FROM ISSUE #53: MISTAKES
SUZANNE ROBERTS is the author of Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Bronze Medal Winner from the North American Travel Journalists Association for Best Travel Book) and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (winner of the National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four books of poems. Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included twice in The Best Women's Travel Writing and has appeared in the New York Times, CNN, Brevity, the Rumpus, Hippocampus, the Normal School, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler, she holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and teaches for the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University. She currently lives in South Lake Tahoe, California.
IN THIS STORY, two young women are pregnant at the same time by the same man. One of the women is a musician and a writer and a feminist, and she sports tattoos and body piercings before they are cool. The other woman is an outdoorsy graduate student and a feminist, and she wears J. Crew sweater sets and Mary Janes. The musician calls the graduate student “Miss Goody Two Shoes.” The graduate student calls the musician “The Slut.” I am one of these women, or was, and now I realize that it doesn’t matter which one. What matters is that the man is let entirely off the hook by two young women who call themselves feminists.
Though both the musician and the graduate student could tell you stories, I can tell only mine: I was twenty-four, and my father had recently died. Daddy worked hard at being a writer and a drinker, but was successful only in the drinking. He shouted at me when he drank, but he was Daddy, so I loved him. I was just starting to be adult enough to reconcile the complicated feelings I had for my father, but he died before I realized his drinking did not mean he didn’t love me. He died feeling like he had failed me. And that has always
