Christian Perry

All I know about my “Year of Barf” is that I vomited once a day for nearly a year as I grew out of infancy. My earliest explorations of autonomy were characterized by bile. When I arrived, my parents were a few years into young adulthood, with a two-year-old already. My mom was the general manager of a restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor, employing my dad and several of her siblings and their partners. A few years after my “Year of Barf,” my older brother and I would spend our afternoons playing games on a N64 plugged into a small CRT TV set onto the bar top, eating two meals a day at the restaurant for months at a time. When I’ve asked my parents about my infancy, all they remember is how little anyone knew about it. I imagine that doctors, family, friends all found it strange — close to alarming, but not scary enough to require immediate intervention. As an adult now, most people find the thought of it a little sad for a baby to experience.

I like to imagine my “Year of Barf” sometimes. The first day passes without real notice. Babies spit up. This time is a little smellier than normal spit up, but is it even noticeable? A week in and my parents are tired of this shit. A week’s worth of clothes are covered in regurgitated breast milk and formula and bile. 

A month in and their irritation evolves into concern. Dad says, it’s just a little spit-up! It’s not gotten worse. They take me to a doctor who says, huh, weird, and just keep monitoring the situation, it’s really all we can do, and let me know if it gets worse. No indication of what worse might be. 

Four months in and I’m sitting up, I’m pulling myself along the floor, and sometimes — if I’m not being watched carefully — I’m leaving a trail of colorful slime in my path like a slug. Rubbing barf into the carpet with my chest, little bits still dripping from my chin. Friends are saying, he’s a normal baby otherwise! and do you know any other babies that barf this much? 

Toward the end of it all, I’m completely autonomous. Able to walk now, my parents teach me to barf in a trashcan or a sink or a toilet. So, my days are peppered with silent self-removals. I disappear without a word for a few minutes and come back wiping my mouth with a paper towel or square of toilet paper. They take me back to the doctor after Mom says, it’s just so sad. I wish we could help him be normal. And the doctor says, acid reflux! and no more dairy! 

My “Year of Barf” ended months before my second birthday with dairy prohibition. As I grew up, acid reflux became Gastroesophageal Reflux Disorder. Doctors found Dad’s same Eosinophilic Esophagitis in my throat. In my early twenties, as I was finishing my bachelor’s, a chronic wave of heartburn nested so deep in my chest that I barfed once a day for several months.

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Standing in my pink bathtub, I face away from the showerhead and drop my head forward. A few weeks of nearly daily rain have let me excuse wet hair as a clean scalp for too long. I line my fingertips equally spaced along the hairline on the back of my head — thumbs pressed against the base of my neck. I bring my hands forward through my hair, moving slowly, forcefully and hoping knots work themselves out — knowing shampoo isn’t the product that helps these things. A lot of hair comes out in my hands. I turn around in the shower, head still drooped, the water now pouring across my face. I replace my hands and bring them forward across my scalp again. A lot of hair comes out in my hands. 

I ball up each mass of hair and slap it against the wall until I’m done. I sigh deeply as I lather my scalp with the two-ingredient conditioner that is supposed to be perfect for my dry, curly hair but does nothing noticeable. I remember how Mom used to throw her hair away in the toilet bowl after a shower, leaving it floating until the next person came in to use the facilities. 

I remember that I called my mom after I stepped out of the shower in my dorm bathroom that first time with a ball of hair still in my hands. I asked have you ever worried about going bald? Immediately, foresight has me feeling silly: with a nearly bald dad, why would I ask my mom? She said no, just check for hairline changes. 

Years later and after their divorce, my dad confessed that she used to cry about the hair she shed. I don’t worry anymore, but I grieve what is loosened from my scalp. 

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When I start to grow out my hair as a teenager, Mom doesn’t love it. Full control of my haircut signaled the impending full control of my visual aesthetic. After fifteen years of a buzz-cut standard, my mom dropped me off at our usual salon and said, do whatever you want with it. There must’ve been some school photos or event, but I can’t remember. I do remember the sun and the blue sky and wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt as I hopped out of our gold minivan onto the sidewalk of the strip mall.

Missy had been the family hairdresser for years. And we were easy — mostly boys getting buzz cuts — so she only ever charged us ten dollars plus tip. To me, Missy was a spotlight of coolness: loud, confident, funny, conversational. She forced just about every conversation I never wanted to have in public — or at least in front of my parents — without putting me out. She was the first to ever ask if I had a boyfriend; the first adult in my life to, without pressure or prelude, respect and honor my queerness. I can’t remember ever telling her that I wasn’t straight. That day, I know she was surprised as I walked into her salon alone for the first time.

It was a basic haircut, very zeitgeisty. I showed her a picture of Justin Bieber’s undercut and said like this but not really and then googled “soccer player haircuts” while sitting in her chair. And whatever I came up with, Missy delivered on. I left the salon with something between a pompadour and an upward coif, and I was drunk on this new kind of agency. I didn’t understand Mom’s dejection, as she was probably realizing her projections of my future weren’t going to come true.

In my early twenties, with my hair the longest it has ever been, I struggle taking care of my curly hair. Some days, I get perfect ringlets — something my youngest sibling has never had to try for. Most days, I’m Mia Thermopolis pre-princess makeover. Every day, I am reminded of who I come from. On the few occasions that I return home, I swap hair care steps with my aunts. Our dark brown curls serve as the physical signifier of our familial bond. 

After I move across the country for grad school, I’m on a date watching Princess Mononoke in my living room. He’s never seen it before, so I’m talking him through the localization changes to the script that Neil Gaiman produced in the Miramax (a Disney subsidiary) distributed English dub. At the outset of the film, the main character must sever his ties to his family and leave his home forever — cutting his hair in the process. My date takes advantage of a lull in my monologuing, you’ve got great hair.

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My parents met as young adults at a minimum-wage job in a small bakery. I’m sure the owners taught them something about being in a kitchen because they baked for everyone throughout my childhood: birthdays, weddings, retirements, graduations — they probably made a funeral cake or two. 

I remember a Barbie-dress cake for a friend’s daughter’s birthday — the grandiose dome of a ballgown that peaked at the doll’s waist. Another was a three-tiered-white-frosted wedding cake, originally planned to be covered in hundreds of white chocolate daisies, which I ruined on a night of mischief as a gymnastically inclined, night-owl toddler. 

It wasn’t just cakes: cupcakes made to look like long-haired dogs and professional imitations of Cookie Monster. Fruit pies and crumbles made with seasonal-fruit pickings. “Betty Sues,” as Mom called them: two layers of chocolate cake married with white frosting and covered in chocolate ganache. Savory pastries made with phyllo dough. 

We all benefited from a new baking gig. Mom or Dad would switch on the radio that hung from the bottom of the plate cabinet, pull all the bowls, utensils, and dry ingredients onto the maroon countertop, and brush us all away from the space. From their stations would outpour music, the standing mixer, and the pounding of batter-filled cake pans on the counter — to loosen the air bubbles from the batter for a denser cake. With the pans in the oven, the small kitchen would be accessible again while they took a break. One of us kids would help clean up the budding mess. Mom or Dad or both would return to their station to prep necessary fondant decorations or icings while the cakes finished baking and cooled.

Sweetness replaced the noise when they were done baking, and a pile of warm off-cuts appeared on the kitchen table. This was about as much cake as I was ever able to eat from my family’s kitchen. The so-beloved, dense sugariness of the cakes was already too much for my small body, and the frosting made it completely inedible for my taste. So, I enjoyed the cake-tops, fresh from the oven.

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I hated the kitchen in my first apartment. It was laughably tiny in the otherwise spacious studio. A year into my lease, I positioned a white five-foot by five-foot cubby shelf at the edge of my kitchenette as a room divider. I couldn’t stand the view of the paradoxically open kitchen and miniaturized appliances from the rest of the space. I preferred the apartment to have a defined kitchen if it meant I could ignore it entirely for takeout.

When I moved in, each of my parents drove the fifty-minute distance to my new home to help me get settled. Both wanted to be the one to help me buy the things I needed for my kitchen, as it was the one space I’d refused to invest in after years of living between sublets and dorms. Dad took me to Walmart to ensure I had pots and pans, a broom, a trashcan, a plunger, some groceries. Mom took me to the local department grocer to ensure I had baking tins and sheets, what I needed for a quiche if I ever wanted to make one, all the supplies to make a good cup of coffee, silverware, plates. 

After shopping with Dad, we went the local pub across the street from my new home. Had a beer and a burger with little fanfare and talked about how I was feeling about my new home. 

After shopping with Mom, we found the only sushi restaurant in town that I hadn’t eaten at yet. We did this everywhere we went, even if it meant buying an eight-piece pack of grocery store sushi to split. 

After their visits, I laid out every new item they’d gotten for me and took inventory. The more I stared, the more I realized I knew nothing about being in the kitchen. Or, that what I knew about being in the kitchen had only to do with cleaning: how to maximize space in the dishwasher and handwash the rest, that I should hand dry what ends up on the counters and wash the kitchen surfaces top-down —  making sure to wipe the cabinet and cupboard doors, the top of the fridge, the stovetop and the oven door, the countertop, and then the floor. Cleaning the kitchen was taught as a tradition. 

When my turn came to learn the correct way to clean, Dad set aside a whole Sunday afternoon to do the work together, discussing the steps and important elements to consider in evaluating a cleaning job. After we finished, we turned off the kitchen radio and lit a candle.

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In my early twenties, as I finished my bachelor’s, I wrote a poem for each of my parents. A not-so-sly attempt at forcing a few conversations about distance and our relationships. As a young adult, what I longed for was the chance to talk again, to recreate the parent-child relationship I had felt more deeply as a kid. I struggled with the loneliness of adulthood. 

“For Mom,” is a sestina in response to the positive changes in our relationships since I’d moved away. We’d been pouring all our misgivings into the same overburdened crockpot for a decade, and the release of its contents threatened us for just as long. Moving out on my own showed us that all we had was something that needed cleaning, restoring.

The poem opens with an account from a recent Christmas: we are in the kitchen and she’s showing me how to handle phyllo dough as we prepare baked brie for the party. Then, Mom is visiting me in my new home, and we’re seated across from each other at the only sushi bar I haven’t been to yet. The final spotlight of the poem falls on the two of us eating together:

After a moment, we’re quiet,

and I wish I could capture it.

The two moments,

a ritual

like your tradition.

A ritual I can always have faith in. 

Because I didn’t know how to ask directly, I pointed to how I’d previously known to identify: in opposition to her. “Like your tradition,” highlights that it is remarkably hers, and refuses an inherited claim to the religion she’d raised me in while renaming it as tradition — accidentally including our familial practices in with the rest. Placing it on equal footing with what we had created for ourselves. 

I don’t really believe in this final stanza anymore. I can’t have faith that we will always have a next meal together and connection is tricky, memory is fickle, and sometimes grocery store sushi is all I need to feel at home. If I were to write the final spotlight again, it might go something like this: “I won’t ever be able to capture it: / all the little ways / you’ve left breadcrumbs around the world / without even knowing / without even trying / helping remind me of home.” 

In an earlier draft of this essay, the ending was full of conditional rumination. An unfunny, fill-in-the-blank Mad Libs exercise: “If I lose my hair, then ____” (with statements about being a man OR being a woman OR adhering to cultural conventions OR adhering to someone else’s perception of my identity). An attempt to make some peace between the uncertainty of the future and the rigidity of my relationship with my body. Because somedays, I feel like I’m stuck reproducing all the good and bad and neutral ways my parents related to their own bodies.

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I think I’ve heard my mom say, if I lose my hair, I wouldn’t feel like a woman. Born to devout Catholics and the third oldest of nine, she left home at 16. She couch-surfed until getting a place of her own, finished high school on time, and worked multiple jobs all the while. I first felt our closeness in college: the dorm food wasn’t bad, but I missed how her cooking filled the house with smells and the kitchen with a mess for me to clean; the freedom was so welcome, but I worked multiple jobs to stay afloat. It was in my small, yellow-tiled dorm bathroom that I could feel the logic of my mom’s sense-of-self in my own way: every ten days or so, when my patchy facial hair grew too long, I would barely recognize myself in the mirror.