17 & 17 Years: an International Journey of Finding Community and Coming Home

By Holly Jean

She knew she had to separate from her surroundings. So, at 17, she altered the course of her life with a single plane ticket. As a virgin who didn't drink, smoke, or swear, life was about to take some drastic turns, starting in an underground bar in Switzerland.  

 

Primarily set in Portugal, Paris, and Barcelona, this memoir spans 17 years and reminds us of the thrilling, messy, and adventure filled discovery that love, travel, and coming of age demands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Holly Jean
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393344629

Book preview

0-17 | Michigan

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When I left home for college, I left for good. Getting ready to leave, I played Cat Steven’s The Wind while I drove my shimmery green Jeep Wrangler around town past all the same landmarks and streets that I drove every day. Expansive green lawns carpeted the earth, paired with a team of landscape architects that managed their flourishing beauty. Every home was punctuated by incredible fluffy trees that swayed overhead and choreographed a dappled play of light and shadows on the wide roads that saw no traffic. At the time, I had no idea how silver my spoon was; I wanted for nothing, and I thought that was normal.

The town was roughly ten thousand people, based on a lake, with mansion-like brick houses and a reputation of excellence. The joke in the region was that everyone who lived there was either a doctor or a lawyer. My dad was the mayor of this town and a lawyer, of course, while my mom raised the four of us kids and kept up her art and inspiration on the side.

On a typical day, everyone would be out jogging or walking their dog or riding their bike or sailing. The town was the inspiration behind the movie American Pie and although most people have forgotten that movie by now, the title explains it enough. 

The comedy about four guys trying to lose their virginity in high school was about as deep as my experience there. I could see the imprint of the same scenes playing out over and over again, the fans in the football stands shouting cheers and expecting victory, my route around the lake and what song would be playing on my CD once I got to the big hill, that one house where that party was. I think it was Sam’s house, but I was never sure and didn’t want to ask for fear I’d look out of the loop. I was more of a leader-of-all-the-social-clubs popular and not it crowd popular. The it crowd meant going to parties, giving blow jobs, and talking shit. I stayed home and studied.

I became friends with a guy named Fernando while living in Ecuador. I went home between living in different countries to be with family and he came to stay with me for a month. He would lovingly mock, this is the healthiest town in the world. We would drive around town or take the kayak to the grocery, and it all felt pretty shocking.

I suddenly had context once I stepped out of the jungle town, Puyo, and back into the manicured precision. In some ways I was impressed. So much money was infused everywhere. I realized how rare it is to be saturated in so much money. I thought about the difference that money would make if it shifted to something more impassioned. I am not sure anyone would notice if 1,000 square feet went missing from their home’s footprint.

But before I had context and before my hormones started to bubble and before my emotions took over, there was a time when I was able to purely appreciate the beauty that this easy living brought into my life. I have highly nostalgic memories that idealize what childhood can be.

For starters, my mom is an artist. The creativity of my mom made every experience exceptional. She was a town misfit in the way that she was potently creative and engaged her entire surroundings with her expression. She wasn’t the DIY kind of creative. My mom was the creative who would become a draw at festivals for the 15 ft tall massive puppets she had swaying high above her head or because of the LED-lit tuxedo she’d wear with glow-tracing bones of a Dia de Los Muertos theme LA tattoo artists would drool over. Never mind that she was a bombshell to boot.

Living up to all expectations, we would have block parties with bonfires in the middle of the maple-tree lined street where her spicy creativity vitalized the risqué side of the polo-wearing inhabitants. At the end of the school year, the entire block turned into an overnight fair, complete with horse rides, dress up, prizes and tents set up in the front yards. It was safe. It was fun and full of imagination. It felt very wholesome and playful.

On a different side of the scale was my dad. He grew up in a military family and moved around the world until he joined the military and followed his expected trajectory. He was handsome like a Ken doll and charming with a seemingly photographic memory. He lived by the books and would watch his surroundings with an analytical eye but would say few words in response unless there was space for a satirical joke or a history lesson.

I was joking with a friend in the car one day of my freshman year of high school.

Ms. Mapes is something else. I think she knows everything.

Yeah, I think she knows everything about everything that ever happened in history.

I bet she knows what Robert E. Lee had for breakfast every day.

My dad chimed in from the driver seat ‘he ate eggs from his two hens until one of his soldiers killed one of his hens’ and bla bla bla happened to that soldier and on and on.

He had a huge library, read a new thousand-page book every week, and collected every National Geographic dating back to 1925, creating a yellow wall filled with global stories. He emphasized the importance of seeing the world through other people’s lenses, and his favorite topics of conversation were the lessons that history has taught us and his navy stories.

I could see the synergies in my parent’s personalities. My dad was likely in love with her flowing artistic creativity, impressed by the beauty that came into the world so free and emboldened with passion. My mom was impressed with his brain, his breadth of knowledge and how that fed his perspective, incorporating more context than most of the public is accustomed to or even capable of. There were rumors U of M tried to hire him as a professor. 

Their synergy was put to use when my mom was making a sculpture about goddesses. My dad sat with her, naming off all the goddesses she had to include and what their stories and historical connections meant. They could be beautiful, I imagine.

As I grew into adolescence, however, his edge became more pronounced. The first time I remember the distinction was in fourth grade when we were on vacation. He teamed up with me in the boardgame Risk to unite forces and conquer. I was excited to have his strength behind me. I felt proud to be on his team. But after the sweet glory of our triumph, he turned on me and killed me off the board. How could I blame him? He was strategic, but he remained in that role evermore.

He played the role of a parent from the 50s and appreciated the approach of the military. He made a game of being chauvinistic and loved to be politically incorrect. He would watch Rush Limbaugh and laugh. He was a broken record about what a woman’s role was (in the kitchen, need I remind you). He had many progressive political views and often emphasized how outdated our political system is, which made his comments confusing. There was always a likelihood that he might be kidding because he was seemingly progressive, but his depression-age approach to daily life made it so you were never sure where the fulcrum was. 

Everything was a lesson when talking to my dad. It put him on a pedestal of sorts as he spoke to us from above. This doesn’t belong here he took the spoon out of the sink and put it into the dishwasher. Women can’t do anything right. It didn’t carry an air of anger. I’ve almost never seen him angry, but he wouldn’t let anything slip. And perhaps he meant to make light of it with a joke, with the exaggeration in his tone, or maybe he was serious. You’re such a disaster was the punctuation he used at the end of every remark. He said it with conviction.

Have you finished your homework?

Yeah, and I made posters for the student council.

He didn’t ask to see the posters. That’s good. Are you ready to go over the four you missed from your math exam? This, I knew, was a joke. I got a ninety-six on my math test which was a really great showing for me because I flat out hated math. I was terrible at math and I hated being terrible at something.

But more importantly, this was the way he acknowledged my success, the thing I was proud of, the thing that made me feel good. He pointed out what I missed, as a joke, but nonetheless my deep thirst for positive recognition was met by the reality of his approach. He wasn’t going to stroke my ego.

There was no room for emotions, background, or questions when talking with him. There was also no connection to understanding. If you ever asked why, his response was automatically because I said so, and so most of the time, we never knew the source or reason behind anything. He was objectively successful, a partner at his law firm, town mayor, and so he was validated. But it made him feel distant as a parent. Unsatisfied needs turn into a passive attitude. And so, we did what we were told because it was ‘right’. We learned to manage our inner frustrations by the habitual practice of bottling or apathy.

In fact, when I was crowned homecoming queen, I finally used the heightened example to point out to him how I felt neglected.

Well, you can read about it in the paper. I handed him the town’s newspaper when he got back home from his work meeting in Boston. I felt both pride in showing him and passive aggression in my teen-angst. My picture took up plenty of the front page.

That’s really neat, Holly. His eyes looked delighted. I am sure he felt guilt, but he was trying to show his support.

It would have been good if you were there.

I would have, but didn’t think you’d win.

I’d like to think he didn’t mean it how it sounded. I tried to assume his best intent. I tried to understand where he was coming from. But his comment was sharp, I didn’t think you’d win.

I expected he understood it wasn’t about winning. I expected he should recognize the honor of being on the court, more, how it was something special, how it made me feel special but him not showing made me feel very un-special. I didn’t take the confrontation further. I didn’t want to break down crying. Crying in front of him never went over well. It usually resulted in him saying, go talk to your pillow, as in, I don’t care. There was nothing more that could be said about homecoming, so I let the confrontation go. I wasn’t enough.

They say there are four parenting styles. Different articles describe them a little differently, but I like the Huffington Post’s approach that boiled them down for the greater public, and I latched on to how accurate they were. The Authoritarian Parenting style rang true to how I interpreted my father at the time: ‘it is expected that the child acts like an adult, but is not treated like one’. My favorite quote was, research indicates that children of authoritarian parents have one of the worst outcomes on virtually any measure of social or cognitive competence. But wait, it goes on: While this type of kid follows rules, they suffer self-esteem issues because their opinions never mattered.

I think of the baby elephants that are chained when young for the circus or tourism. They learn that the shackle around their leg is unbreakable, so by the time they’re an adult, you could tie a shoelace to their ankle and they wouldn’t go anywhere. They call it crushing as in ‘crushing their spirit’.

My situation was far from shackles; it’s almost shameful to make a comparison. He wasn’t trying to crush my spirit; he was trying to show me how to grow into success within the system that raised him.

I can’t help but think that after our basic needs are met, it is our emotional world that thirsts. I had more resources than is necessary for any human. My needs were met with excess comfort. My emotional needs, however, were thirsty. I kept striving until I hit a point where I couldn’t push further. Whether I perfectly fit my age’s archetype for rebellion or whether I was unique doesn’t matter. I could only grow so much within the quality of the lessons I was taught until I was compelled to grow on my own. I was 17. How I chose to grow became what defined me.

Homing

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Gommie was the second wife of my great grandfather on my mom’s side. And when I say second, she was very second. He would go on about his first wife, missing her, remembering her. Gommie was sick of it. She exploded after being subject to memory lane yet again.

I don’t care if she had golden tits, I don’t want to hear another word about her!

Or the time when someone called and said, I’ve got 12 inches for ya.

With a clever rage she shouted into the receiver, Well, if that’s all you’ve got then forget it! and slammed the phone down.

She was rumored to be a prostitute. No one said that word, of course. They said, Gommie was known to have a lot of men around. They said, She was single for a while and had to make ends meet. There were stories that she was abused, there were stories that she had been pregnant ten times, but only two kids lived to adolescence.

Surely there was a lot of hardship in Gommie’s life. Even still, she represented the kind of strength in a woman that was accepted around my mother’s side of the family. Which leads to my mom’s mom, my grandmother, Jean. Jean got so pissed off when the children, when my mom and uncles, were fighting around the dinner table that she took an entire glass container of milk and smashed it against the wall in protest. In fact, her love of smashing was so strong that my grandfather built her a secondary structure in the backyard where she would go to smash plates when she was, how do you say... in the mood to Hulk.

My mother also had this provocative fire. In fact, the fury in her showed its colors after her brother broke her arm. She suffered the pain, she suffered the injury, but as soon as she got her cast, she would make him suffer. She readied her cast and knocked out his two front teeth.

At the same time as the fire burned bright in her, she was a product of the projected perfect TV life. Perhaps she preferred the idea of the perfect TV life as a contrast to the explosiveness she was around. She did well in school; she went to college; she participated in the only sport available to women at the time and became a cheerleader. By 21, she was walking down the aisle in the basement of a church in a dress she made herself. She felt content and rested in the ideal now actualized. She smiled at the wedding reception while eating cheese and bologna roll ups, thinking how she couldn’t be any happier to be Mrs. and take his name.

When my dad’s affairs started, she didn’t catch on for a while, likely because of her sincere belief in honesty and her almost outdated capacity to trust. She was in her early forties when she went to the psychic who had become locally famous amongst her friends. Maxine pulled a card that showed knives in her back, directly calling out the sabotage that my mother was experiencing, but even then, my mom interpreted the possibility to be poor health that might strike my father.

It took a few incidents to awaken her suspicion that culminated into the great reveal. My dad invited her to go to Hawaii for a conference. The dates overlapped with our spring break for school so when she declined, he bought a ticket. 

On the morning of his departure, she noticed something was strange. My dad was supposed to turn right out of the driveway toward the airport, but instead, he turned left. She threw on a wig, borrowed the neighbor’s car, and followed him on a secretive car chase. When she lost him, she felt defeated until she quickly realized his ultimate destination was still the airport. She made a U-turn and stayed focused. She waited in the airport lobby for 15 minutes, maybe 30. She waited with a head full of questions and doubts. Or perhaps she waited, fuming with Gommie’s anger.

And then she saw him. She finally saw him walking up with a twenty-four-year-old blonde. The sliding doors opened as if in slow motion, and there she was, standing in the airport straight in front of them.

With all the rage and fury of that little girl who punched out her brother’s teeth, she took a swing at him that he dodged. Her momentum carried her into the air and she then fell flat on her back. I can picture the police running to the scene. The police asked my dad if he wanted to press charges. She told me how she fantasized about being on the cover of the newspaper with a headline to the tune of Mayor’s wife attempts a knockout punch in front of mistress at airport.

They weren’t what they seemed. These two characters had achieved the ideal— they were attractive, successful, intelligent, and intriguing. My parents were complements to each other in so many ways, but they had grown so far apart that they no longer knew each other while living under the same roof. My mom quickly turned bitter, and my dad felt more detached than ever.

A year or so after my parents’ split, my dad and the 24-year-old blonde moved across the street into a house where a dead guy was buried in the backyard under a tree. Despite my dad’s best efforts to bring light into the house, cutting down the bushes, removing fencing, cutting down the dead-guy tree, I think it will always have a shadow for me. 

My mom couldn’t believe it when he bought the house across the street. She said he did it to flaunt the situation and his new life. She regularly fantasized about putting the key in the ignition of her red van she named Maxine and loading us, kids, dogs, and belongings, into the van and driving until she met the coast. Her social graces shackled her, making her feel obliged to stay, but her art was charged with even more power. ACDC played during our family dinners that we ate on fancy china with a crystal chandelier overhead, shuddering to the bass.

I feel shy to admit that the divorce broke the comfort of my childhood foundation because I feel too fortunate to admit that it hurt. I also don’t like to admit that emotions get the better of me. I don’t like to admit that something that was better for everyone still hurt. But the picture perfect town that I played in so freely, kick the can on Sundays, scavenger hunts on holidays, long sunny summers with bonfires, they all went down the drain with the divorce, with the infidelity, when they grew apart instead of together.

The idealism that protected me was cracked. The divorce led to everything that came next. It’s when I woke up to a reality that life wasn’t easy.

When my mom called me home from Jessica’s house on the Saturday before Easter Sunday, I was annoyed. We were watching a movie that I was glued to. Every year on Easter, my mom would orchestrate a neighborhood-wide Easter egg hunt, and I expected she was calling me home to remind me of the rules. I remember pleading with her on the phone, I know the rules. I even used my desperate voice.

When I got home, my mom and dad sat me down with my two brothers. My sister was told a week earlier. My mom explained the divorce. She said every word while my dad sat on our black loveseat rocking chair, likely scrambled inside.

I remember shaking. I held in the emotions, matching my response to everyone else’s, but my body shook unable to contain the potency. After they said their peace, I went to watch the TV because although my life as I knew it was tattered, I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I put back on the movie from Jessica’s house, but I no longer bought into the PG13-rated love story that was unfolding. I couldn’t even hear it, I just watched the pixels change color on the screen, utterly heartbroken and truly lost for the first time.

We weren’t religious, but I found myself begging to a higher power to make it all go back. I wanted to be on a hospital bed so my plea would mean more. I decided it would be my dying wish. It would bring me peace if things just went back to normal. I wasn’t thinking about my parents. I wasn’t thinking about how this was their story or tied to something bigger or more painful. I was aware of what it was doing to me. I was in third grade. I was nine.

I didn’t understand what divorce would look like. I didn’t understand how we would still be a family. And despite having so many questions that could have been answered, I never asked. I didn’t feel safe in my uncertainty or my voice.

Home as I knew it was gone. Home was now engulfed in the sadness, the air of anger, resentment, or detachment. We didn’t do an Easter egg hunt the next day, but that was the least of the changes. I didn’t even notice.

Time slowly passed, and my prayers weren’t slowly getting answered. My parents severed further apart. Prayers didn’t work.

One day in the car my brother mentioned the blonde, who we had now been introduced to. There wasn’t anything more profound about the moment. We were driving home from school, but with the information hitting, a storm was brewing. My mom wanted to hold it together, but she was honest with her emotions. I kicked my brother in the back of the van for saying something, knowing good and well it would be a trigger.

It’s okay, she’d say in a shaky voice, doing her best to be strong. I already know.

Of course, as time passed, I came to accept my reality. And when lots of time passed, it took a whole new form.

Did I do the right thing? I was floored to hear my mom finally blurt out once I was in college, and we interacted more as peers.

I was shocked she didn’t already know the answer. She caught me off guard. Mom, of course it was the right thing. It was a hard thing, a really fucking hard thing, but it was far more critical to my development to watch you blossom into who you needed to become rather than live a fake life. That was the bigger lesson. Seeing my mom’s homing. Seeing her, through her journey to ultimately find her most true home, her essence. Don’t you feel more fully home now than you did back then?

But for you kids, I mean, she was ready to make her life the martyr, live a false existence if that meant we, the kids, would have come out more stable. She couldn’t hear me say it the first time, she still felt the pain of some kind of guilt or remorse for us.

It probably would have taught us to live in relationships we weren’t passionate for. I’ve heard that women who are in abusive relationships with sons don’t leave as readily as women who are in abusive relations and have daughters. The hypothesis is they see their daughters witnessing what they are putting up with, and they decide they don’t want that life for them, so they take the hard but ultimately more important path. I caught myself in the simile, Obviously, dad wasn’t abusive, but if the affairs didn’t stop, after you took the time to work on it, think of what that would have taught us. Do you think it’s okay if our spouses have affairs? Would you encourage us to suffer through? Endure? Just take it... for the kids? I doubt it. In fact, I hope not because that would be such a sad generational inheritance.

I’m not sure anything I said could erase the emotion she was feeling in the moment. I think she knew better, but it’s hard to always float on better judgement.

In daily life, conversation and emotions didn’t regularly tie to the divorce. The thoughts or awareness of it didn’t surface. We all bought into the script that the divorce was something that happened a long time ago, in the past, instead of something that actively adjusted the way we lived our lives; which it did.

Plenty of years after the divorce, daily life was both harder but also better. The way my mom lived uninhibited by the typical constraints of life was inspiring. She was more alive, more emboldened, and more engaged with life because she did not need to compromise.

Her friends became a central community, vacations to Guatemala and India were a giant leap away from the resorts we visited with my dad, and she played around with her appearance, which was always inclined towards unconventional, but took on more flare when she dyed her hair purple.

Perhaps my favorite story is my mom’s Friendsgiving. By the time we were in college, my mom had given up trying to have normal Thanksgivings because of the divorce and the second layer of family from their divorce. It all became too complicated to be worth it. Instead, she would meet up with her friends. To really kick off the occasion, true to form, she added something fun. She spent days making cannabutter (cannabis butter) from a new recipe book she found after weed was legalized in Michigan.

Outside of turkey, I’d argue that butter is the next centerpiece at a typical Thanksgiving, and this cannabutter was applied to every and any dish at the table. The catch was that it was my mom's first time making it, and because she was used to improvising with recipes, she didn’t take the time to understand the dosing fully.

Thanksgiving has never been more psychedelic and otherworldly than when twelve women in their 50s took 4+ doses of THC with a few innocent butter smears on their baked buns.

"You couldn’t believe it, Hoz. It was like, it was like, I could hear every single conversation happening in the room simultaneously. Like I was sitting right next to them,