I Don't Even Like Beer
By Katie Blackburn
@katiemblackburn
I was still unpacking the last of my boxes when I heard the knock on the apartment door. My neighbor and a fellow graduate student, who lived just one floor below me, had apparently seen me carrying all of my furniture, one drawer at a time, into my apartment the day before. Turns out the moving company we had hired in Arizona to help me move out did not get the memo that we had also hired them to help move in across the country in Pennsylvania, where my items were kindly left in a small storage crate in the parking lot, and where I knew not a soul to call and ask if they could help me carry a small dresser up three flights of stairs.
Alas, that is a different story for a different day. This is a story about beer, and about the kind neighbor who thought I might need one after struggling with my full size mattress alone in the August humidity of the East Coast.
“A few of us from the psychology program are going to the brewery tonight. Would you like to join us?” she asked.
“I’d love to,” I heard myself saying out loud, the “You need to make friends here, Katie!” logic winning out against the “I’m actually just fine staying home alone tonight thanks” part of my brain.
We traded phone numbers, she told me when and where to meet, and I spent the next few hours somewhere between happy to have been invited and incredibly nervous about actually going - the vulnerability of newness competing against the safety of my apartment and the cable I just had installed that day.
I arrived at the brewery close to 8 p.m., found my neighbor, and she promptly introduced me to six or seven of her friends at the table. We all began chatting a bit about ourselves and our backgrounds - I think the first question I was asked by each new acquaintance that night was “And where did you do your undergraduate work?” It was clear credentials mattered, at least a tiny bit, around this table. Most of the people there had been in Pennsylvania a year or two already, and they shared about their doctoral research, their advisors, the undergraduate classes they taught the year before, all topics I believed I had to learn the language of if I was going to be believable in this new role of graduate student. I was feigning my confidence fairly well, that is, until the menus came out.
“Oh you guys, they have their apricot beer on tap tonight!” someone at the table announced, with obvious excitement in her voice. “It’s the best thing here. Only available for a few weeks a year. We’ll take a round for the whole table!” she told the waiter, with an impressive finality and confidence.
But wait, we will? For the… whole table? I thought with a panic. Is that how it works in graduate school? You talk about really smart things and then you all toast with the same beer? Are we not ordering, you know, individually?
No. We were not ordering individually.
And no, I wouldn’t have dared speak up about that in the moment.
I had been in this brand new town a little over 48 hours and I already had an invite somewhere, with smart people, who liked apricot beer, and darn if I wasn’t going to pretend I was one of them.
The waiter brought the full tray to the table and handed everyone their glass, which for the record, was the biggest glass of beer I had ever seen. I couldn’t tell you ounces, but let’s just say it was wide and tall and resembled more a half gallon of milk than a bottle of beer.
Hmm, ok, I took in the challenge in front of me. This is how it works in Pennsylvania.
“Cheers!” someone said with a raised glass, “To being back here with all of you, to another year of your advisor making you cry, and to all-nighters in the library!”
“Cheers!” we all chuckled and said in unison, and I took my first sip.
(This is where you should picture the most bitter, most obvious, most embarrassing pucker face you’ve ever seen.)
It was not good. I knew it wouldn’t be good, and do you know why I knew it wouldn’t be good?
Because I don’t even like beer.
I have tried, really, I have. Perhaps the acquired taste of beer has an expiration date and I started too late, or maybe some of us are simply born with an aversion, but I could not, cannot, drink beer. My unpopular opinion—and to this day I stand by it—is this: beer is gross. I will save my calories for something that does not invoke my gag reflex thankyouverymuch.
But the 22-year-old me who knew only the few people at the table in front of her in this new-to-me city, all of them with this highly coveted, limited availability beer in their hands, could not bring herself to say that. So I kept sipping. And sipping. Drops at a time. And I kept puckering, trying so hard to hide my disgust. I thought about staging a spill, but would they say, “Oh that’s ok, Katie, we’ll get you another one!” and the quarter inch of progress I had made would be diminished and I’d have to start over with a full glass? What a nightmare.
We sat there a long time, still talking and laughing, and I kept my hands near my glass, thinking I could hide how little I had drank and my obvious distaste for the product in front of me. Some people asked for another glass, while I kept trying to make a dent in mine, painful sip after painful sip. That amber liquid sat there taunting me with its promises of acceptance among peers if I could just get it down, and rejection if I couldn’t.
“Isn’t this so good?” someone asked me, perhaps prompting a justification for the three tablespoons worth I had tried.
“It is!” I answered with a forced smile on my face. “It’s different, but it’s good.”
Recalling this scene 13 years later, it is painfully obvious I was lying. Alas, not one of the kind souls at this table asked me another question about the beer, or pointed out the remarkable flush on my cheeks. After a few hours of conversation, and the salt-in-the-wound lesson I learned that the only thing worse than cold beer you don’t like is lukewarm beer you don’t like, I offered a genuine thank you for being included, and left three-quarters of a glass of apricot beer on the table, then drove back to my apartment.
You know those times in our lives we wish we could do over? When our smarter, wiser, more seasoned selves can reflect on moments that we could have handled better, and from time to time we replay these moments in our minds? Apricot beer is one of mine.
In my head, when the words, “We’ll take a round for the whole table,” were offered to the waiter, the much more confident Katie humbly-but-assertively says, “Oh you guys, thank you so much, but I am just not a beer girl.” Smile. Full stop.
I am just not a beer girl. No judgment. No pride either. Just the truth. Not a beer girl. But I can comfortably sit here and enjoy my time at this table with all of you, thankful for the conversation and the new friends and the chance to be acquainted with graduate student life here. Cheers!
There have been a dozen times as a mother, probably more, when, for nothing but the sake of perception, I have been like the insecure girl with a beer she doesn’t like and no confidence to say anything about it. Either out of a fear of being perceived as judgmental, or being judged myself, I’ve not mentioned, let alone stood by the choices I’ve made and preferences I have. I’ve kept quiet, I’ve not told the truth, I’ve tried to be someone I’m not.
But that’s not who I want to be.
I don’t want my parenting to be either plagued by insecurity and comparison, nor for our choices to be perceived as better than the next family’s. I want to start, quite simply, with being confident in what is true about me.
No, we don’t co-sleep.
Yes, I do love breastfeeding.
No, he’s not in preschool this year.
Yes, I buy organic when I can.
No, my kids don’t actually eat their vegetables.
Yes, we are expecting our sixth child.
No, we don’t do sleepovers.
Yes, I allow iPads in the car.
No, I don’t like beer.
Smile. Full stop. No judgment. No apologies. And no pride either. Just the truth.
I don’t think we are doing anything perfect, but I do know we are doing our best. I’m always willing to learn from others, to be corrected, and to do better the next time. But there are a number of things I am not afraid to own, to say “this is what it has looked like for us” with the kids, budget, convictions, and preferences we have.
When I think back on the night at the brewery, if I could do it over, I want to sit and enjoy the company of others, getting to know who they are and what kind of impact they want their work to make on the world, and I want to do it without feeling like I have to be something I’m not.
And today, I want to gather at playgrounds and book clubs and Bible studies and get to know other moms, listening to their fears and joys about motherhood and the kind of hopes they have for their children, and I want to hear everything that we do differently in our families and be confident in those differences. After all, the shared experience of motherhood isn’t in what we do or don’t enjoy or the rules we do or do not have, but simply that we’re in it together - because all the highs, the lows, the laughter, the tears, and the impossible-to-name feeling for wanting to hide from your responsibilities while not for one minute wishing them away—no one gets that more than other moms.
My point is this: I’ll try a sip of your beer, but I won’t suffer through trying to drink a pint of it ever again. Not because I don’t love you, but because, again, I don’t even like beer.
Cheers!
Photo by Lottie Caiella.