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 Mr.
Trinkle and I 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.
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.
The noises of destruction
One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.
It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.
From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.
Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.
Halloween, 1972
She and Paul shepherd you into a
blank-faced building with a mirrored lobby. There is
a gorilla in the elevator. He stands upright and
powerful with black fur that tufts over his arms and
legs. You dig into your mother’s thigh with angel
nails. “It’s all right. It’s just a costume,” she
says and the gorilla, with some difficulty, removes
his head to reveal another one underneath. “See?” he
says. “Just a costume.” Your heart flip-flops. The
gorilla struggles to replace his head and turns
toward you, ape face askew and fixed in a lipless
grin. He attempts to give the thumbs-up sign with a
rubbery hand. “Shit. How am I supposed to hold a
drink with this,” he says, tugging awkwardly at his
digits. More people collect in the elevator: a
flapper, a man in a Nixon mask, a woman mimicking the
hangdog face and lanky body of Cher. Paul, making a
joke, has dressed in prison stripes, while your
mother has Cleopatra-flat hair and a beige tunic with
gold accents.
You flow out with the crowd toward a door in the
hallway. It swings open and Catwoman steps out,
revealing a room cloudy with smoke and conversation
muffled by faux fur and latex. She reaches out with
heavily lacquered nails and rakes the hair under your
halo. People are always touching your hair, cooing
over your thick blonde ringlets as though you were a
doll.
The
gorilla closes the door.
This is an
excerpt of a work in progress. The entire piece isn't
written in second person, just those bits of
dredged-up memory. For another Halloween story,
read The orangutan
did it.
Image: Man in gorilla costume from
Compassionate
Spirit.
Living proof at my fingertips
It was one of those conversations
that I'm tired of having, but I couldn't seem to stop
myself.
Mr. Trinkle 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 Mr.
Trinkle 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. Mr.
Trinkle 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:
Image:
Living proof at my fingertips, or me and family at
Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by my
mother.
Marked by heavy hands
This is the sensory soup of
childhood. It is a mix of family and location, of bad
luck and lucky streaks. We continue the pattern with
our own children, begin the silent lessons, mark them
with heavy hands: this is who you are, who we are.
Whenever my son smells oatmeal pancakes or plucks a
plump blueberry from a glass bowl, the past will
live. "You Are My Sunshine" will conjure up a
darkened room, my soothing cuddle against impertinent
wakefulness. He may spend years in therapy trying to
get my voice out of his head, only to find that same
voice coming out of his mouth in middle adulthood.
I can only hope that his experience is as painless as
growing up can be. Sometimes my best won’t be good
enough.
I remember being seven, lying on that flowered couch
in my grandparents’ family room, my hand sunk into a
plastic bag full of cherries. Cold from the
manufactured air, goose-pimpled, I clutched a pillow
for warmth. The television, which was as much a piece
of furniture as an entertainment device, was showing
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat.
That night I would have another asthma attack,
whether it was because of mildew, cat hair, cigarette
smoke, or my own melodramatic emotions is up for
debate.
Image: Me and my grandmother, Hollywood
Beach, 1973.
Heartbreaker
And -- this is written a year after I posted this -- rereading this makes me feel uncomfortable, like I've presented a story that isn't fully processed or finished. But it is mine and there is a truth to it.
Click here for Part 1.
As I pulled the wheel of the John Deere tractor to the right, the mower, wide and low to the ground, hit rock and screeched as it scraped the edge of the flower bed. Palms damp, grip tightened, I put the tractor briefly into reverse, then hit the gas and forged forward. Shit! The magnolia! I quickly swung around the tree, barely missing the azalea by the front door. Suddenly there was a clear path ahead of me, a gleaming expanse of green. The mower shot across the lawn, cutting another inadvertently serpentine swath.
"Jenny! Got a minute?"
My grandfather was gesturing at me from the kitchen window, summoning me in the usual way: by screaming out a nickname I hated and asking me a question for which yes was only answer.
I cut the engine and surveyed the mower's wobbly wake. Three uneven rows occasionally interrupted by jagged patches of ragged grass; a mangled forsythia; two scraped river rocks; several crushed marigolds. Not the cleanest job. The air smelled green and bitter with freshly cut grass. In the maple outside of the kitchen, a blue jay and her mate traded a series of rusty squeaks, rustling the leaves as they hopped from branch to branch. Some other unfortunate up the street was wasting a perfectly brilliant Saturday on yard work. Their mower sounded wonky, chugging in fits and starts.
Here’s where the moment slows down, where we cue in Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a boy on a bike whizzing down our street in the direction of the river. College aged, tanned and blonde, wearing a black t-shirt and ragged cut-offs, he glances at me. His long muscular legs propel the bike forward and I can just make out the checkerboard Vans on his feet. The moment passes, the bike and passenger become a blur and disappear.
Documented: Dirk's Vans, Little House, 1986ish.
In a place where I know almost everyone, a place I’ve been a part of since before I was born, this person is totally unfamiliar. Cut the music.
Who was that guy?
"Jenny!!"
I hop off the tractor and go into the house.
It is June 1984, the beginning of a summer of new love for my mother and Kevin, the beginning of my time in the Little House. Back in Wilmington, I have a part-time job at a daycare center, but most weekends I end up at my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach. It will be a year before my mother buys a cottage down the street, less than that before I become pregnant (in the Little House. Sorry, parents. That wasn't my story then, but it's the truth). Come spring my friendship with Maureen will end here, too. "Everything happens in the Little House," Maureen and I used to say, and that was before I gave birth there.
So this warm mid-June weekend kicks it off. Maureen's mother drops her off to spend the night and we immediately douse ourselves with baby oil and lie out in the sun, with no worries about wrinkles or skin cancer. Dinner is simple, pepperoni and mozzarella on Italian rolls. When night comes we get restless and decide to take a walk, to kill some time before Saturday Night Live.
Recent picture of Hollywood Beach. Looks like the old benches are gone.
Maureen and I walk about a half mile to the Elk River, down the shoulder of a barely two lane street, past little shacks and cottages built in the 40s and 50s, some expanded in later decades. The beach has trucked-in sand (the actual river bottom is mucky), with a small swimming area marked off by buoys and lines. Several benches face the water. The old folks hang out here at sunset, smoking their cigarettes and admiring the view. Behind the benches are sycamores and a grassy fenced-in area with swing sets, a merry-go-round, and shuffleboard courts, all dating back to the early 60s. The small parking lot has a single street light and a soda machine.
The soda machine stands against a small white clapboard building, the clubhouse, used for community events, the Men's Pancake Breakfast, the Association Potluck. Before the accident in 1966, my grandfather called Bingo here on Saturday nights. Back then he was handsome and charming, unfaithful and dissolute. I played the same game in the 70s, would come down to the clubhouse on a Saturday night with my grandmother. Skeeter Haines, a tall man with a shiny bald head, would call and I'd concentrate on my board. Sitting next to Mom-mom, I would kick my legs underneath the table, rest a hand on her solid muumuu-ed leg. I haven't been in the building since her death in 1979.
Tonight there are a couple of cars parked by the street light. A small crowd of guys are hanging out, leaning against the fence and talking. Someone is playing Led Zeppelin, Heartbreaker, and the not-yet-familiar smell of burning marijuana wafts our way. We walk up and greet the crowd. Rudy, the nineteen year old brother of a school friend introduces us to the boy on the bike, Dirk Nieubaur.
Interior of a '67 Chrysler Newport Custom.
Before we go on, I need a delusional interlude, a nostalgic montage of the future past that comes with its own soundtrack. It’s a hot summer night two years later and I am sliding across the wide seat of Dirk’s 1967 Chrysler Newport Custom, admiring my legs in the dashboard light. The sinuous strains of Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold are coming from the eight-track and I know that a Budweiser is waiting for me outside. Or we’re tearing down Town Point Road in that same former family car aka “The Beast.” Dirk has just restored it to its Motor City glory and wants to see how fast it can go on the straight pass between cornfields, before the road twists and turns through the woods. He steps off the gas at 100 mph, slows it down right before that first curve, ZZ Top’s Manic Mechanic blasting from the new tape deck. That’s us, kissing in the Little House to the White Album. He's thrown over his other girlfriend for good and the moment is sweet and warm, comforting.
OK. The former teenager in love hidden away within me is satisfied now.
Here’s the darker version, the pre-bliss. Two nights later, alone, I go down to the beach to join the crowd. Dirk walks me home, holding my hand, pushes his bike alongside us. Did we kiss down at the beach, did he offer his mouth to mine? Did I breathe in the memory of pot smoke and too many Budweisers on his breath? These are the moments that are supposed to be marked in our minds forever, first love and all that. But there were so many similar nights, nights when he traveled in a haze of drugs and alcohol, when his breath was smoky and beer sweet, that this one no longer stands out.
"Everything happens in the Little House." I let him in, into the house, into me. It was my first time. I thought that casual sex was the way of twenty-year olds. They just did it (though perhaps not with fourteen-year olds, even particularly mature ones). I went along with without joy or desire, let the boundary be crossed without note. Before this moment, I had joked with my friends about the possibility of nuclear war, the potential Armageddon to come. Could you imagine dying, I'd ask, could you imagine some The Day After scenario in which some of us have been obliterated or are radiation-sick and dying, having never had sex? It turned out that sex was much more complicated than I knew, even in its apparent simplicity, the basic equation of one plus one. I wasn't ready.
After that night, Dirk and I became a strange sort of late-night item (in part because he is also dating Rudy's sister, Anne). He shows up at 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m.. I fall asleep watching late night broadcast television, awaken to his knock on the door. Maureen begins seeing Rudy. We start to drink the beers that are offered. I bring jars of gin, siphoned from Mom and Kevin's endless supply, with me to my grandfather's house, hide them in my massive pocketbook. Sometimes a jar springs a leak and I wonder if anyone else on the bus to Newark can smell it too. But nobody says a thing and my grandfather doesn't seem to notice when he picks me up at the bus stop.
When a neighbor friend reports to my mother that he saw two men leaving that Little House at 1:30 in the morning, saw Maureen in Rudy's arms and me giving Dirk a final kiss, I get a lecture, maybe even a cooling off period of one weekend away from the beach. But nothing changes. More importantly, my mother doesn't say a thing to Maureen's parents, though in retrospect I am not sure why. There is nothing to stop us from picking things up where we left off after my brief time away.
At the end of the summer, Dirk goes back to college. Mom and Kevin continue their relationship, with the threat of catastrophic storms to come. And I start tenth grade. Everything is different, from the music (cue in the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, the Dead Milkmen) to the make-up (from none to fluorescent stripes on my eyelids) to the cloves I've started to smoke. And it isn't going to get better any time soon.
To be continued.
My hands untied
Kevin, summer of 1984.
Enter spring–let's say April–1984, West Street, Wilmington, Delaware.
Birds are singing. The tulips and pansies in our raised beds are starting to bloom. Recent March winds have deposited the remnants of chaos, muddied papers, dead leaves and tree limbs, in the alleyway. The winds lifted deck chairs against back fences, turned over plastic flower pots, battered pedestrians. They blew Kevin the poet-carpenter, intellectual powerhouse and gin guzzler, in down the street, saluted him with a flurry of cherry blossoms.
My mother invites the new neighbor over for dinner. He seems strange, a little awkward in his old-fashioned glasses, his blue eyes intense and clear through Coke bottle lenses. Kevin speaks with a touch of New Jersey nasal and renovates and flips houses for a living. He arrives lean and tanned, armed with words of sharpened steel and a large bottle of Gordon’s, his old blue merle collie Barney by his side.
What could I do? I was fourteen. The last guy in our house didn’t even speak when I was at the table.
Here’s what I didn’t do: talk. Smile. Instead I just sat and shoveled in the food, exuded resentment, made infrequent eye contact. Maybe I smirked. And Kevin, a man I had just met, called me on it.
“What’s your problem? You’re just sitting there, sucking all the air out of the room.”
I have no memory of my response.
It wasn’t until yesterday, as I was attempting to capture this pivotal moment yet again, looking over what I’d written almost a year ago on that same dinner, that I realized: I blame myself. Reading over my early attempts is somewhat painful. I was straining to describe that night, to explain Kevin’s poetic rockstar persona and my mother’s deadly attraction to him, to explain my role in my own rejection. The end of parenting, my premature emancipation, the series of adult situations I got into before my time? Culpa. Mea culpa. I should have put on the charm, talked, given a little bit that night. I should have been someone else.
If I had won Kevin over that evening, maybe my mother would have stayed engaged in my life. She might never have started bringing dinner to him, eating in his dusty dining room every night while I ate alone. I wouldn’t have begun wandering the Wilmington streets after dark, wobbly with purloined gin, smoking unfiltered cloves and blasting the Dead Kennedys from my Walkman. The Little House would have stayed empty. The end of innocence could have been put off for another couple of years. If I were a better person, a different person, no one would have told me that I was evil, the root cause of family turmoil.
I know. I know. My brain tells my heart that it would have made absolutely no difference in the outcome if I had smiled or curtseyed or made insightful conversation about Nietzsche and Wordsworth. To be honest, until yesterday, I didn't know I felt this way. I blame myself.
Why do children take responsibility for things over which they have no control? Why do adults shift the blame to the helpless? And why, when we molt and grow and leave our child forms behind, does this sense of responsibility for our own small fates, this idea of being the masters of our abuse (if only I were nicer or less shy or stronger ...) carry on into our adult life?
The child decides that she is the cause of her mistreatment. The adult lets those early experiences dictate her behavior. We find ourselves recreating situations again and again, little kids in the guise of adulthood, sifting our lives through the rusty emotional sieve of the formerly helpless. We choose partners who fit into old scenarios, make decisions based on faulty data, try to get it right this time. With our motives hidden and our reasons obscured, the do-overs usually fail. Then? Familiar pain and reinforcement of our feelings of worthlessness.
Or maybe it's just me who's felt this way. Yes, I've done this, set up the scene, chosen guys who reject who I am, who blame me for their own shortcomings. I've blundered my way through friendships, the sullen fourteen year old in a thirty-year-old's clothing. And although I have stopped replaying the same scenes over and over again, I still have an overarching sense of responsibility for the trajectory of my childhood. My invisible scars feel completely self-imposed, my exposure of them a shameful confession. I feel rotten from the inside, capable of destroying entire worlds. Run from me before I drag you into the muck!
But I'm not that way. I'm not.
So I'm writing my path to self-acceptance, still trying to forgive myself and my family, to look at the world through clean eyes. I don't want to shift blame. I want to let go of the entire concept of it. After all, I'm here, alive, doing so much better than I ever thought I would be. It's time to let go, to untie my hands and live fully.
I figure I'm about 20% there. Maybe more. And if I can do it, you can too.
Coming up: February's blog, a return to the Maureen story (we'll skip over the guess who's coming to dinner segment), and some awards. Not necessarily in that order.
The time before
Maureen, hanging from a tree, 1982
We stayed after school that day,
dismantled the lice bridge and went to the
playground, squished our Docksiders against
spring-rain damp turf. The middling March air was
cool against our faces as we ran to the swingset. In
warmer weather the game was to fling off our shoes to
see who could kick them the farthest. Today we passed
a hairbrush back and forth, hurtling through the air
on wooden seats, trying to make the other person drop
it or chicken out.
“Want to play Space Invaders? Let’s go down to the
Hole in the Wall.”
Maureen’s grandfather owned a bar by the canal, a
basement space in a building from the late 1700s. In
the afternoons it was quiet and we were allowed to
play pool or a video game while her father got the
bar ready for business. The walk from Chesapeake City
Elementary School to the bar took us past the funeral
home, white and windowless, past boarded up
storefronts and ramshackle houses tumbled against the
sidewalk. The Eastern Shore town was not yet
thriving, was a decade away from becoming a boutique
village. We decided against stopping at Pyle’s, a
small convenience store that sold things like Push
Pops and sticky Bubble Yum and Dixie cup ice cream
that came with a wooden spoon. There was plenty of
non-nutritious crap awaiting at the Hole in the Wall,
cheese curls and barbecue-flavored potato chips and
candy bars. I’d get to mix the drinks, sugary
combinations of Coke, 7-Up, and orange soda over ice.
We called them “Suicides.”
The tendency – or my tendency, at least – in writing
about childhood is to make it sound either impossibly
idyllic or like a living hell. So here is a list of
the good stuff: Hanging out on Maureen’s porch swing
after Canal Day, holding a 20-inch sparkler in full
glimmer as we watched a line of cars heading for
Route 213. Playing Atari games – Asteroids, Adventure
– while eating junk food. Dancing around to “Flying
Purple People Eater.” Eating an entire meal without
using our hands, “like cats.” Annoying her sister by
making Three Stoogesesque snoring noises as she was
trying to get to sleep. Organizing slumber parties
with shrieking and séances and morning-after pancakes
a la James Beard.
Behind the idyll? Turmoil. Children are the unwitting
passengers in the lives of others. Best friends only
offer so much protection. I felt like a freak, too
smart and too quiet and odd, living in an
increasingly uncomfortable situation with my mother,
grandfather, and soon-to-be stepfather. This was the
year I actively threatened suicide, when I kept track
of my thyroid and asthma medications in preparation
for an overdose. The year I carried around an Ouija
board, desperate to get in
contact with my dead
grandmother, the year when the girl wars
were beginning and teasing about one’s physical
development or lack thereof was common (“We must,
we must, we must increase our bust!” was the
recess refrain.)
Anyone who thinks that childhood is all carefree is
delusional. Or an amnesiac.
But I didn’t kill myself and our friendship survived
my seventh grade move back to Wilmington. Outside of
the machiavellian middle school environment , Maureen
and I became closer, with frequent overnight visits
and some very funny correspondence. She wrote me
weekly. I was so proud of her letters, of her sense
of humor, that I would bring them into school, my
address carefully blacked out so that no one would
discover that I lived outside of the school district.
The weekend my mother told my stepfather to pack up
his things and leave, I had plans to visit Maureen. I
still went, though I was not in the mood. Yes,
Tim was an asshole (since reformed,
apparently), but he had been a part of our lives for
eight years. We spent holidays with his family. We
needed his income. And I hadn't seen the break
coming. What was going to happen to us?
DEATH at moment of reading! Envelope from February
1983 letter.
I sludged through that October 1983 weekend, trapped
in a quicksand of worry. On Sunday, I was surprised
to see Tim waiting for me at the usual rendezvous
point, the Newark Howard Johnson's. Maureen and I
hugged, I waved at her mother, and slipped into the
Cutlass. Tim and I were unaccustomed to making small
talk and there wasn't much to say. He was staying
with his parents, had hopes of repairing the
marriage, though I doubt we talked about that. He
didn't linger in front of our inner city rowhouse and
I didn't look back as I unlocked the door.
Inside, Mom was sitting in the living room reading
with Frank the cat on her lap. She looked up when I
came in, glanced around the room and asked "Notice
anything different?"
"Sunlight."
One of the first things she had done upon Tim's
departure was to open the living room shutters. They
had been closed since our move to the house, a
bizarre cost-saving measure. The room seemed
unnaturally bright. Light bounced off of the white
walls, pooled in the corners. Our other cat, Liz, was
basking in a patch of it. She held our a paw and
trilled. Could you get more symbolic than this,
darkness transformed by light, a closed off room now
open? A little foreshadowing, a portent of good
things to come?
House in Wilmington during the Tim era.
Don't be so gullible, so easily
blinded by the sun. Sometimes a patch of sunlight is
just that and nothing more. An open shutter can be
closed again.
The end of the Tim era did turn out to be free and glorious,
five months of mother-daughter bonding. We enjoyed
the sunlight. Bought 100% orange juice and name-brand
yogurt. Mom acquired a moped and zipped around town
picking up freelance writing work and groceries. I
arranged rides to and from games, kept up with my
studying, memorized lists of German words, puzzled
over teutonic grammar. Maureen and I continued as
best friends. For Mom's 34th birthday I got her a
card with a guy in drag made up to look like
Elizabeth Taylor: "Birthdays are like husbands –
after a while you stop counting!" Ha Ha.
Adolescence, the process of pulling yourself into
burgeoning adulthood, shakes the seemingly solid
foundations of identity. The sweet boy, lover of
plaid shirts and belted khakis, suddenly starts
dressing in black, from hair dye to nail polish to
skirt and shoes. The athlete takes up drugs and loses
motivation. Best friends drift apart. I started ninth
grade in pastels, a nondrinker, a
German-studying,
Duran Duran-listening cheerleader. I finished
the year close to that, too, though internal changes
were taking place in preparation for my
metamorphosis.
The shift may have happened anyway, it might have
been destiny, but I can't deny that there was a
catalyst. He moved in down the street that spring.
Kevin the poet-carpenter. Kevin with his plumb lines
and his radial saws, with his collie and his poetry
books. My mother met him and dropped everything.
By May I was essentially on my own.
Next
installments: The Little House, demon rum, Dirk, and
a friendship that doesn't survive.
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 the
Murderer (click here
for more on him), 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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 a man that we still call
John the Murderer (if you ever want to read about
John the Murderer, Calvin Trillin has an essay about
him, "I've Always Been
Clean," in the 1984 book
Killings, taken from his New Yorker
essays). 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.