It wasn’t an unhealthy obsession – just a strange one. I had never watched a morning news show before. Rarely did I wake before ten am as a college student. Rarely did I do anything after waking besides stumble out of bed, sort of get dressed, and eat a banana on the way to school. On September 11, 2001, I wandered into an intro-level environmental studies class at 10:45 am, and it wasn’t until well after noon that I began to understand the magnitude of what had happened. “Who flew a plane into what?” I kept wondering as my professor plowed his way through the lesson plan. Never a fan of TV news, I was also never a fan of mornings, which made my obsession with Soledad O’Brien even more unusual.
She anchored CNN’s “American Morning.” I didn’t like her gap-toothed co-anchor or the puffy-faced business analyst. The show was composed of those three and Jack Cafferty, a crotchety old man who hated everything. He was crotchety enough to appear a somewhat contrived character. But the three men on the show I couldn’t have cared less about – it was Soledad whom I tuned in to watch.
I like men. In fact, I had liked a man so much that ten months after deciding to date my now-husband, I found myself in the delivery room of the hospital, having his baby. After giving birth I fell into a deep depression, one that lay dormant during the crisp fall days and crept up my spine and into my brain as soon as the sun began to set. We worked it out so that he took the night watch and I took the morning. If I knew the sun was rising soon, there was hope. As long as someone else out there thought it was morning, then I could think it was morning too. Our daughter’s hungry screams awakened me at four, five, six am. As I fed her I turned on the T.V. As long as I could brew coffee and watch the morning news, I knew the darkness outside would blend into purple and then blue sky, not quickly or slowly, but in its own time. I had my own time too, me and my infant daughter waking up in the darkness on cold mornings in the mountains of North Carolina. Me, my daughter, and Soledad.
Was it her coffee-brown skin tone, coffee lightened with cream and comforting sugar? Or her simply awesome name, Soledad – I began to curse myself for not naming my daughter Soledad, and decided that if I ever had another daughter that her name would certainly be Soledad. Or was it the fact that she went to Harvard? Or that she was a champion runner, and a boxer? That she absolutely rocked any outfit she wore? It was all of these things, plus the amazing fact that she had four children under the age of four, including a set of twins. And there she sat, beautiful, poised, the color of coffee, at seven in the morning, smiling and joking and giving me the news as I lay on the couch in my maternity clothes, running my hand through my greasy hair and trying to work up the energy to start the laundry. She had four kids and was perfect. I had one and was a mess.
My husband made fun of me for liking Soledad so much. I would make fun of me too – a straight woman nursing an obsession with a CNN anchorwoman. What songs did Soledad sing to her kids? I read that her husband was an investment banker. Would such a high-powered couple have a selection of different songs to sing? Songs for the rich and semi-famous? I watched Soledad interview a leading medical researcher about the presence of chemicals used in rocket fuel appearing in human breast milk. “A breastfeeding mother, like myself….” she said. I imagined her running to her breast pump during commercial breaks.
Soledad was everything I wanted to be. But there was something wrong about it. She wasn’t a Diane Sawyer or a Paula Zahn. She was more like a Kelly Ripa. Beautiful and skilled in front of cameras. Why wasn’t I idolizing Maureen Dowd, or Mary Karr? Well, because I had met Mary in a weekend in Prague and I saw her wear the same pair of hot pink hot pants for three days straight. And Mary wasn’t on TV.
The monumental problem: I was torn between Mary and Soledad, their careers. They both had children (Mary one, Soledad four). Mary wrote until she published; Soledad started on a journalism career. Which would I rather? I didn’t know if Maureen Dowd had kids or not, but I made an electronic note to Google it, and never did.
I started ordering books online with titles like “You Can Get a Career in Publishing” and “35 Careers for Bookworms,” and making databases of possible careers. I also bought “The Writer’s Handbook.” At work I filed, filed, filed, answered the phone, filed some more. Soledad had dropped out of Harvard, out of Harvard, to take a journalism job. Oh, the courage! What her family must have said! Five months out of college, here I was, twenty-four with a baby and working part time as a secretary. Where was my job? Could I even be successful and be a mother? Would I ever publish?
I saw Soledad on the phone with her parents. Her father would resemble Groundskeeper Willie from the Simpsons; her mother, a fiery Cuban woman who mimed hitting her Irish husband over the head with a rolling pin. Horrible stereotypes, horrible.
“Dad, Mama…. I dropped out of Harvard to work at WBZ-TV News.”
“You did what?” they would both say, more or less at once.
“I’m going to be an associate producer!”
“Is this what I come to America for, so my daughter can tell me there’s an accident on I-95?” I guess either parent could say this, because they’re both foreign, but I’ll attribute it Mrs. O’Brien.
“I’m starting my career now, and that’s it, Mom.”
“You’re going to make me the only mother in the neighborhood whose daughter dropped out of Harvard.” (Not to mention the only O’Brien child to drop out of Harvard – her five siblings all graduated from there).
My obsession was weird, so I never told anyone else. But when I saw her, the sun was rising, the coffee pot was rumbling in the kitchen, and everything was getting better. The sunrise was everything. Things could continue to get better. And Soledad was still there, every morning.
Maybe I should go to grad school, I thought. There wouldn’t be pressure then for the job, which I couldn’t find. Every day I walked down the street, past Cotton’s house, the elementary school, and the park, and then cut through by the Pentecostal church, down the road and behind the first office building, down the steps and into the second office building, then into the first office on the right where I worked. I listened to NPR for four and a half hours and filed, then walked home.
I’ve come a good way since then, I reckon. Not only can I speak and write in Southern parlance, I have an awesome family, a job that makes me happy, and I’m enrolled in graduate school. Not without massive fails along the way, but here I am. Eventually Soledad left “American Morning” and just as quickly, my infatuation with her faded. She was part of a package of hope, rolled up in morning news, coffee, pre-dawn hours and breastfeeding. I tried to watch the show without her, but it was never the same again. Which is probably just as well; my jealousy and lassitude were no doubt holding me back. We’ll all float on anyway.
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2 comments
Melissa says:
Jan 13, 2010
Interesting…. I had a simliar fascination with Ashleigh Banfield….
KristineEmpire says:
Jan 13, 2010
No, she doesn’t look like a terrorist at all…