The Convertible Life by Sean Meyrick Hanley

Author:Sean Meyrick Hanley [Hanley, Sean Meyrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Baron Press
Published: 2013-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

MOMMIE DEAREST’S sewing room was exactly as I remembered, hideous floral wallpaper and all. It felt like a hot set, painstakingly recreated on a soundstage for a long running series where I was barely an extra. Like a homing pigeon I raced toward the built-in cabinets to search through the endless set of pretentious, hard-bound books which hadn’t been touched by anything other than Moya’s feather duster since they’d been shipped over on the Mayflower. I scanned the books until, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed it tucked away, deep within the recessed shelving. Our baby book. It was hard to believe Mommie Dearest had held onto it all those years, given her obvious lack of feeling for sons of bitches.

My curiosity took over and I began to flip through the pages. I was especially surprised by the level of detail, the sheer amount of effort she put into filling out the minutia on each and every page. Flipping through the diary Mommy Dearest kept of our infancy, one might assume she was more maternal than resentful, more protective than psychotic. In fact, had I been a soap opera star suffering from a convenient case of amnesia, I might have actually been fooled into thinking that, at one point, Mommie Dearest had actually enjoyed raising children.

I kept flipping pages, mesmerized by elaborately descriptive sentences on each and every page. There were whole paragraphs. All about us. I found snippets of once blonde hair saved from our first haircuts, foot prints from the hospital where we were born, and pages and pages of boring-ass baby blah-blah. In fact, it was so surprising that I found myself inspecting the handwriting because I began to wonder if perhaps Daddy had been the one who filled it out? Or possibly Moya since she was the one who actually raised us? But Mommie Dearest’s flowery penmanship was unmistakable. Her distinctive A’s and M’s kept me turning pages as I tried to imagine the endless amount of time she must have taken to record all our boring-ass baby shit.

After I flipped past one particularly innocuous page, I stumbled upon exactly what I had expected in to find in the first place: absolutely nothing. And every page after the empty one was full of more and more nothing, because nothing more was ever recorded. Keepsakes were no longer attached by yellowed Scotch tape whose adhesive had long since dried up. There were no more first fingernail clippings, first teeth, or first poops. No more information was ever recorded from the time we were three years old. From the time of The Accident. Yet, surprisingly everything, absolutely everything up until that particularly fateful day seemed like it had been recorded by an obsessive-compulsive historian. If we weren’t the living and breathing evidence, I might have wondered if perhaps we’d died some sort of sudden crib death.

I was anxiously flipping through the book when I eventually stumbled upon exactly what I had been searching for: our birth certificates.

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