fearless girls
Debbie Feit
When my father died and her mother broke and a lifetime of belongings needed to be boxed up and unexpected symptoms needed to be unpacked, we hopped a plane and a train and trekked across the concrete, our suitcases stuffed with sorrow as we sought comfort and camaraderie in our respective chaos, the cacophony of the city a strange balm for our nerves. We were originally from Brooklyn and Queens, we were comfortable being in the city but, truly, it was being with each other that made us feel at home. We filled our bags with books, our bellies with the flavors of the Lower East Side and our time exchanging knowing looks as we recognized our own exhaustion in the other’s face. We rode seahorses in circles and for the briefest moment we were engulfed in music and lights and whimsy rather than the despair and grief and confusion we had become accustomed to wearing as a second skin. We consulted doctors and cancelled Internet service, consoled ourselves with our siblings, called our husbands to check in and let them know we were OK even though we were nowhere near OK. We researched where to sell mid-century modern furniture and the cognitive effects of COVID on older adults. We cried and made attempts to ease our pain by watching rom-coms and eating chocolate nonpareils in our pajamas. We made calorically ill-advised but spellbindingly delicious choices at Supermoon Bakehouse, schlepping twice from our midtown hotel because the first time we went they were out of the hand rolled 3-day baklava twice baked croissant with crushed pistachios, filled with honey and almond crème patisserie that had beckoned us and the woman behind the counter encouraged us to come back in the morning, giving us a free éclair for our troubles, the next day, a free croissant, because people always tell her they’ll come back and they don’t and we did. We came back but my father can’t come back, her mother in all likelihood will come back but it’s unclear when or how much of herself will actually return. We returned to the Strand and bought books of poetry so we could hold something beautiful in our hands, something inspiring in our minds, something to pull us even an inch closer to the surface of the emotional swamp we shared. We were resigned to our inability to change the fate of our parents and redirected our need for control at the Give and Take Wall at Bluestocking Cooperative where one could pledge any amount of money to any type of person in the form of multicolored post-it notes, twenty dollars to anyone who considered having an abortion as a teen, three dollars for a trans person who newly picked a gender affirming name, five dollars for an autistic lady who has difficulty asking for help and it was impossible not to become giddy knowing that, like all the post-its before us, we, too, could help someone just like us and we donated five dollars to any mom over the age of fifty who was working on a novel. We said fuck it and went ahead and spent ten dollars on a single glass of cantaloupe juice. Eighty dollars on a vintage pair of sterling silver flower earrings. Thirty-five dollars on a t-shirt. We posed with the Fearless Girl, the bronze child who struck the power pose while we ourselves remained powerless and had to summon the strength to smile, knowing that she was far sturdier on her feet than either of us felt and we wondered if we’d ever find our footing again.
Debbie Feit is an accidental mental health advocate, unrelenting Jewish mother and author of The Parent’s Guide to Speech and Language Problems (McGraw-Hill) as well as numerous texts to her children that often go unanswered. Her work has appeared in SheKnows, Insider, Kveller as well as on her mother’s bulletin board, with forthcoming pieces in Emerge Literary Journal, Words and Whispers, Potato Soup Journal and Five Minute Lit. She is at work on a novel whose completion she fears may also be fictitious. You can read about her thoughts on mental health issues, her life as a writer and her husband’s inability to see crumbs on the kitchen counter on Instagram @debbiefeit or at debbiefeit.com.