Tenacious me
Everyone goes through times when writing feels impossible, but what is most frustrating about this spell is those trapped thoughts tugging at me, asking for a voice. I don’t feel empty. I feel frustrated. Sure, I could use the old schtick of breast beating and past resurrection. I could structure whatever it is that needs life into heavy metaphorical framework, thereby obscuring the poetry, the deeply felt quality of it.
Here are the elements: a dream in which I showed the boy how he could blot out the moon with his thumb, and an email from a friend discussing the flood of mutual feeling that emerged when she recently ran into a man who broke her heart decades ago (thanks, b.). The moon fakes a glow, it reflects the light of another; despite its fakery, the moon has power over the oceans, the pull over water and blood; blotting it with a finger is a fraud; our attempts to pretend that deep, inexplicable connection doesn’t exist are a form of cheating the self: moon/ trickster/ tides/ love/authenticity.
Maybe it’s as simple as that, a series of words. Maybe I’ve just been on a throat-clearing binge, need to write and write and write until I get to the point or until the point gets to me. It’s so easy to give up on this stuff, especially when the only compelling reason to keep going comes from within me. Nobody's paying me for this, or giving me a grade, and having the willpower to struggle through self-doubt, foolishness, and what appears to be my own incompetence is not one of my strong points.
The Round Robin starts up again on Sunday. I think I need to challenge myself to not go back to the old themes, to try and divert myself from familial dirges and soaking in the past. Those themes and approaches are too easy. The less sleep I get (my sleeping tends to suffer during the RR – I race to wake up and start writing as early as possible), the darker my writing becomes, too. I don’t necessarily want to avoid darkness, but I do want to avoid the incessantly inward glance. So I need to keep up with my sleep, to remind myself that I have the time.
Attempting to direct my writing may initially result in some pretty poorly written work. It’s unfamiliar territory and will be necessarily self-conscious at first. Or maybe it won’t. But I don’t want to give up on something just because I am not immediately competent. I have to give myself permission to be bad at it. I think that’s the key to a lot of new things for me – I need permission to do poorly, on the assumption that I will learn and improve (or stop after I've tried repeatedly without improvement). In other words, I can set myself up to work through self-doubt by being easier on myself, by allowing myself to fail. If I allow myself to fail and give myself room to learn (and to be unknowing), I can develop tenacity. Willpower.
Hmm. I feel that heart warmth, the faint burn of waiting tears, a recognition of the truth. Is this part of what is going on in my mind, the thoughts that will out? What the fuck do they have to do with the moon and love? Am I distracting myself with metaphorical baubles while the rest of me struggles with what it will take to change my writing (and anything else that needs a rethink)? Maybe.
Maybe it’s all very simple and I just haven’t been able to see it until now.
Image: Incredibooth photo of me, obscured by balls of artificial light.
Is the title a little cutesy? Once I thought of it, I couldn't resist.
The way in
Once you’re in, forget the rest of the world. It’s you and the words and whatever story you’re telling and even if it’s a shitty first draft, if you can lose yourself in it, if you can feel the flow, then something about it will be good, true, authentic, real. Don’t think too much (I write after pausing for a few seconds to think). Sometimes it won’t work out, sometimes what you first come up with will just be the kernel of what you are going for, but who can resist the feeling of being totally there, completely immersed, going for something more solid, more revealing, than reality itself?
I’m no good at fiction. Or the kind of fiction I write is in brief spurts, nothing extended (I don’t count the “novel” I wrote during nanowrimo a couple of years ago). What I mainly write is “fact” filtered through my mind and packed with metaphor. It’s true, it’s a story and some of it really never happened, or what really happened, what I really thought, was so long ago that it has become a fiction itself. What ends up mattering are the remains, the ideas, the impressions that other people left upon me, gathered up in my mind and associated with other times and with stories I’ve read and with the long walks in the middle of the night along tarry roads.
And there are stories I return to again and again, even in the brief fictional pieces I occasionally write. The themes are large – grief, guilt, desire and one’s attempts to stamp it out. My main characters are conflicted women, women who live one life and imagine another or who have been hollowed out inside by a sad past, or dogged by it, shadowed by a darkness that, if the story goes right, will slowly fade over time and coffee and whiskey, over conversations in dark bars, over the long process of self-forgiveness, of being kind to the people they were when they were powerless.
My alter egos drink too much. They pick up men, or they used to before they regained control over their lives. They grasp the hands of children as if they are children themselves, until they reach the epiphany, the moment of change, the realization that they are all grown up and ok and the child they are holding can depend on them, that it’s a gift to depend on a grown-up.
The way I get into a piece is by getting into myself. It’s not always optimal, this self-obsession, this need to tell a version of my story over and over again in different ways, to foist myself on my characters, but hopefully in the process I reach someone out there. We share the truth for a moment or two, and they leave the room holding a piece of me, ever changing, melancholy at the core until the shift takes place.
From yesterday's final Round Robin prompt: "What I know about writing."
Image of "Les grands moulines de Paris" by Julien Mangez.
Scrubbed clean
Sometimes I scrub the write clean, tart it up, obscure (hopefully) most of its resemblances to reality, and post it. Sometimes that’s impossible, or changes the meaning so much that what I was originally going for is covered over in an ill-fitting disguise. Changing a write is always a dangerous business: I risk losing the poetry of it, the truth of the matter, and I also risk hurting or alienating people I care about who may recognize their outline in what I write.
Then there’s me, the habitual self-revealer with the same tired old themes: the suppression of various emotions, the over-emoting, the whining. The depression. The isolation. How much do I want to reveal about myself here? How many times can I wrench my heart out of my chest and wave it around? To whom am I communicating?
I struggle with the desire to reveal all, the ugly bits, the wanting emotions, the feelings that I can’t seem to get out except through a keyboard. It’s the thrill of the emotional flash, the showing of vulnerability, the communication of my disease to others. But some things are personal (did I ever think I would write that?). And sometimes revelation is self-serving.
Because writing is seduction. And I want to seduce. I want your minds, your hearts, I want to show you pieces of me, to hold you in my hand while I occupy your mind. I want to form images that you will never forget, that you will always associate with me. I want you to think that you know me. I want you to never forget me.
What’s the harm in that? Maybe it’s the removed quality, the lack of risk. It’s the fantasy of seduction that I’m after, not the actual business of doing it. Once my words are out there, someone might pick up on them. No effort is needed from me. Nothing risked, nothing gained, and I go at it again the next day with the same emotions. Worst of all, it's a compulsion that fulfills an emotional need. I contain things so well (too well) and want a place to let them live, however briefly, in words, with an audience. Wouldn't it be better just to have them exist in the real world, to integrate them into me?
Leave the topic alone, Jennifer. Put the laptop down and slowly back away.
When I was twenty-five, a newly minted librarian living in Ohio, I struck up a flirtation with an artist/fellow state employee. He wanted to film me in black and white, riding an Italian scooter, smoking, always smoking, quiet, contained, something to show this undercurrent of suppressed desire he saw within me. We never followed through on his plan. I’ve lost touch with him. He had it right, though. Suppression.
I suppress and reveal. Suppress and reveal. And today I am trying to live with it while still keeping it under wraps, living with the things that perhaps are just part of who I am, destined to be hidden for the rest of my life.
As for the rest of you, the ones I've borrowed without thinking, you're safe, at least as far as blog posts go. I can't promise that the stuff of my life won't show up somewhere else someday. But I promise to blur the line between fiction and reality so well that only the larger truth remains.
One paragraph of this was from today's prompt, "Jumping."
At the moment, writing is begetting writing for me. Prompts, psych paper, posts. Feeling lucky to be able to fit it all in.
Image (Low flying dames) by me -- this was on the sidewalk near a Halloween witch display in our neighborhood. Maybe the connection of image to text is getting more and more obscure ...
Ringing true
Nora led me on the slow walk along Dwight. She concentrated on sidewalk scents, the deep contemplative sniff, totally ignoring the grumble and gunning of car engines and their acrid exhaust. She’s getting older and I cut her some slack, let her enjoy the spicy roots of roses and street trees, the metallic bitterness of security gates. Outside the store, I tied her to the stoplight post, knowing from experience she hated to be left out. She jumped and barked and pulled at her leash as I entered the double doors.
Bamboozled is for last chances, last-minute alcohol, milk for when you run out, bananas for a burst of health after the fried fish sandwich. Most people come here for six-packs and lottery tickets, for the cigarettes behind the register.
The girl at the counter, glossy black hair, cinnamon skin, was speaking into a mobile phone in a language I didn’t know. Somewhere behind her my pack waited, anticipating the tap-tap of nervous hands, the ceremonial unwrapping of cellophane, my trembling choice: which one would burn first? Even through the closed door I could hear Nora's yelps. The girl made eye contact. I put an empty hand to mouth and inhaled deeply, pantomimed the satisfaction of holding and releasing smoke. Phone crooked between ear and shoulder, she turned to the cigarettes, letting her hand pass from brand to brand. I nodded when she got to Camel Lights.
This was the start of my escape and I noted the details: the dog's distress, the store's faint odor of disinfectant, the rows of 12-packs in the sunlight, the layer of dust on the cans of Coco Lopez. I dug into my back pocket for a ten and one of my fingernails bent against the denim. The girl and I slid our offerings across the counter, my cash for her cigarettes. A pale scar divided the back of her hand in two. Someone stuck his head in the door to ask if anyone knew whose dog that was, the distressed one tied to the post? She's mine, I told him and ran out to Nora, leaving my change behind (oh, her dance of recognition, of joy in not being abandoned she gave as I freed her from the post). We continued our walk to University, past Indian restaurants, cafes, and small grocery stores, turned left, and went to the water.
Cesar Chavez Park, a former landfill, juts into the bay. The grass is uneven, the ground underneath lumpy and booby-trapped with gopher holes. As Nora obsessed over gophers and ground squirrels, I looked across the water. San Francisco glittered in the distance, a taunt for what I could never have, another thing to bemoan, and my chest ached.
But suddenly the feeling changed. This is the mystery, the real topic of fiction: that moment of change -- is it a moment? A process? What brings it on? What is the key to the transformation? Did the kites flying above push me toward acceptance? Was it the family picnicking near us, two silent and exhausted parents watching their chubby toddler rip up handfuls of grass? Had I been working on it unconsciously all along? This was when my heart shifted toward truth and yet I can't get at the truth of the moment, at least not here.
As we left the park, I sent the pack of cigarettes sailing into a trash can, a sacrifice to note my sacrifice, an acceptance of the delicate balance in my life between ambiguity and love, novelty and stability, lightness and darkness. Cleansed by bay breezes, baptized by the city's exhaust and the hum of the highway, Nora and I returned to the humid familiarity of home.
That night I woke to chains dragging and ghosts howling, the sound detritus of a rowdy party up the street. But I was having a dream, too, of coming to the edge of the impossible, flirting with it while knowing it was impossible. I kept changing my clothes, rejecting my outfits, my disguises. Nothing fit or it was dirty or ripped, long out of style or season. The impossible and his progeny waited for me. In the end I told them to go on ahead. I would make it to our destination on my own in whatever identity fit.
Yesterday morning I did tell my husband I was going out for a pack of cigarettes (har har har). It was day four of the boy's illness and my husband was also laid up (and continues to be) after hernia surgery. I felt trapped by other peoples' needs. A dog walk, some studying, some time almost-alone, and a little more sleep helped shake the feeling. There is nothing to escape. This is my life and I am committed to it and to whoever we will become, me, the man, and the boy.
Besides, I already have a pack of cigarettes in my desk, a remnant from the truly horrible spring of 2011. The pack is almost full. I’ve never finished a cigarette. But I like the fact that it is waiting for me in a drawer, that I can take on the role of rebel or angry girl or self destructive harpy without taking it on at all. Because I am not any of these things.
It doesn’t mean that I can’t return in my mind to the time when home meant my erasure, that I can't wear the dark coat and scuffed boots even on a sunny October day. The cigarettes and stories act as a pressure valve for my dark side. I dance with the impossible in my dreams and I return to reality when I awake. In my first version of the cigarette story, the fictional me got to the edge of the bay and kept on going. The water submerged her. The dog barked as it swallowed her up. But there was no point to this ending, no transformation, just the further disappearance of self.
It didn't ring true.
I got very absorbed in this one -- probably best to think of it as a work in progress.
Image by meddygarnet.
handmade small things
We sacrifice the wood, the clay, the stones for our own pleasure, take tool to make tool, indent the surface with hammer strikes, slash our signatures in yielding earth. The items are useful (the bedside table, the chair, the bureau) or pure whimsy (the feather sail on a sacrificial boat). But all are art.
Handmade things, old things, have the texture of life, of the personal. Sometimes I imagine my grandfather working in his shop, running a sander over the surface of what is now a bookcase. I see the ghosts of workmen lightly tapping in our living room mantel. I see Kevin, 65 years old now -- I see his apparition everywhere, on a bike shimmering down Shattuck, walking distractedly past a restaurant, a shadow piloting a beaten-down truck. He defies space and time, is again driving posts into soft Smith Island mud or putting up drywall in a West Street townhouse.
It is the small movements, the bit by bit and nail by nail, that create something new. My living room fills up with the past, with carpenters and painters and potters. They swirl around me, busy assessing the smoothness of a plaster curve, the pattern of lace on clay, whether a surface is level or slanted. They are totally in the moment, lost in creation.
Writing is a form of creation, of making something again and again until it works in some indescribable way. But the point most of the time is to make it look effortless, unlabored. There is nothing of the handmade to it, even though hands are intimately involved in the effort, stretching across keyboards and plunking down heavy typewriter keys.
I could make a pocket-sized book with pithy sayings in my blue scrawl, my loopy g’s heavy over the blank spaces below, obscure epigraphs for the pretentious. Perhaps I could make it my confessional, a place for true secrets complete with illustrations and discursive footnotes. I would sew the binding with big stitches, mock up the cover. The mockup would become the real thing, the final version, a touch of creation in progress.
I would leave my message to no one out on the curb or would toss it into the air along a busy street, pure art for art’s sake. My book would become an infiltrator, a bit of me in someone else's hand, someone lost and lonely. Who else would grab at crazy scribblings on the ground? We touch through the page. My thoughts enter the other's mind. The intimacy goes one way. Still, the stranger contains me. Absorbs me. Transforms me.
The handmade small things were ideas once. They lived in someone else's mind until the someone made them real. I am buoyed by the invisible creative process of others.
How can I be lonely surrounded by so many minds?
Image of my scrawl on the recipe box my grandfather made, propped up against a ceramic piece probably pumped out by machine (but made to look handmade -- this was a 30th birthday present from my husband that came from the British Museum), with pictures of my paternal great-grandparents on either side.
This could use more work ... feels very draft-like. And so expandable. What about cooking as art, for example? Temporary, sensual, life-giving.
Borrowed souls
He escaped. He got out of that car and climbed up the thorny hill and I was chasing him and she was, too, and all of the sudden I was scratching a dog behind the ears in my therapist’s office while all the people I know from my local waking life, the Berkeley era, parents from school and preschool, were in the waiting room with me. Outside children played on old-fashioned monkey bars while their parents were otherwise occupied (in the city or locked into office buildings or tapping away at laptops in coffee shops or maybe they were hanging their heads, resting them in their hands, listening to the blood flowing, pumping, feeling the stress of money troubles).
They knew me, these parents. They knew me better than I wanted them to know me. They had read my confessionals, my one-sided characterizations of the past (“myopic” one ex-friend wrote to me in a terse huff). They didn’t know why I borrowed people, those whom I felt had wronged me, those I once loved or still did but couldn’t. Because they weren’t writers themselves, they didn’t know that the people who lived, that I recreated in words, were now characters, that I owned them. I took their features and my own perceptions and changed reality into a copy, a mix of impression and imagination and sometimes emotion.
Thems the breaks when you know an artist, folks. Besides. By the time I get to you, to the hidden or not-so-hidden you, you are a fiction. Not real. Mine.
Can I call myself an artist? A writer? Can I handle the pretension, the assumption of it all? I can certainly hide behind it when I write things that cause pain or reveal too much about other peoples’ lives. It’s not as simple as borrowing other people, or making them my own. The past I sometimes write about doesn’t belong only to me and the people I pepper my writing with are sometimes very real.
I don’t want to be borrowed myself, want to exist fully as a human being, to not be summed up or characterized by a few of my traits in order to fit someone else’s idea of who I am or what they want me to be. I am slowly learning to tread carefully when dealing with the “facts,” to not direct my anger in public words so obviously or without some compassion for the people I prop up and make mine. Unfortunately, I have a whole passel of melodrama out there in the world to show up a time when I didn’t even think about how others might react, where I was the glowing center (or sometimes the black hole), the god moving around the souls of other people.
All I can do is to try to do better, to be better. I'm trying.
Postscript
A poem by Kevin that has been going through my head lately. Dedicated to those whom I've hurt out of my own myopic pain.
TWO-PIECE PUZZLE
Here's one of those two-piece wire puzzles.
There's only one way to take it apart.
(If you don't have the patience, don't start.)
It belongs to my son who would dazzle
all of us, doing it right.
He can't, I couldn't have either
when I was seven. I found it on the floor
of the bedroom after he'd spent the night.
I remember I'd had one like it
and I sat on the bed for a long while
fooling with it before I put it down
in frustration. I'd thought: Don't force it.
If you can't solve it, at least you'll
not spoil it as you did the other one.
--Kevin Sheehan
From the prompt "What I know about writing." The last prompt of the Round Robin. The end of the madness. I'm not sure if I will take the next round, so my posting will not be as frequent for the next several months. Unless I cave and take the class.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of disembodied marionette heads at Marionette Museum in Hohensalzburg Fortress the by Curious Expeditions.
Fictionalized
I’ve become accustomed to writing in bursts at 4:30 in the morning, giving the quick impression, the fast take. The rest of my time lately has been spent in household tasks and I tell myself this is fine, really it's fine, at least I have something to show for it, some signs that yes, I can write. Maybe I’m not meant to write drawn out stories. Maybe these bursts are my thing. Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that, like most writers, I’m just going to have to plug along without ever selling or really publishing a goddamned thing.
Why is it so important to have thousands of readers? What is it about the mind meld process of reading someone else’s words? Is this a power trip, me wanting to insert a bit of me into you? What do I expect from this process? I am trying to let go of the shoulds, the idea that I should be writing one thing or another, that I need to please everyone in my life, that I should ignore my core in order to satisfy what I think other people want from me.
I don’t want to write for the masses. I have no desire to do the marketing dance, to write stories that will fly off of bookstore shelves (it’s good to not have desires for impossible things anyway). In order to please myself I probably need to write more, but, as with everything else, I have a hard time separating me out from the rest of it. I need to be disciplined, to push beyond the ease of four or five paragraphs. But what to write about that will please me, will keep my attention through self-doubt and difficulty?
My past is no longer up for being detailed. Leave me alone, it tells me. Make me into something else, please. Fictionalize me. In these conversations, I have to talk back. Then, past, why do you insist on historical accuracy? When I escape you in words, why do you hang over my shoulder and correct my “facts”? The past is fading, it no longer speaks in full sentences, but still, it can correct with a look. I parade it out in therapy sessions and crying jags, give it its due so that it will dissipate or return to the files in my mind, the places I will refer to when I need a situation, a fight, a season of loneliness and booze.
Still. I turn to the rest of you. I borrow your sentences, I watch the sunset filtered through filmy blinds. I see your lives reflected in mantel mirrors. Sooner or later, you will show up in my words, barely disguised. I promise to treat you with kindness, with affection, with acknowledgment for your strengths and flaws. So please talk to me, will you? Give me material, give me conversation. Don’t leave me alone by the side of the road, wordless, my head resting in my hands.
From the prompt "What I know about writing."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This is the final prompt of this session. The next one starts up some time in July. The boy is home and campless for the next couple of weeks, so I'm not sure what my writing time will be like.
Image by Ben Fredericson (xjrolokix).
Sleeve-tugging talk
I’m almost done with Stephen King’s book On Writing, a quick and useful read. In it, he talks about the importance of making dialogue real, how it’s one of the things in the writer’s toolbox, and then he names some writers who aren’t too good at it (but are published: there’s hope!). Perhaps writers who are shy and quiet and don’t get out much (to listen to strangers, to talk to them) are not going to be good at writing dialogue that feels real. I’m doomed.
Here is a typical bit of dialogue from my day.
“Mom?”
Do I respond to him, to the shouts from the back of the house? I continue to cut watermelon into quarters, just the way he likes it.
“Mom?”
He'll have to come to me if he wants my attention. I put the watermelon on a plate and wet a corner of a napkin for ease of face- and finger-wiping.
“MOM!”
Officially irritated, I grab the plate and stomp it to the back room, petulant, a child myself. “What?”
“I want you back here with me.” Depending on mood and hunger level, this line can be delivered with faux tears or real ones or just a kind of excited calmness.
Do you really want to read on? I bore myself with this stuff, with the everyday nothings that add up to years of fetching and watching and picking up. Still, there are moments of beauty. When my husband is out of town, my son and I talk more. He’s almost six and still fascinated by what school and the world was like when his dad and I were kids. We’ve had evenings where I get to recreate the ancient world of the 1970s, when Nana was way too young and way too angry and I was a chatty thing who had to write out “I will not talk in the Delaware Art Museum” for my teacher one hundred times on thick-lined paper after a too-loud field trip.
These are conversations, though I would find them difficult to reproduce as dialogue, impossible to do in ten or twelve minutes because I don’t have an ear for the essential.
I’ve told him about Lillian, though I didn’t tell him her name, the woman who ran the Montessori school I briefly attended in first grade who didn’t give me a trophy when I did the number two times tables in front of the school – not because I didn’t get them right (I did), but because I was clearly adding and had not memorized them. I told him about the first day of first grade at the public school when my mother called the police because I didn’t get home on time. I'd gone with a new friend who locked me out of her house and then laughed at me as I begged to use her phone to call my mom.
We talked about school buses and the songs I'd sing on them. I added a contemporary flair to the discussion by bringing up a YouTube video of Queen singing "We Will Rock You."
This is it, this is it people, this is my life, and it’s lovely and lucky and all I can think about at the moment, my husband due back late tonight after four days away and maybe my brain will be free soon and I’ll come up with something brilliant and fictional that takes place on a faraway island with lots of sex, the smoothing together of body parts and there will be a theft and drug deals and the woman kills her adversary in the end.
From the prompt "Give us the dialogue."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This week nothing is really flowing from my fingertips. I've doctored this one a bit.
Image: The boy drawing on a restaurant menu, Sunday.
I traffic in symbol
I traffic in symbol -- nothing is as it appears on the surface. Reality comes with a shadow of interpretation and hidden meaning.
Excerpts from recent prompts that beg to be expanded. You can do it. Or I will. Someday.
The melodrama of love and loss has a kind of beauty. A dark green beauty, jealous as jade, sharp on the edges. I don’t need to know it again. I can remember. I hold the past in my hand and cut myself against it again and again. (Photo prompt, today)
It is more than the loss of love, more than rejection and impossibility. It is how it links to every loss you've ever had. Love is a chain of toxic links, it is heavy, it pulls you under the surface, and when it’s over, when your lungs are half-full, almost satiated with water, it shoves you back to shore. You gasp, you limp, you remember the beauty of a fluid life, the hot grab of water pressure against your skin. You remember the love object in tropical blue, the bubbles leaving his mouth as he spoke, and he had eyes for you, only for you. (Photo prompt, today)
The shiny cherry red rain boots flop on their sides, emptied of leg. These are the faux me, the faux patent leather. They are not so-five-minutes ago. They are now. They are the moment, the constant shifting moment. It’s good to live in the moment, except when the moment is all you have. You can’t ride the crest of a moment, you simply drift around in it, unsure of your path or past. (Five minutes ago, 2 March)
Because rooms, houses – they soak it all in. Mainly the pain. Pain soaks into the walls, it drips into the floors. Joy bounces, happiness glides, and guilt is a slick that anyone can slip on. But pain and deep sadness? They stick around. (Room for rent, 28 February)
You whisk the knife up and down against the steel. The action is masturbatory, repetitive. You don’t want to stop, want to wear the knife down to nothing, want to straighten it until it’s useless. Finally, you do stop. The blade gleams, it purrs with the attention, and you draw your good thumb to the edge, press it without going into the flesh. (On the cutting edge, 15 February)
I used to think the me of me was fixed, solid, that I recognized her, would be able to tell it was me coming from across a crowded room by an aura of me-ness. Why? Because I’m self-aware, of course, I’m clever and quick and can see past my own subterfuges to the pulsating core. (Searching, 12 February)
We know what the good thing to do is, we want to be good, to be clean as the morning sky, as tangible as bread dough, as in the here and now as the newborn. Yet the bad courts us, it tempts us. Or maybe there are no perfect goods and bads and sometimes our monkey brains look at the total equation and decide where we want to take our goods, where the gratification will come from. Sometimes the more esoteric, the more removed the gratification, the easier it is to ignore it, to back away from it and go for the good of the moment, the embrace, the bite of gamey goat cheese, the slice of cake light and fluffy, the moment when you should say something ignored. (Cheese, 9 February)
And a silly one:
Simian pants, an apt description of a young man I saw on the BART today, his skinny saggy-butted jeans making his legs look more primate than human.
Related post: Drum-tight heart.
Image: This morning's thought, as I was realizing that nothing is as it appears on the surface for me.
Edited a couple of times to expand and fix typos.
Riffs on a theme
laundry
thinking about last night's writers' group meeting
cleaning
dishwasher emptying
pondering 80s band names
exercising
music
daydreaming
talking on the phone (a long overdue and good, if a bit unsettling, conversation)
I need to complete my assignment for my creative nonfiction class. I need to take the story of Kevin's death -- the long day, the endless winding down, the surreal quality of it all -- and find a different way in. I've written about 3000 words, most of them the wrong ones. I need to do it, but keep on avoiding the task.
In this week's "lecture," our teacher was talking about finding the theme, the underlying topic that holds a piece of writing together, something that takes it out of a story of a series of events into something larger than itself. This is what is missing from my current draft. It's missing from some of my other work as well. People die. They rush into it, they take their time about it, they go out in an explosion of gunpowder or in the slow drip of blood and breath. This is not a theme, this is a fact, and it's not enough to make Kevin's last day compelling story material.
So what is the theme? Has it revealed itself yet? It finally hit me: forgiveness.
My forgiveness of Kevin through his long slow horrible hospitalization. My self-absolution through being there every day, through every up and down, by being kind to someone who was unable to treat me with kindness. His apology. His forgiveness of himself (the day before he died, three of us in the room during his confession to the hospice minister, the story I already knew but that Kevin's son was hearing for the first time, our role as witnesses, to the story, to Kevin's pre-Vatican II Catholic abused child fear of being bad and going to hell). Fear of what would happen to him after death kept Kevin going for a long time. He confessed and was absolved. And then his body slowly let go, loosened its grip on life.
OK. I have a theme. It's the same theme that runs through almost everything I write. Now I have to figure out how to approach it, in my voice, without going overboard. That last day where we weaved in between his hospice room, where death was taking its time, and the outside world, where spring was everywhere, where we had to eat, where people rushed and lived and acted as if they were immortal? I have to make it real and rich and, ultimately, about something else.
Fingers crossed that I can pull it off by Sunday night.
Megalomania
My mother thinks that with the right marketing plan, I could make a lot of money doing this writing thing. It’s all about the volume, the number of people paying, she tells me on the phone. You need to learn how to sell yourself.
All I need to do to sell myself, to have the chutzpah to push my work, I respond, is to become a megalomaniac and all I need to become a megalomaniac is a coke habit. It’s simple. This gets the laugh I wanted, but still she persists. A marketing plan.
My mother doesn’t read the blog (I’ve asked her not to and she’s also afraid to read it, which is fine with me), but she is my mother and as such has absolute confidence in my abilities. The confidence is nice, but perhaps misplaced. Not because I am a lousy writer, but because I can’t imagine who would pay for this stuff. I can't imagine who would pay me for anything.
It’s been six and a half years since I quit my job to go to cooking school and almost five and half since my son arrived on the scene. Though I worked part-time at a library when I was pregnant, I haven’t occupied the library universe for a while and I’m not sure I want to go back anyway. As for the culinary life, I don't have enough hustle for professional kitchens or enough desire to make the food career work. Really, I'm doing what I want to do: writing, on my terms. It's a luxurious position to be in, to be able to spend my weekdays wasting, getting lost in narratives about the past and present, but it also keeps me somewhat isolated and financially dependent. I drift along, pump out blog posts, and respond to prompts. (Oh, and I also parent the kid, take care of the animals, clean the house, wash the clothes, make the meals, and intermittently garden. Let's not forget those tasks.) The result is a whole lot of words that don't add up to much, or so it feels on my off days.
One of the things that was so terrifying about quitting my congressional library job was my worry that once I cut the tethers from the organized salaried world I would drift along without ambition or urge, that I would never return to a normal workaday life. Turns out that worry was valid. I don’t want to return to a life where my mind was held hostage for 40 – 50 hours a week, where my off hours were spent in a post-work recovery haze, where my parenting would be affected by the petty irritations of office life. Maybe that last job imprinted me forever, the small open reference room with seven other librarians, being constantly on, the lack of privacy, the constant interaction mixed in with a control-freak boss. Or maybe it's something else, in my nature, this desire to be on the other side of imposition.
The desire to be on the other side of imposition, to not have to answer to coworkers and bosses and office politics, imposes its own limitations, financial dependence, being defined by a very inwardly focused role, that of mother and wife. I've given up one regime for another. But at least this contained world is mine. I can write about what I want. I have the time and freedom to follow my thoughts.
And, of course, I have ambitions. I want readers, I want to be good at what I do, I want to take the particular details of my life and make them universal. I'm willing to work hard to do it right. But I have no idea how to “market” the version of myself I put out here. This blog has a very limited scope: me. While I am willing to expand my scope – while I have to expand my scope – I still wonder how to make it all fit together, to have the professional life I need, the satisfaction of writing what resonates for me, and maybe a little money, not much, but enough.
My mother says she'll help. I'm also open to suggestions, to ideas on how to make this a more professional life, ones that are outside the realm of megalomania. Step one: complete and submit my pieces.
Or maybe I need a dose of reality, a confirmation that this is not a paying gig, that I'm lucky enough to be able to do it and if I expect cash flow, I have to look elsewhere.
Image: Me, of course.
Distraction smackdown
I began this post in a spiral-bound notebook, the words running together in thin blue ink. The first draft shaped up while I was sitting in a playground, my legs half-sunk in sun-hot sand, the kid and his father playing next to me. I wrote the second under the hum of the washer and the whine of distant drilling and guttural dog barks. Distractions of this sort -- the frisk of wind through the trees, the UPS truck, the clang of a stone against metal -- don't pull me away from my work. They may even be necessary. When I'm immersed, the sounds of the world disappear. When I need to resurface, they provide something else to concentrate on.
Spending the time between sentences thinking, being, and exploring is qualitatively different from spending that time seeking and clicking. Writing on my computer, I am easily taken off course by the pursuit of shiny fact. I skim, I kick my feet in the shallows, but never plunge in. Getting deep into writing is hard. It scares me. Like most writers I worry that my stories are no good, or that I will lead myself into dead water, trap my narrative in the mud. But when my mind flits here and there, tracing the edges without risking the plunge, I feel like I'm wasting my life.
I've been thinking a lot about fear lately, how it has ruled my life to a large extent, from my worries about driving a car to my reluctance to risk friendship. I am facing the fear. It is time to push through self-doubt, push myself into the depths, which means that I have to fight against the pull of the Internet as well as the pull of perfectionism.
So. I'm going to write my drafts in longhand or on a typewriter. One or two days a week, I will ask my husband to take the modem with him so that when I am not writing, I am forced to remove my mind from its high state of distraction, to remember or recreate what I did for all those years before we had wireless.
The no-techness and portability of a notebook and a pen pleases me. The three of us will hang out together, lazy in the sun, perched on park benches, sitting at tables in libraries and coffee shops. Sometimes I'll drag out the old Royal portable, punch out my manuscripts, thrill in the tangibility of each return. Perhaps, like an old (and crazy) friend of Mr. X I will drag the portable around town with me. My powerful clacks and whirs will both annoy and intrigue my fellow coffee shop denizens. They will glare, concentration pulled, as they sweep and tap their fingers against flat screens and plastic keyboards.
Writing isn't about speed, it's about thinking, about revision, about building up and whittling down to get to the truth of a matter. Changing the method doesn't determine the quality of the work or make it easier to create. But it will help me go deeper into the narrative. If I don't slow down and unplug, I will never finish anything and if I never finish anything, I will feel like a fraud, unfulfilled, weak and wanting.
Who needs to live like that?
Autumnal fantasy
The first symptom is a change in my sleeping patterns. I acquire a bizarre capacity for sleep, up to 8 hours at a stretch. Sometimes I even sleep past 7 a.m. Then, upon waking -- the clear September sunlight, all blue sky and weekend promises, scattered across the bed, the kid and the husband still snoozing -- my thoughts turn to houses in tree-lined neighborhoods where the streets follow the contours of the earth. What would it be like to live in a place that wasn’t flat and scrubby? I cruise craigslist for open houses, picture a slightly-altered reality, my family plus two cats and a dog living in a 900-square foot house along a path in the hills.* The last sign that I’ve gone over the edge is my sudden frenzy of organization. During the week, when the kid is safely contained in school, I begin to plot out my time, make a plan of attack, harness my energy.
It happened last year and the year before that and now I'm in the middle of it again. I could blame the sudden unfiltered sunlight after months of fog or say it is a response to the end of a month of unstructured time with the kid. Whatever the reason, September comes and I sleep it off, take control, imagine walking out my door to redwoods and hummingbirds. I feel hopeful, like I can make some positive changes, impose structure, make it all right.
The sleeping won’t last and the desire to move will fade, but I hope that my attempts to organize will stick this time. As a stay-at-home parent and a hopeful writer, I very seldom feel a sense of accomplishment. One day flows into the next, the kid grows and changes and I try to adapt, and the words come in fits and starts. Without some plan or approach, I’ll spend the next several years in a haze, knowing that I should be doing something, but remaining unsure of what that something is.
Measuring success in parenting is difficult. The job is years in the making and the parameters shift. Parents need to be flexible, to adapt their techniques to the kid, to change approach if necessary. I could make a list of goals – the big one would be to raise a confident, happy, and loving adult – but the process of reaching them is fraught and nonlinear. In lieu of any concrete measurement, I concentrate on the tasks, the appointments and activities, the household maintenance, lest each day ooze into the next, me sitting at my computer or on the couch fuzzy with shoulds, never feeling the urgency.
Measuring “success" in writing is almost as difficult. Do I achieve it by writing every day? By getting published? By getting better? By actually finishing something? By the number of people who read my work? Is it how I feel about my writing or how others perceive it? Writing in my journal every night, while consistent and satisfying, does not feel like writing success. Writing the blog doesn't feel like success either, though I get a lot of satisfaction out of it.
I have two writing goals: to become more skilled and to get published. These goals are almost as nebulous as raising a confident, happy, and loving adult, but I am hopeful that they are within my abilities.
The first step is to create a structure, a framework for my days and my writing. Without an external push to start or finish a piece outside of my own idiosyncratic reasons, there is little to compel me to stop fiddling with it. The secret (!) is to maintain momentum when I'm in the weeds. I've entered a few contests, with tight constraints and set deadlines, with structure built into the process. I haven’t won a thing, not even an honorable mention. The people that win these things are usually Writers -- published, journalism-degreed or MFA-certified ones. They teach writing. They coach other writers. They know what they are doing.
I, too, want to be a Writer. I want to know what I am doing. I've improved in the last three years, by writing for the blog, joining a writers' group, and participating in the Round Robin. Writing every day certainly helps. Getting away from the Internet helps, too. Taking serious classes might be useful. So. I will take a couple of classes, completing and submitting stories all the while, and then perhaps move on to a low-residency MFA program. It’s a long range, flexible approach that I hope will work.
In the meantime, I make my to-do lists and keep pushing through my reluctance and occasional lapses in confidence. Surely my desire to be a skilled, published writer isn't a delusion of September, but something attainable and real. A possibility.
*And an issue with our current house purchase (yes, it's still in process) has made this more appealing.
Image: Me as giraffe.
The anxious in-between
And here I am, at a café, drinking tea, attempting to write. The sound bounces around, the music and the clang and rush of coffee machinery, the clink of cutlery against porcelain. From where I sit, in a corner in the back, it appears that this place is half-populated by women in-between (like me) and bald men. The other fifty percent are hipsters with their beards and pale skin and chunky glasses.
When I left the house this morning, I told our babysitter, "I'm not used to getting out of the house in the morning." He said he aspired to that, to not being used to the morning slog. Once again, I felt like a deadbeat, a producer of short blog posts and not much else, though being the mother of a small child certainly counts for something. How long do I give myself in this writing gig? At least another year or two, especially once the kid is in real school and I have more time to devote.
August has become the month of anxiety: how will I fill the time with the boy? (So far, so good.) Will he and his friend get along the two mornings a week that they are sharing a babysitter? (Remains to be seen.) What will our adjustment to school be like? (To be determined.) When I go away for three nights at the end of this month, will I pine for my family? Will I feel like a bad mother, missing the Kindergarten/First Grade picnic at his new school? (Oh, just be quiet, anxious brain.) And, finally, if I decide to take up meditation in order to quell all this mainly useless anxiety, will that take up too much of my time and not be productive? (Here I'm just being silly. I think.)
Then there is the Big Anxiety: that I suck. Mainly as a writer, but in other ways as well. I wonder if I will ever not-suck, whether it matters if I am never published, whether I need to write for myself or other people. I should write to please myself, of course, but the danger in doing that is that I am stuck with myself, without thinking about an audience, or about what makes good writing. It's not possible to improve in a vacuum. Not that I write in a total vacuum, but almost.
I start so many things, devote weeks to them, and then let them drop. I need to finish a story, two stories, three stories. More. I need to submit them and maybe get rejected and maybe not. I need to get out in the world. Even being in this cafe is a worthwhile thing: can someone be a good writer and avoid other people? For the last three years, I have moved from my guest-room office to my son's preschool to the occasional playground or play date. When I get out in the world and see all these other human beings, with their stories and distinctive ways of dressing (though we're all clad in dark jeans here and we all use MacBooks), with their different conversational patterns, I remember that I am connected to the world, and all the world is writing material.
Image: The crumbs of my croissant.
Drum-tight heart
Sitting in a cold doctor's office on a sunny morning, looking at my Moleskine notebook, discovering old writing ideas that I will never use. Please steal them. Give them life. Some of them have been trapped in my little notepad for years.
First the concepts
angel-in-residence
ritual explosives
liquidity of memory
drum-tight heart
fill it up with Ethyl
Then fill in the gaps
Message on our answering machine, 2003: Giovanni's got a package for you.
Conversation on a dry, dusty day at Children's Fairyland:
Father, very angry, to toddler: You got my shoes dirty right after I cleaned them!
Grandmother, placating: You know how funny he is about his shoes.
Finally, the Moleskine
Good luck reading my writing. I can barely decipher it myself. And I've been drawing the same doodles since I was twelve.
This post is written in homage to koe whitton-williams of the half-life of lineoluem and if the walls could talk. I've chosen to go almost all lower-case in this paragraph, but I could be wrong. I'm working without a stylebook.
Next post: a return to narrative.
Images above: Me, waiting, waiting, for the doctor or, err, the nurse-practitioner
Images below: What I wrote in my notebook while I was waiting
Chiaroscuro
Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.
I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon: develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.
Part II: Resonance
OK, OK, OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was going through my old stuff, looking for something, saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my mother, though Kevin's absence would still be palpable.
Sometimes I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I prefer to dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and light.
I write about what resonates and I have a complex relationship with both happiness and the past. The past is always present for me; it informs the present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with great material. Don't even have to think about it. As for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm generally happy, except when I'm not. The hollows, shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough patch here and there, a little complexity and strife to make it more interesting.
But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough to eat.
And five days later cold
It started with Maggie May's post on how one could possibly cope with losing a child. Or maybe it started before then, in my first grief at nine over the death of my grandmother, the grief that morphed into my obsession with Ouija boards, seances, and ghosts. Or possibly it was before even that, sparked by the hit-and-run death of the unpredictable feline Sheba, or the demise of acrobatic Regis, whose neutering stitches became infected, or the abrupt disappearance of Hector, my future ex-stepfather's dog who had to be put to sleep because of his epileptic fits.
The themes of death and grief and how we cope with them have been on my mind, simmering under the surface. I watched Kevin fade away in puffs of canistered oxygen and piped-in morphine. I've had my own sad mourning story, the first line written in the Little House when I became responsible for someone else's death, when what was left of my childhood was stomped into flatness.
So when I just started writing without a plot in mind for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), maybe I shouldn't have been surprised at what was coming out of my fingertips.
If I say anymore, I might just stop writing. I seem to be on a roll and I don't want it to stop. And I can't get A.S. Byatt's poem Dead Boys out of my head. She wrote it after her 11-year-old son was killed in a car accident. She had to go on living, because it was her only real choice.
An excerpt from Dead Boys by A.S. Byatt
One son is many sons.
A bundle, a putto, a grave
Boy with kind eyes. One blow
Cracks all their bones at once.
Pastes all the gold hair red.
Soft lip and toothless mouth
Drop blood on the breast.
A white-haired crawler on grass
Head like a dandelion-clock
Above daisy faces that come,
Yellow and white and green
Year after year after year
Stops like a toy wound down.
Like a doll dropped in the wet.
I am a cold grey house.
In every room a boy
Gestures and halts and falls
Again and again and again,
A boy with his hamster curled
On his trembling extended palm,
Like a rigid ammonite,
'Is he dead, is he asleep?'
And the boy who leaned his head
On my shoulder in a bus.
He slept so deep, he jerked
And lolled as the bus ground on
Like a puppet, like a sack,
But he was warm that week --
My cheek was damp with his warmth --
And five days later cold.
Image from Celestial Dome.
Nefarious times I live in
Forgive me, fellow bloggers, for I have sinned. I did not intend to leave this blog for almost a month while I frittered away five weeks with my son. My mother visited for ten days and I did not blog. I had eight hours of babysitting one week and I did not blog. This past week -- my son's first back at school in over a month -- coincided with the visit of an old friend and I did not blog.
But during those eight hours of babysitting, I started to think about writing again, about tackling the never-ending story in some different way, fitting in time for as-yet-nonexistent freelance work, attempting to keep this blog somewhat current (all while finishing household projects). Good writing grows best in the dark (thanks, rcb!). What sees the light here in fragmentary form tends to stay that way. Or sometimes it embarrasses me later in its undeveloped melodrama and weak attempts at capturing reality.
It's tempting, really tempting, to put up little bits and pieces on the blog. There's nothing like instant feedback to keep one going, except that I don't keep going. The past -- meh. I've dug into it, and created stories out of it, have exposed enough. Now I'm looking to take the facts of my life, the weird experiences and characters as twisted and lively as wisteria in bloom, and make them fictional. I want to harness the crisscrossing metaphors of my subconscious.
Blah, blah, blah. I'm continually on the edge of something, a change, a new way of being, perpetually on the hopeful precipice. But I've come so far from the first days of this blog, typing in the dark and yearning for more.
Image: My mother and me walking in Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
Education of an impostor
Because folding is the metaphor, see? For domestic knowledge and stability. For normalcy. When you don't feel normal and want to fit in, you observe and try to copy. Everything is a clue to the right way to behave. Nobody needs to know that you are an impostor.
Last night my small book group met to discuss Michael Ondaatje's novel Divisadero. It's a flawed book, or at the very least a book that requires both careful reading and a lack of attachment to resolution. I was the only one who really enjoyed it. Yes, the characters are damaged and abandoned, solitary types with hidden motivations. But they are my people, sketched out in Ondaatje's poetic language. I can't be the only one who knows how to fill in the blanks.
What I can't get from careful observation, from cracking open other peoples' linen closets, I get from books. Stories show me the possibilities in life. Sometimes I know the characters, fellow strangers in a strange land. There is solace in the world of quiet ones, solitary bookish people trapped in the amber of personality and circumstance. Freedom is possible. Maybe it is as simple as self-acceptance and if there is hope for them, there is hope for me. Or maybe there is no hope and I should just get on with it.
“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refused to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” -- Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136.
Without stories, I would be a series of events waiting for an author, searching for a unifying theme. Without memory, the raw material of story, I am nothing. But a strange thing can happen when we start to tell our stories, to mix memory with narrative: the stories can change. We can change. Our past can drop away, defanged.
I am here to gather the pieces and make them into something new, a narrative, a mutable monologue: this is who I am. If I'm lucky what I write will spark something in you.
Maybe it's time for another story.
Image: Me, Wilmington, DE, circa 1976?
More on the villanelle.
Join one sentence with another
For about eight months now, I've been taking a course at The Writing Salon called the Round Robin. Once a week the instructor, Jane Underwood, sends a class email with that week's writing prompts and partner assignments. Every day, for no more than twelve minutes, my partner and I each write on that day's prompt, sending the resulting "writes" to each other by email. Occasionally, the prompt is a photograph. Usually it is a phrase (yesterday's was "I feel exasperation tensing my face"), sometimes just a word.
The point is to just do it, to see what happens when we let our words flow without forethought or editing. Each partner responds to the other's work, pointing out the things that they like, encouraging the good. The process is exhilarating and a little scary. I read the prompt, gnash my teeth, and then start typing, not knowing where I'll end up.
And where I end up often surprises me. Mainly I divert my thoughts from real life, bored with the worn roads of me, well-traveled and devoid of wildlife. The words don't tumble, exactly, they waltz, softshoe onto the page, join me at a leisurely pace. I start with one sentence, join it with another, and before you know it, I have a story. A vignette.
Like this one, so different from what I write here.
Writing prompt: The test
It’s nothing. Just a blank sheet of paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. The doctor passes it to me. I stare at one of the desk legs, slit my eyes until the carpet and wood blend together, a fuzzy field of sand and tree.
Did she mention what I am supposed to do with the paper? Is that the whole point of this test, to see how I react? Origami isn’t my thing, doc. I can’t even fold a paper airplane. And I am not up to folding a cootie catcher. The idea makes me smile, though, a cootie catcher with various diagnoses hidden underneath the flaps, with pictures of clowns and crazies decorating the outside. Pick a number, say the riddle, figure out the problem.
The sheet of paper sits there, like a command: Do something. So I do. I grab it and growl, start ripping, take what I’ve ripped and rip through that as well, doubling, tripling the thickness of the paper until I can’t rip anymore. By now I’m stomping around her desk, going in circles. I take what remains of the paper and toss it into the air, cackling as the confetti drops around us.
I sigh, sit down. “I feel so much better. Thanks, Dr. Krapinski.”
She offers me a cigarette.
Image from here by way of I Am the Cheese.
More on cootie catchers.
Procrastination, B-29 bombers and ball turret gunners
Sometimes, though, when ideas are percolating, our minds lead us in strange directions. (And, of course, that's what's going on here, not really procrastination, but preparation. Percolation. All this will all lead to a wondrous stream of language soon enough. Right??)
Crew members in front of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb.
I don't want to be loosey-goosey on the details, because that would give it away, but I've been thinking a lot lately about the B-29 bomber, nicknamed the Superfortress. Boeing engineers developed the plane in the early 1940s as a long-range bomber, large enough to reach the shores of Japan, and it was a technological wonder. It also was a bit of a rush job, with early models especially prone to overheating. One 1943 prototype burst into flames on a test run when an engine fire quickly spread to the wing, destroying it. All ten crew members and another twenty people in a nearby meat packing plant were killed. By the end of the war, engineers had worked out most of the kinks, though the American public was most likely clueless about its defects (for example, this anti-Japanese government propaganda film on the bomber is all blue skies and heavy bombs).
Ball turret.
From B-29s my mind meandered to ball turrets, those little bulbs of steel and plexiglass that popped out of the bellies of B-17s and B-24s, two guns loaded on either side for enemy planes. The gunner would be cramped in the ball turret for hours, trapped, rotating, circling, with a bird's eye view of the destruction below and in the air. There are two excellent oral histories by former ball turret gunners on the web. Earl Mills, who flew in a B-17 and was eventually shot down, tells of his experiences, while author Sabine Ulibarri details a particularly frightening mission in an excerpt from Mayhem Was Our Business. Both men were diagnosed with combat fatigue, better known now as post-traumatic stress disorder.The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose. --Randall Jarrell
Stryker bed frame.
Really, though, what led me to ball turrets (bear with me) were thoughts on my grandfather's hospitalization. For the first six months, he was in a Stryker hospital bed frame (often used for patients in traction). From what I can tell, his mid-60s model was made up of a skinny mattress supported on either side by two mattress-width steel circles. Strapped in, he would wait for the moment when the bed would begin to move, to slowly flip his position from supine to prone. What would it have been like to be in that bed, sick, practically skinless, ears melted away and hearing almost gone, in and out of lucidity as his body fought off opportunistic infection? It turned him at least twice a day and he would often beg my grandmother to make it stop, to keep it from happening, in part because he associated it with the painful removal of his burn dressings, with debridement.
A man who avoided going overseas in World War II. A nation soaked in wartime propaganda, rah rah black and white newsreels, sanitized war stories of precision and heroism with an undercurrent of death and chaos. Twenty years later, fire, destruction, pain, and fear. Then, guilt and heroic fantasy.
Off to write. Slowly.
'Cos I'm a liar
Fact is fiction, fiction is fact. They intermesh. One informs the other until the words themselves become the truth of the writer’s experience, more real than reality.
When I started my stillbirth story, I was hemmed in by fact. I’d show it to my mother and she would offer corrections to misplaced fictions, give me her version of events. Some facts are important. It is not acceptable to totally make things up, to frame the innocent, or create character flaws or strengths where none exist. I wanted to be fair to my parents, which is a strange impulse when documenting an unfair situation, but why give fuel to the threatened?
Then I read poet and essayist Mark Doty’s piece on memoir, in which he describes his sister’s wedding dress. It was practical, a two-piece beige suit with matching pillbox hat. Did she choose beige as a rebellious stand against traditional white? Was the choice a result of parental pressure, the (barely) pregnant bride denied? Was it a beige suit after all? Why is his 45-year-old vision of the dress so strong? Memory is elusive, impressionistic, sometimes dead wrong. Facts are slippery. Doty questions whether these facts always matter in the telling of one's life story. Aren’t the impressions real in their own sense, the memoir a murky middle ground, a product of the "juncture of memory and imagination"? In the end, imagination wins out.
Or it does most of the time. When I found out that my mother's Aunt Ruth had a spinal condition and couldn't wear high heels − one of her legs was shorter than the other − I had to rewrite a scene (since totally excised) from the Florence Crittenton Home portion of my stillbirth story. The sound of her heels clicking against the linoleum floor, keeping time with my infant mother's screams was almost irresistible to me, a summing up of institutional efficiency and a baby's wordless pain. But I had to change it, especially once I discovered that my mother was a generally silent baby, calm, and apparently tearless. The soundtrack of nothing, no tears, no outward display of emotion, the image of Aunt Ruth limping as she exited the building with my stony-faced mother, was much more compelling than a newborn wailing against metronomic heel taps. Here was an infant who was already accustomed to being ignored, a child who grew up under a heavy coat of suppressed and private pain. This presentation of the silent child − from my mother's memory of stories her adoptive mother told her − deepened my understanding, explained the emotion underlying her explosive temper, the avoidance adapted early in life. Though, of course, this is all my interpretation informed by imagination and experience.
I’ve started to let go of the hard truth. I can’t recreate the world of my childhood, but can remember the feel of it. Does it matter if the house was truly cavernous, whether the bathroom had mint-green tile, whether it was Johnny Walker Red or tequila? It does not, but the story doesn’t develop without description, without a sense of the reality of place and time. Many facts don’t change, of course, and those facts are the bones of our life stories, fleshed out with language, given new life with words.
The events I write about here (outside of my fictional pieces, and even then the lines are blurred) happened. When I can't remember something, I take my impression and create a reasonable facsimile of reality.
And that’s the truth, Ruth.
***For thought-provoking writing on writing and a great Julian Barnes quote on creating fact out of fiction, please check out this post from Scottish writer Jim Murdoch's fine blog, The Truth About Lies.***
Ramble on
It’s started – 10 weeks of writing prompts, writing every day for 10 –12 minutes. No edits or changes, just send the piece to that week’s partner and give them feedback on their piece. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Well, I know I can write, given unlimited amounts of time to tinker and touch-up. I’m accustomed to taking my time, going back and changing things, moving words around.
What am I afraid of? Making a mistake? Sounding like an idiot? Actually, though my nerves tingle and twang as I look at each day’s prompt, there is something about it that is freeing. Just go with the words. Letting things go has always been difficult for me.
I attribute this in part to years of dinner table discussions with Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. Anything you said could reveal your intellectual and moral vacuity; flabby thinking was the sign of a rotten psyche. He was good at it, could sniff out half-baked statements, then deflate them with a quick rational jab. How could I challenge what was true when truth was a moral issue and the challenge itself a sign of my moral bereftness? My mother trapped herself for 18 years in these conversations. Over time her tiny reserve of self-confidence depleted.
As I sat in the Writing Salon this Sunday, for one of two class meetings (the rest is online), I watched the instructor. Thin, petite, probably somewhere in her fifties, with dark shortish hair, she could be my mother (I’m finding a lot of women in their fifties who look like they could be my mother; it won’t be that long before I could be her, too).
My mother is full of creative energy. She writes incredible poetry, designs jewelry made from glass and metal she finds on the streets of Baltimore, and has made some beautiful pieces of pottery. Her garden is amazing. She reads and ponders, is an excellent conversationalist, funny and erudite. She has spent most of her career being a copywriter, first for advertising companies and later for two universities. But she has never had the fundamental level of confidence to take on things in her life completely.
Mom, August 2008.
“You’re secretary material,” my grandmother used to tell her with more than a hint of contempt, trying to subdue Mom’s thoughts of going to college. Perhaps no one was surprised when she got pregnant and dropped out to become … a secretary, though she later went back and got a degree in English and Anthropology. Her family refused to see her intelligence, her need to be intellectually engaged.
So here I end up, writing about writing, and it morphs into writing abut my mother. This post took 12 minutes to create, though I can’t bear to let it go through raw: there will be some edits. Over the coming weeks I’ll put class work out here, polished or not, though I’m probably not going to post the bad stuff. Or maybe I will. That could be freeing, too.
In the meantime, I’ll remind my mother of her talents. She reads my stories, tells me I have a way with words. “It must be those Irish genes,” she says, alluding to my father’s side. The last time she said that, I came back with “Or my Polish?/German?/Swiss? genes!” (all theories of nationalities, since she is adopted.) We both laughed – doesn’t that mean I should be making watches or kielbasa or something? – but she knew what I meant. She’s got talent.
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.
Glorious suffering
Like the Bay in November, the water looks thick, as though it’s huddling against itself for warmth. I insert a hand and quickly remove it. Too cold. I straighten up, circle the pool, and try dipping a toe in the water. I can’t do it. There will be no swimming today.
Off I go to the air-conditioned house to blog about my inability to leap.
I haven’t written anything substantial for weeks. Today was a lucky day. The kid is napping as I type, a rare occurrence. I took care of a few blogging tasks, ate lunch, and decided that today was the day I would take a look at my months old short story.
This was serious stuff. I set up the laptop at my new, improved writing space. Knowing how distracting the Internet can be, I disabled our wireless connection, told myself to be strong. I opened the file with anticipation.
Every word was questionable, every description hackneyed. I circled the edge of the story, but couldn’t submerge myself. And now I sit writing a blog entry about how damn hard it is to write fiction. Hard because what is in my mind is so difficult to get on the page. Hard because I want to write layered stuff and what I’m writing at the moment seems so simplistic and clichéd. I know that that writing takes practice, but I want to be good at it. RIGHT NOW!
I could look at the bright side. I’m writing more now that I ever have. Even when I am working on a blog entry, I am still writing. When my brain is unlocked, I am capable of just letting the words flow.
Writing blog entries is easy, relatively quick, and satisfying, with almost instant positive feedback. It gives me a chance to organize my thoughts, to mine the mysterious subconscious. Sometimes that puts distracting thoughts to rest so that I am able to write about things outside of my own experience. Writing fiction (or even creative nonfiction) is more plodding and risky. But, oh, for the chance to do it well, to create something that gets beyond the walls of my own skull. Surely the benefits are worth the pain? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to keep at it.
Beginning next week, the kid will be in school three mornings a week. I will have guaranteed, uninterrupted time to write in the daylight.
I expect mornings of glorious suffering and struggle.
That’s not too much to hope for, is it?
Freed by chains
I tried to tackle it again a couple of nights ago, started a post about the drawn-out death of Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. There was his actual end, a very long day in the hospice, waiting as his lungs and heart slowly gave out, waiting for that last long sigh, and the prelude to the end, six months of hospitalization, the horror of it all.
And what about the back story? Or the story before the back story? I couldn’t determine what was important, when to stop my tortured, embarrassed typing. It was overwhelming. The process became a story on its own, a tale of tale-telling gone mad. I canned my original account and the post, though it is still worth writing, provided I create a sound framework.
Good short stories require limits, a set period of time, a riff on one theme or maybe two. Limits create the freedom to explore something in depth, to stop glossing over and really, finally, maybe start get to the bottom of things, to make a stab at the truth.
And so it goes with the stillbirth story, the thing I’ve been working on for a year now. In the process of writing and rewriting it, I’ve been working through the feelings, airing out my tamped-down grief and omnipresent guilt. So I dragged the last 23 years through the mud. When I tried to tie it to the present, give it a neat resolution in my sweet adult life, the story fell apart. It wasn't a story, but a timeline with representative examples.
I needed to do this. Writing it out, the long version and short version, the angry words, and the passages full of self-recrimination, was necessary. The words weren't wasted, but the piece did not transcend.
Then -- a thought: limit the story's timeframe to two weeks, to the just before and the right after. And no initial perfectionism: keep on typing, let my subconscious do its thing. I would clean it up later.
There it was, a story. No pat endings, no struggles to reach peace in 2400 words. The limits freed me.
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?
Shameless plug
You're in luck! Now you can find selections of my work at PublicLiterature.Org, a site that includes the full-text of several classic books as well as contributions from published and aspiring writers. I've recently posted "Running Back" (aka "Going Faster Miles an Hour") here and will be adding more in the future.
(Note: "Running Back" is misfiled as fiction. Ahh, if only . . .)
Schlump
Am I the only person in the world who needs time, real time to exist and think and be by myself, to write? Extemporaneous writing just doesn't do it for me. Just sit down and write ... but what if I have nothing to say? Sometimes I need to sift through my thoughts, to make sure everything is all clear, before words come out.
Write about what you know. Hmmm. Maybe I need to get out more. I don't particularly feel like writing Mom-lit. I love the little guy and find practically everything he does worthy of mention (did I tell you about his pteronadon song? "you are my friend pteronandon, you make me smile ..."). To write about him, however, would box me into this life. I need an escape hatch or, at the very least, a window to open to let in the breeze.
Just keep writing, 1000 - 2000 words a day, wrote a commenter here recently. I admit, I got defensive. It isn't so easy to just sit down and write so many words for me, partially because of the nature of my life (and I probably wouldn't be writing at all if I had a job outside the house) and partially because I've never written like that. I think too much, maybe, and the thoughts get tangled up in each other. My internal editor tries to sort things out, to make sure all is nice and neat before letting the words loose from my mind.
I have a friend (are you reading, Bob?) who shows up periodically in my in-box, long e-mails about his life, writing, academia, and philosophy. If he were working on the 2000 words a day quota, one e-mail would practically take care of it. Bob has always been this way -- the words flow. They're not always the most well-crafted, but he is a good writer and he gets there eventually. I'm jealous.
When I decided to start writing, Bob -- who has 3 children and teaches and writes for a living -- told me that he didn't know any writers who sit down for blocks of time and just write. Everybody fits it into the odd moment, writing ideas on a scrap of paper here, tapping away at a laptop there.
I'm creatively bereft at the moment. No ideas, no tapping. This is a theme here lately, but just writing about it makes me feel like I am getting back into the swing.
Say, how many words is this???
Throw it away
Or write up my petty complaints on my blog? Bingo.
Right now I feel like a frustrated housewife who has this little writing pipe dream. I wish I had more energy at night to write with conviction. If only the kid went to sleep before 9:30. If only he went to sleep unassisted. If only I'd started writing a decade ago, when time spread out before me and my brain was just a wee bit larger.
I know I'm lucky to have this life, to have a little time. It's just enough time to waste.
And now he wakes ...
Liminality
Sometimes you know the change is coming: before the baby is born, the summer in between high school and college, the morning of the wedding, the flight to a new city. Or it's a surprise. Time appears to be treading water and you're right there with it, stuck. Then you wake up a changed person. The work is done and there is no going back.
Liminal moments, the experience of liminality, make for good stories. It's time to create stories from my imagination, to make the change, to wake up altered. I'm tired of myself! And there is so much more to communicate through fiction, so many ideas to explore and characters to create. My mind needs to stretch. I have no idea how to do it, except to write and read, read about writing, and read to immerse myself in words and description.
Time to jump off the fence into the future. But I'll still dip my toe in the past. There are stories to finish and I'm in the thick of it. Stay tuned.
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.
Taking what they're giving
'cos I occasionally work for a living (me, that is, not C, who is pictured above).
My time has been consumed by a small freelance writing job I picked up last week, coming up with some popsicle recipes accompanied by a short article for Vegetarian Times. It's been kind of fun using my brain in a different way, though it usually prefers a more leaden diet of hairshirt nostalgia. Healthy orange creamsicles or triple berry popsicles lighten the mood a little too much.
But I'll take what I can get and I'm grateful for the work.
Get in your go-cart and go, little sister
I can do this.
So much of what I've written is confessional, or revealing: here, see, this is how it was for me, this is what I've hidden under my shell. Secrets and shame. I can't seem to write about anything else.
Today I thought I'd try something different, a short piece about how running has helped me both with writing and with pushing through a tough year in my marriage. Running, like writing or maintaining a relationship, takes discipline. You run through reluctance, bad weather, and physical pain. In most cases, things improve with effort and persistence. Even my "inspirational" running story turned an emotional striptease. Though as I write about it here, I can see a way out of that ... I'll have to think about it some more.
Taking the interesting bits of my life and thoughts (if I could figure out which, exactly, were the interesting bits) and writing fiction -- that would be the way to go, the way to really transcend my personal pain-o-rama. But fiction is SCARY . I've barely poked my toe into the murky waters of the personal essay form. Yes, we should do things that call to us, even if they are scary. But I'd like to feel competent in some form of writing first. Work on one neural network at a time.
Ah, well. Maybe just one short story ....
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.
Sweet rejection
A kind rejection letter (do they write this to all the girls?):
I enjoyed reading your essay and found your narrative voice very readable and engaging. However, I must report that we’ve decided to give it a pass. Please note that this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of your work (we receive about 750 submissions for every seven we publish). I wish you the best of luck placing this piece elsewhere.
Not so bad. And now I get a chance to make the story better. So much is spelled out, as though I needed to explain myself, make it clear why I feel so fucked up at times. (Well, I didn't put it that way, but this was part of my thought process. I've come a long way in the last six months).
Nubbin brain
I'm 38 years old and I haven't written a creative word since I was an undergraduate. I don't expect it to come easily. The Mom and K project has an emotional heft that makes it difficult, too. And I seem to suffer from a twisted nostalgia, a real desire to inhabit the past, at least so I can write about it about it with some veracity. I'm trying to let go of my obsession with uber-accuracy, which helps when my literal mind gets caught up in the details.
Mark Doty has a good essay about memoir and truth in the latest Poets and Writers -- but now that I have H and C beside me reading a book, the nubbin brain is shrinking even more and I have a hard time bringing it to mind. Check it out if you can, though you'll probably have to get your hands on a physical copy.
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.
First time in weeks ...
The K story is changing. All of the sudden, there I am, with opinions and experiences and a viewpoint. K's arrival wasn't the first thing to ever happen to us. He stepped into a context, into a scene that needs to be set. And for this, I have to include my mother's second husband and the quirks of our great triumvirate. Without getting into it too much.
What is lost -- a tight, arid focus -- is worth losing. It's funnier, too. And maybe it's really about me anyway, right?
Making it personal
Yesterday, I read through what I've completed of my brick house. I ended up feeling as though I had swallowed a brick (and I now wonder how far I can take this analogy). It is dense stuff, well-crafted paragraphs that describe them, but as a story are somewhat monotonous. It lacks life. My mother is right -- this is about my experience, is my attempt to exculpate them, and to get over the past. So I have to jump back into the story, become the third character.
I also have to add some real life. That's difficult. The fights, well, they kind of blend together in my mind, though there are some very memorable ones. The conversations -- most of them are gone, too. But the past can be conjured, and sometimes impressions are better than facts.
The hospital and hospice: they are still fresh. I'm beginning to wonder how much of my story will be that, the time when I could be there so unconditionally, providing support, showing that I was a good person. That wasn't my intention, to focus on that time. But it was the beginning of forgiveness and understanding.
Enough navel-gazing for tonight.
Continued evolution of a paragraph
My mother’s first lesson shortly after birth: deep attachment is followed by corrosive loss. The Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers is filled with the bereaved. Somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through its gray halls. They will soon join the other inmates, shell-shocked new mothers, swaddled newborns clutched in ambivalent embraces, jiggling, shushing, jiggling, shushing. This is how I picture her birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” My biological grandmother holds her freshly-bathed daughter, names her Lois. Over the next six weeks she feeds, diapers, jiggles, shushes. Her daughter calms to her warm, familiar scent, the intimacy in their gazes is bone-deep. But ephemeral. When the time comes, she signs the adoption papers, hands her wailing baby to the waiting nurse. It is as clean as a guillotine strike.
The next paragraph is much harder -- how can I describe the mix of my mismatched grandparents, pushy aunt, and guilty-from-the-get-go mother? Without getting too deeply into it? Do I devote a paragraph to my grandfather's accident? What about John the Murderer? Or Jim the Laminator? We'll see.