Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose
09 December 2010 09:45 AM Categories: Childhood hangover
It’s a sweet manufactured memory, though when I hear the songs I feel an ache, a knowledge that it happened. I have no recollection of my father's early presence. I don't even remember my parents' marriage. From the way my mother tells it, that's probably a good thing. My father experienced one of his first major depressive episodes shortly after I was born and the picture she paints of the situation isn't an attractive one. From her description of the time, I imagine a small, dusty apartment. The blinds are down, the floor and coffee table are junked with papers and books, the cats have been using the plant pots as litter boxes. My father lies on the couch, motionless, a sad lump. In the galley kitchen, Mom, still in her work minidress, scours the grease off a pan and grumbles to herself.
It wasn't as if either of them knew what was going on, what the gulf between them was about. It just was and it went beyond the relationship disillusionment that often comes with having a baby.
My father tells me that they were in love, and the concept is foreign to me, almost subversive. Love? I (silently) refused to believe it. All I remember is the aftermath, and part of that aftermath was my father’s sudden absence, his early unreliability, his later cluelessness. I know what my mother went through and what I went through with her and some of those early years after their divorce were bad. Where was he?
It was almost easier for me to think I came from indifference or from teenage hormones and a lack of birth control than from love. The idea that I was the product of two people who loved each other made the bad years worse somehow, unsettling, just like my recent revelation that those bad years didn’t have to happen. Better that I take the responsibility, say that I deserved the bad, that it was under my control, my fault. My conception set it into motion. At least that's how I felt initially: why give in to love, to my own blamelessness? It opens up a whole new category of pain.
Maybe this is why, when I picture my father holding me, singing softly in the fading daylight, I often start to cry. It was the closest we’ve ever been and I don’t remember it and I don’t want to believe it. He was there. The world was fresh. Then he left. It was right before everything got fucked up.
The scene in the rocking chair, our eyes meeting until mine slowly closed in sleep, feels theoretical. Still, I can picture it. But that dusty apartment, my parents’ marriage falling apart? I can’t even imagine myself into it, the toddling towhead stomping across the floor or sleeping in a crib like the little angel I apparently was. It is incongruous enough to imagine my parents living together, let alone living together with me. The three of us as a unit? It isn't a fantasy I indulge in. I used to think this was because I was a realist who lived without (much) regret, but now I know it is because the thought of it, the idea that we were once a family, that I came from love, actually hurts. I have never wished my parents back together. It wouldn't work. They are totally incompatible. But that feeling . . .
When my son was a baby, I focused only on him, the feeding, the sleeping or not-sleeping, the always being there. It was all-encompassing. We swayed to a mellow soundtrack -- early k.d. lang, Bill Withers, Elizabeth Mitchell. In the black night, the muddy twilight, the too-early dawn, when he was awake and should have been sleeping, I soothed him with songs. Some of them I made up on the fly, personalized for him. I also sang other peoples' songs, ones that sounded beautiful but with dark lyrics. They reflected my mindset at the time, so sleep- and self-deprived and scared. I may be the only mother in the world who sang The Old Main Drag by the Pogues to her infant, but it's a pretty tune with the weight of the world behind it. And though the song was dark and some of those early times were, too, I never left my son. He has always known that I love him no matter what.
Of course, my father loves me, too. I’ve never doubted that, not on a rational level. But those early, iffy years when he was absent, struggling with depression and learning how to be a grown up, the years when I was in desperate need of stability and safety and, later, my desolate adolescence, have always been between us. My anger became part of the barrier, prickly and electric, older than words. Lately, however, things have been changing. He makes a point of calling more often. I make a point of calling him back. We talk like family. The barrier is disappearing, my feelings softening.
I see his sadness, feel his need for connection, the pain of the distance between us. I think about the good times, the steady years. They always involved music. Our weekends together came with a soundtrack.
He turns sixty this month and I want to write for him, something about music and memory. Something about songs, for my father, about how they connect us. But first I wade through the ambiguity. I press gently on the painful places, dim the light to obscure our weaknesses. I keep on moving, my eyes closed. Love is like that, blind and brave and senseless.
Image: Dad, Mom, & me, Easter 1971. I've used this image before, one of two I have of me with my parents (not counting my college graduation pictures).
Thanks to Lydia, for planting the seeds for this post.
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