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 MaryAnn 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. MaryAnn 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 MaryAnn 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.
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.