Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants by Jill Soloway

Author:Jill Soloway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

8

Shoemaker’s Daughters

The Shoemaker’s Children is one of those ye olde parables about a man who possessed the skill to make comfortable shoes at a reasonable price for the entire village, yet left his own children’s feet unshod. Unshoed. Unshod with shoes.

When we were little, my father was an anesthesiologist. But the pressures that went with the job proved too much, and around the time we moved to South Commons he changed his mind and decided he wanted to be a psychiatrist. Finished with putting people to sleep, he now wished to wake people up.

In college and beyond, I met a lot of other psychiatrists’ kids, and found we instantly felt kindred. The son of a New York analyst turned me on to the Shoemaker’s Children theory. Shrink parents are either too busy with their hundreds of other, more important, paying-client brood, obsessed with meta-analyzing everything, or just plain nutty-ass nutbags themselves. So, while children of the folktale walked to school barefoot, enduring the jeers: “Heh heh! Lookit! Ol’ Shoemaker’s Kids ain’t got no shoes!” shrinks’ kids go through life as raw, open wounds, little smoke stacks of nerves. “Heh heh! Lookit! Ol’ Shrinky’s Kid’s having sex with a stranger again!”

Do children of the practitioners of the Talking Cure need to act out, perhaps dabbling in the Fucking Cure to get attention? Maybe I did cast my net about in my late teens, twenties, thirties… all right, always. But, I didn’t see myself as a big ol’ skank ho, even though when it came to sex, my motto was, Gotta Try Everybody. I figured, what if you DIDN’T have sex with someone, and he turned out to be The One? And how would you know if he were the one if you didn’t have a glance at his psycho-sexual soul song?

I believed in love. I was searching for it, every single day, everywhere I went. But as hard as I tried to find The One, my attempts were hampered by my secret knowledge that I, Jill Soloway, wasn’t made for love. I figured I’d never find my soul mate. I’d never have a family, one of those Eileen Fisher extended clan families that take up two pages in a Vanity Fair ad, clean cousins and nieces, everyone out on a porch at the family ranch, women with silvery bangs, so many sandals.

Faith and I had it worse than your garden-variety Shoemaker’s Children. We were Soloway’s children. Less Eileen Fisher, more Capturing the Friedmans. I’m not saying there were unspeakable horrors in a basement tutoring program in our house. In fact, I don’t even know if there were unspeakable horrors in the basement in the Capturing the Friedmans house, because I refuse to see the documentary. All the Jewishness and fondling and first-generation Kaypros are just too damn grody when combined. For my own sanity, I have to pretend it never happened. For similar reasons, I refuse to see Schindler’s List.

No, The Soloway-Shoemakers Children isn’t a parable. It isn’t even a story. It’s the last line of a story.

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