God Only Knows By Laura J. Oliver

My son’s birthday is this week, and mine is 12 days later, on St. Patrick’s Day. I have discovered a bit of Irish in my ancestry, so it seems fitting. It’s just enough of a holiday to be fun and not enough to hog the show—like being born on Christmas, where Aunt Lucy perennially gives you one “big” gift to cover both occasions, but it’s really two half-gifts. Robbed.

Mr. Oliver was born on Valentine’s Day—romantic by default– and the associated colors, pink and red, brighten the gray of February. My mother was born on George Washington’s birthday. No one cared. It was a distinction she trotted out again and again to little acclaim.

George who? What? Oh.

Of a lifetime of birthday celebrations, one stands out. Just as I turned 13, Mom sold Barnstead, and we moved from Eagle Hill to one of the highest points of land in North Shore. If she could no longer be companioned by a river, she could at least build a house with a view.

It was the first new house I had ever lived in and the first in which I would live with a single parent. My older sisters left for college. My mother worked full-time in the city. In that empty house, I invented structure in place of company. Home from school at 4:00. Change clothes. Homework from 4:30 to 5:00. Walk down the hill to collect the newspaper. Read the funnies from 5:10 to 5:30.

In the weeks leading up to my 14^th  birthday, my two best friends began distancing themselves. Not inviting me over after school, not sitting with me on the school bus, acting as if they didn’t like me. Later, I would discover this was not meant to hurt me, but was a strategy designed to keep their plan a secret and to maximize the effect: You were confused, lonely, and felt inexplicably ostracized.

We were planning a party! SURPRISE!

To really make it a surprise, the party was to take place at my own house. My mother covertly agreed to take me out on some kind of errand long enough for my friends to let themselves in and decorate, and for all the other 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls to arrive.

This was quite the ninja move, except that my mother was miserably bad at lying or too tired to bother. She took me to my Friday afternoon piano lesson at Mr. Brown’s house behind the Harundale Mall, but that didn’t take up enough time. She stopped at Hutzler’s department store on some kind of a faux errand, and when that too had not taken up enough time, she actually said, “Let’s drive around the parking lot and see if anyone dropped some bobby pins or change.”

How naive am I? I still didn’t get what was going on. That’s how bad a liar she was and how gullible I was. I tend to enter the reality of whoever I’m with, and so I rode around in the family Malibu, scrutinizing the pavement of the Hutzler’s parking lot as the sun went down.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “To be Irish is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart.”

I suspect that to be human is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart, but here’s the thing.

You get to choose what breaks it.

Two friends worked weeks to celebrate my birthday, when without them, there would have been just Mom and a cake. Instead, there was the excitement of a house full of kids. Somebody gave me an Otis Redding album, and we played “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. We played spin the bottle, and in the tiny, windowless bathroom off the family room, I was kissed for the first time.

Both my friends lived in intact families. I was often at their houses hanging out, working on our scrapbooks, and walking down to the beach. Maybe they knew it was lonely in the house on the hill. One of them is gone now.

They probably didn’t know that by Friday night, Mom was so tired that the idea of a house full of teenagers was the last thing she wanted to accommodate, and yet I know she was grateful on her behalf and mine— they were doing for me what she couldn’t do.

And she kept the secret even when she had run out of delaying tactics, and her mind had gone blank. We just drove around that parking lot until we had killed enough time to go home to a darkened house where friends waited in hushed suspense.

You can’t prevent heartbreak in this world. You can only choose what breaks you.

For me, it’s two friends, a house full of kids, and the Beach Boys singing, “God only knows what I’d be without you.”

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.