, rolling her eyes and sucking her teeth simultaneously, turned to my brother and said, "She think she white," when I asked to join the volleyball team. It was her way of reeling me back in, reminding me to check myself and keep my guard up.Eventually, I just learned to lie or hide evidence, not to tell them anything about my life away from their own.
When I dated my only high-school boyfriend for a month, he gave me a long-stemmed rose for Valentine's Day. I tore the stem in half on the walk home from the subway. I thought if it was small I could sneak it in, but my mother, brother, and I slept in one room; there were no private spaces. I ended up throwing the rest of the flower out in a stranger's trash can a few blocks from my apartment. It just wasn't worth the trouble.
Six months became nine and I still hadn't brought my boyfriend up to my mother, but I knew I couldn't get away with it for much longer. His parents were starting to learn more about me than my own parents knew. His mother read one of my short stories. His aunt did too. I never told my parents about my writing, afraid of what they'd say.
"I mentioned you to my sister," I told Karl.
My sister was sixteen at the time. She'd been born my junior year of high school and was the person in my family to whom I felt closest. Technically, she was my half-sister — and unlike me, she was born in America. She had a different father, who was American, and perhaps because of that, she could say things to my mother that would have gotten me broomed.
Every summer, since she was in elementary school, she'd come to my apartment to spend a few weeks. When she returned home, I knew my mother pumped her for information about me.
"Mommy asked me if your apartment was clean," she'd said once.
"What did you say?" I asked, steeling myself for betrayal.
"Not really," she mumbled, followed by a guilty snicker.
When I told my sister I had a boyfriend, I gave her as much information as I could and waited for it to disseminate to my mother. This was how we communicated, like spies passing notes. I was no better. The only thing I knew about my older brother's personal life I'd learned from accidentally finding his OKCupid profile.
A few days later, unnerved by the silence, I called my sister.
"Did you tell her?"
"Yeah."
"What did she say?"
"Nothing."
"She didn't say anything?" I asked, skeptical.
"Oh, yeah … she said you think you're white."
Nine months became a year, and I started to become sick at monthly intervals. My doctor scheduled a surgery at the end of summer.
"I better not meet your parents for the first time in the hospital," Karl said.
"No," I said. "I won't let that happen."
My sister came to visit over the summer, met my boyfriend, and carried information back to my mother. I spoke to my mother on the phone a few times, waiting for her to mention it. After a few phone calls without her betraying any knowledge, I asked.
"You know I live with someone, right?"
"Yes, I heard," she said, her voice uncharacteristically sing-song, a sign that she was uncomfortable.
That was all I was getting from her, but it was better than nothing.
"My mother knows you exist," I said to him.
"When I am I going to meet her?"
I had not even attempted to tell my father yet, assuming once I told my mother she would somehow pass the information on. My surgery date was drawing closer, and I knew I should make a better effort, but something was stopping me, an internal block.
I never invited any of my friends over to my apartment in middle school or high school. I knew most of them were middle class or had money, and I just assumed that they wouldn't understand. But at the end of senior year, just after graduation, I let my two closest friends come over. I was nervous as they followed me into our dark tenement apartment. The hallways always smelled like urine. All our windows faced an empty lot filled with garbage because our upstairs neighbors threw trash out of their windows. But my friends didn't judge me and acted like it was a privilege to see a piece of me that they'd never seen before. Later, when I asked my mother if I could go to the mall with them to buy stuff for college, it was as if I'd just told her I was going to hitchhike across the whole of America.
"You going back out to walk the street this time of night?"
It was 5 p.m. If I had been alone, she would have blocked me, but with my two friends standing there, she let me go. An hour later, a taxi ran a red light and collided with another car, causing it to jump the curb and hit us where we stood. I remember after they brought me out of the ambulance and onto a gurney, I begged the attending nurse not to call my mother.
The first word my mother uttered when she saw me fully conscious and alive was "See!"
I wasn't present when Karl met my mother for the first time in the waiting room. I had already been ushered into surgery before she arrived.
When I was sent to recovery and he came in with my sister, only two visitors were allowed at a time. He said my first words, still groggy from anesthesia were "Was my mother mean to you?"
My father didn't come for the surgery but arrived at the end to drive us back to New Jersey. Karl struggled to make conversation with him, unaware that he is naturally laconic. My throat hurt from the breathing tube they'd inserted, so I couldn't speak, couldn't lean over and whisper, You're wasting your time, he won't open up to you after twenty minutes in a car. It has taken me years to learn how to have a conversation with my father.
A few days later, I called my sister.
"What did she say about Karl?"
"Nothing bad."
"I don't believe you."
"She just said he looked really worried while you were in the operating room."
My mother called me on Christmas Eve.
"What Karl doing today?" she asked. I was surprised because months had passed since their meeting and she hadn't mentioned him to me.
"He's going over to his parents' house."
"Well … tell him I said merry Christmas. Or is happy Hanukkah for him?"
"Merry Christmas is fine," I said.
I turned to him. "My mother says merry Christmas."
"I told him," I said.
"He's there?"
"Yeah. He's next to me."
"Let me talk to him."
"What for?"
"Just to say hello."
I handed him the phone.
Maisy Card is a librarian and writer living in Newark, New Jersey. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | Searching for a Mother's Truth at the U.S.-Mexico Border | | | | By Alice Driver | | |
I met Ana Lizbeth Bonía, 28, from Comayagua, Honduras, at La Casa del Migrante Diócesis in Juárez, Mexico, near the U.S. border. Ana arrived at the shelter days away from giving birth, having traveled for ten months with her two-year-old son, José Luis, and her husband, Luis Orlando Rubí, 22. They had fled Honduras with 500 lempira (equivalent to $21) in their pockets, in an effort to escape threats of violence from a gang that had tried to extort Luis, who ran a business fixing cell phones.
Their journey to Juárez lasted nearly a year because whenever the family ran out of money, they begged in the streets or found a place to work, staying in one city or another until they could afford to move on. She and Luis discovered that migrant shelters were often run for profit, and that to eat or shower, the shelter would charge them money.
Like many migrants, Ana had fled the threat of violence in her home country, but she also desperately wanted her children to have access to a good education. "My mom took me to work when I was four years old," Ana told me. "She had a vegetable and fruit business, and she would send us kids out to the street with baskets." Ana attended elementary school but was forced to drop out after that to help support her family. She wanted her children to have a different life.
When it came time for her to give birth, she told the workers at at La Casa del Migrante Diócesis that she didn't want Luis to be present; nobody knew why. When her newborn, Nicole, was fifteen days old, Luis had a violent fight with Ana. He was asked to leave the shelter for breaking the rules.
That day, Ana walked around with red scratch marks on her neck, saying, "I don't know where he is going. He will not return." Later, over plates of beans and squash and tortillas, she told me that another migrant had told her that Luis had planned all along to leave her and the children and cross the border alone. When she confronted him about the rumor, they fought.
After this, Ana no longer spoke about Luis, and I was aware that I would never know the true nature of their relationship. Traffickers often arrive with women they have prostituted along the migrant trail, leaving the pregnant women behind so that the shelter will cover the costs of the birth. "Maybe they are not related," Father Javier Calvillo Salazar, the director of the migrant shelter, speculated when I asked if he was worried about Ana since her husband had left. "They don't have any legal documents — no marriage registry, no birth certificate." And then he began to talk about how human trafficking was a bigger business than the drug trade. "Every migrant is a story, and you know the journey for many of them is similar — all the loss, all the pain, all the suffering," Father Javier said. "That is precisely the reality."
As more migrants arrived at the shelter, they began to share their stories with me. I listened to them all without question — even when they seemed too surreal to be true. One story in particular came to represent the difficulty of learning and understanding the truth at the shelter:
A pregnant woman on the migrant train La Bestia began to have contractions. "She screamed for help, but people began to move away from her," Father Javier recounted. "Her water broke and blood began to flow. The baby slid out, but at the time, the train stopped, the door opened. Blood flowed out, water flowed out, and then suddenly a crocodile appeared and ate the baby."
The migrant population has experienced such levels of violence that trauma and fear influence every aspect of their transient lives. "You have to think about everything migration implies — rape, extortion, getting shot. Anyone who survives says that the experience of riding La Bestia is terrible," Father Javier said.
Of the crocodile eating the baby, he commented, "I remember clearly the testimony of that woman. You might say, 'Oh, my, good heavens,' but you discover that other migrants tell similar stories."
I would hear more stories about crocodiles along the marshy route. But I still had trouble judging what was real. After living at the migrant shelter for two weeks, the one thing I came away understanding was the level of violence migrants suffered at the hands of gangs in their home countries and at the hands of human traffickers along the migrant trail.
"I am doing it for my daughter," Anahí Ortigoza Reyes, 34, from Huajuapán de León, Mexico, told me of her attempt to cross to the United States. She had arrived at the shelter distraught after being separated from her four-year-old, Ashley Anahí.
Anahí had hired smugglers to guide her and her daughter to the United States. But the smugglers took her daughter across the border first, dropping Anahí near a border wall with wire cutters and instructions to cut holes through various chain-link fences. Anahí was picked up by border agents and returned to Juárez, where she ended up in the migrant shelter.
We sat in the shelter's TV room in front of a mural that read "No human is illegal." She told the group of migrants there that she thought the smugglers had used her to distract border agents so they could move drugs across. She had let the smugglers take her daughter by herself, because, according to them, it would be easier to get them through separately. "When you trust people," Anahí said, "they take you to the slaughterhouse in order to do their business."
Getting Ashley Anahí back to Mexico would not be an easy task, because she had no birth certificate or passport with her in the United States. Perhaps out of fear of being judged as a bad mother, Anahí initially told us that her daughter was in the United States with her husband. However, when Father Javier talked to authorities to try to get Ashley Anahí back to Mexico, he was told that the man who had the girl in the United States had no blood relationship to the girl. U.S. authorities wanted to charge him with kidnapping.
"Who was he?" I wondered. Anahí didn't talk about him. The last thing she told me was, "My daughter is there alone in a place she doesn't know, another country, another language. And she is asking [after me], '¿Y mi mamá cuándo viene? ¿Y mi mamá cuándo viene?'"
Dr. Alice Driver is a journalist and translator based in Mexico City. Driver is a 2017 Foreign Policy Interrupted fellow. She is reporting on migration from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador for Longreads Originals. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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