The raw and the cooked
04 July 2010 07:49 AM Categories: Childhood hangover
The good news: when I read it, I feel calm. Less ashamed. Still so sorry for the girl I was, for the child I couldn't love, still affected by the time in ways that some future therapist will help me work out. But the actual story reads and feels like something that happened a long time ago to the person I used to be. Her experiences are mine, of course, are a part of me, but they are long ago and I've dealt with them -- to some extent.
The bad news: when I write about it, my writing is still highly controlled and almost immediately edited. I'm so concerned about making it into a coherent story with some sort of transcendent message that it's hard to just write about it freely and with raw (versus over-metaphorized) emotion. At this point, the transcendent message is that I survived, that writing about it and removing the secrecy has been healing. I'm torn between just writing it out and out and out, in private, and coming up with something that opens up the experience by broadening it, writing three separate stories (my grandmother's, my mother's, and mine) with background on accidental teenage pregnancy in the early 1950s, the late 1960s, and the mid-1980s.
This is probably the best way to go about it, to escape from my self-obsession and to broaden the topic. Of course, this requires my mother's consent to tell her story, which I strangely ignored in early drafts, outside of saying that she decided to marry my father. Ideally I would be able to track down her biological mother or at least get the woman's name (she may be dead), which also requires my mother's permission.
Writing it out and expanding it aren't mutually exclusive. I can write something raw and loose that can be tightened up later and also write about my mother and grandmother's experiences and the experiences of the many, many others who have been in our position. Maybe I can finally turn this into something worth reading. Something that makes it more than just tragic.
Image: Me at fifteen in my grandfather's front yard, summer 1985.
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