Books on Tape Inc. - Glitter and glue: a memoir

This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details of people described in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

Copyright 2014 by Kelly Corrigan

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

B ALLANTINE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corrigan, Kelly.
Glitter and glue : a memoir / Kelly Corrigan.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-345-53283-1
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53284-8
1. Corrigan, Kelly, 1967. 2. Corrigan, Kelly, 1967 Family.
3. Mothers and daughters. 4. Motherhood. 5. Young womenUnited StatesBiography. 6. Corrigan, Kelly, 1967 TravelAustraliaSydney. 7. AmericansAustraliaSydney
(N.S.W.)Biography. 8. Young womenAustraliaSydney
(N.S.W.)Biography. 9. NanniesAustraliaSydney (N.S.W.)
Biography. 10. Sydney (N.S.W.)Biography. I. Title.
CT275.C7875A3 2014
994.4092dc23 [B] 2013041936

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Misa Erder
Jacket photo: Ekely / Getty Images

v3.1

This is a work of memory, and mine is as flawed and biased as any other. I was aided by dozens of old letters, photographs, journals (both mine and my friend Tracys), and the Internet, on which I could call up images of just about everywhere I went in 1992. Many of the names and personal details have been changed.

When I was growing up, my mom was guided by the strong belief that to befriend me was to deny me the one thing a kid really needed to survive childhood: a mother. Consequently, we were never one of those Mommy & Me pairs who sat close or giggled. She didnt wink at me or gush about how pretty I looked or rub my back to help me fall asleep. She was not a big fan of deep conversation, and she still doesnt go for a lot of physical contact. She looked at motherhood less as a joy to be relished than as a job to be done, serious work with serious repercussions, and I left childhood assuming our way of being with each other, adversarial but functional, was as it would be.

If my mother thought of me as someone to guide, my father thought of me as someone to cheer. I was his girl, as in Thats my girl! Have you met my girl? He liked to hold hands and high-five and was almost impossible to frustrate or disappoint. His signature You bet! Why not? energy was all I needed for several decades. But then my daily life became more consequential, and I woke up needing things he could not supplya certain understanding, call it a seasoningthat only my mother seemed to have. Her areas of expertise, which often had appeared piddling or immaterial, became disturbingly relevant. And thats saying nothing about the second-guessing and anxieties I could take to her, worries that would only ever bounce off my dads optimism, as was the case on the day I was told I needed surgery.

I remember leaving the doctor thinking three things:

I cant have more kids.

Its for my own good.

I need my mom.

On the way to the parking lot, I dialed home or, I should say, the place that was home when I was a child. My dad ran to pick up the phone on the first ring. I know because Ive seen him do it a hundred times. He loves connecting, hes dying to catch up, cant wait to hear your voice, anyones voice.

Lovey! he sang out, as if it had been years, not days, since we talked. Hows my girl?

Im okay. Is Mom there? I wasnt crying, but I wanted to.

What? he said in mock hysteria. You dont want to talk to Greenie? The Green Man? My dads brothers have been calling him Greenie since college. I always thought it referred to the Irish in him, but it turns out its more about a bad hangover. Youre breaking my heart, Lovey!

Sorry. I just need Mom.

Shes at the bridge table, probably making her opponents weep right this minute!

I asked him to have her call me when she got back, and told him I couldnt talk right now. That was A-OK with him, because everything is A-OK with him.

Love ya, mean it, he signed off, as usual.

Love ya, mean it.

Before I got in my car, I called my moms cell and left a message explaining that Dr. Rawson would be taking out my ovaries a week from Thursday. I tried to sound cool and relaxed about it. I said I was being spayed, ha ha. I hoped she would hear past my witty BS.

Two years before, a lump I found in my breast turned out to be a seven-centimeter tumor. So I did what people with tumors do: chemotherapy, radiation, surgery. I also started taking a tiny pill every day to suppress ovarian function, since my cancer used estrogen to multiply. After ninety days, my periods kept coming. I bragged to the doc that I was born to breed. Turned out there was something on my ovarya cyst, most likelybut it did not wax and wane, the way cysts should. It sat there, stubborn and ominous. The time had come.

You have kids? the doctor asked.

Yeah, two girls. Three and five.

We do this now, and maybe we avoid something worse later.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, San Francisco disappearing behind me, I did not call my husband. Edward was a reasonable man who took zinc at the first sign of a cold, stretched thoroughly before and after exercise, and, when lifting heavy objects, used his legs, not his back. He was, in all situations, an advocate for avoiding something worse.

I did not call either of my older brothers, I do not have a sister, and I was not quite ready to involve a girlfriend. So I called my moms cell again, and this time she answered. She said shed just hung up with the idiot at the airlines who wouldnt accept her frequent-flier miles, which were barely expired, and I said, God help the customer service guy who took that call, but what I thought was Shes coming.

She arrived from Philly the day before I went in for surgery, letting Edward carry her tiny black suitcase on wheels up the stairs, where she would unpack all her must-haves: a silk pillowcase that keeps her hairdo looking nice, her mauve bathrobe with giant pearly buttons, a small jelly jar of Smirnoff because she doesnt like the expensive vodka we buy, and several strange secondhand presentsa bedazzled purse, one of my old Nancy Drews, a down vest with a broken zipperfor the girls. Georgia and Claire love her and always have. Shes different with them. She makes Jell-Oa hundred percent sugar-free, Kellyand plays Crazy Eights and rubs lotion on their clean feet and reads them whatever they bring to her, even the long books with no pictures. When she leaves them, she cries. Actually cries, with real tears. From a woman who extended the adage Children should be seen and not heard with and preferably not seen, its startling, like opening your toolbox and discovering that your supposedly industrial-strength staples are made of Play-Doh.

After the procedure, Edward brought me home, where everything was fine and good and just the same but somehow different. The girls gave me homemade cards with words my mom helped them spell, like