So much to answer for
In the dream this morning, I thought, “why not invite him over to dinner?” The house was empty now and I was trying to piece everything together, my life, the grocery store trips, how much food to allow my household of one. My old dormant crush, the man I now know only in my dreams but who could still hold a place in my heart (diminished by knowledge and years and age, jammed in between the other things from my twenties that I regret), was coming to dinner.
Before he made it (in the omniscience of dreams, I saw him walking along the sidewalk, this Yorkshireman – never underestimate the power of an accent – with his wiry climber's build and surprisingly grey hair), I woke up. 4:44 a.m.
I was relieved to wake up so late. Last night, restless after a day at home with a sick boy and a never-ending stream of movies, I was having a hard time getting to sleep. I had to bring out the Buddhist Scotsman with his gentle, almost sexy whisper-voice (“and now allow the muscles of your thighs to soften”) in order to get my spastic mind to quiet itself, to take that internal tension, so automatic at times, and smooth it out. I soothed myself with images of a night of extended sleep, expecting all the while that I would wake up at 2:30 or 3:00. But I made it to almost 5:00 a.m. and that was good enough for me.
I don’t have enough to do, enough to feed on. Don’t envy me. I’ll be envying myself in six months. Or, really, I have things to do but I am having a hard time getting interested in them. Oh, there’s the usual cleaning, the stuff sorting, the life organizing, But I could also be exploring and writing and entering life more. I have to structure my time and make myself a life and I am just realizing now that I don’t have to stay in the house as a form of atonement, a way of showing that I am not a layabout wasting time (as I waste it). There are wonderful things about controlling my days, but not if I let them slip away.
Don’t laugh at me or roll your eyes – or, at the very least, don’t tell me that you are doing so, and I'll pretend that you aren't – but I think I am holding on to this emptiness as a penance, that the structure I set up against myself is a form of payment for my sins. I am not a religious person. I was not raised in an environment of structured guilt. But I carry around guilt anyway and I cling to her, the old me, the one who was alone, who took her anger and directed it inward. I’ve mentioned at least once here the idea that my thoughts could kill. In a recent tearful conversation about my first child's birth/death, one therapist nailed it when she asked me if I thought that I killed that child with my anger and hate. I had a lot of that at the time, a lot of adolescent resentment. I was sixteen and on my own. I knew then – and know now – that killing with thought and emotion is impossible. I know and I don’t know. It’s so hard to shake, this feeling of responsibility. I hated and wished for release and then he died. It's a twisted logic, a spurious connection between a, b, and c.
My second son's birth was a trigger. Not that my life before parenthood was some sort of free romp, but it was much less self-constrained. Then the boy who got to live arrived, along with the overwhelming reminder of what I was capable of, my dark powers. I’ve been trying to make it up to the ones I’ve wounded, the ones who are no longer here, including the adolescent me who was stuck with the responsibility, the burden of someone else's death.
I used to have dreams about the baby I forgot. There he was in the antiquated crib in the high-ceiling room with the wispy curtains floating in the breeze. By the time I remembered – to get food, to change a diaper, to check in – he would be dead. I haven’t had those dreams for years, thank goodness. That’s part of the healing process, the joy of having a child now and doing right by him.
I am grateful for my ability to pick apart my emotions, for finding the why. Once I know the why, I can deal with it, and I am, ever so slowly. This new discovery of my self-imposed prison both as penance and as a way to hold on to the girl that was, is useful. I can cry over her and then allow myself the freedom to live.
So why the dream visit from the Yorkshireman, the occasional Mancunian? He used to represent freedom to me, freedom and desire, the world of art and living on the edge. He’s an outdated symbol (nothing personal Mr. H/C/T) who was showing up for the final supper, our last meal together.
It’s been a long leave-taking from my caged life, but I am halfway there. The second half, which is all action and forward movement, is going to be the most difficult. It will take willpower and a sense of direction without knowing my ultimate destination. I can do it, though I may be writing about it ad nauseam until I get further along the path.
A note on the title: "So much to answer for" is a line from the Smiths song Suffer Little Children, which is about the 1960s Moors Murders. It fits Manchester, my dreams, and guilt.
Image: Me, last night, verging on sleep.
The only way to escape
Where was I twenty-six years ago today?
At this point, I was probably in an ambulance on my way to Christiana Hospital, the baby’s dead body still attached via the umbilical cord, or maybe I was in triage, though there wasn’t much that could be done. I was answering that obnoxious doctor’s questions from my position of half-naked weakness. I really should do more to honor this day, to remember the child, to remember me, terrified and alone, with a lot more loneliness to come.
I hold my hand out to both of us. The teenaged me was strong (though she didn’t feel that way), scared (though she bluffed her way through it all), self-sufficient to a fault (though she crumbled whenever she let someone in). I carry her self-sufficiency and the echoes, the shadows, the deep impressions, of being unwantable, unhandleable, not worth it. And the baby? I want to be free enough to hold him in my mind, to claim his as mine, to soothe him. I am not sure if I will ever be able to get rid of the guilt, for letting the pregnancy happen, for letting it go on, for being so angry and unable to care for anyone, not even myself, for being someone no one could take care of.
Writing about this is not wallowing in a sad past. I want to do it (myself?) justice. I don’t want to cover it up. I don’t want to pretend it never happened. I suspect I am the only one that thinks about it at this time of year, the last one holding the burden, and it is mine to hold. Maybe that ennobles me in some way. But mainly it feels like the continuation of a theme, the things I keep tied together or that I toss in the air and catch, one by one, mainly for myself, to keep myself vigilant, to remind myself that we must protect and take care of the powerless, that anger often means pain, and that our responsibility to our children is to not only give them the skills to live in the world, but to show them how to love – and we show them that by accepting them and loving them unconditionally.
It’s one of the few bonuses in a sad story. And I am thankful that I have been able to escape enough of my past to recognize it.
From the prompt "Thanksgiving dinner."
Image of the cornfield behind my grandfather's house taken by me on some late fall day in the mid-1980s. I've used it before in this post. I miss that landscape and wish I could go for a walk in a fallow cornfield, that I could take a late night stroll down to the river to skip stones.
I had a hard time giving this one a title. Wanted to call it untitled. Didn't want to make it too maudlin, either, or to try and hook readers by something slightly sensationalist.
And . . . Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
When the pep talk mantra doesn't work
It was a day of little triumphs, like the amazing feeling of getting a fidgeting, recalcitrant first grader to push through words she thought she couldn’t read. Every time she did it and I told her see, I knew you could do it, she giggled with surprise (at her abilities? at my goofiness?). We ended the session with a high five and I thought: this is the kind of stuff that makes me feel good.
It was a day of strangeness. I had my monthly medication check-in with the psychiatrist. We made Mad Men psychiatry jokes and talked about the good parts of being an introvert, and then my worries about my son’s social contentment, which are all mixed up with feelings about my social issues as a kid. It’s waking me up at 1:00 a.m., these worries, despite my constant pep talks to myself: he’s fine, there is nothing wrong with him, there was nothing wrong with you, think of all the support he has that you didn’t, he will get through childhood relatively unscathed, he’s only six, etc. etc. I was clearly fighting back tears when we spoke, which is when she asked me the salient questions. Have I been crying a lot lately? (Kind of, but for what feels like good reasons.) Any suicidal thoughts? (Absolutely not.) Usually she asks me what I think we should do with my medication. This time she made the decision to stick with my usual dosage.
There was money stress, figuring out how we were going to pay our property tax and its surprise supplementals, making sure our monthly bills were paid, doing the accounting for the next six months, complete with emergency savings plan.
Then there was the regular Thursday play date with the boy’s good friend, except something is happening to their friendship and I don’t know what to do about it. Actually, I know I can’t do anything about it. I can see what was once close fading in front of me and again my insides stir up, they tighten. It’s like I have tangled wires in my gut. They fight about everything, these two opinionated personalities that want to control the agenda in different ways. I intervene because I have to. I play monster to make them laugh and keep the peace. I want it to be easy, or at least I want to know that when this ends (if this ends) that my boy has someone else he can be comfortable with and I worry again that his social life will never be easy. How can I give him the tools to make it better for himself?
Finally, at dinnertime, with the takeout from Gregoire, my post-5:00 p.m. beer making me groggy, my everything is fine/don’t want to wallow in worry attitude not working very well, I told my son about my first grade best friend and our huge fights, the way I was jealous of her closeness with the neighbor girl, and how it got better as we got older. There was a Halloween tie-in, the story about her Halloween visit to our apartment in fourth grade when my mother followed trick-or-treating with an ill-advised reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders at the Rue Morgue.
Do you have any more stories about Halloween to tell me, he asked. He’s heard them all before, but I told them again with more detail. Halloween 1976, second grade, was where my mother wanted me to wear a mask and I didn’t, because I was dressed up as a Colonial girl and Colonial girls didn’t wear masks. She refused to let me trick-or-treat without one, so I sat at home and watched the kids in their costumes, my chest tight and the streaks of dried tears still on my unmasked face (Nana was very stressed back then, the explanation always goes, and it is absolutely true). Halloween 1980, sixth grade, was where my best friend and I wandered along a windy unlit country road to get to another neighborhood and I worried about deer stampeding when I should have worried more about being hit by a car.
I don’t know how it happened, but the boy started getting teary and then I did, too, and when I walked over to hug him, I knocked my knee into his chair in a very painful way. After that, I put on pajamas and took to my bed. My husband kindly did the rest of the evening routine while I read magazines and stared at my computer.
And at 1:00 a.m., the worries spilled out again. They woke me up with their relentless whining. I concentrated on my breathing. I let thoughts of the closeness of others comfort me, and, eventually, I fell back asleep.
Image: The boy this summer.
Risky business
This is not the time to worry about how you look, about the sags and the stretch marks and the jagged lines. This is not the time to insist that the other does the same. Just stand there, vulnerable, naked, open to whatever happens next. Yeah, you try it, lady, you tell me with a roll of the eyes. You’re right, you’re right. I don’t know if I could do it either.
There are certain kinds of risk-taking that are appropriate, times when you make the leap off the cliff knowing that the drop off isn’t far or that there is a soft surface waiting to envelop you below. There are ways to game this, though the word game implies a calculated process. There are ways to remember that risking connection doesn’t mean risking your soul, baring yourself before the fully clothed. There are ways to practice it, too, ways to take little steps towards emotional freedom.
I’ve been reading lots of self-help books, oh so many, not so much on the cheesy side of things, but still, they are self-help books. The latest is about relationships when one of the partners has been through childhood trauma. Not PTSD trauma, necessarily, but, well, trauma. It’s taken me a long time to think of myself as someone who was traumatized by parts of my childhood, but now I, umm, own it. Not in a self-pitying way, but in a “yep, that was pretty bad” kind of way.
Not surprisingly, as someone who was abandoned at times, neglected and left to deal with overwhelming circumstances on my own as a child, as someone who was specifically told how bad I was and then saw how the people around me acted to prove it, well, getting naked (metaphorically) isn’t so easy. Oh, sure, it's become easier, especially in my writing. And I was reassured to read that traumatized people who can tell coherent stories about their childhoods tend not to pass the buck on to their own children, though I know I still have a ways to go there. It’s the closeness, the skin to skin stuff, that has me flummoxed, that has my heart pounding in the middle of the night, that wakes me up at 3:00 a.m. with soothing dreams of escape, of sweet sweet aloneness.
My childhood was a set up that made any deeply intimate situation feel like soul risk. It was also a set up that led to poor boundaries, to giving myself over to those who retreat, the constant pursuit of approval. I understand it more now, I do, and I think I am on a different path, but it’s still so fucking hard. To stay in the moment, to stay in my head, to read these reactions of panic as vestiges from long ago. What you think about me says less about me than it does about you, and your reactions come from your own place of darkness. It's not me, it's not me, and what is me I see with clarity now, with the distance of someone who lived those things long ago. Or I am slowly slowly getting there, on the path to freedom of a sort.
From the prompt "Time out."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Gaellery.
The reliving
Adults often look at children with envy, think back to an era when time extended before us, when summers lasted forever and we had the luxury of being bored, of being full up on sleep. Children don't know about bills or about deadlines or about existential angst. We imagine their internal lives, the little pangs and sadnesses, but we believe they haven't been in the world long enough to experience the full terror of it. Covered over with experience, with joys and disappointments and fashion changes, adults see childhood as a time apart from the difficulties of life, a time before, a time you'd better enjoy because, well, it gets worse. The responsibilities accrue and time slips away and let them dream because we allow it, that brief period in life when anything is possible. Fools.
But: Adults also drag children along according to our foibles and whims and fucked up agendas. We take our childhoods out on our children or on other peoples’ children, usually unconsciously, sometimes not. Some adults repeat the cycle, in power this time, powerful and powerless all at once, the larger body lording over the smaller one. We forget how children are stuck with us, little people with no control over where we take them or what we do to them, primed to love us, primed to blame themselves for our bad behavior. The adult-child relationship is one we should take seriously and respect: adults should always try to remember what it was like to be little, to be dependent, while still holding our adult role of boundary enforcer, teacher, protector, and encourager.
A few weeks ago, in a dinner conversation sparked by our son’s requests for stories from "when you were a kid," I gave him a sixth grade excerpt. Our school had a closed circuited TV system and a video camera and I was part of a team that put on an occasional news show. Sometimes we played a morning song over the P.A. The joke – the joke – was that one morning we would put on "Hell is For Children" by Pat Benatar. Because at 11, we weren’t children, right?
By the time I was eleven, I had moved to at least eight different apartments and houses. I had attended four elementary schools. Mostly I lived with my mother, sometimes with my grandparents. My mother and I spent one brief stretch with a boyfriend who was an abusive drunk. My father, who was becoming a more frequent presence, had been on and off the scene for most of my life. At nine, I had watched my grandmother, the most stable person in my life, die in front of me as I panicked and called for an ambulance.
We played "Hell is For Children" and that last year in elementary school was the year I carried around pills and threatened suicide and got a secret racy card from my grandfather and dragged my ouija board everywhere. Maybe it was suppressed grief for my grandmother or maybe it was the accumulation of sadness. I wish that I had been capable of getting real help or that someone had stepped in, but who knew and who cared enough to suss out the details of my depressed state, to protect me?
I want to save children, to scoop them up from bad circumstance, to provide a stable and sympathetic presence, to give them the tools to survive. I think of Holden Caulfield’s image, him in a field of rye stopping children before they fall off the cliff. I get it. I want to be a catcher in the rye, staving off the premature ending of innocence.
This isn’t possible. I know. But I think there will be something I can do, someday, to ameliorate the pain children feel from being dragged into the adult world too early. This is not your doing, I would tell them, not your fault. And I would give them tools to recover, to let them rediscover their beauty, their wholeness, something to make them better adults someday. Adults who haven't forgotten what it was like to be helpless.
Image: Christmas 1980. My soon-to-be stepfather, grandfather, and me. I've used this photo before, but it seems very appropriate for this post. Because I look so ... comfortable.
Up against your will
Less than five hours of fitful sleep, one too many Widmer Hefeweizens at the Echo and the Bunnymen show last night, the usual predawn wake-up after a week of bad nights and early mornings: I am tired.
Two years ago my husband and I went to another Echo concert, the Ocean Rain tour, and I spent the first three songs of it sobbing in my seat, bathed in the sounds that accompanied my abandoned adolescence. Ocean Rain came out in 1984. It was the soundtrack for the long lonely time when I lived almost on my own, the years of isolation and pregnancy and death and the relentless sameness of life afterwards. The music tugged the emotions out of me. Not so much at last night's show. Until the encore. "The Killing Moon" killed me and there I was sobbing and sobbing on my husband’s shoulder, crying like I’ve been crying a lot anyway these days.
Before the Killing Moon tears, I cried in the lobby. Before the tears in the lobby, I went up to get yet another beer and then stood alone, back against the wall, until my husband came to find me. We’re stirring up a lot of stuff right now, both together and on our own, and it’s good, it’s all good, but I am one with these feelings that I used to keep at bay by focusing on the stories, their origins. It’s not the why that is so important now, it’s the is-ness of the feelings and sometimes I can’t believe the depth of them. These are just feelings. They won’t drag me down or threaten my very being or toss me off the edge, but for a while last night I had the image of my body flipping over and over again after a leap off a cliff.
There was no bottom to hit, it was just the fall and the flip. My old-fashioned dress swirled around me. I looked like I was twelve years old. My body turned like a pinwheel in the wind and I fell. I fell. The image wasn’t soothing and it wasn’t disturbing. It was representative.
We’re in the middle of it now, me and him, we won’t give up until our psyches are shining, clean, clear, the emotions floating out of us like words, meaningful, changeable, whole, complete. It’s a long journey, the end is murky. I’m grateful for my tendency to worry at relationships like a dog gnawing at a bone. I’m grateful for my husband's presence, too, for the fact that he is there with me, listening, trying, supportive.
So I float, I flip, my tears stream. I stand alone with my back against the wall. I feel the threat of love’s promise to always be there when such a thing is impossible.
From the prompt "I won't give it up."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I edited this -- a tired brain is a slow one and adds unnecessary words. Took the extra words out, made the language clearer, and there you go.
Image by James Dawson.
A loaded term
I had a dream about them last night, about visiting New Jersey. We arrived in the early morning and my stepmother offered us wine from the half-empty bottle we had brought with us. I accepted and then felt embarrassed to be drinking before the sun came up and made excuses, asked for coffee. Their house was huge, more huge than in real life, with a mezzanine balcony that hung over the kitchen. It had a public bathroom and a group of school kids was visiting (dreams and their strange shifts of time, place, perspective) and I watched the kids swing from one part of a low-hanging chandelier to another as I yelled for them to stop.
Before that, I cried in the kitchen, apologizing for my sadness while hoping my stepmother, who was prepping food, would notice and ask me more. She had cut and colored her hair, was honey-blonde now with eyes to match. They were cold, nothing reflected back. What had happened over the last year to change her very being?
But back to the children who didn’t listen to me, who dangled and laughed and moved with supple limbs. I wanted to protect them. I want to protect my son. I want to go back and retroactively protect myself, an impossible task.
I have a family of my own now, a triad, a threatening triad, with the man present for the child and me off in the corner, remembering, remembering. Kindness leaves and men do too, even the women walk off eventually. The child grows up, the cats die, no one lives forever, and the memories become sweeter and more aching than the reality. I don’t fight it anymore, I am one with it, noticing the feelings, giving them their due, knowing that I survived by a certain sort of soul detachment, connected at the head, connected by jokes and fights, by tossed wine glasses and shouts. Love was worry, worry that the object would go up in a poof of smoke, would leave for a pack of cigarettes and never return.
And yet I cling to the idea of magic, to the man returning from the long journey, returning for me. There is no room for anybody else. I am a valuable object. It works for a while, his love holds me together. Time, proximity, life: they weaken the bond. Eventually I look for another to play the chase and catch game.
From the prompt "Family," a word laden with meaning for most of us. Edited for clarity and grammatical correctness and then edited again. Too loaded of a topic.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.I spent some extra time on this one. It's still raw and unstudied and I don't know how I feel about it.
Image: Me and my mother at my grandparent's house, sometime in the late 70s
Men, liquor, punk and pregnancy
Longtime readers have heard it all before. First I shared it, then I shaped it. Now I continually reinterpret, run my fingers over the words, trace the abandonment, part of the story that led me to where I am now. I've gone from openness to control to anger twice removed.
My fabulous writing group met on Monday night. I finally passed Reconciliation on to them, the story of the end of Kevin's life, how we supposedly reconciled through his long last hospitalization. Kevin was my mother's boyfriend from 1984 until his death in 2002. He was a mixed bag, more rotten than good, and his presence in my life led to the troubles, continued and expanded my narrative of never-good enough, of self-blame, the dance of convincing and wheedling, of proving my worth to the unworthy and congenitally reluctant.
I passed the story on to the group, but I didn't want to go there. Life has been emotional enough lately without retracing the days of ventilators and morphine. But there I sat with these wonderful supportive women, who had kind words and useful feedback, including the desire to hear more of my story with Kevin, to have the payoff, to understand why reconciliation was required in the first place and what led to it in the end.
I'm thinking. I'm thinking. It's complicated, of course. Unfortunately, the upshot of what I am thinking is that there was no reconciliation. What went on for those six and half months of Kevin's final hospitalization, of all those hours I spent next to him in the hospital, was another one of my attempts at healing, at proving how good I was, at trying to remake the old story in a different way. The guy was a bastard who didn't deserve my goodness, but I was -- and remain -- too fucking kind to have treated him any other way. It's the same kind of empathy that keeps me from being able to direct too much anger at my mother (with her own troubles) or at a person who recently did me wrong, who hasn't manned up and never will (poor kid: it's hard to be strong when you're an emotional mess).
I started this post yesterday, kept on typing and erasing with the usual worries about pulling up the past on a thick narrative rope. I don't write this to keep the past alive, I write it to interpret it and my interpretation keeps changing. Conveying the depth of my abandonment -- my abandonment "issues," as cliched as they are, as typical, as shared with the masses -- without resorting to maudlin description is almost impossible and yet I am compelled to write about it, to share it, to neutralize it.
We could take my history with Kevin scene by scene, ugly fight by nasty canard, that first dinner where Kevin tore into 14-year-old me for being quiet and sullen followed by my mother having dinner at his house every night followed by her telling me that Kevin said I was evil and she agreed followed by my move to the Little House, the stillbirth, the continued life in bad circumstances. I could add in the confusing bits: his sit down with me and my boyfriend D after the pregnancy, lecturing D about our relationship "because her father isn't doing it;" his confidence in my intellectual abilities and advice to get a library degree; his funny stories that left the impression of uproarious laughter long after the plots were forgotten.
My child's mind fit the pieces together, they already were set in place, but the neglect of my teen years cemented the image: I was the catalyst for the bad things that happened to me. I caused it all. I was a bad person. I deserved what I got. I was a liar and a cheat, irresponsible and evil, too quiet or not quiet enough. Because of the evil within me, the evil I spread with my bad words and dark looks, I was left behind. I was to blame for my own neglect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the history. I know it's bullshit. And I know that writing it out in such bald language doesn't really help. It does get me angry, which isn't such a bad thing -- though the anger remains directionless and sometimes turns on me. Lately, with the help of my therapist, I've been feeling the feelings -- the sadness, the need that once had no end, the anger -- with the understanding that they won't destroy me. That they are totally appropriate. It's the only way I know to heal at this point, letting them out in fits and starts when they need it, giving them a voice, that and being brave, knowing I'm not a child anymore.
It's less about the history now, it's about the effect, the acceptance, the march forward. The feelings are with me in the room, they know why I've called them here, and we're going to hash it out together. We will gut and rebuild my psyche without looking back.
Enough about this. You were expecting stories about men (the gropings), liquor (siphoned gin leaking out of jars on the bus from Wilmington to Newark), punk (fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck her fucking brat), and pregnancy (pushing out silence). But I'm sure you have some of your own stories of love and the bottle and the music that saved you, that kept you from smashing something, that tapped into your anger before your head exploded.
I will leave you with a bit of punk, Riot by the Dead Kennedys, something I listened to on my headphones as I walked through the Wilmington night, lit cigarette resting between my fingers. I was a little unsteadily from the gin, from the vodka, from the amaretto, but I kept on going, turned the anger in on itself, gave myself another scene for future narrative.
Image: Legs, Little House, 1985ish, one of three in the "Legs" series, probably taken when I was up late and liquored, waiting for a man.
Title comes from a comment on my essay from the writers' group. I tacked on the last word.
Not talking about sex
This was the question a relatively new acquaintance – close enough to care, not close enough to get it – asked me a few months ago. It was a legitimate question. I knew why I started to write about my past: to bring it out into the open, to deal with it, to have other witnesses to what feels more and more shadowy but still powerful in long-term effect. Writing about it was also a way to focus on a time when I really experienced things, was me, pure and whole and freshly wounded. It had become a way to stay trapped, too, or maybe to suspend time, or a way to tap into the days of hidden blood and bruises.
So I do it less now, am focusing on the present and the future. I have plans that I am slowly implementing to live a more complete, less hidden life in the now.
Still. The past lives. It affects the way I can be close to other people, it has changed the way I experience joy. My memories of loss, abuse, and neglect keep me too safe in some respects and make me foolhardy in ways that surprise me.
Some things are hard to talk about and even harder to write about. And yet I often write about things here that I have a difficult time telling the people closest to me. I’m not sure if writing about it in public is brave or stupid or the ultimate in too much information.
Let’s talk about sex, shall we? Or let’s not. It’s not something I’m used to talking about in all its joy or its risk. My early experiences with sex were ones of acquiescence, or ignored pain, or noncommunication. For many years, I’ve suspected that the time my mother and I lived with John, the short time with that alcoholic abusive man who made three-year-old me stand at the table regularly for meals, with whom I was home alone in the middle of the night when my mother was on her paper route, the man who showed up at my daycare one morning after it was all over and took me on a tense shopping trip – that something happened with him that was totally inappropriate.
But I didn't -- and still don't -- know.
I recently had an experience that brought up memories of John, of me being small, too small, a little girl, the pressure of a large body against the slip of mine, the forcefulness, the connection of pleasure with a sort of submissiveness. The experience itself wasn’t bad. It was even healing, at least on some levels. But when it was over, I had John in mind. I couldn’t figure out why, exactly, until my body reminded me.
The topic of what happened to me when we lived with John is one I have not wanted to examine in too much detail, in part because of its shadowy nature. When analyzing my attitudes on sex, I assumed that my relationship with it, which has gone from adolescent passivity to long-ago barroom pickups to occasional abstinence in monogamy, had a bad beginning, a foundation of mistrust and quiet. My first experience at fourteen, those nights of waiting alone in the Little House, the craziness that was my life then, imprinted me in an idiosyncratic, self-protective way. I see now, however, that I have to confront both my early adolescent sexual experiences and whatever may have happened before then more directly. Not here (some readers breathe a sigh of relief; others a sigh of disappointment), but in my personal therapy and in my life.
To say this is terrifying is an understatement. I’m afraid of the feelings that I will uncover. I’m afraid of the obligations that exploring them will bring. My first impulse is to imagine joining some sort of celibate community where I never risk being reminded of my total helplessness again, never risk feeling like my soul is being sucked into nothingness by the physical act of being close. But my body, my mind, and my heart are uniting to bring the past to light. I can no longer ignore it.
Related posts: Beautiful simplicity, The factoid with legs, "I've Always Been Clean."
I write this stuff and wonder how it will fit into a future job search (hello, potential employer!) and I'm still working on the new blog (how does hitting parked cars sound as a title?).
Wish it were fiction
LETTER ONE, NOVEMBER 1984
Excerpts from a letter that is (unintentionally) funny and tragic. It fleshes out the character of the teenaged me. The barely fifteen-year-old me. When I write of poetry below, I really mean: crap. Because that's what we wrote. Really really bad "poetry," though it was more like horrible lyrics to terrible songs. I can still quote some of these "poems" verbatim, however, which may attest to their, umm, powerful nature.
I've deleted the long dull paragraphs about beer and waiting for the person I was "dating" at the time to call me.
What strikes me the most about this letter is that I was just a kid. Just a kid, involved in things way over my head, with no one watching over me.
Six months after I wrote this letter, part of it had come true.
COMEDY
Maureen,
Hi! I worked with your poem, and mine. I think I helped with yours, (Sorry if I changed too much.), but mine might need some editing from you. Your poem sounds better without that part about his mama dressing him funny. Also, the part about "All your movements are hot and runny" -- YUCK-E-POO!!! I dunno, that just gives me this really gross vision. What I don't like about my poem is mostly the part about rabbits, pelicans, and pelibits. Oh well. I should be down to the beach in a couple of weeks, so we can work on them then.
TRAGICOMEDY
"The rabbit died" -- I swear to God, you should go into school and start screaming "Oh no -- Jennifer's in so much trouble -- THE RABBIT DIED!!!!!!!" Can you imagine the looks on some of the peoples' faces???- Especially people who know about this summer. You should try it and see what happens. Make them believe it, just like how you told CN I was killed in a car crash. It would be a veritable laff riot. (Don't ask- it's just one of my unusual sayings). Or, even better, I could write you a letter:
Dear Maureen,
I've got some really horrible news. The rabbit died. That's right, Maureen. I'm pregnant. We're still trying to figure out the father: Is it D, J, B, the Hot-Dog-Man, or my latest, R? Oh Maureen, you've gotta help me!!!!!! My abortion is scheduled for November 6-please come to Wilmington to help me through the operation.
Your pal and bestest buddy,
JLC
When you think about it, that's not so funny. I could easily be writing you a letter like that. God, that's scary!!! One thing I know I don't want to be and that's pregnant!!! Never, ever wish that on me, 'cuz I just might kill myself if that happened. (Geez, that would make it two sins!!!) Let's get off this morbid subject!!!
THE LONG SIGN-OFF
Your pro-abortion, pro-premarital (and teen) sex, pro-birth control, pro-de-manhoodizing for D and Y, great pal and BESTEST BUDDY,
JLC
LETTER TWO, AUGUST 1985
I wrote this letter sometime after the night we stole my grandfather's car, the night that ended our friendship. The date on it -- 4 August 1985 -- surprised me, since I had assumed the auto theft was in spring. Most of 1984-87 is a murky blur for me, though.
I probably wrote this assuming that Maureen's mother would read it. I addressed it to Bobohead #2, with my return address going to Bobohead #1.
I'd call most of this tragedy.
Maureen,
Hello. I thought I'd write a letter, since I have this distinct feeling that your mother would hang up the phone if I tried to call.
Why in the hell did you wait until this morning to tell her the fantastic news? She must have really bitten your head off! You know, she told Pop-pop that he should have you arrested. :-) I think she's overreacting just a tad. The woman must really hate me. I don't know. Right now, I am in a state of shock. At least I've stopped crying. (Kind of. Your mother triggered my tear ducts all over again.)
Hoh gee. Life's a bitch and then you die. Oh, your mother told me not to tell you this, but she hasn't exactly done me any favors lately and I really can't do a thing about what she thinks about me anymore, so I'm going to tell you after I finish this incredibly long sentence. She asked me if we used illegal drugs -- such as pot -- down here. I like your mom, but geez, how can you live with her? I'd go nuts within a week. Then again, I'd go nuts with any parental authority (or over-protectiveness). Oh well. I guess I've made a permanent enemy.
I know this letter is pretty flip (look it up if ya don't know what I mean), but I really feel guilty about the whole thing. I mean it's not just "Awww shucks, we got caught! Better be careful next time" (as if we'll ever see each other again for the rest of our natural lives). But I really regret it. I hate hurting people. And your mother really made me feel like scum of the earth. I mean, I already feel that way! Seriously, Maureen, do you feel in the least bit guilty?
Oh -- there's another tape of yours down here. I'll probably mail it to you or drop it off sometime (as you dodge the bullets from your mother).
You know, I think each other's parents think that the other corrupted the other. Huh? That made no sense! What I mean is that your mother thinks I'm a bad influence on you, and Pop-pop thinks you're a bad influence on me. I think we're a bad influence on each other. Like when we get together, we ignore all the rules. Oh well. I wish I could shut up about the whole stupid thing!!!
In fact I guess I'll finish this letter. Write back! I'll probably call you tomorrow anyway. BYE!
Your bestest, stupidest, scum of the earthiest, jerkiest, not to mention sexiest (ha ha ha) BUDDY!!!
Jennifer
These letters are breaking my heart.
The big reveal
The Nana my son knows is a patient and kind 60-year-old. This was not the mother I grew up with. It usually works this way, thank goodness. Grandparents do not often revisit their parenting crimes on their grandchildren. The stakes are lower. The grandparents are older. They’ve let go a bit.
Still. I have the stories. When I tell them, I do it with as little anger as possible, though sometimes they come out in a you-have-no-idea-how-lucky-you-are-kid mode and afterwards I feel cheap, like I’ve used my history the wrong way. Not surprisingly, given my dinner table memories, these conversations come up most often at mealtimes, treacherous territory for me. You are unhappy with the food I prepare: well, when I was a kid, mealtimes were horrible. First we lived with a guy who made me stand at the table. Later I had a stepfather who berated me or simply refused to talk until I left the table. Then Kevin came along and my mother stopped eating with me altogether, left me food on a plate while she went down the street to his house. We’re not even getting into the spinach soufflés, the bitter mugs of hot carob, the flattened, honey-sweetened cookies, the sugarless world my mother left behind when Kevin appeared. No, we’re not talking about food. We’re talking about family and how children learn to feel comfortable in the world.
Two nights ago, after we had successfully and calmly pushed through a dinner of whiny petulance, the boy and I started talking about fights. For him, fights are an ugly thing, to be avoided. Sure. I understand this, especially because fights with angry grownups can be frightening to the little guy. But, as I explained, fights are often necessary and there are ways of fighting that are more productive than others. People have disagreements. We get angry because we are human, because we can’t always get what we want, but if we learn to fight productively, we . . . get what we need? Well, not exactly. But there are definitely ways to disagree that are more functional than others.
At some point in this discussion, I got teary, because I remembered the childhood fights with my mother. They were frightening. Nasty. My mother threw food, glasses, a honey jar. I threw things back. We were cruel. There were no apologies when things calmed down. I’m glad not to remember too many specific details about those fights, so long ago, though I remember their later incarnations, the bad years when I was in Ohio and my mother was under great stress. Our phone conversations (always when I was at work) were so nasty that I would have to go to the ladies room afterwards to press away the tears and splash water on my face. It took me years (and a patient husband) to learn how to fight calmly, to try and trace my anger back to the source and understand that my point of view wasn’t the only one, that I didn't have to rip into someone when I was angry.
I told the kid about some of those early days, about how scary Nana was, because I can’t imagine hiding it. I wanted him to know parts of my story, in addition to explaining why I occasionally lose it, why the old ways return to me, though they return less and less. We talked about how Nana is a different person now. The woman he sees in pictures, with the long, straight seventies hair and bellbottoms, or in those wedding photos where she and my dad, nineteen and eighteen, look like embryonic versions of themselves, doesn’t exist anymore.
As he gets older, I’ll have to deal with the other stuff, too, the more complex issues of my later childhood. I recently found myself thinking that I didn’t matter as a parent, that whether I was here or someplace else would make no difference to him. The source of this thought is unclear. He and his dad have a wonderful, playful relationship that I am not totally a part of, but I understand that. What really struck me as I analyzed the thought was that at some point both of my parents must have been operating under the (unacknowledged) assumption that they did not matter to me.
They were wrong.
The idea that I would think the same thing about my own importance to my son was frightening, for what it says about my current state of mind and for what it would make me capable of. Clearly I have more to work out, for his sake and for mine.
So I'll keep on writing, put "find a new therapist" on my to-do list, and remind myself that I am important, in small and big ways, in my son's life. I'll keep on telling him the truth about my life, when it seems appropriate, while letting him know that people change and grow, that nothing is static.
I've been a writing fiend. Why? I don't know. I can't help myself. If you are still reading this blog, thank you. If you've been reading for a long time, then some of this may be familiar, a return to deep themes.
Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose
It’s a sweet manufactured memory, though when I hear the songs I feel an ache, a knowledge that it happened. I have no recollection of my father's early presence. I don't even remember my parents' marriage. From the way my mother tells it, that's probably a good thing. My father experienced one of his first major depressive episodes shortly after I was born and the picture she paints of the situation isn't an attractive one. From her description of the time, I imagine a small, dusty apartment. The blinds are down, the floor and coffee table are junked with papers and books, the cats have been using the plant pots as litter boxes. My father lies on the couch, motionless, a sad lump. In the galley kitchen, Mom, still in her work minidress, scours the grease off a pan and grumbles to herself.
It wasn't as if either of them knew what was going on, what the gulf between them was about. It just was and it went beyond the relationship disillusionment that often comes with having a baby.
My father tells me that they were in love, and the concept is foreign to me, almost subversive. Love? I (silently) refused to believe it. All I remember is the aftermath, and part of that aftermath was my father’s sudden absence, his early unreliability, his later cluelessness. I know what my mother went through and what I went through with her and some of those early years after their divorce were bad. Where was he?
It was almost easier for me to think I came from indifference or from teenage hormones and a lack of birth control than from love. The idea that I was the product of two people who loved each other made the bad years worse somehow, unsettling, just like my recent revelation that those bad years didn’t have to happen. Better that I take the responsibility, say that I deserved the bad, that it was under my control, my fault. My conception set it into motion. At least that's how I felt initially: why give in to love, to my own blamelessness? It opens up a whole new category of pain.
Maybe this is why, when I picture my father holding me, singing softly in the fading daylight, I often start to cry. It was the closest we’ve ever been and I don’t remember it and I don’t want to believe it. He was there. The world was fresh. Then he left. It was right before everything got fucked up.
The scene in the rocking chair, our eyes meeting until mine slowly closed in sleep, feels theoretical. Still, I can picture it. But that dusty apartment, my parents’ marriage falling apart? I can’t even imagine myself into it, the toddling towhead stomping across the floor or sleeping in a crib like the little angel I apparently was. It is incongruous enough to imagine my parents living together, let alone living together with me. The three of us as a unit? It isn't a fantasy I indulge in. I used to think this was because I was a realist who lived without (much) regret, but now I know it is because the thought of it, the idea that we were once a family, that I came from love, actually hurts. I have never wished my parents back together. It wouldn't work. They are totally incompatible. But that feeling . . .
When my son was a baby, I focused only on him, the feeding, the sleeping or not-sleeping, the always being there. It was all-encompassing. We swayed to a mellow soundtrack -- early k.d. lang, Bill Withers, Elizabeth Mitchell. In the black night, the muddy twilight, the too-early dawn, when he was awake and should have been sleeping, I soothed him with songs. Some of them I made up on the fly, personalized for him. I also sang other peoples' songs, ones that sounded beautiful but with dark lyrics. They reflected my mindset at the time, so sleep- and self-deprived and scared. I may be the only mother in the world who sang The Old Main Drag by the Pogues to her infant, but it's a pretty tune with the weight of the world behind it. And though the song was dark and some of those early times were, too, I never left my son. He has always known that I love him no matter what.
Of course, my father loves me, too. I’ve never doubted that, not on a rational level. But those early, iffy years when he was absent, struggling with depression and learning how to be a grown up, the years when I was in desperate need of stability and safety and, later, my desolate adolescence, have always been between us. My anger became part of the barrier, prickly and electric, older than words. Lately, however, things have been changing. He makes a point of calling more often. I make a point of calling him back. We talk like family. The barrier is disappearing, my feelings softening.
I see his sadness, feel his need for connection, the pain of the distance between us. I think about the good times, the steady years. They always involved music. Our weekends together came with a soundtrack.
He turns sixty this month and I want to write for him, something about music and memory. Something about songs, for my father, about how they connect us. But first I wade through the ambiguity. I press gently on the painful places, dim the light to obscure our weaknesses. I keep on moving, my eyes closed. Love is like that, blind and brave and senseless.
Image: Dad, Mom, & me, Easter 1971. I've used this image before, one of two I have of me with my parents (not counting my college graduation pictures).
Thanks to Lydia, for planting the seeds for this post.
Oh, baby
Sure, you may see a sweet little bundle of innocence, quiet for once (thank god), but what I see is a life-changer, a preverbal beast that will wake you up every two hours for the next two and a half years, that will still be coming into your bed five years later, tossing and turning with that cough that refuses to go away. Between his hacks and the exploring feet (depending on his position, thrust between your thighs, wedged into the small of your back, playing against the back of your neck) and that damn cat, you’ll never get a full night’s sleep again.
Whenever I hear that someone is having their first baby, Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N’Roses pops into my head. This is especially true for the older parents, the ones who have spent a decade or two sleeping in and going out to dinner whenever they want. Having a baby changes things and at first the change may not be so welcome. Here is this tiny dependent creature, so sweet (truly), who can’t really tell you what he or she wants yet demands you take care of all of his needs. “Demands:” it isn’t a fair word at all. Babies need us and sometimes that can be totally overwhelming, especially when you don’t get more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep for years and when you feel like you have no idea what you are doing.
Then there’s the way a baby can slam you into your past, the past that may be present anyway. When my son was born a little over five years ago, we lived on the East Coast, close to my mother and a four hour drive from my father. We had naive (and perhaps unfair) hopes that my mother would help with the baby. At the time, her life was a bit chaotic, as it was for most of my childhood. She was entangled in an unhealthy relationship with someone who had a serious substance abuse problem. This person – let's call him Ricky, the addict with the little boy's name – had access to her car even though he was unlicensed. He brought strange characters into her house. He drove her around town on scrap metal hunts, adventures in Baltimore's underbelly, and borrowed money from her when his ran out. The night I went into labor, he had "borrowed" her car. Our plans for her to help that first week were scrapped as she tried to locate her car and dealt with other Ricky-related problems.
Being abandoned by my mother at a critical moment was a familiar feeling. Having a tiny being that depended on me when I felt so incompetent and unworthy didn't help. The switch from a life of controlling my own time and being out in the world independently to being on baby time and hardly ever leaving his side was a difficult one. Meanwhile, the boy didn’t sleep in general or at all without a warm presence beside him in the bed. My mother problems, my “abandonment issues” were kicking me in the ass. Welcome to the jungle . . .
We adjust. We find our way as parents. Still, I can’t look at a picture of a baby without remembering my son's first year and wishing I could do it all over again with a clear mind, letting the baby be a baby and me be a mother, competent and necessary.
The photo was the prompt. Jane Underwood of the Writing Salon is the photographer.
Back to the old house
The house meant safety and comfort. It was predictable, constant, the place my mother and I returned to when life was falling apart, where my grandmother would take care of me when my mother was working or needed the time.
Then, when I was nine years old, my grandmother died. She collapsed in a chair in the kitchen while I stood watching. With my grandmother unconscious and my grandfather unable to use the phone, it was up to me to call the ambulance. My grandfather and I waited for the Volunteer Fire Department, a long, horrible wait. We watched the men struggle to lift her substantial body onto the stretcher. Would things have been different, I wondered, if I had gotten the cat off the chair sooner, if had understood my grandmother's gasps and flapping arms more quickly?
Sometime between the card games (solitaire, spit, go fish), the many phone calls to friends and relatives, the shopping trip for a burial dress, blue just like she'd wanted, and the wake where an uncle pulled out a cousin's loose tooth, the family decided that my mother and I would move in with my grandfather. In less than a month, we were out of our one-bedroom student housing apartment and back in the house at Hollywood Beach, my unemployed future stepfather along for the ride.
My grandfather’s house was cigarette smoke and chemicals, sugar and coffee, sawdust and mildew. It was porn magazines next to the candy in a cabinet in my grandfather’s room. It was my stepfather’s workout den in the unheated guest cottage we called the Little House. It was séances and Ouija boards, the yearning for a sign that my grandmother was still watching over me. Sometimes it was fights around the dinner table, arguments over food or housecleaning. It was nights in tight spaces, me in the sleeping bag under the bedcovers, in the attic with the pull-down steps, on the inflatable raft under the picnic table. It was sadness and anger and grief, the knowledge that I was on my own.
They sold the Hollywood Beach house in 1990, but I still visit it in my dreams. It stands for itself, it stands for part of me. The dreams used to be yearning, worried, guilty. I forget to take care of my (dead) grandfather. My mother and I bury body parts in the front yard. My uncle and aunt show up and I hide from them. Then the dreams changed, got a little better. My grandfather and I coexist in the house. We have a companionable sit at the dining room table. I leave before my aunt and uncle arrive. Interestingly, the Little House is never featured in these dreams, despite its importance in my own personal history.
Last Thursday night, I had another house dream. It was a beautiful summer day and various neighbors were busy with yard work or socializing. I felt comfortable, a part of things, visible and connected. My mother and I were discussing the renovation and eventual sale of the house, reminiscing about good times. I worried that the foundation would need to be redone, but she thought it was sound. My aunt and uncle arrived and went to work moving furniture from the house out to the lawn. Thinking this was a yard sale, a large crowd gathered in the grass and started dickering over the furniture. I yelled that it wasn't a sale, just the preparation for renovation. Suddenly I was happy about it, the prospect for an improved house, the same house but better, remade. Maybe we didn't have to sell it. Maybe we could add another floor, tear out the mildewey carpet, put up drywall where 70s embossed paneling had been, and come back to this house to live. It could be itself, a summation of memory and experience, and it could be something new at the same time.
What to make of it? The house is me, I am the house. The house is what it was, a place where things happened and people died, a holding place for my memories, a symbol of false security. My childhood was difficult, full of moves, losses, and bad men. Once my grandmother died, I had no adult advocate, and so I constructed a framework for myself, one where I made sure to rely on no one for my emotional needs, where I took care of my physical needs on my own as soon as I was able. I've let go of some of this. I have friends, a husband, good relationships with my parents. But I am still self-sufficient to a fault and quick to mistrust others. The framework gets in the way. It feels as much a part of me as my bone and muscle, organic and necessary to my existence. But perhaps I can work around it, make it into something new. The old house needs renovating. The foundation is sound. I'm ready.
And I'm not nearly as melancholy about it as Morrissey:
Image: The old house, undergoing renovation a year and a half ago. The Little House is to the left, obscured by the digger.
Hidden in plain sight
Visiting the snow, the long drive, the feeling of dampened jeans and chilled hands, this is what he thinks about as he hides in the bushes by his elementary school. His mother has dropped him off early for afternoon kindergarten and he doesn't know any of the other children. He is scared. He waits for the bell.
Maryland's Eastern Shore, the mid-1970s
Her classmate comes closer. The girl presses her hands against the blacktop, just in case. Her cheeks flush. Slow and deliberate, the boy rounds the corner. Her heart is fluttering. There are wings in her chest, delicate, the feathers fine and white, struggling to lift her up.
“Goose!” he shouts as he taps her barrette. She thrusts herself up, but he is fast, too fast. He makes it back to her place before she does. She feels foolish, ashamed of her performance. Now it is her turn. She will have to go through it all over again.
East Bay, 2010
The boy lines up with the other children to go to the cafeteria. He is fascinated by this room in almost the same way he is fascinated by minotaurs and werewolves. It is big and epic with unknown corners and secret powers. The space is dark, as dark, he imagines, as a torch-lit labyrinth. The other kids, too many, 20, 40, 60 of them, are unpredictable. They ask him questions that he ignores. Their voices echo around the space until they blend together, a constant mumble, nothing to do with him. He concentrates on the small, immediate things, finding a seat, pulling his lunchbox zipper open to get to the confounding containers inside.
There are fans hanging from the ceiling. He carefully counts them out: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8. Eight. He counts again. He thinks about what will happen when someone turns them on. The blades will whir and whir. Their strength will pull him from his seat. They will chop him to a million pieces. He imagines tying his legs into a knot around the table leg or grasping his seat as tight as he can against the pull. He practices his grip. The fans are never on. This both relieves and worries him. He knows he must keep watch.
****
This post is for the quiet children, observant and quick inside their heads, but slow when it comes to speaking, the ones who are overwhelmed by crowds and noise, who are sometimes afraid to tell grownups about their fears. It is for the perfectionist children, too, anxious, wanting everything to be right on the first try, who don't want to be observed while they figure things out. Really, it's for my son, beautiful, smart, and incredibly imaginative, hidden in plain sight.
I want life to be easy for him. I want him to have fun playing games, to feel free and loose when he draws or forms letters. I want him to sail through the crowd, to tell jokes to the classroom just like he does at home. I want him to regale everyone with his stories and silly rhymes and to let go of his anxiety about getting things just right. But those things aren't easy for him. They weren't (and aren't) easy for me or his father.
So. I promise to support him, to not try to make him into something he's not, to gently help him push him through when necessary. Because I was a child once, too. Because I want him to be happy with who he is. And because I know how hard it can be to feel comfortable in the world.
Top image of San Gabriel mountains by danorth1.
Middle image: Me, in kindergarten.
Bottom image: The boy in plain sight, playing with the saber tooth cat sculpture on the UC-Berkeley campus.
All stories based on actual experiences. We did reassure the boy that the fans wouldn't pull him up to ceiling or chop him into a million pieces.
No fun
At least it amuses me to associate the lack of fun in writing it -- the raw, the half-baked, the buried -- with this song, which is relentless and angry in its lack of fun (forgive the Spanish subtitles, but this was the only video I could find with that famous last line: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?").
Even if it isn't fun, it is necessary.
Back to work.
The raw and the cooked
The good news: when I read it, I feel calm. Less ashamed. Still so sorry for the girl I was, for the child I couldn't love, still affected by the time in ways that some future therapist will help me work out. But the actual story reads and feels like something that happened a long time ago to the person I used to be. Her experiences are mine, of course, are a part of me, but they are long ago and I've dealt with them -- to some extent.
The bad news: when I write about it, my writing is still highly controlled and almost immediately edited. I'm so concerned about making it into a coherent story with some sort of transcendent message that it's hard to just write about it freely and with raw (versus over-metaphorized) emotion. At this point, the transcendent message is that I survived, that writing about it and removing the secrecy has been healing. I'm torn between just writing it out and out and out, in private, and coming up with something that opens up the experience by broadening it, writing three separate stories (my grandmother's, my mother's, and mine) with background on accidental teenage pregnancy in the early 1950s, the late 1960s, and the mid-1980s.
This is probably the best way to go about it, to escape from my self-obsession and to broaden the topic. Of course, this requires my mother's consent to tell her story, which I strangely ignored in early drafts, outside of saying that she decided to marry my father. Ideally I would be able to track down her biological mother or at least get the woman's name (she may be dead), which also requires my mother's permission.
Writing it out and expanding it aren't mutually exclusive. I can write something raw and loose that can be tightened up later and also write about my mother and grandmother's experiences and the experiences of the many, many others who have been in our position. Maybe I can finally turn this into something worth reading. Something that makes it more than just tragic.
Image: Me at fifteen in my grandfather's front yard, summer 1985.
Breaking the chain
In the midst of our trip to New Jersey to visit my father and stepmother (the long flights, the Christmas presents, the one-sided conversations), I realized that I was no longer angry with them. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, a kind of lightness or a shifting of a burden. Of course, this new feeling didn’t save me from the usual visit hangover, a subtle thwack to my equilibrium. My emotions always need time to settle after these visits, though I've gotten better at recognizing that over the years.
It is possible to let go of anger without shedding sadness and guilt and that's where I am today, a little sad and perpetually guilty, replaying conversations from the trip and wondering what to make of them, how to fit them into my new vantage. My stepmother told a story of a breakfast in Bryn Mawr when I was nine or so, a scene at the diner with gleaming chrome and murals of 1940s college scenes on the walls. Apparently I had cut into my waffle with too much force and my plate flew onto the floor. As it shattered, so I did I, started to cry while they tried to comfort me. I didn't remember a thing about it, but I do remember being constantly on edge during my visits with my father, on alert, my guard up. It took very little to shake up my practiced calm.
So what can you do? For the first nine years of my life, my father wasn’t always reliable. He was intermittently present (despite some rosy memories on my stepmother’s part; she’s an optimist and my father’s protector and she wasn't around then anyway). His child support payments were regular, his love was constant, though often from a distance. Everything else shifted around. And then, in adolescence, he failed me. They failed me. How can you tell someone that they can’t make up for the first nine years? Or that maybe they aren’t as safe as they think they are?
You don’t. So I won’t. All I can do is approach them warily, be mindful of the gaps in our experiences, acknowledge their efforts and their love, see how blind the compassionate can be and hope to keep my own sight.
But the guilt, the uncontainable guilt. It's about not being good enough, ever, then and now, and it carries over in ways that can be paralyzing. Once again I'm left with the idea that I still have a lot of work to do before I forgive myself. How do you let go of the feeling of being wrong-hearted from birth?
I have no idea how to go about it. I am open to ideas, though. Suggestions are welcome.
Image: My father, mother, and me, Easter 1971. I know that by writing this, putting it out there on the Internet, I take risks. So they might read it. If it would make a difference in what we talk about, wonderful. If not, well, at least they are reading. And I'm sure they have their own ideas about the past. Perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps.
As for the song, it's going through my mind and feels appropriate in some way.
I carry the heavy water
People tell me that they would like to know more about my mother. Yes, she really wanted to be a horse when she grew up. She writes poetry, makes pots, gathers detritus for ornament. She put herself through school when I was small, owned a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay, was involved with men who were interesting in divergent ways. In a neighborhood of tight short grass, she let her front yard become a meadow and spent one carless year getting around on a moped. She has always been left-leaning, was even briefly a Communist in the early 1970s. When I was a teenager we would remove real estate signs from former corn and soybean fields in a vain protest against development, would fishtail down country roads with these huge signs sticking out of the back of her battered 1973 Corolla station wagon. Other times, I would roll my eyes when she pulled over at the sight of mayapples in the woods. Fuming in the passenger seat, worried that someone I knew might see us, I would wait for her to dig up a few plants for her shady backyard. After my stepfather moved out of the house, Mom and I traced the outlines of our celebratory forms on the walls of his workout room, poses of joy and freedom, and shared a laugh at imagining how the drawings would mystify him. He wouldn't have known happiness even if he was bench-pressing it, but we understood: happiness was being on the run.
She was an unconventional parent, loving when she wasn't blinded by circumstance or her own sadness, and supportive when she wasn't worried that I would disappear into an unsuitable life. But she also had a fiery temper and a tendency to neglect. Our past together comes in shades of grey, from the light mist of early morning fog to the dark moment before your eyes adjust to the blackout. Would I have chosen a stable, boring parent instead of her? No. After being out of her house for twenty-five years, long independent from her moods and moves, it's easier to say that. I've written through most of the pain, have decided to show the scars of my childhood to the light.
Without those experiences, without my mother, would I be writing today? Is there value in being scarred, in the bittersweet ache of having survived relatively intact? I have forgiven my mother. I still work on forgiving my father. But the largest task is grappling with the effects of their behavior. Sometimes that old pain of abandonment feels a part of me, impossible to escape, something that flows through my veins and arteries and regenerates in my marrow, the cell memory of neglect.
I'm working on it, I'm writing it out. I'm giving it a voice. And slowly, slowly, it's working.
The scars sparkle like broken glass. The light makes them golden, supple, gives them a hue that I never appreciated in the dark. These are who I am, who my mother and I were, what we were capable of, and I’m here, I’m here, I float above the earth. I’ve known life and death. I carry the guilt, I carry the heavy water. I shine with the brilliance of knowledge of the grave.
Image: My mother and me, December 1982. Isn't being thirteen with braces just wonderful?
Most of this is from a recent prompt, Gold.
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.
I feel it. I name it. I let it go.
So it might surprise you that one quarter through that first margarita we started fighting. We don't fight often these days, and when we do it's usually quite civil. This was an old-style fight with incredulous looks and just-caught nastiness. Each of us thought the other was clueless, wasn't listening, was going off on some crazy tangent. Ultimately, we pulled it back together, reached a deeper understanding, but for fifteen tense minutes, I fought the urge to run out of the restaurant into the cold rain. I fought the urge to be by myself and pretend that it was better this way, to live without risk, to be warmed only by my own intellect and senses.
Yes, here they are again. My parents after their wedding, June 1969, staring off into the misty future. It's too late now ...
Earlier that day, my mother and I had been talking about trust and infidelity. I explained how how I learned some time ago that to trust in others blindly is foolish because no one is perfect. Other people can let you down, not out of cruelty, but because they are human and bound to make mistakes. If you expect perfection or total fidelity, you may end up very disappointed, so why not keep an open mind about it? Not to expect to be let down, but to not let yourself get crushed if it happens?
The words had come out with more vitriol and less clarity than I felt. I sounded angry, specifically with my husband, and Mom asked me if he knew I was so angry. Strange. I didn't feel angry. But there we were in Fonda a few hours later, raising our voices. For the last half of the fight, I'd been dabbing at my eyes with the corner of my cloth napkin, trying to hold back the tears. It felt like I'd been willing them not to fall for weeks, maybe months, while I kept the rest of life together. When it was over, when we reached détente, the tears came out, along with the sudden understanding that this whole thing was all about my mother. Or maybe it wasn't that simple. It was also all about my father. And let's not forget to point a finger at the dissertation and the feelings it stirred up in its death throes. That thing was once used as a wedge, a separator, an agent of my perceived rejection. The diss is dead and buried now. It hadn't been an issue for years. What could I hold against a corpse?
Here is my mother, more present than I ever remember. There is no demanding, angry Kevin, no Baltimore petty criminal heroin addict boyfriend, no personal life drama to get in the way. When Mr. Trinkle and I left the East Coast, the addict was the center of her life. Interacting with her then felt like a continual rejection, an extension of the loneliness of childhood, though I see now that that the rejection has never been personal. In the past two and a half years, she's changed her life. The addict is now on the periphery, no longer the center of her world. There is no drama. She is here, flawed but available. I have just enough safe space for the anger to emerge. It's wordless, this anger, and scared, too, rage coupled with fear. I know she is capable of turning on me, of causing great pain, of making me wish I never existed. Or at least that's how it used to be.
Here is my husband, present and loving. The days of avoidance by dissertation are long over, but I remember them, remember how neatly our neuroses fit together, his reluctance dovetailing with my grasping need for absolute acceptance, with the tests and the tantrums, the nastiness and tossed objects. We have a history, a time when I felt very rejected, unloveable, and even though we've talked the hell out of it, there are still those tight corners in our relationship that remind me.
Combine my mother's visit with the completion of the dissertation and those deep feelings of unworthiness rise up. They poke and prod. I want to run out in the rain and be alone forever. I want to ball up my fists and shadowbox in the cold attic. I want to be invisible, the observer who cannot be observed. An old self-protective voice whispers if you let them get too close, they could destroy you. Keep your distance. But this is not the only way to see things. I have choices.
Now the struggle to be present, to be in the moment, is mine. If I don't give all of myself over, if I hold back, I don't risk absolute rejection. It used to be that I would test the ones who loved me, would stamp my feet and pepper every fight with threats to leave. These days I hide under a carapace of calm. I hold it together and when I do break, I tend to downplay my vulnerability. I maintain a friendly facade, a protective attitude. Intimacy equals risk. Oh, it's easy with you, reader. We have geographical distance and thick words to separate us. The pull of the everyday, the undertow of the mundane, doesn't come between us. We can pretend for a few minutes that we are intimates, reach an understanding without touch, and then return to our real lives unscathed.
Already all of this is changing for me. By the time my thoughts get to you, I'm working them out, naming the feelings, articulating them so I can put them away. One of the reasons this blog was so important to my recovery process (I call it a recovery process because I don’t know what else to call it) is because it gave me a place to name my fears, to articulate my ugliness in a relatively risk-free environment. Still, there are risks. When I find out that someone I know in real life or from my past has read the blog, I feel a panicked thrill – they know! (Depending on how far they've read, of course. They may know very little.) And then my stomach sinks and I feel a different sort of panic. I'm afraid of being judged for the things I've done, for those I've scraped up along the way. But I also worry that they will read and think: She deserved it. They will wonder about the intrinsic evil in me, about the horrible things I must have done to cause my family to abandon me. Rationally, I know this is crazy. Emotionally, it makes my heart ache.
I feel it. I name it. I let it go. But it isn't easy.
A virulent strain of grief
I’ve been reading a lot about death lately, death and long hospitalizations and the kind of hope that people with sick children cling to, a stretched kind of hope that comes with chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. When I started writing for National Novel Writing Month, that’s where I was drawn, partly out of some kind of voodoo thinking that writing about it would protect my family and partly out of wanting to work through how someone copes with the loss of a child.
And then there was what happened to Kevin.
I’ve written about Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before, in short bursts of roundabout language. He came into our lives when I was fourteen and nothing was ever really the same again. By the time I was fifteen, I was living in the Little House with disastrous results and he and my mother were at the thin edge of eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is starting to lose his mythical qualities, has become more human in my mind in the last year, more culpable and weak. He was a bully, really, a smart and witty bully, though that of course was not the whole of him.
[Warning: The below goes into detail about an illness and a harrowing hospital stay and may be upsetting to some readers.]
In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of, well, it’s a little murky. He was in the final stages of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disease, though it was probably pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the bone marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in a last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. These organs try, but ultimately fail, to make useful blood. Instead, they produce bad blood, the cells immature and misshapen, blood that does a half-assed job of keeping the body healthy. People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage this disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell transplant, which is always a dicey position. If you have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will cease to work (because of the extramedullary hematopoesis).
Before March 2002, before we called in hospice and accepted the fact that Kevin’s death was imminent, Kevin spent six months in the hospital, nearly all of it in the Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care. Trying to write about that time in a way that makes any sense is impossible. I’ve tried it, tried to come up with a timeline and a reason why he ended up on a ventilator (aka respirator) shortly after he was admitted and how early on we thought he was going to slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and how Kevin couldn’t swallow because his epiglottis was damaged from his emergency intubations, so he couldn’t eat and how there was a doctor we called Dr. Death because he insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going to make it, let alone walk again (he was right on the former, wrong on the latter). Kevin was on the vent/off the vent. He kept on getting pneumonia. He was hooked up to tubes and lines, trapped. But alive.
Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of anthrax scares and work closures, of mail that came to the federal library where I worked months old, crispy and irradiated. It was the beginning of Kevin’s long end, a journey that required great vigilance on my mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a large number of doctors and nurses. Being in CCU for six months is incredibly intense, all-encompassing, and stressful, and when a patient is as fragile as Kevin was, you have to be vigilant. It isn’t that the professionals aren’t competent, it’s just that they want to do things, think that action is always the best course. And sometimes it isn’t.
When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel, all those details of his hospitalization came out, details I have stored away for years: the sound of the ventilator and the beeps of IVs that need attention; the smell of pneumonic mucus as I suctioned it out of Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin trapped under a blanket of tubes and devices, so fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the too-late knowledge that he must have been desperate for touch); the horrors of his frequent intubations, emergency procedures where doctors had to essentially jam an air tube down his throat after his oxygen levels dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back and that eating in front of him when he was getting his food, this green sludge, through a stomach tube would have been horribly cruel; how skinny, impossibly skinny he became. How, after being bedridden and hospitalized for three months, he took his 80-pound frame and a walker and did halting laps around the CCU, in an act of pure will.
So all this came spewing out last month, disguised under a new premise with a much younger protagonist. After the month was over and the first draft off my head, I realized I had a lot of legwork to do. For example, I know next to nothing about the disease I had chosen to grace my unlucky character with. And what do I know, really, about parental grief, which is a particularly virulent strain? I've been doing research, reading books and looking at websites. There is one blog out there, very detailed and well-written, created by a mother who was chronicling her little boy's fight against cancer. That little boy died in September. The whole thing is horribly sad (and as I read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I doing this?).
When you are in the middle of a life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of keeping someone alive, of trying to make them well, it's all you can think about. Everything becomes medical and you find out all you can. You learn about the strength of nurses and the support system that crops up in a hospital. You learn to live with things you never thought were possible before. You are steeped in the smells and sounds of illness and it feels like it will never end. You don’t want it to end with death, but sometimes it does and you have to let go of the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for this family and the little boy that will never grow up. I hope that I can do justice to him and to Kevin and to all the people who have experienced such prolonged pain.
The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's Eastern Shore, April 2009.
Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order. What I'm looking for now is authenticity, a way to write something that sings and is true and real, that doesn't exploit illness as a book topic, but brings it to life and honors those that have gone before us.
It's daunting.
Top image: Kevin at Georgetown University Hospital, January 2002, about three months before he died.
Beautiful simplicity
When you go to the ballet, sitting up in those nosebleed seats, don’t look up at the ceiling. You might find yourself dizzy with the height, lightheaded on the knowledge of the distance between you and the stage. The ballerinas are fleshy blurs, their tortured feet rustle and tap, sounding the effort of weightlessness. The chandelier, heavy with crystal and planetary glass, is so close you can practically touch it. Your bones flutter with the thought.
Your mother has put you between him and her, and you are wearing a floor-length skirt, a little quilted number that befits the time. 1973. His fingers are thick. You remember the marks they made when you were bad or weren’t, red welts across your bottom, three broken circles around your skinny arm. When you are three years old, it doesn’t matter who makes the rules or what it means to break them. To be a three-year-old girl is to be too much of everything: lower lip pout and high screech, pounding footsteps interspersed with tiptoes. You are flesh-and-blood will.
His hand kneads the bulb of the lacquered armrest. As he reaches across your back to touch your mother, the scent of underarm sweat, whiskey and Vitalis floats into the air. Below, the dancers’ feet hover above the wooden planks of the stage, hard legs defined under delicate pink.
His smell envelops the three of you.
From a prompt that morphed into a longer piece. The longer piece currently lies dormant on my computer, waiting for me to be ready again.
Image from DanceHelp.Com.
Living proof at my fingertips
My husband and I were standing against the wall at the Fox Theater in Oakland, this over-the-top restored venue from the late 1920s, drinking our beers and waiting for the group Echo and the Bunnymen to come onstage. We'd already had a lot of laughs that would be almost impossible to explain here (for example, the image of us wearing cucumber and cabbage outfits, just to find our moment of glory in the truly ridiculous [but very cool-sounding] Echo song Thorn of Crowns). Without warning my dead son winnowed his way into the conversation, which lead to talks of alternate lives and then my father showed up, too, unrepentant, demanding the old song and dance of anger.
My father and stepmother visited us last month, which was a truly wonderful visit, one for which I am grateful. As a result of nerve damage in his back, he is in constant pain and traveling is very difficult on him, but they made the trip and we all had a good time. There was just one ripple in the visit, one that I tried to ignore, in a discussion that would have been impossible without the blog. He found writing to survive over a year ago and read through it in its entirety. Eventually he apologized via email for any pain he had caused me, which was the extent of our interaction on the topic. During this most recent visit he asked "Are we ok?" meaning, I suppose, "Is everything all right between us?". Yes, I said, we were ok -- when he read the blog I felt like he was listening to me. Did he feel like we were ok?
Well, sure, but he wanted me to know that, despite my accusations to the contrary, he had tried. I had no idea what he was talking about, but his response was probably to this post, where I write about my anger at my parents for doing nothing when I desperately needed help: "My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth." It's a heavy accusation and I stand by it. The truth hurts. We didn't dig any deeper into that particular pit, but our discussion bothered me, still does, and that was what I was talking about in the lobby of the Fox Theater, that and imagining my never-to-be-24-year-old son, dressed in skinny tapered pants and an ironic t-shirt, angry at me for my own form of neglect, of the fetal variety.
The band started. We hustled to our seats, suddenly surrounded by the music that was a part of the soundtrack of my mid-teens and I started to cry. I sobbed through the first three songs while my husband patted me reassuringly, probably feeling bad about the tickets, which were a birthday present. The music transported to a bleak time in my life, when things started really getting bad and I was indescribably alone. I felt the direness of my situation at fifteen and sixteen, combined with the beauty of my current life. I am forty years old, married to a good, supportive man. We have a healthy, creative, wonderful child. My life is in enveloped in love and warmth. How did I get so undeservedly lucky?
Our conversation in the lobby -- the clinical look at my father, the ghostly appearance of my son, my guilt over that time of terrible fear and anger -- began to make sense. No matter how much work I've done here on revealing secrets, writing out my pain and anger, trying to forgive my parents, I can't take the experience of what happened in the Little House away. Even thinking about the music we were about to hear brought me to the edge of that past, to the isolation and neglect. And my father's main reaction upon reading this entire blog, apart from a generic, though I'm sure heartfelt apology, was to tell me that he tried. He has never acknowledged any direct responsibility for (or curiosity about) that time. I wish his acknowledgement didn't matter. Maybe someday it won't.
I've put so much effort into trying to forgive the unaware that I've forgotten to pay attention to my own grief. I still carry around sadness for things lost, for not mattering enough, for acknowledgment that will never be. So I cried and cried until Ian McCulloch started singing about vegetables. My husband turned to me and raised his eyebrows. We started to laugh.
I really am lucky.
Echo and the Bunnymen play "Silver" in Oakland, courtesy of some fellow fan:
Who are these people and what are they doing in my blog?
DATE: May 1981
OCCASION: My mother's second wedding.
LOCATION: Eastern Shore, MD.
PERSONNEL (from left to right):
Mom: Barely 31 years old. Obscuring new husband's mother.
Grandfather: Looking pleased. The bridegroom had a reputation as a good guy. Even though he had spent the year before the wedding happily unemployed, lifting weights in the Little House, and waiting for my mother to come home from work and make dinner (though perhaps this view is a little one-sided).
Me: Eleven. And a half. Wearing my mother's dress
Best friend (from ages 8 - 14): Total support. Very funny. We went from childhood to rebellious adolescence together, from dancing around her living room listening to "Goofy Gold" to sneaking cigarettes and chugging 7-oz Budweisers. I miss her.
Cousin: Seven years old. Now an Episcopal minister. I haven't seen or spoken with her since my first wedding in late 1995. Our mothers don't speak either.
Oh, and I almost forgot. Here's a better look at ...
The car: Then-stepfather's 1968 (?) Oldsmobile Cutlass, permanently awaiting a paint job. I hated that #%*& thing, though it did get us from Point A to Point B.
Yeah, I've been going through my boxes of life detritus, old photos, letters, embarrassingly boy-crazy journals. The process has has brought up thoughts about friendship, loss, and connection. This picture stuck out, less for the time and situation (which, wonderfully, have lost their power for me) but for the strange posed/not posed quality of it, and for the relationships that have slipped away.
There's the next post, though I'm not sure where I'm going with it. And hopefully fiction will be returning when my writing class starts up again next month, or even sooner if I can pull it off.
The factoid with legs
At my grandparent's house during the John The Murderer era.
It was a dark place, with a cavernous bathroom, small squares of mint-green tile above the white, a pedestal sink, the tall window adjacent to the toilet covered by a pullcord shade. Outside of the bathroom, the rest of the old Wilmington rowhouse loomed: shadowy rooms; marked-up walls in need of paint; hardwood floors scratched and worn from decades of footsteps, the worst places covered by faded area rugs; a raggedy couch there, a threadbare recliner here; the folding tables with chipped veneer. Because the windows were painted shut, the air was stuffy, smelling of overcooked food.
I don’t remember other kids. I don’t remember playing. I do remember lying on the floor (or was that a cot?) for my nap, but not sleeping. Maybe that’s why the bathroom is so solid in this elusive memory – those that don’t nap are made to stand in the bathroom. Bad girl.
Tears and stubbornness. It wasn’t fair. No one could make me sleep in this place.
The woman who ran the home-based daycare knew John, my mother’s ex-boyfriend. So when he showed up after the breakup, after we moved out, when he came by to pick me up during naptime, she let me go. I was quiet and polite – this was important, to go along, to not make him angry, to stay safe. He took me to a store, had me pick out a huge stuffed animal to take home, and returned me without harm. It was a somewhat threatening attempt to get back into my mother’s good graces. When that didn’t work, he pursued us to my grandparent’s place, "kidnapped" my mother for a brief time, another sketchy story of violence that isn’t mine to tell.
Recently, when my little one, my sweet, sometimes maddening almost-three-and-a-half year old was behaving just like a preschooler should, testing boundaries, being frustrating, I felt the anger flame up inside of me, the low boil going immediately to steam. After calming down, I thought about my life at his age and how small and defenseless and maddening I must have been myself, a little person in the midst of some very bad things, trying to protect her mother, to keep it together. The past was reaching out to slap me in the face again, the suppressed anger of long-ago, the abuse I both witnessed and experienced.
I’ve asked my mother to tell me what happened while we were living with John. Some of it I vaguely remember (or know from past conversations)– being made to stand at the table for meals, his physical abuse of my mother, his tendency to drink – but there are gaps in my knowledge. I need to know, to confront it, to feel the suppressed feelings. It will be another step toward emotional wholeness, a step toward being an aware parent.
My mother has agreed, apologetically, guilty, worried that I will be angry with her. There is no cause for worry. I just need to know.
It's the next hurdle.
Not fade away
Mick Jagger, circa 1969, from Rolling Stone.
The centerpiece of Thanksgiving dinner was a rockfish one year. Kevin had caught it himself, straight from the Chesapeake Bay. Mom stuffed it with breadcrumbs spiked with chopped fennel and onion, and there were mashed potatoes, cranberries, and a nod to green, string beans on the side.
We ate by candlelight, as usual, talked about politics as usual. I wish I could go back and capture those conversations, remember the deep level jokes and high level discussions. Almost any dinner with my mother and Kevin was devoted to real conversation and humor, sometimes dipping into reminiscence. It was the closest we ever came to feeling like a family.
Like the night a couple of years before Kevin got sick, when he was just starting his PhD program at Penn, and Augie the collie was a puppy. I had taken the train from DC to Wilmington to visit and things were unusually smooth, no arguments, very little baiting. We ate sautéed chicken over vermicelli in the candlelight. The entire dish was sprinkled with breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil, garlicky and herby and delicious.
The conversation turned to the sixties. Kevin had taken a year off from college in 1966 after being busted for selling marijuana (a setup, he claimed) and he headed off to California, hitchhiked down the coast. He talked about Dylan going electric, mentioned the rivalry between the namby pamby Beatles devotees and the rebellious Rolling Stones fans. There was talk of high school dances, the moves and the moments. The radio was playing music from that era and he and Mom started to slow dance as I watched from the table.
What do you do when a family culture dies? When a powerful personality disappears? The center did not hold. We’re still trying to create our own gravity.
Everything around me remains the same
And the story is just about really, finally, complete. The final excerpt (still in draft mode) is below. For other excerpts from the work in progress as well as posts on the topic, follow the stillbirth tag.
I'm putting this experience to bed now.
Photo by PhineasX.
Gusts of words swirl around me that week. I walk right through them. Who needs to talk? Dad is explaining the baby’s name to his father: “She said it was the first thing that popped into her head.” “Jennifer didn’t know what was going on,” my stepmother tells the phone receiver. At an aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, we sit and hide behind the blast of televised football and the scraping of forks, my paternal grandfather’s frequent throat-clearing sounding a note of general disapproval. Six days after the birth I try the nightgown trick again, tighten it over my empty abdomen. Flat as a pancake.
On an unseasonably warm December day, wisps of clouds pulled across a cerulean sky, Dad drives me back to Maryland. There is clean-up to be done. He drags the stained twin mattress to the end of the driveway, props it against the fence, bloodied side in. (“Very tasteful of your father,” Mom tells me later, with more than a hint of sarcasm.) My parents share a laugh at the ancient pack of pilfered Pall-Malls I’d jammed underneath it – if they only knew about the empty beer bottles hidden in the box spring of the other mattress. Dad gives me an awkward hug, waves goodbye from the car. I open the door to the Little House.
Smells become part of the background of a place, as invisible as the color of the ceiling or the punctuation of electrical outlets against wallboard. You forget how a house smells, forget it practically the moment you close the door. The stale air of the Little House hits me like a slap in the face. It is the scent of bottled-up mildew, of pressed wood and formaldehyde, the smell of isolation. I take a canister of Lysol and scour the room with an antiseptic rain, spray the walls and floor until they are damp. Over the afternoon I slowly change the feel of the place, moving furniture and taking down photographs.
When the familiar urge hits, I walk quietly into the main house. From my grandfather’s room comes the sound of MacGuyver, then the jingle of a commercial. An ice-cream scoop sits in the sink beside a spoon and scraped bowl. Grabbing a large tumbler from the dishwasher, I kneel to open the china cabinet, reach for the Johnny Walker Red on the bottom shelf. I walk back to the Little House clutching my glass of whiskey and Coke between both hands, taking careful, deliberate steps on every slate stepping stone, as though one misstep onto grass means bad luck. After locking the door behind me, I take a sip. The drink is strong and bitter, cold and soothing. Humanizing. Some drink to numb the pain. I drink to feel it. I begin to cry.
On Monday morning, puffy-eyed and stoic, I walk to my mother’s for our ride to school and work. She is cranking up the ancient, oil crunch era Toyota with the nonworking gas gauge. An egg and scrapple sandwich lies on the passenger seat, on top of the paper. I hop in, open the Wilmington News-Journal, take a bite of food. Mom puts the car into gear and backs out of the driveway.
Everything around me remains the same.
Inner battle
Grappling with myself. Photo by my husband, taken from the vast Santa collection of my father and stepmother.
The things I am supposed to be doing and don't want to do, the shoulds, they sometimes control me. They become obligations body-checked by anger. Or maybe it’s the should nots, the tamping down of what rises up naturally: I should not be feeling angry. I have no right to be upset.
This is not supposed to be a blog about current angst (except for the mundane, piles of laundry, sick kid, dog-walking variety). Most of the anger I carry around is the nostalgic sort, dealing with that stuff that happened when I was a kid, the things I can’t change and must make right in my mind in order to live a full life. It’s been working, for the most part. I’m letting go.
Yes, I have complained about my current relationships with my parents, have brought up marital discord from the not-so-distant past, but most of this has been in the context of grappling with painful memories, revealing old scars to healing light.
But I haven’t talked about my stepmother. Part of the reason I don’t talk about my stepmother is that she is practically a saint. She is my father’s total champion, and if anyone needs a champion, it’s him. My father has treatment-resistant depression, a condition he has been grappling with from the time he entered college. It was because of depression that he stopped working in his early 40s. The man has been on many different varieties of medication; he’s been through research studies; he’s done electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and lost a chunk of his memory in the process. Eventually the drugs lose effectiveness, the troughs get deeper, he stops functioning.
There are physical problems, too. Diabetes. Obesity. Arthritis. Within the last two years my father has developed debilitating back pain and can barely get out the door. At the age of 57, he is practically housebound, a predicament he and his wife have taken on with characteristic stoicism. Throughout it all, my stepmother has been a rock, always supportive, never complaining, a breadwinner, maker of meals, and vacuumer of a four bedroom house.
Why am I angry with this woman? Why am I carrying around this stupid useless feeling? Because I am invisible to her. Because when I was pregnant with my second son, she talked about it being my first baby (perhaps a teenage stillbirth doesn't count). Because – stupidly, since I really should let go of this one, but couldn't they have waited a week? – she got married to my father two days before my fourteenth birthday. Because she never even so much as e-mails on my birthday. She has no idea why I might be feeling pain and apparently doesn’t want to know. Perhaps she feels she might be implicated in some way. I don’t know.
My father loves me, but he has not been a very good father. It's just the truth. Four years of every other weekend visits does not a good father make. Financial support for one's child – which I do appreciate – doesn't make one a good father either, though certainly there are many absentee fathers out there who don't even do that. He laid the foundation for distrust early. A little recognition of this past and his part in it would make a huge difference. After he read the blog, he acknowledged it in a general way, though we've never talked about it. But what about her?
I know she thinks I'm a bad daughter and in many ways, I am. Phone calls sometimes go unreturned for days. I'm late with birthday and father's day greetings or send a lame e-card. I put off making our travel plans to see them and have been absent for multiple surgeries. I avoid discussions of Christmas, a holiday that is an obsession for them. The guilt floods over me, paralyzing and cold, and I feel a surge of preemptive, protective, useless anger.
What am I supposed to do with this anger? What do you do when you can’t talk to someone about your feelings? How do I do the right thing while honoring how I feel?
So many questions. Does anyone have answers?
(And when this particular angst is out of the way, I have many awards and other kindnesses to acknowledge. That's the next post.)
"When are you due?"
I was not going to be that girl. I was not that girl, marked by pregnancy, announcing my mistake and stupidity to everyone. Most of my friends didn’t know about it. Even my new boyfriend was clueless, in more ways than one: all that direct contact with my ever-rounding form and he never asked a question. I was going to spend my last trimester in hiding, living with my father and stepmother. Everyone swallowed the story, my need for a little time away.
It seemed to be working, the baggy clothes campaign, the stony denial, but one incident brought doubt. A friend, Lynne, and I were out skipping school at the usual place, a shopping mall near school. We stopped in a boutique where Lynne bought a pair of earrings. As she was ringing up the sale, the salesclerk gave me a friendly glance.
“When are you due?” she asked.
I blushed. She blushed. We were both briefly, awkwardly silent, before the clerk quickly covered for me. “Oh, no! You’re too young! I’m so sorry!”
Thank you, lady.
Later, at the food court, I asked Lynne “Am I getting fat? Do I look pregnant to you?” gently patting my belly, camouflaged by loose-fitting clothing. Lynne dipped a French fry in ketchup, gave me a quick once over. “You look fine,” she said, and shoved the fry in her mouth. That was that.
Two ways of looking at it
I wish I could explain the importance of the notebook. It’s one of those old black and white composition books, barely held together by 45-year old glue and stitching, the edges of the pages the color of dead oak leaves, cured by time. An artifact, a little piece of Kevin, half-filled with poems of late adolescence, poems that he probably wrote in his senior year of high school. They are short and generally angry, each one typewritten and stapled or taped to the front of a page.
If I could explain the importance of the notebook, maybe I could explain the importance of Kevin. How can someone who tried to destroy me, who battered my mother emotionally, be so key to who I am? Kevin was extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone like him, a man who pushed himself out of a childhood of emotional and physical abuse and formed a self out of will and ashes. He was a poet, a self-taught carpenter, a working class intellectual. In the midst of fatal illness, he completed his dissertation and received a PhD. He was also so wickedly funny that my mother and I still laugh when we remember his stories and jokes.
Kevin sometimes ripped us to shreds with that knife-like wit. He was an active participant in the neglect that led to my pregnancy at sixteen. Whenever he saw hypocrisy or hidden motive – which was often – he skewered the hypocrite, uncloaked the motive. His ability to see the darkness in himself and others never took into account the overwhelming goodness we each have, the lightness that makes up most of who we are.
I have a lot of empathy for him, whose cruelty and black math was caused by a childhood of pain and anger, but it probably helps that he is off stage now, six years dead. It was a long and painful exit. Kevin didn’t deserve to suffer, to be hospitalized for six months, to have his body whittled down to 80 skeletal pounds. He didn’t deserve to lose his ability to swallow and sometimes to breathe unassisted. No one deserves what happened to Kevin. But that time of suffering was also a time to make peace. I was at the hospital for hours almost every day, there for both him and my mother, keeping company, being a second set of eyes to make sure no mistakes were made. I was there for comfort.
It gave me a chance to prove my humanity, to show that we all have the ability to be good. Even him. Even me.
Sometimes I still believe it. But writing that paragraph about how I benefited from Kevin’s suffering leaves me with a dirty feeling, as though I relished the opportunity to be redeemed through his pain. It wasn’t like that. I was there because I wanted to be, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Kevin’s final day stretched and stretched from early morning into late afternoon. A small group of family gathered in his hospice room and listened to him wind down, heard the silent spaces grow between each breath, watched his heart flutter out from under his ribcage. Outside, daffodils were pushing through once-frozen ground and the forsythia was in bloom. The world was coming to life again as we sat and waited for death.
It came with a dramatic final exhale followed by dead quiet. The dog broke the silence with a bark, my mother reached for me and Kevin’s son, held us and cried. Mom later said she felt Kevin’s energy leave his body, had an image of him walking along a river path against a cloudless sky, his old collie Augie by his side. When Kevin's brother thanked me for my presence, I said, "I'm so glad we had this time," and immediately regretted it. What was I saying? Those six months of dying were great? What a wonderful opportunity for me?
That night I woke up after midnight to the pressure of Kevin’s hand on mine, a grateful and loving presence. Don’t be hard on yourself. You were there for me. Thank you.
Then he was gone.
Two Ways of Looking at It
Kevin Sheehan (Knife Gift)
The magician, who is about to perform,
is wearing a suit which belongs to
his father. No one is supposed to know
that he is not his father. His first
trick, which involves some
simple sleight-of-hand, is well-received.
he bows, and the suit collapses.
And what if I would not grow up,
would not perform
the necessary murder. So what.
Was it any of your business?
I chose to be the child, hurt
and unhurting, but my body,
my beauty, betrayed me.
The orangutan did it
Photo of Gertrude Stein from Ovation TV.
I was possibly the only seven year old in the world whose mother read Gertrude Stein out loud to her. At the kitchen table Mom would puzzle through the books she checked out of the Wilmington Public Library, boring her reluctant audience of one. It became a joke between us, the dazed child resting her head on the table, lulled into submission by the tediousness of Gertrude Stein. “A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger,” I would tease Mom, and we’d laugh.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when she picked an Edgar Allen Poe story as a Halloween treat for two nine-year-olds. We were living in Newark, Delaware, in a one-bedroom, student family housing apartment. My friend Marie was spending the night and we did the rounds of our complex. Many neighbors didn’t expect trick or treaters, and the ones that did weren’t passing out Hersey bars or KitKats. There were several international families living there and I remember getting strange candies, sweet wafers, little trinkets.
Most people didn’t even open their doors, like the hulking single guy who now lived in my friend Belinda’s old apartment (student family housing?). Belinda had lived there with her mother and younger sister and we had spent most of the previous summer together, organizing skits in the little playground and running around the adjacent field where the University of Delaware marching band held their practices. A long scar traced the length of Belinda’s chest, the mark of two surgeries to correct a congenital heart condition. She had another round of operations scheduled in a couple of years. Though Belinda didn’t seem particularly fragile, I wanted to protect her from harm. When she and her family moved to Michigan in late August, we were both bereft and worried about dealing with new schools on our own.
I wanted to go to her apartment, stare down the guy I blamed for her move, get a little restitution Halloween candy. MaryAnn and I walked up the stairs through the dreary light of humming florescents, up one flight to Belinda's place. The strings of my Cousin It costume kept getting under my feet as they brushed against each stair. The hulk's television was on, blaring some sports event. “Trick or treat!” I yelled, pounding on the hollow metal door. No response. Marie looked at me skeptically through her Wonder Woman mask. “Let’s just go back to your place.”
Poster available from All Posters.
Maybe my mother decided to read “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to help us get over our candy haul doldrums. Perhaps she was hoping for a good, old-fashioned Halloween scare. The story, written in 1841, starts slowly (so slowly that she couldn’t have possibly started at the beginning. Even a nine-year-old raised on Gertrude Stein would have protested), but it sped up when she got to the crime scene. Two women have been brutally murdered. Here is the description of one of the corpses, courtesy of the Poe Museum:
We didn't get very far through the story before Marie became hysterical. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. Finally, Mom called her parents and they picked up my friend half an hour later."After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity. "To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."
She never spent the night at my place again.
Writing prompt: Its dark and secret heart
Mom-mom, 1934.
My obsession with ghosts started in the sixth grade, though it had its roots in my grandmother’s death two years earlier. We were in the kitchen, putting groceries away when she suddenly clutched at her throat and started gasping for air, frantically motioning to the kitchen chair. I stood there, confused, scared. Finally, I moved the cat, and Mom-mom collapsed into the empty space.
It was up to me to dial 911. We waited 40 minutes for the ambulance to come all the way from Elkton. She was dead or close to it by the time it arrived. Congestive heart failure. In a couple of weeks, my mother, her boyfriend, and I moved in with my grandfather and tried to cope with her absence and our new living situation.
I’m not sure where the Ouija board came from. Maybe it was a Christmas present. I started carrying it around with me, taking it to school, begging my friends to help me contact my grandmother. They went along with it and I believed everything. Mom-mom had a friend named Sam up there in heaven. Everything was all right, and she was watching over me.
My mother took the death chair out of the kitchen, eventually storing it in the attic space over the garage. I was into sleeping in tight spaces, under picnic tables, in tiny tents I set up in the backyard. One night I convinced my best friend to spend the night in the attic with the chair. The space was hot and smelled of cut wood and roofing tar. I kept staring at the empty chair, waiting for my grandmother to appear.
Over the years, through neglect and hard times, I kept on waiting. When, as a teenager, I moved to the Little House adjacent to my grandfather’s place and felt totally alone, I wished for a sign of her presence, a sign that someone was watching over me.
Now I know that such hopes are false.
It's not easy being green
Elk River, Winter of 1977-78
The year before, my mother had decided to go back to college. In order to save money, she moved in with Jim, her future former husband, while I went to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. It was a year scented by cigarette smoke and coffee fumes. Mornings were my favorite time of day, sitting in the warm kitchen, a tray of food prepared for me by my grandmother, usually Eggo waffles dabbed with Parkay squeezable margarine and dripping with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, cartoon-character shot glass of orange juice on the side. That winter the snow kept coming. It piled up and formed five-foot drifts in the driveway, places to dig out forts and make snowmen. Snuggling in my grandmother’s bed as we listened to the radio school closing announcements became an almost-regular ritual.
Mom scored a one-bedroom apartment in student family housing in the summer of ’78 and I moved back in with her. She took the couch in the living room while I slept on a full-size mattress on the floor in the bedroom, a wooden orange crate for a bedside table topped with a flowery ceramic lamp, a clock radio, and an “I Love You This Much” figurine -- a robed, potbellied man, arms outstretched – that she had given to me in first grade.
1978-79 was the first year of court-mandated school desegregation for the Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly white, middle class community at the time, to an elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It was the fourth school I had attended since kindergarten.
The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.
After lunch, students were herded over crumbling asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of black history covered the exterior walls. At night the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit (worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become accustomed to choosing my clothes.
The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike from mid-October through most of November. Much of that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a day or two; I read a lot of books from the small children’s section at the University of Delaware library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre, images of children lying on the ground beside their parents, as still and peaceful as if they were asleep.
April 1979
By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch over my grandfather.
Our grand experiment was over.
Ramble on
It’s started – 10 weeks of writing prompts, writing every day for 10 –12 minutes. No edits or changes, just send the piece to that week’s partner and give them feedback on their piece. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Well, I know I can write, given unlimited amounts of time to tinker and touch-up. I’m accustomed to taking my time, going back and changing things, moving words around.
What am I afraid of? Making a mistake? Sounding like an idiot? Actually, though my nerves tingle and twang as I look at each day’s prompt, there is something about it that is freeing. Just go with the words. Letting things go has always been difficult for me.
I attribute this in part to years of dinner table discussions with Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. Anything you said could reveal your intellectual and moral vacuity; flabby thinking was the sign of a rotten psyche. He was good at it, could sniff out half-baked statements, then deflate them with a quick rational jab. How could I challenge what was true when truth was a moral issue and the challenge itself a sign of my moral bereftness? My mother trapped herself for 18 years in these conversations. Over time her tiny reserve of self-confidence depleted.
As I sat in the Writing Salon this Sunday, for one of two class meetings (the rest is online), I watched the instructor. Thin, petite, probably somewhere in her fifties, with dark shortish hair, she could be my mother (I’m finding a lot of women in their fifties who look like they could be my mother; it won’t be that long before I could be her, too).
My mother is full of creative energy. She writes incredible poetry, designs jewelry made from glass and metal she finds on the streets of Baltimore, and has made some beautiful pieces of pottery. Her garden is amazing. She reads and ponders, is an excellent conversationalist, funny and erudite. She has spent most of her career being a copywriter, first for advertising companies and later for two universities. But she has never had the fundamental level of confidence to take on things in her life completely.
Mom, August 2008.
“You’re secretary material,” my grandmother used to tell her with more than a hint of contempt, trying to subdue Mom’s thoughts of going to college. Perhaps no one was surprised when she got pregnant and dropped out to become … a secretary, though she later went back and got a degree in English and Anthropology. Her family refused to see her intelligence, her need to be intellectually engaged.
So here I end up, writing about writing, and it morphs into writing abut my mother. This post took 12 minutes to create, though I can’t bear to let it go through raw: there will be some edits. Over the coming weeks I’ll put class work out here, polished or not, though I’m probably not going to post the bad stuff. Or maybe I will. That could be freeing, too.
In the meantime, I’ll remind my mother of her talents. She reads my stories, tells me I have a way with words. “It must be those Irish genes,” she says, alluding to my father’s side. The last time she said that, I came back with “Or my Polish?/German?/Swiss? genes!” (all theories of nationalities, since she is adopted.) We both laughed – doesn’t that mean I should be making watches or kielbasa or something? – but she knew what I meant. She’s got talent.
Crying the rodent death blues / The beast in me
Take the case of Happy.
Happy (short for Happy Easter) was a golden hamster my grandmother gave to me for Easter 1976. He came complete with a Habitrail, one of those cages with a main unit attached to smaller annexes via clear tubes. It was just like a wild hamster warren except translucent, plastic, and above ground. Watching Happy scurry through the tubes, from wheel to main cage to tiny den was amusing. He impressed me with his ability to get through tiny spaces. I would scoop him out of the cage and cup my hands around him, leaving an opening that got smaller and smaller over time. Happy was always able to make it through.
One winter morning, hamster feed in hand, I opened the Habitrail and discovered it empty. All of that time spent squeezing through my fingers had been training for Happy’s escape. His disappearance was upsetting, but even more devastating was the discovery a few days later of his tiny corpse in the basement. It was stiffened with rigor mortis, hamster toes stuck in a permanent curl. Happy’s last meal had been rat poison.
By the age of seven, I had lived through a few pet deaths, all of the feline variety. Sheba had been hit by a car, Amber was anemic, and Regis bothered his neutering stitches until infection creeped in. Each death brought tears, but with Happy it was different. For many months after the hamster’s untimely death, I rode a wave of grief. On long rides to my grandparents’ or on the walk to school, the loss would hit me.
Dinnertime was the toughest, with all that time to think under the monotony of adult conversation. My mother, her someday husband Jim and I would be sitting at the white picnic table in the kitchen and I would feel a pang. The spinach soufflé would grow cold on my fork as I stared past Mom and out the window into the backyard. Happy was buried back there, his corpse stuffed for one final time into a toilet paper tube. I imagined him in better days, pushing his way through my open-toed shoes, doing endless laps on the wheel, escaping from my fingers. I couldn’t contain my sigh, the big exhale of emotion.
“Do you know what I’m thinking about now?” Long silence, then another sigh, “I’m thinking about Happy.”
These words of grief, repeated many times over that year, were not taken seriously.
By age eleven I was ready to try rodent stewardship again, this time with a gerbil. Perhaps it is a sign of Happy’s hold on my heart that I no longer remember the gerbil’s name. He (or she) was also cut down in the prime of life, a victim of illness. He had been listless all day, sitting in a corner of his cage, not touching his food. The gerbil refused to open his mouth whenever I presented an eyedropper full of restorative honey water. I hovered over the sickbed into evening. As night came, a summer storm rolled in. The sky flashed with lightning and my gerbil took his final breaths in an echo of thunder. After it was over, I reached out and stroked his still-warm body with an index finger. And then – an indication of my future impulses? – I immediately wrote my version of the night’s events: “Death of a Gerbil.”
My mother and Jim teased me for what they interpreted as my overemotional response to almost everything. Jim also thought I was too serious and would describe the child me as being like a 42-year-old woman (as I approach the last year of my 30s, his description makes even less sense). The labels were applied with a grain of contemptuous truth to everything from my asthmatic coughing fits that led to vomiting as well as my often-expressed desire in sixth-grade to kill myself.
Over the years I’ve learned how to regulate my external emotional responses, but I still have a flair for the melodramatic that usually comes out in my writing. For example, I started this post with some ideas about the loop of deep self-doubt that occasionally runs through my mind. The initial paragraph read very differently:
I am afraid to see a psychic, for what she may tell me about what she sees in my soul. Will she feel the energy, the darkness that is eating me from within? One look in my eyes, a quick riffling through my internal dialog, and the extent of the rottenness at my core will be clear. She’ll have to make something up, be polite, get me out of there.
This is grown-up melodrama. Like my grief for Happy, when these feelings hit, they are genuine. I acknowledge that there are times when I feel rotten and hollow. This doesn’t mean I am rotten and hollow – my feelings are not objective reality, but to deny them and their origins would be denying part of myself, part of my internal life.
I fight these moments of darkness. But I am convinced they are part of being human and will never fully go away. We don’t want to acknowledge feelings of deep inadequacy, so most of us go around trying to pep-talk ourselves into feeling better. We don’t want to face the beast within.
The good in us, the light, is powerful. It can lift us above the void. But if you feel pangs of self-doubt, why not acknowledge the reality of the feeling, trace it as far back as you can, and move on? Don’t underestimate your ability to confront the beast.
The darkness within doesn’t define us. We are far more complex than that.
For readers who are now thinking of the Nick Lowe song, here it is, as sung live by Johnny Cash, a man whose life was defined in some part by his attempts to push through the darkness. Next post: blog of the month.
Another existence to be denied
So there my mother and I sat, sunk into opposite ends of a comfortable couch, leaning forward to tell the social worker our feelings, sketching out my genetic profile. We filled out reams of forms, information about family health problems, questions about my diet, my drug and alcohol use.
Who knew what mysterious weaknesses I might be carrying? My father’s side of the family had endocrine problems, heart disease, diabetes and a tendency toward dark moods. When the veil of depression fell, some family members took to alcohol or other substances with an addict’s zeal. An affinity for darkness and a desire, a need, to obliterate myself in its face are part of my hardwiring.
What about my maternal lineage? My mother’s family history was a big blank, an open field where the quality of the soil and provenance of the plant life was a mystery. Like my biological grandmother and my mother before me, I had gotten knocked up young and out of wedlock. Only my mother had chosen to marry, to keep me in the fold. This predilection for teen motherhood, the easy and careless ways of our womenfolk – did that count against me?
Adoption was a closed affair when my mother was born. In 1950, the presumption was that a “chosen baby” would grow up satisfied, would never want to know the story of her beginnings. The privacy of the birth parents was paramount. Mom, however, did want to know and set out in adulthood to find her birth mother. Through a third party the woman revealed the depth of her silence: she hadn’t spoken about her first child at all, even keeping the secret from her husband and subsequent children. She wanted no further contact, no dramatic revelation, no recognition of reunion. When pressed on the name of the birth father, she was especially vehement. She would “never, never tell.” It stung.
In private, we speculated, joked about the freedom bought by ignorance. Her missing history provided a unique vantage, a way to step outside of the American obsession with ancestry. We could build a story about her origins outside of the confines of family fact, but the story never got very far. Polish or German? (My orthodontist, after assessing her facial structure, was pushing for Polish.) Catholic or Protestant? (Well, she did seem to have a thing for Catholic guys.)
To imagine too much seemed self-delusional. Of course, her parents might have been love-struck, two highly intelligent beauties who consummated their love after much deliberation in a sacred act of commitment and rebellion. Imagining what could be the truth – sex forced upon a young woman not ready or pregnancy as the inevitable result of one night between two clueless teenagers – led to a sense of hopelessness. Her birth father was the silent partner in this transaction. A ghost.
The adoption process had changed in 36 years. My child would know my name, would be able to trace his genetic strengths and frailties back a generation or two. His new family would send me pictures. I would be permitted to write him letters. But when we were in those Golden Cradle offices, he was another existence created to be denied. I was young and angry, and what was happening didn't seem real.
My biological grandmother, my mother, me: we all played a role in the conspiracy of suppressed connection. It was a gift passed along the generations. A present for my firstborn.
The wonderful, the not so good, and the unknown
Then, the unknown: my father found this blog. This is not a shocking development, since there is at least one link out there with my full name that points to writing to survive. What does it mean? I don’t know. I hope it means an open line of communication. And that’s all I’ll be saying about it here. Some things are meant to be – yes – private.
Finally, happily, the wonderful: two fine bloggers gave awards to writing to survive in the past week.
John of Storied Mind passed along the Brilliant Blog Award, which is quite an honor from someone who I think has a brilliant blog! The premise behind Storied Mind is that writing and creating stories about one’s experience with depression can help break through its deadening effects. Storied Mind also aims to create a community, a place where people can gather and discuss their experiences with depression. All of this is beautifully done, with thought-provoking posts that dive deep into the experience of mood-related disorders and what may work to reach clarity. Thank you, John. I am truly honored.
Kimmy of The Eagle The Lion and The Dove passed another award my way, the I Love Your Blog award. Kimmy’s blog is all about focusing on the light in darkness, seeking the beauty in the world and ourselves, knowing that none of us is perfect. It’s a great dose of daily inspiration. Thank you, Kimmy – I’m so happy we found each other via Entrecard!
As a way to share the love and highlight some outstanding blogs that are part of my daily reading, I am planning to have monthly reviews, with a feature on my sidebar linking to the Blog of the Month. Stay tuned for the October selection.
I slip into the night
My first memory of the house is from the summer of 1972. I am three, walking the 20 feet from the cottage to my grandparent’s place, planting my sturdy feet in thick grass and clover. I take off in a run when the ball of my right foot meets something small and sharp. It burns. I begin to cry. Someone – my aunt? my grandmother? – whisks me into the main house, probes tender flesh with pointed tweezers to remove the bee’s stinger. Afterwards, I lie on the family room sofa in cool air conditioning, injured foot propped on a pillow, a thick paste of soothing baking soda drawing out the pain. I watch cartoons, sucking on a straw to get at the last of Coca-Cola over ice.
That was over thirteen years ago. My grandmother has been dead since 1979 and the Little House is now my home. I spend my days waiting for darkness to fall. Bring on the night, I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.
Inside the main house at 9:30 p.m. sharp, my grandfather takes out his hearing aids and removes his prosthetic foot, trapping himself in bed for another night of muffled sleep. Four houses down the street my mother, blinded by man and money troubles, sleeps in a cocoon of sadness. My father is sixty miles away, a prisoner of debilitating depression; his kindly wife is totally focused on his well-being. Unheard, unseen, and seemingly unimportant, I slip into the night or let the night slip into me.
This is where my power of description seizes up.
Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I don’t want to rehash the past in angry diatribes here.
But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst of the never-ending stillbirth story, attempting to write about my time in the Little House, a companion piece to my biological grandmother’s experiences and as I try to get my mind around it I find myself asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?
When reality broke through, when my pregnancy became apparent and ended a month later in a stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in the Little House, when it became clear that I needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?
These are not new thoughts, but the underlying feelings have changed. My anger before was mainly self-directed, anger at my family turned inward: what evil in me brought on their rejection? But now I am reaching a different conclusion: my mother and father had so little respect for themselves, for their power as parents, that they gave up, figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even assumed that they would only make things worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth.
Now I have to work through the feelings, unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense with suppressed emotion, so much a part of who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out of most other versions of the stillbirth story because it feels like an emotional bomb. As I try to get back into that time of isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger, my self-protection (or something) kicks in.
It is time to control the explosion through language, to capture the shards of the experience on the page.
I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the experience controls me.
The home of permanent in between
When my grandmother started to show, her parents sent her to the city. They dropped her off at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers. I imagine her emerging from the black car alone, tattered suitcase in hand, looking nervously up the set of granite steps. Inside, somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through the gray halls.
It is the home of permanent in between; the suppressed energy of smothered potential thickens the air. The girls, all going by pseudonyms, make very little small talk. In the nursery, rows of bundled babies silent as dolls wait, neatly packaged in individual bassinets. Once retrieved, the babies seek out their mothers’ faces, liquid newborn eyes encountering guarded glances. Both mother and child have learned not to waste energy on tears or outward displays of emotion. The bonding and the break are inevitable.
This is how I picture my mother’s birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” They undo the straps, let the drugs wear off. Hours later, my biological grandmother holds her swaddled daughter, names her Lois. Lois is tiny – less than five pounds – too little to be released to her adoptive family. Over the next six weeks the pair are entangled in the monotony of new life, the seemingly endless cycle of feeding, diapering, and sleep. They calm to one another’s warm, familiar scent. Their gazes become intimate. Bone-deep.
When the six weeks are up, Aunt Ruth, a go-between, my adoptive grandmother’s sister, comes to take the baby. Waiting in the home's entrance, the young mother frantically bounces her silent infant, dreading the break. Finally, Aunt Ruth appears, says her hello, and waits.
“It’s time.”
The mother hands over the baby. It is as clean as a guillotine strike.
Before she has time to reconsider, she races inside to the central staircase and runs up two flights of stairs to her room. Her breathing is contained, shallow, a precaution against tears. She’s been trying to memorize every inch of her daughter, the moon face framed by white-blonde hair, her blues eyes, dainty toes and impossibly tiny hands, but already the image is fading. She reaches her room and slips inside, leans against the closed door taking short, sharp breaths. A glass baby bottle sits on the bedside table, a remnant from the final feeding. The girl eyes it, finally reaching out. Then, the satisfying sound of glass irrevocably broken, the implied threat of jagged shards.
Taking several deep breaths, the young woman calms. She begins to push the glass into a pile with her shoe and decides to find a broom and dustpan.
There will be no tears.
That was then, Part II
October 1972, Hollywood Beach, my 3rd birthday?
The above photo was taken at my grandparents’ house during the John the Murderer era.
Christmas 1976, Wilmington
Jim, the future and former stepfather, took this holiday shot. Memories of this apartment: no car; no money; asthma attacks; three dead cats and one poisoned hamster; the bus ride to a movie theater showing Star Wars; juicy cherry tomatoes straight from the garden out back (the garden that also contained a kitty graveyard with little wooden crosses); iced chamomile tea; hot carob instead of hot chocolate. For my mother, it was a time without hope. A year later she returned to college to complete her bachelors degree, thus solving the hopelessness problem for a time.
This is now:
August 2008, Berkeley
My son and my mother, having a good time. We had a great visit. And yes, no one ever seems to look directly at the camera in this family. (That was then, Part I can be found here.)
The pain that is invisible
In a conversation last night, she casually tossed out a line that I had to follow up with, because it indicated how bad things were for her at a couple points in my childhood. I’m sure she’s dropped this line with insouciance before, and I’ve just followed her laid-back lead. But it’s deadly serious. And frightening. And sad.
Of course, my mind is buzzing with thoughts, about secrets, about forgiveness and the pain that is invisible when you are growing up, the pain of the depressed, hopeless parent. Maybe not totally invisible. I was a sensitive kid, the little mother, always worried. Part of the worry, however, was about me: what was going to happen to me if something happened to her? Today I feel mainly empathy for her pain and sad that she’s felt so hopeless.
I’m sure she’s awake downstairs, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times. So, off I go to start the day ...
The dammed
And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?
I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.
But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.
If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?
One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.
Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.
I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.
My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.
As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.
I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.
The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.
The feelings need time. They will out.
In the beginning ...
When I started this blog in late December of last year, I wasn't in a good place. All the things I've been writing about since then were burbling just below the surface, barely suppressed, waiting to be given form and shaped into a story. I used a pseudonym -- Anonmomous -- and wrote pretty freely about my angst at the time, my desperation, the stifled creativity that I blamed on my daily mundane existence mixed in with a childhood hangover.
I had no creative outlet, but a strong desire to write and figured that starting a blog would force me to do it on a regular basis. Maybe I would find others out there like me, or attract an audience (even an audience of one would have been wonderful). But nobody reads a blog if they don't know about it. I started using my real first name, joined blogcatalog, and things started to look up.
Most of my early posts are gone, but I recently found an interesting one from right before I "came out." I've reproduced it below.
Thanks to Geoffrey for asking some questions that got me thinking about the early days and how the process of self-expression has actually changed the story I've created for myself.
I also have to thank The Fearless Blog for her kind profile of writing to survive, and her words of encouragement. As usual, she got me thinking about how a positive attitude can change the equation entirely.
Manufacturing interest
18 February 2008
As I was thinking about whether I would post tonight, not sure if I had anything to say, I decided I would manufacture something of interest to write about: the manufacturing of interest in what I am writing here.
I have no idea how you arrived at this blog, whether you find it entertaining, or relevant, or worth five minutes of your time. I could probably come out of the closet, quit being anonymous, and invite people I know to read it, or at the very least passively put up the address in my facebook profile and e-mail signature. Perhaps then the blog would spread like a benevolent virus across cyberspace, e-mailed here and there: you simply HAVE to read this.
Would more people read? Maybe. Would it affect what I write here? Most definitely. In a good way? I am not sure. Currently, I can write corny or stupid or revealing stuff here without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings or worrying about looking corny or stupid. I would probably remove anything non-writing related, which may be the cleaner and kinder way to go. I still have much mulling to do on the topic.
H and I took advantage of our holiday Monday babysitter to go into the city. We wandered around North Beach, did some vintage shopping, had lunch. We ended up at City Lights and I was suddenly overwhelmed by all that fiction, non-fiction, poetry, ecology, etc etc, titles and authors I have never heard of and will probably never read.
What a crazy idea it is to write when there are so many talented people out there who can barely sell a book.
But I can't worry about that now, can I?
A Dream of the Snow
By the time he died, after eight years of illness, we had reached a peace. I loved him like a father.
Today would have been Kevin's 62nd birthday. (My mother just called to tell me she had a pain in the neck, just like she has every year on his birthday. Ah, the tension continues even after death . . .)
In honor of Kevin, I am posting one of his poems, "A Dream of the Snow." For many months after his death six years ago, my mother had this as her voice mail greeting. She got a lot of hang-ups.
A Dream of the Snow
From Knife Gift by Kevin Sheehan
For a long time I hid
while my body grew,
watched while it learned
a hard way to speak
till the clothes that it wore
no longer fit me
and I could not understand
a word of its speech.
For a long time I slept
while my body dreamed,
cried when it married, moved
away. Now I dream alone
in the room where we played.
Not of the fields, but the falling,
not of the cold, but the coming down,
my body is a dream of the snow.
The Victorian Village slasher
We met him on a dog walk, a meandering stroll through our Columbus neighborhood, past a brick-solid hodgepodge of Victorians and gingerbread, Italianate rowhouses and cobblestone alleyways. This world was new to me, a stable life as an adult, with a fiancé, a dog, a professional job, living hundreds of miles from my mother. I was going to hold on to that stability with a death grip, make sure I would never fall back into the abyss.
But back on the East Coast, Mom was cracking up. I wasn't allowed to call her at home, so we’d talk at work. The conversations usually ended with screams (hers) and tears (mine). My cubicle was in the middle of the library, exposed. I would hold my voice tense and steady, then rush to the ladies’ room, smash the tears back with toilet paper, splash the redness away with cold water.
My mother was a frequent subject on our dog walks. I obsessed over our new rift, the rage unfairly projected, while my husband-to-be made sympathetic noises. I was to blame by choosing my fiancé, a snobbish WASP, loyal and overprotective. It was a slap in the face to my bohemian mother.
If my abandonment, my choice to betray, wasn't bad enough, she was also struggling with her long-term boyfriend, a difficult character in the best of times. Kevin was in the early stages of a rare illness that would eventually kill him. She had to support them both on a small salary and was stretched to the point of financial ruin.
On that cool September evening in 1995 Mr. X and I were having the usual discussion. Would Mom and Kevin follow through on their threat to boycott the wedding? Why was she being so cruel?
I didn’t notice the runner pass us. Then we heard it.
“Hey, jogga!”
The small voice was coming from a bush to our right. Whoever it was, they couldn’t quite pronounce their r’s.
“Hey, jogga! I am the O.J. Simpson! I am the O.J. Simpson!”
Suddenly, a little boy, no more than five, leapt out from behind the bush, making stabbing motions with his empty hand in the direction of the runner, who was long gone. He looked at us and just started talking. Yes, he could hang out in his yard after dark. His mom and dad were divorced and he was living with his dad, who liked to drink ice beer. Had we ever tried it? He had, and he didn’t like it. He talked on, aggressively friendly, clearly lonely.
Another runner flew by and the boy repeated the performance, enjoyed the effect. It was disturbing and amusing, this five-year-old's violent pantomime.
Beyond the open screen door of his house, I could hear canned laughter, the hiss of a bottle being opened. His father, up until this point a lumpy shadow behind a curtain, turned his head to the side and yelled, "Get in here!" The boy said goodbye, walked into the house, and shut the door behind him.
Over the next few months, we walked by that house several times. We never saw him again.
Dead on arrival
There on the fading photocopy of an autopsy authorization form is my signature. It's the writing of a teenager, rounded and totally legible, unlike the scrawled signature I have today. Then, the autopsy. They cut him open, weighed and measured his organs. Everything was for the most part normal, or "unremarkable" in autopsy parlance, with the critical exceptions of his lungs. The causes of death are listed as prematurity and bilateral pulmonary atelectasis.
Even now when I read it I feel a moment of panic: was he born alive? It did seem to me like he was moving initially, but my mother says otherwise. If we had been at a hospital or closer to emergency care, would he have lived? But the record is titled "Record of Fetal Death (Stillbirth)."
Does that leave me off the hook?
About two months after his death, I got a call from a parent running a bereavement group. The hospital had passed on my number and he was inviting me to their next meeting. As we talked, he mentioned that his stillborn child was a Christmas baby.
"That must have been so hard for you, right around Christmas," I said stupidly.
"Well, it's hard no matter what the season."
He was so kind, as if we were in this together.
I gave him my address and got off the phone as quickly as I could. What right did I have to grieve? The child I never wanted, who I was going to give up for adoption, was dead. Perhaps I even willed it, or brought it on with dark feelings and too many Budweisers. I wasn't a parent. I didn't deserve to feel anything.
For many years, I had a recurring dream. The baby had arrived. I wasn't prepared: no clothes, no diapers, no place to sleep. And somehow, the infant would slip my mind. He languished in a cold room, too weak to cry, his stomach knotted with hunger, a soaking diaper clinging to his skin.
By the time I remembered, it was too late.
Depression's child
After the fire
As the story goes, he stepped outside, lit a Pall Mall, and popped the huge blister on his stomach. "I think you better call an ambulance."
80% of his body was covered in third-degree burns. He spent nine months in the hospital, nine months at home with a full-time nurse. He suffered through over 26 skin grafts. His hearing was ruined from massive doses of powerful antibiotics. When his right foot was giving up the ghost, its blood vessels cauterized by fire, surgeons took a couple timid swipes, lopping off one toe, then a couple more. It took a third operation to amputate it just below the ankle.
Years later, a doctor told him, "I've seen skin like that on a dead man."
When I knew him, he was demanding and unhappy, a man with a limp and two hearing aids. I learned to hate his call: "Jenny, got a minute?" I was definitely not a Jenny and what if I didn't have a minute? It was the typical stupidity of youth. I wish I could go back and treat him with kindness and empathy, to understand what was destroyed in the fire.
In my dreams he's back in the old house, living off hot dogs and root beer, not yet clued in to his own death. He tries to call me, jamming his thick, arthritic fingers into the phone's dial. No luck.
Loyalty
We saw my mother today, and will be heading to Baltimore to see her again on Saturday. There she was in solid form, no ghost. C was immediately comfortable with her. We had a good time. I was loyal for many years, keeping things hidden, trying to protect my mother and defend her. Now I feel like I have betrayed her here by writing these things in public, painting her with such a broad brush. It's complicated. She's complicated. And my feelings are all twisted up.
Can I have it both ways? Protect her and save myself? Probably not. But I can acknowledge the shades of gray.
Leaving on a jet plane ...
Since I can't bear to tear myself away from the blogosphere, I'm bringing my trusty laptop along. Hopefully I will have time to write other stuff, too, though that will be tough in a hotel room with little respite from watching the kid. I also want to work on a new layout for the blog. Naptime will be packed.
We'll be seeing my mother for the first time since last September. C is excited (this breaks my heart; even though they've had very little contact, he clearly loves her). I'm sure she is, too. I guess I am as well. If the air is clear and we're all feeling friendly and happy, the show will go off without a hitch. We will link arms and walk offstage, filled with warmth and love. If anyone's mind is clouded with worry or with things left unsaid, the performance will be off. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when it's over.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Iron grip
Or is it gripping me, pulling me under the water's surface?
The past may threaten, may flash a set of phantom fangs when I tell it to go away but it isn't really coming back. Time goes forward, never back.
But sometimes the past is as present as my own mind, and it is up to its same old tricks. Sleights of hand and feats of illusion.
Why do I still talk to you almost every day? Why can't I just accept you for who you are and get over it already? And then I get out the family pictures and realize how young you were. I'm sorry.
Lacunae and mortar
I hacked away at my stillbirth piece recently, snipped away most of the backstory, trimmed the interim stuff, and shaped the conclusion into a neat little bob. It went from around 2700 words to 1300 and I was pleased. But my readers were not. They wanted more about me and my life, from the time of the pregnancy to the story's conclusion in my current, normal, well-adjusted life. (How do you do it, girlfriend? Smoke and mirrors.) And when I reread it, I knew they were right.
I'd love to give more, but which more should I choose? Writing this piece is a delicate business. How do I get across my almost total isolation without whining about it, how do I show what it was like to be fifteen and sixteen, practically on my own, with no allies? And how do I stay a sympathetic character? This was no love child. I was full of anger and hatred at what felt like a parasite, an unwanted growth. In some ways the stillbirth was an escape, albeit one with a lifetime of guilt, pain, and flight from grief.
So I'm back to it, filling in the lacunae with the mortar of my experiences, moving things around and bringing myself back. Again.
Missing person
The paneling tacked up against drywall, the damp concrete slab with its thin covering of plywood and carpet. The mildew, the cigarette smoke, the asthma attacks. Hollywood Beach, Christmas 1980.
In this photograph, from left to right: Jim, the unemployed soon-to-be stepfather, who spent his days lifting weights in the Upper Room; my grandfather, demanding, handicapped as the result of an industrial fire, who kept his candy in a cabinet by his porn; and me, a little freak 11-year-old who dragged a Ouija board everywhere and had séance parties, all in the hope of contacting my dead grandmother.
Mom was behind the camera. She commuted two hours round trip to work and came home every night to a hungry, demanding household. Once the plates were cleared, the complaints were served: the meal was too simple or too complicated. Had she gone too far this time, or held too much back? I listened and hated them, wanted to defend her honor. But I just sat there instead. This was not a happy time.
My grandmother collapsed suddenly one February afternoon in 1979. We were in the kitchen putting groceries away when she started breathing heavily. Unable to speak, she motioned in the direction of the sleeping cat on the kitchen chair. I was helpless. Finally she removed the cat herself, sat down, and closed her eyes. I called 9-1-1. The same volunteer fire department that whisked me off to Christiana Hospital six years later took her limp form away. They didn't tell me she was dead, but I knew.
The grief we were all smothering after her death came up in unpredictable ways. Just when we thought we had stamped it out, had ripped up the roots and crushed the last toxic leaf, we would discover another dank tendril wrapped around the front doorknob or emerging from the drain in the kitchen sink. It would not be denied. The only photographic evidence I have of her from my lifetime is a picture of the two of us. I'm playing on the floor, looking off at some distraction, away from the camera. She is a disembodied hand holding a cigarette.
It's been almost thirty years and I still miss her.
"I've Always Been Clean"
Yes, this may be a fantastical image, though I am hopeful that my family will have happy, stress-free meals. I want my son to associate eating with being social, with other people.
I don't.
Once Mom realized that Kevin and I clashed as dinner companions, she dropped me. Suddenly eating for her was all about fat, meat, sugar, and Kevin. She cooked real french fries and bacon cheeseburgers, the plates dripping with grease, and ferried them to Kevin's place. She shopped at a special butcher, burning up the moped rubber to get there, for the proper ingredients for Swedish meatballs. The woman who used to prepare hot carob was baking trays of brownies oozing with real chocolate. I wasn't invited to the party. She always left me a plate, though.
Even before that were the dinners with Silent Tim. Was he not talking on purpose? Was I such a terrible dinner companion? What did I do wrong?
But long, long before dinners with Silent Tim were dinners with John (if you ever want to read about John, Calvin Trillin has an essay about him, "I've Always Been Clean"). We lived with John when I was about three, for less than a year. Since he only had two chairs at his kitchen table, I stood for meals.
This has always been a little factoid of my life, perhaps made slightly more interesting by the Trillin coverage (my grandmother kept a file of clippings from the local newspapers on John's later trial for perjury; I wish I had that file). I barely remember standing at the table. What I do remember is being proud that I could play quietly in his presence. I also remember being afraid.
This factoid has legs.
The Girls Who Went Away
I wanted to read it for insight into my biological grandmother's experience, the teenager who gave birth to my mother in a Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in 1950. What was it like for her? How did she get there? Why did she keep my mother's existence a lifelong secret, never telling her later husband or subsequent children? What about the birth father? Or the more intriguing question: do secrets have their own genetic legacy? Is it any coincidence that her daughter got pregnant at 19 and had a shotgun wedding and that her granddaughter had her own troubles?
So I picked up this excellent book, with sad stories of a time before easily available birth control (or abortion) and sex education. And I found a part of my own story: isolation, secrecy, and shame. I am not alone.
Yes, it may seem from my current blah blah blah on the topic that I've spent the past 22 years chatting openly about my first pregnancy, telling my unlucky seatmates on long airplane rides, droning on at playgroups about the sad outcome. But it's been a big secret. Huge. Even now, as I write on a blog whose url I have in my e-mail signature, I am completely terrified of what my friends and passing acquaintances will think. But I want them to find out. I'm tired of the secrets. And I think they will be kind to me in their hearts, even if the whole thing may freak them out a bit.
Right??
Letting it percolate . . .
After reading some interviews, it appears as if she truly has no prejudice, despite suffering from neglect at the hands of very mixed-up parents.
I don't think I'll ever be at the place of complete acceptance, a place where I am ok with some of my past, since I feel a little warped by it, but I'm also not a published author. Forgiveness I can see. Acceptance, well, I've already have accepted some things -- without my unique mother I wouldn't be who I am, Kevin gets some credit there, too, and my dad contributed some fine DNA -- but I didn't need to be left to bleed, either. That's where forgiveness fits in. At some point.
So -- more memoirs to read, more research to be done. And I'll keep on working on my story, but out of sight. I don't think it's helping me to put it out here and, to be honest, it makes me anxious about the whole thing. Kind of like serving a partially cooked dinner to a room full of guests (you imaginary ones count, too). It's just not ready yet.
But I'll leave the vestiges up.
Off to bed.
Stepfather shuffle
If you've read the West Street Sequence (so far) of A Prolonged Illness (note: no longer on the web site), you will know about Tim, my mother's ex-husband. Jim, the Philadelphia Flyers lover. Tim, the man who wouldn't talk when I was at the dinner table, unless it was to harangue me. Tim, the Big Mean Step-Father.
After Mom kicked him out and life became simultaneously freer and crazier, Jim did some soul-searching. Went to therapy. Joined a church. Eventually remarried. And would take me out to dinner about once a year. The last time I saw him also was the most bizarre. Tim, his wife, and his sister (Joy), came to DC to have dinner with me before I left for graduate school. I hadn't seem Joy in almost ten years. She just couldn't stop with the remarks: "You talk just like Chris [my mother]! You have mannerisms just like Chris! You move your hands just like Chris! That's exactly what Chris would do!" Since she hated Chris for hurting "Timmy," these comments were not meant kindly. I eventually burst into tears. Joy gave a petulant apology. I swear she even stuck out her lower lip.
These dinners were never comfortable for me. What was his agenda? Did he feel guilty? Did he want to make it right? Who knows, maybe he was fond of me. Hewas in our lives for 7-8 years, for a large chunk of my childhood.
We lost touch after he and family moved to Idaho, about a decade ago. I tracked him down late last year (yeah, I know, I know) and he's been sending cards and presents for C for holidays ever since. So here I am in the middle of a Tim flashback, hating the man for being a prick, when we get this Easter package from him with toys for C.
I'm feeling a bizarre mix of feelings right now, mainly anger and guilt, the usual partners in crime, though there has to be some sadness, too. Do I have to forgive everyone, see the human in every single fucked up bastard I've come across?
Am I insane?
No one has good memories of being a teenager, or a pre-teen, right? It's all awkward and embarrassing and no one could possibly understand. You feel like a freak and want so much not to, you want to fit in somewhere. Even if you court difference, the bolt through the body part, the angry music and electric hair, you want somebody to align with. It sucks.
Well, I'm writing about the twelve-year old Jennifer era right now. It sounds so whiny -- we were poor, my stepfather was mean, I was ashamed of our living situation. But it's all true and real and apparently still has an effect on me because I'm all worked up. I do think there were events and circumstances that made things more difficult for me than for others, but it's hard to capture. As I write I remember more and I feel the familiar pain.
Bleah. Let's hope I'm transcending something here.
Making it personal
Yesterday, I read through what I've completed of my brick house. I ended up feeling as though I had swallowed a brick (and I now wonder how far I can take this analogy). It is dense stuff, well-crafted paragraphs that describe them, but as a story are somewhat monotonous. It lacks life. My mother is right -- this is about my experience, is my attempt to exculpate them, and to get over the past. So I have to jump back into the story, become the third character.
I also have to add some real life. That's difficult. The fights, well, they kind of blend together in my mind, though there are some very memorable ones. The conversations -- most of them are gone, too. But the past can be conjured, and sometimes impressions are better than facts.
The hospital and hospice: they are still fresh. I'm beginning to wonder how much of my story will be that, the time when I could be there so unconditionally, providing support, showing that I was a good person. That wasn't my intention, to focus on that time. But it was the beginning of forgiveness and understanding.
Enough navel-gazing for tonight.
Continued evolution of a paragraph
My mother’s first lesson shortly after birth: deep attachment is followed by corrosive loss. The Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers is filled with the bereaved. Somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through its gray halls. They will soon join the other inmates, shell-shocked new mothers, swaddled newborns clutched in ambivalent embraces, jiggling, shushing, jiggling, shushing. This is how I picture her birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” My biological grandmother holds her freshly-bathed daughter, names her Lois. Over the next six weeks she feeds, diapers, jiggles, shushes. Her daughter calms to her warm, familiar scent, the intimacy in their gazes is bone-deep. But ephemeral. When the time comes, she signs the adoption papers, hands her wailing baby to the waiting nurse. It is as clean as a guillotine strike.
The next paragraph is much harder -- how can I describe the mix of my mismatched grandparents, pushy aunt, and guilty-from-the-get-go mother? Without getting too deeply into it? Do I devote a paragraph to my grandfather's accident? What about John the Murderer? Or Jim the Laminator? We'll see.