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.