A virulent strain of grief
And then there was what happened to Kevin.
I’ve written about Kevin,
my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before, in
short bursts of roundabout language. He came into our
lives when I was fourteen and nothing was ever really
the same again. By the time I was fifteen, I was
living in the Little House with disastrous results
and he and my mother were at the thin edge of
eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is starting
to lose his mythical qualities, has become more human
in my mind in the last year, more culpable and weak.
He was a bully, really, a smart and witty bully,
though that of course was not the whole of him.
[Warning:
The below goes into detail about an illness and a
harrowing hospital stay and may be upsetting to some
readers.]
In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of, well,
it’s a little murky. He was in the final stages
of myelofibrosis,
a bone marrow disease, though it was probably
pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With
myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes fibrous and
hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the
bone marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the
liver -- in a last-ditch effort to make blood, a
phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary
hematopoesis. These organs try, but ultimately fail,
to make useful blood. Instead, they produce bad
blood, the cells immature and misshapen, blood that
does a half-assed job of keeping the body healthy.
People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they
bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and
bone pain. While there are drugs to manage this
disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell
transplant, which is always a dicey position. If you
have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will
eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection
will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you
will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will
cease to work (because of the extramedullary
hematopoesis).
Before March 2002, before we called in hospice and
accepted the fact that Kevin’s death was imminent,
Kevin spent six months in the hospital, nearly all of
it in the Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care
unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care. Trying
to write about that time in a way that makes any
sense is impossible. I’ve tried it, tried to come up
with a timeline and a reason why he ended up on a
ventilator (aka respirator) shortly after he was
admitted and how early on we thought he was going to
slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker
hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius
solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and how Kevin
couldn’t swallow because his epiglottis was damaged
from his emergency intubations, so he couldn’t eat
and how there was a doctor we called Dr. Death
because he insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going
to make it, let alone walk again (he was right on the
former, wrong on the latter). Kevin was on the
vent/off the vent. He kept on getting pneumonia. He
was hooked up to tubes and lines, trapped. But alive.
Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of anthrax
scares and work closures, of mail that came to the
federal library where I worked months old, crispy and
irradiated. It was the beginning of Kevin’s long end,
a journey that required great vigilance on my
mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a large
number of doctors and nurses. Being in CCU for six
months is incredibly intense, all-encompassing, and
stressful, and when a patient is as fragile as Kevin
was, you have to be vigilant. It isn’t that the
professionals aren’t competent, it’s just that they
want to do things, think that action is always the
best course. And sometimes it isn’t.
When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel, all
those details of his hospitalization came out,
details I have stored away for years: the sound of
the ventilator and the beeps of IVs that need
attention; the smell of pneumonic mucus as I
suctioned it out of Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin
trapped under a blanket of tubes and devices, so
fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the
too-late knowledge that he must have been desperate
for touch); the horrors of his frequent intubations,
emergency procedures where doctors had to essentially
jam an air tube down his throat after his oxygen
levels dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at
Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back and
that eating in front of him when he was getting his
food, this green sludge, through a stomach tube would
have been horribly cruel; how skinny, impossibly
skinny he became. How, after being bedridden and
hospitalized for three months, he took his 80-pound
frame and a walker and did halting laps around the
CCU, in an act of pure will.
So all this came spewing out last month, disguised
under a new premise with a much younger protagonist.
After the month was over and the first draft off my
head, I realized I had a lot of legwork to do. For
example, I know next to nothing about the disease I
had chosen to grace my unlucky character with. And
what do I know, really, about parental grief, which
is a particularly virulent strain? I've been doing
research, reading books and looking at websites.
There is one blog out there, very detailed and
well-written, created by a mother who was chronicling
her little boy's fight against cancer. That little
boy died in September. The whole thing is horribly
sad (and as I read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I
doing this?).
When you are in the middle of a
life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of keeping
someone alive, of trying to make them well, it's all
you can think about. Everything becomes medical and
you find out all you can. You learn about the
strength of nurses and the support system that crops
up in a hospital. You learn to live with things you
never thought were possible before. You are steeped
in the smells and sounds of illness and it feels like
it will never end. You don’t want it to end with
death, but sometimes it does and you have to let go
of the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for this
family and the little boy that will never grow up. I
hope that I can do justice to him and to Kevin and to
all the people who have experienced such prolonged
pain.
The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's Eastern Shore,
April 2009.
Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order. What I'm
looking for now is authenticity, a way to write
something that sings and is true and real, that
doesn't exploit illness as a book topic, but brings
it to life and honors those that have gone before us.
It's daunting.
Top image: Kevin at Georgetown
University Hospital, January 2002, about three months
before he died.
The burn notebooks
Part of the front page of the notebooks my
grandmother kept after my grandfather was
burned.
After my grandfather was burned
over 80% of his body
in a flash fire at the Dupont Holly Run paint
plant, my grandmother started keeping a diary. I
have the copies, four small looseleaf notebooks
with her remarks on his hospitalization, dating
from the accident on 11 June 1966 until his
release from the hospital on 24 February 1967.
There are tallies of blood transfusions (38 pints
of blood between June and December), of skin
grafts (26; the last one is on 22 December, with
the note "last - if all take"). I'd missed the
fact that he actually had four operations on his
right foot before they finally amputated it (28
September: "Little toe came off in dressing.").
It's slow going. Mom-mom's handwriting is hard to
read and the first six months are a roller-coaster
ride of medical emergencies, infections, and mourning
for what was lost. Doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of
making it. No one knew that the fire wouldn't kill
him for another 24 years, when he finally succumbed
to skin cancer at the age of 78. The "girls" -- my
aunt, 20 at the time, and my mother, 16 -- don't get
much mention. What it was like for them? I may ask my
mother, but don't expect to get very much information
and it might not be necessary for my purposes.
I'd love to talk to my grandmother about that time
for her, too, though the notebooks conjure her up.
Ultimately, though, I'm looking at these books to get
a better understanding of my grandfather, who went
from being an active man in his fifties who loved
jazz and waterskiing and driving fast in his '65
Mustang to a dependent, almost-deaf burn victim. He
didn't get behind the wheel of a car again until
1981.
During his hospitalization, he suffered, really
suffered. Being burned is painful, but so is the
treatment, borrowing healthy skin to graft onto
exposed flesh, having your raw body immersed in a
whirlpool once or twice a day. Even the necessary
turning ("Dressings wet. Al begged not to be
turned."), which probably happened at least four
times a day, sounds like a horror. And then there is
the debridement, the sloughing off of dead skin and
muscle that had to be done on a regular basis. Things
surely have gotten better for burn victims since the
60s, but there is no getting around the pain. It's no
wonder that my grandfather was scared of his hospital
bed in those first six months. It must have seemed
like a torture chamber.
Pop-pop and Greta in 1978, 12 years after the
industrial accident.
Pop-pop suffered and hovered close to death, lost his
hearing and a foot. His once-smooth skin tightened
and scarred. Then he got out of the hospital, had a
home nurse for another nine months, and went back to
work (a desk job this time). He retired and taught
himself how to build furniture and make
Canada
goose and mallard whirligigs
to sell at
Nickerson's Fruit and Vegetable Stand. He built
the Little House and put a new wood shop on the
beach cottage, as well as a new family room. His
interest in model trains intensified and the old
wood shop became the setting for a huge train set
with two separate tracks, a couple of tunnels, and
a tree-covered mountain range. It was the kind of
thing that neighborhood kids and grown-ups would
come over to admire, though he would always remind
me that these small trains weren't toys.
I'm working on a piece that is about him, but not
quite about him, fiction informed by imagined
experience. I want to figure out what was forged by
flame.
My hands untied
Kevin, summer of 1984.
Enter spring–let's say April–1984, West Street, Wilmington, Delaware.
Birds are singing. The tulips and pansies in our raised beds are starting to bloom. Recent March winds have deposited the remnants of chaos, muddied papers, dead leaves and tree limbs, in the alleyway. The winds lifted deck chairs against back fences, turned over plastic flower pots, battered pedestrians. They blew Kevin the poet-carpenter, intellectual powerhouse and gin guzzler, in down the street, saluted him with a flurry of cherry blossoms.
My mother invites the new neighbor over for dinner. He seems strange, a little awkward in his old-fashioned glasses, his blue eyes intense and clear through Coke bottle lenses. Kevin speaks with a touch of New Jersey nasal and renovates and flips houses for a living. He arrives lean and tanned, armed with words of sharpened steel and a large bottle of Gordon’s, his old blue merle collie Barney by his side.
What could I do? I was fourteen. The last guy in our house didn’t even speak when I was at the table.
Here’s what I didn’t do: talk. Smile. Instead I just sat and shoveled in the food, exuded resentment, made infrequent eye contact. Maybe I smirked. And Kevin, a man I had just met, called me on it.
“What’s your problem? You’re just sitting there, sucking all the air out of the room.”
I have no memory of my response.
It wasn’t until yesterday, as I was attempting to capture this pivotal moment yet again, looking over what I’d written almost a year ago on that same dinner, that I realized: I blame myself. Reading over my early attempts is somewhat painful. I was straining to describe that night, to explain Kevin’s poetic rockstar persona and my mother’s deadly attraction to him, to explain my role in my own rejection. The end of parenting, my premature emancipation, the series of adult situations I got into before my time? Culpa. Mea culpa. I should have put on the charm, talked, given a little bit that night. I should have been someone else.
If I had won Kevin over that evening, maybe my mother would have stayed engaged in my life. She might never have started bringing dinner to him, eating in his dusty dining room every night while I ate alone. I wouldn’t have begun wandering the Wilmington streets after dark, wobbly with purloined gin, smoking unfiltered cloves and blasting the Dead Kennedys from my Walkman. The Little House would have stayed empty. The end of innocence could have been put off for another couple of years. If I were a better person, a different person, no one would have told me that I was evil, the root cause of family turmoil.
I know. I know. My brain tells my heart that it would have made absolutely no difference in the outcome if I had smiled or curtseyed or made insightful conversation about Nietzsche and Wordsworth. To be honest, until yesterday, I didn't know I felt this way. I blame myself.
Why do children take responsibility for things over which they have no control? Why do adults shift the blame to the helpless? And why, when we molt and grow and leave our child forms behind, does this sense of responsibility for our own small fates, this idea of being the masters of our abuse (if only I were nicer or less shy or stronger ...) carry on into our adult life?
The child decides that she is the cause of her mistreatment. The adult lets those early experiences dictate her behavior. We find ourselves recreating situations again and again, little kids in the guise of adulthood, sifting our lives through the rusty emotional sieve of the formerly helpless. We choose partners who fit into old scenarios, make decisions based on faulty data, try to get it right this time. With our motives hidden and our reasons obscured, the do-overs usually fail. Then? Familiar pain and reinforcement of our feelings of worthlessness.
Or maybe it's just me who's felt this way. Yes, I've done this, set up the scene, chosen guys who reject who I am, who blame me for their own shortcomings. I've blundered my way through friendships, the sullen fourteen year old in a thirty-year-old's clothing. And although I have stopped replaying the same scenes over and over again, I still have an overarching sense of responsibility for the trajectory of my childhood. My invisible scars feel completely self-imposed, my exposure of them a shameful confession. I feel rotten from the inside, capable of destroying entire worlds. Run from me before I drag you into the muck!
But I'm not that way. I'm not.
So I'm writing my path to self-acceptance, still trying to forgive myself and my family, to look at the world through clean eyes. I don't want to shift blame. I want to let go of the entire concept of it. After all, I'm here, alive, doing so much better than I ever thought I would be. It's time to let go, to untie my hands and live fully.
I figure I'm about 20% there. Maybe more. And if I can do it, you can too.
Coming up: February's blog, a return to the Maureen story (we'll skip over the guess who's coming to dinner segment), and some awards. Not necessarily in that order.
Not fade away
Mick Jagger, circa 1969, from Rolling
Stone.
The centerpiece of Thanksgiving
dinner was a rockfish one year. Kevin had caught it
himself, straight from the Chesapeake Bay. Mom
stuffed it with breadcrumbs spiked with chopped
fennel and onion, and there were mashed potatoes,
cranberries, and a nod to green, string beans on the
side.
We ate by candlelight, as usual, talked about
politics as usual. I wish I could go back and capture
those conversations, remember the deep level jokes
and high level discussions. Almost any dinner with my
mother and Kevin was devoted to real conversation and
humor, sometimes dipping into reminiscence. It was
the closest we ever came to feeling like a family.
Like the night a couple of years before Kevin got
sick, when he was just starting his PhD program at
Penn, and Augie the collie was a puppy. I had taken
the train from DC to Wilmington to visit and things
were unusually smooth, no arguments, very little
baiting. We ate sautéed chicken over vermicelli in
the candlelight. The entire dish was sprinkled with
breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil, garlicky and herby
and delicious.
The conversation turned to the sixties. Kevin had
taken a year off from college in 1966 after being
busted for selling marijuana (a setup, he claimed)
and he headed off to California, hitchhiked down the
coast. He talked about Dylan going electric,
mentioned the rivalry between the namby pamby Beatles
devotees and the rebellious Rolling Stones fans.
There was talk of high school dances, the moves and
the moments. The radio was playing music from that
era and he and Mom started to slow dance as I watched
from the table.
What do you do when a family
culture dies? When a powerful personality disappears?
The center did not hold. We’re still trying to create
our own gravity.
Inner battle
Grappling with myself.
Photo by my husband, taken from the vast Santa
collection of my father and
stepmother.
The things I am supposed to be
doing and don't want to do, the shoulds, they
sometimes control me. They become obligations
body-checked by anger. Or maybe it’s the should nots,
the tamping down of what rises up naturally: I should
not be feeling angry. I have no right to be upset.
This is not supposed to be a blog about current angst
(except for the mundane, piles of laundry, sick kid,
dog-walking variety). Most of the anger I carry
around is the nostalgic sort, dealing with that stuff
that happened when I was a kid, the things I can’t
change and must make right in my mind in order to
live a full life. It’s been working, for the most
part. I’m letting go.
Yes, I have complained about my current relationships
with my parents, have brought up marital discord from
the not-so-distant past, but most of this has been in
the context of grappling with painful memories,
revealing old scars to healing light.
But I haven’t talked about my stepmother. Part of the
reason I don’t talk about my stepmother is that she
is practically a saint. She is my father’s total
champion, and if anyone needs a champion, it’s him.
My father has treatment-resistant depression, a
condition he has been grappling with from the time he
entered college. It was because of depression that he
stopped working in his early 40s. The man has been on
many different varieties of medication; he’s been
through research studies; he’s done electroconvulsive
therapy (ECT) and lost a chunk of his memory in the
process. Eventually the drugs lose effectiveness, the
troughs get deeper, he stops functioning.
There are physical problems, too. Diabetes. Obesity.
Arthritis. Within the last two years my father has
developed debilitating back pain and can barely get
out the door. At the age of 57, he is practically
housebound, a predicament he and his wife have taken
on with characteristic stoicism. Throughout it all,
my stepmother has been a rock, always supportive,
never complaining, a breadwinner, maker of meals, and
vacuumer of a four bedroom house.
Why am I angry with this woman? Why am I carrying
around this stupid useless feeling? Because I am
invisible to her. Because when I was pregnant with my
second son, she talked about it being my first baby
(perhaps a teenage stillbirth doesn't count). Because
– stupidly, since I really should let go of this one,
but couldn't they have waited a week? – she got
married to my father two days before my fourteenth
birthday. Because she never even so much as e-mails
on my birthday. She has no idea why I might be
feeling pain and apparently doesn’t want to know.
Perhaps she feels she might be implicated in some
way. I don’t know.
My father loves me, but he has not been a very good
father. It's just the truth. Four years of every
other weekend visits does not a good father make.
Financial support for one's child – which I do
appreciate – doesn't make one a good father either,
though certainly there are many absentee fathers out
there who don't even do that. He laid the foundation
for distrust early. A little recognition of this past
and his part in it would make a huge difference.
After he read
the blog,
he acknowledged it in a general way, though we've
never talked about it. But what about her?
I know she thinks I'm a bad daughter and in many
ways, I am. Phone calls sometimes go unreturned for
days. I'm late with birthday and father's day
greetings or send a lame e-card. I put off making our
travel plans to see them and have been absent for
multiple surgeries. I avoid discussions of Christmas,
a holiday that is an obsession for them. The guilt
floods over me, paralyzing and cold, and I feel a
surge of preemptive, protective, useless anger.
What am I supposed to do with this anger? What do you
do when you can’t talk to someone about your
feelings? How do I do the right thing while honoring
how I feel?
So many questions. Does anyone have answers?
(And when this particular angst is out of the way, I
have many awards and other kindnesses to acknowledge.
That's the next post.)
Two ways of looking at it
I wish I could explain the
importance of the notebook. It’s one of those old
black and white composition books, barely held
together by 45-year old glue and stitching, the edges
of the pages the color of dead oak leaves, cured by
time. An artifact, a little piece of Kevin,
half-filled with poems of late adolescence, poems
that he probably wrote in his senior year of high
school. They are short and generally angry, each one
typewritten and stapled or taped to the front of a
page.
If I could explain the importance of the notebook,
maybe I could explain the importance of Kevin. How
can someone who tried to destroy me, who battered my
mother emotionally, be so key to who I am? Kevin was
extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone like him, a man
who pushed himself out of a childhood of emotional
and physical abuse and formed a self out of will and
ashes. He was a poet, a self-taught carpenter, a
working class intellectual. In the midst of
fatal
illness,
he completed his dissertation and received a PhD.
He was also so wickedly funny that my mother and I
still laugh when we remember his stories and
jokes.
Kevin sometimes ripped us to shreds with that
knife-like wit. He was an active participant in the
neglect that led to my pregnancy at sixteen. Whenever
he saw hypocrisy or hidden motive – which was often –
he skewered the hypocrite, uncloaked the motive. His
ability to see the darkness in himself and others
never took into account the overwhelming goodness we
each have, the lightness that makes up most of who we
are.
I have a lot of empathy for him, whose cruelty and
black math was caused by a childhood of pain and
anger, but it probably helps that he is off stage
now, six years dead. It was a long and painful exit.
Kevin didn’t deserve to suffer, to be hospitalized
for six months, to have his body whittled down to 80
skeletal pounds. He didn’t deserve to lose his
ability to swallow and sometimes to breathe
unassisted. No one deserves what happened to Kevin.
But that time of suffering was also a time to make
peace. I was at the hospital for hours almost every
day, there for both him and my mother, keeping
company, being a second set of eyes to make sure no
mistakes were made. I was there for comfort.
It gave me a chance to prove my humanity, to show
that we all have the ability to be good. Even him.
Even me.
Sometimes I still believe it. But writing that
paragraph about how I benefited from Kevin’s
suffering leaves me with a dirty feeling, as though I
relished the opportunity to be redeemed through his
pain. It wasn’t like that. I was there because I
wanted to be, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Kevin’s final day stretched and
stretched from early morning into late afternoon. A
small group of family gathered in his hospice room
and listened to him wind down, heard the silent
spaces grow between each breath, watched his heart
flutter out from under his ribcage. Outside,
daffodils were pushing through once-frozen ground and
the forsythia was in bloom. The world was coming to
life again as we sat and waited for death.
It came with a dramatic final exhale followed by dead
quiet. The dog broke the silence with a bark, my
mother reached for me and Kevin’s son, held us and
cried. Mom later said she felt Kevin’s energy leave
his body, had an image of him walking along a river
path against a cloudless sky, his old collie Augie by
his side. When Kevin's brother thanked me for my
presence, I said, "I'm so glad we had this time," and
immediately regretted it. What was I saying? Those
six months of dying were great? What a wonderful
opportunity for me?
That night I woke up after midnight to the pressure
of Kevin’s hand on mine, a grateful and loving
presence. Don’t be hard on yourself. You
were there for me. Thank you.
Then he was gone.
Two
Ways of Looking at It
Kevin Sheehan (Knife Gift)
The magician, who is about to perform,
is wearing a suit which belongs to
his father. No one is supposed to know
that he is not his father. His first
trick, which involves some
simple sleight-of-hand, is well-received.
he bows, and the suit collapses.
And what if I would not grow up,
would not perform
the necessary murder. So what.
Was it any of your business?
I chose to be the child, hurt
and unhurting, but my body,
my beauty, betrayed me.
The orangutan did it
Photo of Gertrude Stein
from Ovation TV.
I was possibly the only seven year
old in the world whose mother read
Gertrude
Stein out
loud to her. At the kitchen table Mom would puzzle
through the books she checked out of the
Wilmington Public Library, boring her reluctant
audience of one. It became a joke between us, the
dazed child resting her head on the table, lulled
into submission by the tediousness of Gertrude
Stein. “A
cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger
is a cheeseburger,” I would tease Mom, and we’d
laugh.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when she picked
an Edgar
Allen Poe story as a Halloween treat for
two nine-year-olds. We were living in Newark,
Delaware, in a one-bedroom, student family housing
apartment. My friend Marie was spending the night
and we did the rounds of our complex. Many
neighbors didn’t expect trick or treaters, and the
ones that did weren’t passing out Hersey bars or
KitKats. There were several international families
living there and I remember getting strange
candies, sweet wafers, little trinkets.
Most people didn’t even open their doors, like the
hulking single guy who now lived in my friend
Belinda’s old apartment (student family housing?). Belinda had lived there
with her mother and younger sister and we had spent
most of the previous summer together, organizing
skits in the little playground and running around the
adjacent field where the University of Delaware
marching band held their practices. A long scar
traced the length of Belinda’s chest, the mark of two
surgeries to correct a congenital heart condition.
She had another round of operations scheduled in a
couple of years. Though Belinda didn’t seem
particularly fragile, I wanted to protect her from
harm. When she and her family moved to Michigan in
late August, we were both bereft and worried about
dealing with new schools on our own.
I wanted to go to her apartment, stare down the guy I
blamed for her move, get a little restitution
Halloween candy. MaryAnn and I walked up the stairs
through the dreary light of humming florescents, up
one flight to Belinda's place. The strings of my
Cousin It costume kept getting under my feet as they
brushed against each stair. The hulk's television was
on, blaring some sports event. “Trick or treat!” I
yelled, pounding on the hollow metal door. No
response. Marie looked at me skeptically through her
Wonder Woman mask. “Let’s just go back to your
place.”
Poster available from All Posters.
Maybe my mother decided to
read “Murders
in the Rue Morgue” to help us get over our candy
haul doldrums. Perhaps she was hoping for a good,
old-fashioned Halloween scare. The story, written
in 1841, starts slowly (so slowly that she
couldn’t have possibly started at the beginning.
Even a nine-year-old raised on Gertrude Stein
would have protested), but it sped up when she got
to the crime scene. Two women have been brutally
murdered. Here is the description of one of the
corpses, courtesy of the Poe
Museum:
We didn't get very far through the story before Marie became hysterical. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. Finally, Mom called her parents and they picked up my friend half an hour later."After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity. "To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."
She never spent the night at my place again.
It's not easy being green
Elk River, Winter of 1977-78
The year before, my mother had decided to go back to college. In order to save money, she moved in with Jim, her future former husband, while I went to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. It was a year scented by cigarette smoke and coffee fumes. Mornings were my favorite time of day, sitting in the warm kitchen, a tray of food prepared for me by my grandmother, usually Eggo waffles dabbed with Parkay squeezable margarine and dripping with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, cartoon-character shot glass of orange juice on the side. That winter the snow kept coming. It piled up and formed five-foot drifts in the driveway, places to dig out forts and make snowmen. Snuggling in my grandmother’s bed as we listened to the radio school closing announcements became an almost-regular ritual.
Mom scored a one-bedroom apartment in student family housing in the summer of ’78 and I moved back in with her. She took the couch in the living room while I slept on a full-size mattress on the floor in the bedroom, a wooden orange crate for a bedside table topped with a flowery ceramic lamp, a clock radio, and an “I Love You This Much” figurine -- a robed, potbellied man, arms outstretched – that she had given to me in first grade.
1978-79 was the first year of
court-mandated school desegregation for the
Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles
roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly
white, middle class community at the time, to an
elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It
was the fourth school I had attended since
kindergarten.
The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient
gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t
like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers
and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked
until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk
was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss
in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.
After lunch, students were herded over crumbling
asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms
and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of
black history covered the exterior walls. At night
the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the
schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and
broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The
atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired
the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to
school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit
(worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night
Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a
well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become
accustomed to choosing my clothes.
The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike
from mid-October through most of November. Much of
that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher
brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a
day or two; I read a lot of books from the small
children’s section at the University of Delaware
library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of
the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides
in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre,
images of children lying on the ground beside their
parents, as still and peaceful as if they were
asleep.
April
1979
By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and
Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch
over my grandfather.
Our grand experiment was over.
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.
Another existence to be denied
So there my mother and I sat, sunk into opposite ends of a comfortable couch, leaning forward to tell the social worker our feelings, sketching out my genetic profile. We filled out reams of forms, information about family health problems, questions about my diet, my drug and alcohol use.
Who knew what mysterious weaknesses I might be carrying? My father’s side of the family had endocrine problems, heart disease, diabetes and a tendency toward dark moods. When the veil of depression fell, some family members took to alcohol or other substances with an addict’s zeal. An affinity for darkness and a desire, a need, to obliterate myself in its face are part of my hardwiring.
What about my maternal lineage? My mother’s family history was a big blank, an open field where the quality of the soil and provenance of the plant life was a mystery. Like my biological grandmother and my mother before me, I had gotten knocked up young and out of wedlock. Only my mother had chosen to marry, to keep me in the fold. This predilection for teen motherhood, the easy and careless ways of our womenfolk – did that count against me?
Adoption was a closed affair when my mother was born. In 1950, the presumption was that a “chosen baby” would grow up satisfied, would never want to know the story of her beginnings. The privacy of the birth parents was paramount. Mom, however, did want to know and set out in adulthood to find her birth mother. Through a third party the woman revealed the depth of her silence: she hadn’t spoken about her first child at all, even keeping the secret from her husband and subsequent children. She wanted no further contact, no dramatic revelation, no recognition of reunion. When pressed on the name of the birth father, she was especially vehement. She would “never, never tell.” It stung.
In private, we speculated, joked about the freedom bought by ignorance. Her missing history provided a unique vantage, a way to step outside of the American obsession with ancestry. We could build a story about her origins outside of the confines of family fact, but the story never got very far. Polish or German? (My orthodontist, after assessing her facial structure, was pushing for Polish.) Catholic or Protestant? (Well, she did seem to have a thing for Catholic guys.)
To imagine too much seemed self-delusional. Of course, her parents might have been love-struck, two highly intelligent beauties who consummated their love after much deliberation in a sacred act of commitment and rebellion. Imagining what could be the truth – sex forced upon a young woman not ready or pregnancy as the inevitable result of one night between two clueless teenagers – led to a sense of hopelessness. Her birth father was the silent partner in this transaction. A ghost.
The adoption process had changed in 36 years. My child would know my name, would be able to trace his genetic strengths and frailties back a generation or two. His new family would send me pictures. I would be permitted to write him letters. But when we were in those Golden Cradle offices, he was another existence created to be denied. I was young and angry, and what was happening didn't seem real.
My biological grandmother, my mother, me: we all played a role in the conspiracy of suppressed connection. It was a gift passed along the generations. A present for my firstborn.
The wonderful, the not so good, and the unknown
Then, the unknown: my father found this blog. This is not a shocking development, since there is at least one link out there with my full name that points to writing to survive. What does it mean? I don’t know. I hope it means an open line of communication. And that’s all I’ll be saying about it here. Some things are meant to be – yes – private.
Finally, happily, the wonderful: two fine bloggers gave awards to writing to survive in the past week.
John of Storied Mind passed along the Brilliant Blog
Award, which is quite an honor from someone who I
think has a brilliant blog! The premise behind
Storied Mind is that writing and creating stories
about one’s experience with depression can help
break through its deadening effects.
Storied Mind also aims to create a community,
a place where people can gather and discuss their
experiences with depression. All of this is
beautifully done, with thought-provoking posts
that dive deep into the experience of mood-related
disorders and what may work to reach clarity.
Thank you, John. I am truly honored.
Kimmy of The Eagle The Lion and The
Dove passed another award my way, the
I Love Your Blog award. Kimmy’s blog is all about
focusing on the light in darkness, seeking the
beauty in the world and ourselves, knowing that
none of us is perfect. It’s a great dose of daily
inspiration. Thank you, Kimmy – I’m so happy we
found each other via Entrecard!
As a way to share the love and highlight some
outstanding blogs that are part of my daily reading,
I am planning to have monthly reviews, with a feature
on my sidebar linking to the Blog of the Month. Stay
tuned for the October selection.
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.
The home of permanent in between
When my grandmother started to show, her parents sent her to the city. They dropped her off at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers. I imagine her emerging from the black car alone, tattered suitcase in hand, looking nervously up the set of granite steps. Inside, somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through the gray halls.
It is the home of permanent in between; the suppressed energy of smothered potential thickens the air. The girls, all going by pseudonyms, make very little small talk. In the nursery, rows of bundled babies silent as dolls wait, neatly packaged in individual bassinets. Once retrieved, the babies seek out their mothers’ faces, liquid newborn eyes encountering guarded glances. Both mother and child have learned not to waste energy on tears or outward displays of emotion. The bonding and the break are inevitable.
This is how I picture my mother’s birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” They undo the straps, let the drugs wear off. Hours later, my biological grandmother holds her swaddled daughter, names her Lois. Lois is tiny – less than five pounds – too little to be released to her adoptive family. Over the next six weeks the pair are entangled in the monotony of new life, the seemingly endless cycle of feeding, diapering, and sleep. They calm to one another’s warm, familiar scent. Their gazes become intimate. Bone-deep.
When the six weeks are up, Aunt
Ruth, a go-between, my adoptive grandmother’s sister,
comes to take the baby. Waiting in the home's
entrance, the young mother frantically bounces her
silent infant, dreading the break. Finally, Aunt Ruth
appears, says her hello, and waits.
“It’s time.”
The mother hands over the baby. It is as clean as a
guillotine strike.
Before she has time to reconsider, she races inside
to the central staircase and runs up two flights of
stairs to her room. Her breathing is contained,
shallow, a precaution against tears. She’s been
trying to memorize every inch of her daughter, the
moon face framed by white-blonde hair, her blues
eyes, dainty toes and impossibly tiny hands, but
already the image is fading. She reaches her room and
slips inside, leans against the closed door taking
short, sharp breaths. A glass baby bottle sits on the
bedside table, a remnant from the final feeding. The
girl eyes it, finally reaching out. Then, the
satisfying sound of glass irrevocably broken, the
implied threat of jagged shards.
Taking several deep breaths, the young woman calms.
She begins to push the glass into a pile with her
shoe and decides to find a broom and dustpan.
There will be no tears.
That was then, Part II
October 1972, Hollywood Beach, my 3rd birthday?
The above photo was taken at my grandparents’ house
during the John
the Murderer era.
Christmas 1976, Wilmington
Jim, the future and former
stepfather,
took this holiday shot. Memories of this apartment:
no car; no money; asthma attacks; three dead cats and
one poisoned hamster; the bus ride to a movie theater
showing Star Wars; juicy cherry tomatoes straight
from the garden out back (the garden that also
contained a kitty graveyard with little wooden
crosses); iced chamomile tea; hot carob instead of
hot chocolate. For my mother, it was a time without
hope. A year later she returned to college to
complete her bachelors degree, thus solving the
hopelessness problem for a time. This is now:
August 2008, Berkeley
My son and my mother, having a good time. We had a great visit. And yes, no one ever seems to look directly at the camera in this family. (That was then, Part I can be found here.)
The pain that is invisible
In a conversation last night, she casually tossed out a line that I had to follow up with, because it indicated how bad things were for her at a couple points in my childhood. I’m sure she’s dropped this line with insouciance before, and I’ve just followed her laid-back lead. But it’s deadly serious. And frightening. And sad.
Of course, my mind is buzzing with thoughts, about secrets, about forgiveness and the pain that is invisible when you are growing up, the pain of the depressed, hopeless parent. Maybe not totally invisible. I was a sensitive kid, the little mother, always worried. Part of the worry, however, was about me: what was going to happen to me if something happened to her? Today I feel mainly empathy for her pain and sad that she’s felt so hopeless.
I’m sure she’s awake downstairs, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times. So, off I go to start the day ...
The dammed
And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?
I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.
But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.
If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?
One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.
Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.
I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.
My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.
As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.
I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.
The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.
The feelings need time. They will out.
A Dream of the Snow
By the time he died, after eight years of illness, we had reached a peace. I loved him like a father.
Today would have been Kevin's 62nd birthday. (My mother just called to tell me she had a pain in the neck, just like she has every year on his birthday. Ah, the tension continues even after death . . .)
In honor of Kevin, I am posting one of his poems, "A Dream of the Snow." For many months after his death six years ago, my mother had this as her voice mail greeting. She got a lot of hang-ups.
A Dream of the Snow
From Knife
Gift by
Kevin Sheehan
For a long time I hid
while my body grew,
watched while it learned
a hard way to speak
till the clothes that it wore
no longer fit me
and I could not understand
a word of its speech.
For a long time I slept
while my body dreamed,
cried when it married, moved
away. Now I dream alone
in the room where we played.
Not of the fields, but the falling,
not of the cold, but the coming down,
my body is a dream of the snow.
The Victorian Village slasher
We met him on a dog walk, a meandering stroll through our Columbus neighborhood, past a brick-solid hodgepodge of Victorians and gingerbread, Italianate rowhouses and cobblestone alleyways. This world was new to me, a stable life as an adult, with a fiancé, a dog, a professional job, living hundreds of miles from my mother. I was going to hold on to that stability with a death grip, make sure I would never fall back into the abyss.
But back on the East Coast, Mom was cracking up. I wasn't allowed to call her at home, so we’d talk at work. The conversations usually ended with screams (hers) and tears (mine). My cubicle was in the middle of the library, exposed. I would hold my voice tense and steady, then rush to the ladies’ room, smash the tears back with toilet paper, splash the redness away with cold water.
My mother was a frequent subject on our dog walks. I obsessed over our new rift, the rage unfairly projected, while my husband-to-be made sympathetic noises. I was to blame by choosing my fiancé, a snobbish WASP, loyal and overprotective. It was a slap in the face to my bohemian mother.
If my abandonment, my choice to betray, wasn't bad enough, she was also struggling with her long-term boyfriend, a difficult character in the best of times. Kevin was in the early stages of a rare illness that would eventually kill him. She had to support them both on a small salary and was stretched to the point of financial ruin.
On that cool September evening in 1995 Mr. X and I were having the usual discussion. Would Mom and Kevin follow through on their threat to boycott the wedding? Why was she being so cruel?
I didn’t notice the runner pass us. Then we heard it.
“Hey, jogga!”
The small voice was coming from a bush to our right. Whoever it was, they couldn’t quite pronounce their r’s.
“Hey, jogga! I am the O.J. Simpson! I am the O.J. Simpson!”
Suddenly, a little boy, no more than five, leapt out from behind the bush, making stabbing motions with his empty hand in the direction of the runner, who was long gone. He looked at us and just started talking. Yes, he could hang out in his yard after dark. His mom and dad were divorced and he was living with his dad, who liked to drink ice beer. Had we ever tried it? He had, and he didn’t like it. He talked on, aggressively friendly, clearly lonely.
Another runner flew by and the boy repeated the performance, enjoyed the effect. It was disturbing and amusing, this five-year-old's violent pantomime.
Beyond the open screen door of his house, I could hear canned laughter, the hiss of a bottle being opened. His father, up until this point a lumpy shadow behind a curtain, turned his head to the side and yelled, "Get in here!" The boy said goodbye, walked into the house, and shut the door behind him.
Over the next few months, we walked by that house several times. We never saw him again.
Depression's child
After the fire
As the story goes, he stepped outside, lit a Pall Mall, and popped the huge blister on his stomach. "I think you better call an ambulance."
80% of his body was covered in third-degree burns. He spent nine months in the hospital, nine months at home with a full-time nurse. He suffered through over 26 skin grafts. His hearing was ruined from massive doses of powerful antibiotics. When his right foot was giving up the ghost, its blood vessels cauterized by fire, surgeons took a couple timid swipes, lopping off one toe, then a couple more. It took a third operation to amputate it just below the ankle.
Years later, a doctor told him, "I've seen skin like that on a dead man."
When I knew him, he was demanding and unhappy, a man with a limp and two hearing aids. I learned to hate his call: "Jenny, got a minute?" I was definitely not a Jenny and what if I didn't have a minute? It was the typical stupidity of youth. I wish I could go back and treat him with kindness and empathy, to understand what was destroyed in the fire.
In my dreams he's back in the old house, living off hot dogs and root beer, not yet clued in to his own death. He tries to call me, jamming his thick, arthritic fingers into the phone's dial. No luck.
Loyalty
We saw my mother today, and will be heading to Baltimore to see her again on Saturday. There she was in solid form, no ghost. C was immediately comfortable with her. We had a good time. I was loyal for many years, keeping things hidden, trying to protect my mother and defend her. Now I feel like I have betrayed her here by writing these things in public, painting her with such a broad brush. It's complicated. She's complicated. And my feelings are all twisted up.
Can I have it both ways? Protect her and save myself? Probably not. But I can acknowledge the shades of gray.
Leaving on a jet plane ...
Since I can't bear to tear myself away from the blogosphere, I'm bringing my trusty laptop along. Hopefully I will have time to write other stuff, too, though that will be tough in a hotel room with little respite from watching the kid. I also want to work on a new layout for the blog. Naptime will be packed.
We'll be seeing my mother for the first time since last September. C is excited (this breaks my heart; even though they've had very little contact, he clearly loves her). I'm sure she is, too. I guess I am as well. If the air is clear and we're all feeling friendly and happy, the show will go off without a hitch. We will link arms and walk offstage, filled with warmth and love. If anyone's mind is clouded with worry or with things left unsaid, the performance will be off. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when it's over.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Iron grip
Or is it gripping me, pulling me under the water's surface?
The past may threaten, may flash a set of phantom fangs when I tell it to go away but it isn't really coming back. Time goes forward, never back.
But sometimes the past is as present as my own mind, and it is up to its same old tricks. Sleights of hand and feats of illusion.
Why do I still talk to you almost every day? Why
can't I just accept you for who you are and get over
it already? And then I get out the family pictures
and realize how young you were. I'm sorry.
The Girls Who Went Away
I wanted to read it for insight into my biological grandmother's experience, the teenager who gave birth to my mother in a Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in 1950. What was it like for her? How did she get there? Why did she keep my mother's existence a lifelong secret, never telling her later husband or subsequent children? What about the birth father? Or the more intriguing question: do secrets have their own genetic legacy? Is it any coincidence that her daughter got pregnant at 19 and had a shotgun wedding and that her granddaughter had her own troubles?
So I picked up this excellent book, with sad stories of a time before easily available birth control (or abortion) and sex education. And I found a part of my own story: isolation, secrecy, and shame. I am not alone.
Yes, it may seem from my current blah blah blah on the topic that I've spent the past 22 years chatting openly about my first pregnancy, telling my unlucky seatmates on long airplane rides, droning on at playgroups about the sad outcome. But it's been a big secret. Huge. Even now, as I write on a blog whose url I have in my e-mail signature, I am completely terrified of what my friends and passing acquaintances will think. But I want them to find out. I'm tired of the secrets. And I think they will be kind to me in their hearts, even if the whole thing may freak them out a bit.
Right??
Stepfather shuffle
If you've read the West Street Sequence (so far) of A
Prolonged Illness (note: no longer on the web
site), you
will know about Tim, my mother's ex-husband. Jim, the
Philadelphia Flyers lover. Tim, the man who wouldn't
talk when I was at the dinner table, unless it was to
harangue me. Tim, the Big Mean Step-Father.
After Mom kicked him out and life became
simultaneously freer and crazier, Jim did some
soul-searching. Went to therapy. Joined a church.
Eventually remarried. And would take me out to dinner
about once a year. The last time I saw him also was
the most bizarre. Tim, his wife, and his sister
(Joy), came to DC to have dinner with me before I
left for graduate school. I hadn't seem Joy in almost
ten years. She just couldn't stop with the remarks:
"You talk just like Chris [my mother]! You have
mannerisms just like Chris! You move your hands just
like Chris! That's exactly what Chris would do!"
Since she hated Chris for hurting "Timmy," these
comments were not meant kindly. I eventually burst
into tears. Joy gave a petulant apology. I swear she
even stuck out her lower lip.
These dinners were never comfortable for me. What was
his agenda? Did he feel guilty? Did he want to make
it right? Who knows, maybe he was fond of me. Hewas
in our lives for 7-8 years, for a large chunk of my
childhood.
We lost touch after he and family moved to Idaho,
about a decade ago. I tracked him down late last year
(yeah, I know, I know) and he's been sending cards
and presents for C for holidays ever since. So here I
am in the middle of a Tim flashback, hating the man
for being a prick, when we get this Easter package
from him with toys for C.
I'm feeling a bizarre mix of feelings right now,
mainly anger and guilt, the usual partners in crime,
though there has to be some sadness, too. Do I have
to forgive everyone, see the human in every single
fucked up bastard I've come across?
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.