Gut feeling
Or, today, the sound of the boy coughing, deep and thick, the click of my keyboard over the Sinbad movie he is watching for the tenth time (Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger), my laptop warm against my thighs, and outside the day looks like a mix of blue and grey, the warmth coming later, but it won't matter for today is a sick day and the boy and I spend our time together in the cave, the inner sanctum.
In my head, a kind of springy emptiness, like a field of rich earth, freshly turned, damp with a light rain, awaiting the seeds, the new growth coming, everything regenerating. It’s like I’m in the proper part of a cycle now. A fire ripped across this field. I kept it in check though it didn’t stop threatening me with smoke and cinders until a week ago. Then the turning, the rain (a gift), and plunk plunk plunk, I will push the seeds into the ground.
When I woke at 2:30 a.m., surrounded by my noisy thoughts and too many blankets and the heavy buzz saw of my husband’s snoring, I lay there staring at the ceiling. I finally went downstairs, read a page or two of the first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography (so worth a reread), and tried to sink into sleep. It happened eventually, my thoughts settled and shuffled into place. When the heat woke me up at 5:30, I knew what had happened overnight, further change and problem solving.
Yeah, those people who did me wrong, left me, put up a distorted mirror to show me a crazed vision of my ugliness? What of it? They weren’t trying to do wrong, they were helpless themselves, perhaps a bit pitiful, too, so trapped in their own lives that they didn’t know what to do or didn’t think anything needed doing. It’s over. The anger pulls me down, makes me crazy. It’s a barrier of nothingness, a thick covering over my heart and will. The time has come to let it go. Even better – though scary – the time has come to make it right with the ones who really wronged me, the ones with a history, to approach them without malice and try to repair the connection or at the very least to finally tell the truth and stop hiding myself. It will free me from the power of rusty ragged anger, from the power of the unspoken. It will percolate into other areas in my life. And with it comes the necessary acceptance that those who are incapable of reaching into themselves to examine their behavior are irrelevant to me.
Last year’s cycle of melodrama suddenly made sense. It made it worth it. A necessary revisiting of pain. A show of strength. A vow to follow my gut, tell my truth, and assert my will when necessary.
Image of the sun about to emerge from behind fluffy clouds.
From last week's prompt "All around me," edited and added to a bit. Don't worry, at some point I will stop writing so much about anger, forgiveness, and compassion, just like I stopped writing about my past so much. But it may take a while.
And, yes, the boy is sick again, though not so bad this time. In fact, I think he'll go to school tomorrow. I added up the days he's been sick since September: today is sick day number 22. Over three weeks of illness, three weeks of cave-dwelling wonderment.
A healing force
I was reading through a fragment of a short story I wrote last summer when we were at Berkeley Family Camp. It’s a piece aching with premature loss, advance preparation for the removal of love, for the leaving of the boy. Every connection in life of the main character, a aging mother of one grownup child, is held together with duct tape. Her emotions are brittle things, chipped wineglasses wrapped in tissue paper and stored in flimsy boxes. The boy is gone and she knows very little about his present life, though she holds him close in her mind, her versions of him throughout his childhood clear and familiar, his present self a mystery. The warm, small body that nestled next to hers has become a foreign thing, awkward in its separateness and size. In the first scene, she sits in a lounge chair by a creek, wistfully watching children splash and play, observing their parents strong and present. She remembers.
It’s not that she regrets the lost connection or begrudges the boy his adult life. It’s that the loss felt inevitable from his first steps and the loss feels like (on some internal level) rejection. Dear reader, it may not surprise you that this mother was supposed to be me.
Along with anger, compassion, and forgiveness, I’ve been thinking about abandonment lately, that and what it means to be vulnerable and how being vulnerable for me as a child meant danger, something to guard against. There were times when I was left to handle difficult situations on my own, left to fend for myself, and so I did and learned that to depend was to be disappointed. It always sounds like a cliché to me, but it’s true. It fits. Along with that self-reliance, with that necessary isolation, was the idea that I didn’t deserve support anyway. If I did, then why was I alone in my struggles?
I was talking with my husband about this last night, about how it was somehow more comforting to imagine being rejected as a child for who I was, that there was some actual controllable cause or that I meant enough to my parents to be the cause, than to think that it had nothing to do with me. It was easier if there was a reason -- if only I had been nicer, kinder, less evil, less needy. If only I hadn’t said that one nasty thing. But their abandoments didn't have anything to do with me. It was just where they were at the time. They could only handle so much and were incapable of taking on more.
Making myself the cause of my own abandonment is comforting in a twisted way and it’s also not comforting at all. Of course I don’t sit around and think about how evil I am or needy, how much I deserve(d) to be left alone. Instead, I approach life prepared for the inevitable, steeling myself against the day the people I love go away, or I court it, in the hopes of the problem finally being solved, me being seen, redeemed … forgiven. But this is changing. Slowly, incrementally, I can see how my needs were and are legitimate, that I deserved the full attention of the adults in my life, and that they were incapable of providing for me. I can see that I deserve connection, that I need not isolate myself as penance for my wrongs, for my bad nature and evil deeds.
So often when I write these posts, I feel a release of feeling in my chest, a profundity of emotion, the realness of it all: this is how I feel and it is not going to change. I am trying so hard. I’ve been working on this for so long. And I think I am finally getting there. I’m at the edge of the cave, crawling towards the light, recognizing love for what it really is: a healing force.
Image by Bruce McKay Yellow Snow Photography.
So much to answer for
In the dream this morning, I thought, “why not invite him over to dinner?” The house was empty now and I was trying to piece everything together, my life, the grocery store trips, how much food to allow my household of one. My old dormant crush, the man I now know only in my dreams but who could still hold a place in my heart (diminished by knowledge and years and age, jammed in between the other things from my twenties that I regret), was coming to dinner.
Before he made it (in the omniscience of dreams, I saw him walking along the sidewalk, this Yorkshireman – never underestimate the power of an accent – with his wiry climber's build and surprisingly grey hair), I woke up. 4:44 a.m.
I was relieved to wake up so late. Last night, restless after a day at home with a sick boy and a never-ending stream of movies, I was having a hard time getting to sleep. I had to bring out the Buddhist Scotsman with his gentle, almost sexy whisper-voice (“and now allow the muscles of your thighs to soften”) in order to get my spastic mind to quiet itself, to take that internal tension, so automatic at times, and smooth it out. I soothed myself with images of a night of extended sleep, expecting all the while that I would wake up at 2:30 or 3:00. But I made it to almost 5:00 a.m. and that was good enough for me.
I don’t have enough to do, enough to feed on. Don’t envy me. I’ll be envying myself in six months. Or, really, I have things to do but I am having a hard time getting interested in them. Oh, there’s the usual cleaning, the stuff sorting, the life organizing, But I could also be exploring and writing and entering life more. I have to structure my time and make myself a life and I am just realizing now that I don’t have to stay in the house as a form of atonement, a way of showing that I am not a layabout wasting time (as I waste it). There are wonderful things about controlling my days, but not if I let them slip away.
Don’t laugh at me or roll your eyes – or, at the very least, don’t tell me that you are doing so, and I'll pretend that you aren't – but I think I am holding on to this emptiness as a penance, that the structure I set up against myself is a form of payment for my sins. I am not a religious person. I was not raised in an environment of structured guilt. But I carry around guilt anyway and I cling to her, the old me, the one who was alone, who took her anger and directed it inward. I’ve mentioned at least once here the idea that my thoughts could kill. In a recent tearful conversation about my first child's birth/death, one therapist nailed it when she asked me if I thought that I killed that child with my anger and hate. I had a lot of that at the time, a lot of adolescent resentment. I was sixteen and on my own. I knew then – and know now – that killing with thought and emotion is impossible. I know and I don’t know. It’s so hard to shake, this feeling of responsibility. I hated and wished for release and then he died. It's a twisted logic, a spurious connection between a, b, and c.
My second son's birth was a trigger. Not that my life before parenthood was some sort of free romp, but it was much less self-constrained. Then the boy who got to live arrived, along with the overwhelming reminder of what I was capable of, my dark powers. I’ve been trying to make it up to the ones I’ve wounded, the ones who are no longer here, including the adolescent me who was stuck with the responsibility, the burden of someone else's death.
I used to have dreams about the baby I forgot. There he was in the antiquated crib in the high-ceiling room with the wispy curtains floating in the breeze. By the time I remembered – to get food, to change a diaper, to check in – he would be dead. I haven’t had those dreams for years, thank goodness. That’s part of the healing process, the joy of having a child now and doing right by him.
I am grateful for my ability to pick apart my emotions, for finding the why. Once I know the why, I can deal with it, and I am, ever so slowly. This new discovery of my self-imposed prison both as penance and as a way to hold on to the girl that was, is useful. I can cry over her and then allow myself the freedom to live.
So why the dream visit from the Yorkshireman, the occasional Mancunian? He used to represent freedom to me, freedom and desire, the world of art and living on the edge. He’s an outdated symbol (nothing personal Mr. H/C/T) who was showing up for the final supper, our last meal together.
It’s been a long leave-taking from my caged life, but I am halfway there. The second half, which is all action and forward movement, is going to be the most difficult. It will take willpower and a sense of direction without knowing my ultimate destination. I can do it, though I may be writing about it ad nauseam until I get further along the path.
A note on the title: "So much to answer for" is a line from the Smiths song Suffer Little Children, which is about the 1960s Moors Murders. It fits Manchester, my dreams, and guilt.
Image: Me, last night, verging on sleep.
Nothing to be frightened of
It was a relief to get those things off my head and out of my house and to mail them myself. Now I wait and try not to worry too much about what will happen or question my approach. I filled out the paperwork, added up the hours I’ve worked, gathered transcripts from four schools (so strange to see my transcripts from Washington College, with the classes I chose and then the series of Ws for withdrawal for spring semester 1989 – what a hazy, long ago time that was). I have recommendations from people who believe in me and know me. I have a résumé that runs the gamut from legislative librarian to stay-at-home mom. And I have this essay, which I know is well-written, it tells the necessary story, but how many people apply to graduate programs in part by writing about their personal struggles?
This is a place where I want to hang on to the anxiety, the protective, don’t-get-used-to-the-idea-that-you-are-changing-your-life anxiety. It’s a habit. So I’m backing off. I wrote what was necessary. I wrote what I had to. And I have nothing to be ashamed of anyway.
So. Sunday. The husband left for a business trip. The boy and I hung out, met up with friends at a local park in the afternoon. That night I stayed up late and slept hard when I did fall asleep. We got through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I read most of Prince Caspian out loud at breakfast and bedtime. We kept up with his schoolwork and other reading and ate grilled cheese sandwiches one too many times, mine layered with dill pickles and Dijon mustard with a steamed artichoke on the side.
It has been hard to find the time and the mental space to write, so I leafed through my journal a couple of days ago, one I’ve been intermittently writing in since early last summer. My mind is in some form of neutral, not feeling inspired or poetic, just here. I was trolling for post topics, for something to write about. Obviously, I have not yet burned my diaries, though I have examined them for things that might confuse or cause pain to the ones I will someday leave behind. But sometimes I confuse myself, like in this somewhat enigmatic entry from a night in late November when I was still trying to turn my 2:00 a.m. anxieties into 11:00 a.m. pish posh:
11/29/11
So tired tonight + afraid of the wake-up, so I also took a sleeping pill. One might think tiredness could sometimes mean worries for a churning mind + I guess I am worried about that but not really. Not really.
Nonetheless, to wipe from my mind
the taste of honey
the taste of radishes (this could be radicchio and not radishes – my writing isn’t that good; in fact, radicchio makes more sense, as much sense as anything could in this context)
the unknown mixed with the too known
Then there’s the dark and slightly dense stuff from the days before my attempts to control my night anxieties with lists:
6/29
We believe that words don’t really matter, that they dress the corpse, the fading memory of the lost, the words lie, they control, and everyone knows it. We think that tears don’t matter, they water the crops, salt our salads and our eggs, the you intact under thin yellow skin.
I read this (and some other stuff from that time period, what remains, anyway) and I want to reach out a sympathetic hand to my six-months-ago self and say (affectionately), “Lighten up, honey. It’s not so bad. And why are you dragging everyone else into your mental landscape? Drop the we. Drop the attitude.”
But of course this was where my head was at the time, muddied and sad. I spoke to myself in runes, in multilayered metaphors as dense as lead. In the first part of the journal, I had written a fragment of a short story, something that just flowed out one afternoon when we were at Berkeley Family Camp. Maybe the words were ready; maybe the fact that there were no electronic distractions made it easier for me. Maybe I just needed to get my worries out onto paper, my projections, the image of a (fictional! fictional!) me at 61, with all the regrets and none of the joys of getting older.
I typed the story up yesterday, with some gaps where I couldn’t read my writing. But I don’t know what to do with it. It is well-written enough for a first draft. It has my distinctive voice, with the same old themes: self-sacrifice, regret, suppressed desire, guilt, the danger of deadness when deadness seems like the only way to stay safe or to keep others safe from my darker tendencies.
Maybe that is the problem, those themes, written into my life as though they were part of the framework, the structure, instead of being lousy additions. My life is a stately Victorian with a series of poorly thought out add-ons, boxy awkward things that cover up the fine bones of the original. The paint on them is peeling, their roofs leak, the wood has begun to rot. They no longer serve a purpose.
The time has come to remove them from the main structure, to pull away at rippled drywall, to pry the boards off, to reveal the beauty underneath, and to know this is something I am doing myself, not letting be done to me. I am in control of the process.
It's nothing to be frightened of.
A note on the title and the last line of this post -- it is also the title of a non-fiction book by Julian Barnes, a memoir and a meditation on the fear of death. It's a great book. I've just read his latest (Booker-prize winning) piece of fiction, The Sense of An Ending, which I highly recommend as well.
Image of a Los Angeles Victorian by Neil Kremer.
Submerged
The bare branches of the trees behind the beach shake in the wind. Further along, outside of a small red house built too close to the edge (it always floods when the ice melts and the rains come), children play in the chill of a January inside my imagination, where the sky is neither here nor there and the sun hides behind a wispy cloud curtain and I know that in the night, the night things will happen. The lines will blur and the glass will shatter. I am looking forward to it.
Our reflection trembles. She glances at me, concerned, when a clawed hand reaches out from the water and yanks her glasses off her head, leaving four red streaks on her forehead. The children squeal and cry out and I'm not sure if it's little ones we hear or the keening cries of hawks circling the meadow beyond the trees. The sky and the sun remain silent, noncommittal, observers with no agenda. With glasses tightly clutched between claw and palm, the hand descends smoothly into the water, leaving behind a memoryless glass surface.
There are beasts in there, creatures with fangs and webbed feet, and sudden riptides that pull you away from the sand, out, out, out into the deep, where there is no bottom and you tread water and shout, feeling the small slimy things rub against you in the dark water, knowing you are alone in your predicament.
Remember the way the night blurs reality, the deep fall off the edge of the pier into muttering water, the endless drinks and cigarettes, until the lights go out and you sink. Until nothingness is as tangible as stone.
I can talk around things in metaphor. I make it neat and clean before muddying it again. After six days of family, the good, the bad, the in between, the first thing that came to mind when I sat down to write this afternoon was the deceptive image of the calm surface of a lake, unnaturally smooth, the air carrying a warning, and underneath this flat featureless surface (the one that reflects reality back to the viewer), life in all its darkness exists. Feelings surface and submerge, they hide at the edge of the drop off where the shallows fade away. The plants lining the rocky edge of the water are lush, green, and feathery, but most of what goes on beneath is not the kind of thing you want to see. Or not the kind of thing I chose to reveal. To make real. So there it lies, hidden.
Even I’m not sure what this metaphor means. The preternatural calm, the hidden world, the moments when the surface breaks … well, parts of it are obvious, but the question remains: what do I do with it?
Write about it. Dive deep into it. Accept it. Understand it. I can’t drain the lake. What lurks under the surface scares me, but it is also part of me, and I want it to come to light, to play in clear waters, to exist within me freely.
Write about it. Hang about on the surface in a fishing boat, netting the webbed beasts one by one, pulling the slimy things by the bucketful from the water, letting them dry slowly on the beach, burying them in a deep pit in the sand so they can rot undisturbed.
Write about it. Keep on writing. Sit on the beach and stare at the surface. Bring a friend. Bring two friends. Bring my sense of humor. We'll hold hands and wade along the shoreline, interlocked, and each day get closer to the creatures, holding out offerings of food, until the creatures swim up to me and we gingerly make our peace.
Or perhaps a variation on all of it, picking and choosing according to what is necessary at the moment of comprehension, of recognition.
Image (taken at Weeki Watchee Springs, FL) by Toni Frissell, initially published in Harper's Bazaar in December 1947, provided by trialsanderrors
Blinded me with silence
And, of course, we would call our crushes, just for the adolescent thrill of hearing the love object's voice, or knowing that the phone was ringing in his house. When someone answered -- was that him? Or his brother? -- we didn’t breathe heavily. Instead, we sat on the other end listening, our hearts beating faster. The relieved laughter came after we hung up the phone.
When I woke up this morning in the quiet after a night of lightly drugged sleep, in the silence of a house about to be filled with people, one of our crush calls came to mind, which I only remember because Maureen wrote about it in a letter at the time. Funny what sticks in one’s mind.
Phone: Ring! Ring! Ring!
D (my eventual boyfriend) answers: Hello?
Silence. My face flushes and my heartbeat quickens.
D: Hello?
Silence. Heart pounding.
D (blows into phone) woosh, woosh Hello?
Silence.
D (raps receiver with knuckles) knock, knock, knock
Silence.
D: Hello? (blows into phone) woosh, woosh… (knocks receiver with knuckles) knock, knock, knock
Silence.
etc. etc., until D hangs up and Maureen and I collapse into a heap of giggles on her dining room floor.
(D wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. I think he actually believed something was wrong with the phone.)
For D, this silence indicated a mechanical problem. For me, the silence was meaningful, it said volumes, told of my immature love and maybe held my regrets as well, regrets for letting him take something he shouldn't have away from me.
On its own, silence is fine, of course, it isn’t a bad thing, it can be totally neutral. It can be partially neutral. Or it can be a canvas onto which we paint our insecurities.
I've just finished reading The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, a well-written and somewhat brutal compilation of three novellas on women going through crisis. One of the things about it that struck me is how each narrator interpreted the silence of the other (the wayward husband, the absent child), what the silence meant to them and how they created an entire story about what was going on in the other's head without ever having a conversation about it.
We each come with a history. The history has taught us to interpret signals, to read facial expressions, body language, and silence. I grew up in an atmosphere where I could get yelled at for entering the room and sitting down in the wrong way, where my very presence was apparently odious and led people to turn away from me, where most silences held anger and resentment. I am very versed at reading (or misinterpreting) the signals of rejection, to anticipating the moment when it will all end. Silence. An eyebrow raised. The friend with arms intertwined facing away from me. Furrowed brows. Frowns. The tone of a voice. I tend to go for the most negative interpretation and wrack my brain for how it happened, how I finally did it, how I gave away my true ugly self (this is not how I am really thinking about it, but I do think it's part of the underlying framework of my thoughts, one that I have been slowly exposing and rebuilding).
At least now I am aware of my reaction, of the way I read faces and stances and silence, and of the internal struggle between "what did I do wrong?" or "when will this person leave in a disgusted huff?" and the mantra of I'm ok, I'm ok, I'm ok.
Still, it's hard, these internal pep talks, these nights of deep breaths and afternoons of well-massaged panic. And each time I worry, each time I go down that dungeon path, I also have to remind myself that I might be right! That maybe the silence, the stance, the raised eyebrow does mean something bad. But that doesn't mean that I am bad or that the meaning will destroy me.
On some level, it seems ridiculous to make this clear and obvious to myself. Still. That's how it is for now as I renovate and rebuild this strong solid self of mine. I just have to accept it and get on with life.
Image by gilderic.
Unfiltered
In the middle of the night, while everyone sleeps, I open my eyes, let his name roll off my tongue. I say it as the only witness, the one who was there and remembers, and in the night it is almost as if he exists, whole, alive, solid as anything and just as beautiful as life itself, as the pumping of one’s heart, the slow rise of breath, the way the blood flows from here to there, feeding us, keeping us going, warming our fingertips.
The name is smooth, small, round, cool. It is heavy and old. It is an afterthought, the only thing left, a placeholder, an artifact from another era.
When I opened the box, I took out the name, I polished it up, I held it close to my heart and warmed it against my skin, and I said: you are mine, nobody else’s and I am sorry for what I couldn’t do, for who I was, for my horrible timing. I am sorry that I was me and not someone else stronger, more loved and supported. It was our bad luck, your bad luck. Fate made it this way. I can't think of it any other way because I can't change it now, the build-up to the creation and destruction of life.
Last week, we got to the heart of it. Can you kill something with hate? Murder off a part of yourself, a part of someone else, with the intensity of negative emotion? Is it possible to be responsible for someone’s death through your hatred of them? The hatred of the innocent is a sad and evil thing. I was weak. I am so, so sorry. I think this is very important, the therapist said, this feeling that I killed with hate and the fact that I am having a very hard time forgiving myself for it and for what happened to me afterward, for my lonely struggles. She was right. The guilt permeates everything, leaves my closest relationships tinged with grey, fogged over, aching and heavy with my weakness.
I am sorry. I wish I hadn’t been left to carry the burden of what happened alone. I am not the only guilty party, but I was the one left holding the bag, and here I am, struggling to carry it, to lighten it with words and action and an attempt to keep my battered blackened heart open to love.
I hold him here and there, he is always with me in his cozy box, warm and close. After the house fills and then empties of family, I will open it again, give him the attention he needs and deserves.
I will not forget.
A dense little post, but necessary.
The full poem I mentioned in the post Collecting the shards:
Aubade
Take a streetcar to the water’s edge.
You’ll find an empty bench.
Go and sit on it.
Look out across the bay
water shimmering.
I do believe there is
there is an emptiness.
One can attain to it. -- Kevin Sheehan
... which I can now tie to a quote from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which we just read to the boy. This is from the point in the book shortly after Aslan is murdered: If you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you -- you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness.
It's grief. It's appropriate. But I have to return it to the box for a little while, keeping the box close to me, close to me and safe.
Image by Rust Morris.
The buzz
I’m not sure why this particular side effect has stuck. My appetite has returned. I blame my sleeping problems on my mind now and not on the rush of my medicated heart. The jitters disappeared on week three of my regimen. I only notice the ringing when I am quiet, when I sit down to read or in the conversational lacunae, the slow moments when I can't tune out my head. Just after I started writing this post, the heat kicked on and so the buzz has been wiped out by the exhale of forced air, the concentration of warmth, but I can feel the vibrations just inside the bone.
I’ve grown used to talking casually about antidepressants, about being depressed, and I live in a bubble world where that’s ok. But in the online class I’m taking through a community college, well, not everyone has jumped on the depression bandwagon, meaning that not everyone thinks that it exists as an actual affliction.
I don’t know my classmates, don’t totally remember their stories. I do know they run the gamut from curious high school students to graduate students fulfilling a requirement. A number of them are from rural areas of California. Most are young, somewhere in their late teens or early twenties. There are people with shining positive outlooks and those for whom religion is vital, essential to their world view, and there are some who are unsure of their place in the world.
One of our latest class discussion questions was in part about whether feelings of anxiety and dread were a part of being human. Um, well, of course?? That’s not how I put my response, but that sums up my conclusion. We all experience anxiety and deep dread – or should – and perhaps we have to experience them in order to understand what it means to be human, to sit with the pain of other people and let them sit with ours. This doesn’t mean that we have to totally accept the feelings. There are ways of holding them close while moving toward the light, of keeping the worst of what is human in a carefully cupped hand and holding that hand up to the sun.
In the discussion, I briefly mentioned taking antidepressants. No one attacked me personally for this – it’s not that kind of forum – but I was surprised both by how some approached the question (“well, I certainly hope that feelings of anxiety and dread aren’t part of being a person!”) to their clear disdain of depression as an actual malady. Some incoherently compared antidepressants to alcohol, something the weak get hooked on. Others wrote that the idea of anxiety and dread as a part of being human sounded like something cooked up by a pharmaceutical company looking to market a new antidepressant (ah, if only the pharmaceutical companies were more existential in their marketing approaches).
I wasn’t expecting subtlety from my classmates. I wasn’t expecting a group hug. I don’t really care what they think about depression or antidepressants for my sake. But it worried me for their own sakes or for their family members and friends who might be going through a thick sad depressive hell and are afraid to speak up for fear that they show their weakness or their lack of “positive attitude.”
Depression isn’t a simple thing. The reasons for it are many, a weird concoction of genetics and history, of circumstances and chemistry. I resisted the idea of it lurking in myself for years, though now that I look back I can see how I’ve gone through bouts of depression before. Some of it originates in isolation and compacted grief. Some of it is from childhood experiences. I am sure there is a genetic component as well. But whatever the reasons, my experience of it is real and the antidepressants are helping. Are they placebos? Maybe. But I choose to believe they are working for me now in the way I need them to, that they are clearing my mind so that I can do the hard work of becoming a whole human being.
It’s worth the constant buzz in my head and the occasional judgment from strangers. I know what I am experiencing. I know I am not alone, that my truth is someone else’s, maybe yours, and that together we can support each other across the ether, can hold our anxiety and dread up to the sunlight while clasping each other's hand.
Image of the head of Athena at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by Walter Gobetz.
Flicking matches in the dark
I write this and I am tired. But I want to talk to you, I need to tug on your sleeve and tell you how I am in between the reading, the schoolwork, the last couple of weeks of elementary school tasks (making sugar skulls, entering Scholastic Book orders, haranguing other parents) and Halloween costume making and my slow drop-off from the online world.
So I make the walk every week. I am tired of the walk, but it offers buffer space, time between home and revelation (if that’s what we’re in the mood for). Last Thursday after I reached my destination, in a room rich with leather and compassion, warm and low-lit, the tissue box beside me, I compacted a tissue in my hands and talked briefly about my interrupted sleep, the way I torture myself when I wake up at 2:00 a.m., the spilling open of my mind, my worries overflowing from my head to the pillow to the floor. Night thoughts are the worst. Why don’t you tell your night self to be kind to you? the therapist asked.
My night self. Suddenly she was there, showing herself from the dark place where she doesn’t sleep. She sat in the light of a faded street lamp, resting her back against a brick wall. Young, about fifteen or so, all in black, she glared at me and flicked matches my way, one by one, flick flick flick.
So maybe you need to pay more attention to the teenage you.
What the therapist said made sense. I’ve been trying to get back to this girl, to get to her, for a long time now. I like to pretend that she was an anomaly, some sort of thing to be suppressed, something to push aside, but she is part of me, with her rebellious independence, her outsider’s view of the world, combined with an openness and compassion toward the pain of others. Her experiences and feelings are not dark blots to be ignored. I have to integrate her back into me, the good and the bad and the inconvenient, take the fragments of emotion and personality and piece together a whole self.
Before I went to sleep that night, I approached the night me. I knew she didn’t want to talk. I knew touch would be iffy, too. I got closer, awkwardly close, and reached out to hug her …
But before that? When I was crying alone with the weight of too many emotions? I thought of the man in the other room, patiently working on a Halloween mask. I thought of how ridiculous it was that I was crying by myself when I had someone who could hold me when I was sad. So I did something I haven’t done in a very long time: I asked him to come to me and I cried in his arms until I didn’t need to cry anymore.
So I was ready when I reached out to the girl: You are me. Let's heal each other. We are going to accept our rebellious spirit, our independence, our interest in the world and other people that has been hidden behind a fear of the worst parts of us being exposed. We will accept our pain and see our loneliness, knowing that they don't define either of us. What we are defined by is strength and adaptability and compassion, by the feelings we want to pretend don't exist, by the way we can see others when we aren't blinded by our own melodrama.
She took the hug, though I haven’t totally convinced her yet that I am for real. Rebuilding trust is a slow process, a careful walk through unknown streets with halts and long silent stretches and moments where there is nothing but feeling with all of its layers, the warm hand-hold, the turning toward the other when the wind cuts through you, knowing, finally, that you are not alone.
I deleted my Facebook account (I have another one out there, friendless at the moment, a clean slate). Facebook wasn't working for me anymore. It was a distraction and felt like a layer between me and the world anyway, though there are a few folks I will be refriending with my new account soon, if they'll have me, my small cadre of friends, virtual and otherwise. My Google+ account is still out there, though I am not on Google+ very much.
I haven't let my Facebook escape stop me from creating a writing to survive Facebook page, however. If you'd like to "like" it, click on the link on the sidebar, or click here.
Does it make me a hypocrite to use Facebook for blog promotion?
Nah.
Image by maewe.
Giving in to the thaw
What of a prompt that no one but myself will read? Why do I always have to feel so contained, my contents spilling out, my emotions partially submerged, the bulk of them under water while my exposed self, blue with cold, frozen in place, glides past you without a sideways glance? Meanwhile, under the surface the rest of me melts. Sometimes it disappears as though it never lived, to be taken up by some other frozen being floating in the thick, cold water.
This morning, after the workout (boring, but I like feeling strong), I laid on the floor and cried. And then berated myself for crying (you know, not wanting to give in to my emotionality, my excess, the melt) and then I thought: this is shedding the excess, letting go of the overflow. This isn’t sadness or wallowing: this is me. I feel. To feel isn’t a crime. To be able to give voice to what is real is a gift.
Reawakening is confusing, the muddle and hodgepodge of mixed emotions, the recognition of what I have hidden from myself. To reawaken while also keeping my faults in mind, my me-centered fantasies, my needs that I want to cover over again so quickly with something, someone, but it’s only me here, waving at myself – it’s hard, this stuff, but hard in a good way, like the 25th push-up or going to the party that you wanted to avoid.
So my sentences are fraught and too long. My emotions are real and inconvenient and my metaphors mixed. I still feel like I am waiting for the rest of life to begin, but in reality I am preparing for the journey, reading the books, writing the rest out, thinking of a day when I am no longer isolated, when I will have colleagues and conversation and (please!) arguments about truth and what is real, about how best to handle the slipperiness of life.
Climb e’vry mountain, I say, in the way that works best for you. Accept the fact that there is no normal, that we all muddle along, and the only thing we can really do is try for authenticity, for being true to ourselves, while holding a hand out to the people behind us, the ones who aren't quite there yet.
My time as a member of this Round Robin go-round was short (someone else dropped out, so the numbers evened out), but I still have this week's prompts and I will substitute from time to time, so I may toss one or two up here in between studying and other writing and making sugar skulls and finishing the boy's Halloween costume. This prompt was "Something square." I went from a box to an iceberg to a puddle.
Image by Maria & Enrique of a forest near Onelli Bay (with iceberg) in Patagonia, Argentina.
Ringing true
Nora led me on the slow walk along Dwight. She concentrated on sidewalk scents, the deep contemplative sniff, totally ignoring the grumble and gunning of car engines and their acrid exhaust. She’s getting older and I cut her some slack, let her enjoy the spicy roots of roses and street trees, the metallic bitterness of security gates. Outside the store, I tied her to the stoplight post, knowing from experience she hated to be left out. She jumped and barked and pulled at her leash as I entered the double doors.
Bamboozled is for last chances, last-minute alcohol, milk for when you run out, bananas for a burst of health after the fried fish sandwich. Most people come here for six-packs and lottery tickets, for the cigarettes behind the register.
The girl at the counter, glossy black hair, cinnamon skin, was speaking into a mobile phone in a language I didn’t know. Somewhere behind her my pack waited, anticipating the tap-tap of nervous hands, the ceremonial unwrapping of cellophane, my trembling choice: which one would burn first? Even through the closed door I could hear Nora's yelps. The girl made eye contact. I put an empty hand to mouth and inhaled deeply, pantomimed the satisfaction of holding and releasing smoke. Phone crooked between ear and shoulder, she turned to the cigarettes, letting her hand pass from brand to brand. I nodded when she got to Camel Lights.
This was the start of my escape and I noted the details: the dog's distress, the store's faint odor of disinfectant, the rows of 12-packs in the sunlight, the layer of dust on the cans of Coco Lopez. I dug into my back pocket for a ten and one of my fingernails bent against the denim. The girl and I slid our offerings across the counter, my cash for her cigarettes. A pale scar divided the back of her hand in two. Someone stuck his head in the door to ask if anyone knew whose dog that was, the distressed one tied to the post? She's mine, I told him and ran out to Nora, leaving my change behind (oh, her dance of recognition, of joy in not being abandoned she gave as I freed her from the post). We continued our walk to University, past Indian restaurants, cafes, and small grocery stores, turned left, and went to the water.
Cesar Chavez Park, a former landfill, juts into the bay. The grass is uneven, the ground underneath lumpy and booby-trapped with gopher holes. As Nora obsessed over gophers and ground squirrels, I looked across the water. San Francisco glittered in the distance, a taunt for what I could never have, another thing to bemoan, and my chest ached.
But suddenly the feeling changed. This is the mystery, the real topic of fiction: that moment of change -- is it a moment? A process? What brings it on? What is the key to the transformation? Did the kites flying above push me toward acceptance? Was it the family picnicking near us, two silent and exhausted parents watching their chubby toddler rip up handfuls of grass? Had I been working on it unconsciously all along? This was when my heart shifted toward truth and yet I can't get at the truth of the moment, at least not here.
As we left the park, I sent the pack of cigarettes sailing into a trash can, a sacrifice to note my sacrifice, an acceptance of the delicate balance in my life between ambiguity and love, novelty and stability, lightness and darkness. Cleansed by bay breezes, baptized by the city's exhaust and the hum of the highway, Nora and I returned to the humid familiarity of home.
That night I woke to chains dragging and ghosts howling, the sound detritus of a rowdy party up the street. But I was having a dream, too, of coming to the edge of the impossible, flirting with it while knowing it was impossible. I kept changing my clothes, rejecting my outfits, my disguises. Nothing fit or it was dirty or ripped, long out of style or season. The impossible and his progeny waited for me. In the end I told them to go on ahead. I would make it to our destination on my own in whatever identity fit.
Yesterday morning I did tell my husband I was going out for a pack of cigarettes (har har har). It was day four of the boy's illness and my husband was also laid up (and continues to be) after hernia surgery. I felt trapped by other peoples' needs. A dog walk, some studying, some time almost-alone, and a little more sleep helped shake the feeling. There is nothing to escape. This is my life and I am committed to it and to whoever we will become, me, the man, and the boy.
Besides, I already have a pack of cigarettes in my desk, a remnant from the truly horrible spring of 2011. The pack is almost full. I’ve never finished a cigarette. But I like the fact that it is waiting for me in a drawer, that I can take on the role of rebel or angry girl or self destructive harpy without taking it on at all. Because I am not any of these things.
It doesn’t mean that I can’t return in my mind to the time when home meant my erasure, that I can't wear the dark coat and scuffed boots even on a sunny October day. The cigarettes and stories act as a pressure valve for my dark side. I dance with the impossible in my dreams and I return to reality when I awake. In my first version of the cigarette story, the fictional me got to the edge of the bay and kept on going. The water submerged her. The dog barked as it swallowed her up. But there was no point to this ending, no transformation, just the further disappearance of self.
It didn't ring true.
I got very absorbed in this one -- probably best to think of it as a work in progress.
Image by meddygarnet.
Damage control
This isn’t a rhetorical question. Over the last month, something inside me shifted. I moved to the right of damaged, can feel my iron core, my strength, expanding to reach its full potential. It’s an almost normal feeling. Like maybe I don’t actually have any holes to fill. I don’t need to tug on anyone’s sleeve for attention, don’t need to prove my worthiness. I am worthy.
Experienced in pain? Yes. Been through some difficult times? Yes. Kicked around by fate, bruised and left to cope alone? No longer. I don’t want to discount the effects of my childhood, but I no longer need to soothe that part of myself. This has been part of a long process of writing things that were necessarily fraught, revealing what I felt to be my ugliness, my secrets, to anyone who would read them.
Therapy has helped, too, and grounding myself in the present. I’ve realized that I don’t need to replay my childhood to make it right, that human beings are resilient and capable of change up until the very end. But one of the biggest revelations was that I created some of my darkened reality by clinging to long-ago events and by living off of fantasy in my daily life. I thought that in order to heal I had to have someone to heal me and that every rejection, real or otherwise, was a kick to the soul. I thought that the change was a mysterious substance that only the initiated could access or that I could only access by convincing the unavailable to redeem me with their love.
I don’t want to discount the love of other people, their support and friendship. My husband has stuck with me when others might not. Without his kindness, patience, and love, this process would have taken much longer. My friends, both real-world and virtual, have also been there when I needed them, empathetic and kind and necessary. (I am grateful that you are in my life.)
Normality. Everything is so everyday. My sleep is slowly improving. The dog walks are generally without tears unless they are about the heartaching beauty of life, its fleetingness. I have been a calm parent, a fount of reasonableness in the face of the boy’s occasional irrational fits, boundaries firmly in place. I am reading and studying and seeing the world around me. I am cooking food again and really tasting it. My focus is no longer on inner pain or on perceived slights, though, of course, I still have a lot of work to do.
It’s good. It’s strange. The only thing that concerns me is my withdrawal from social interaction. The only people I talk to are my family. After dropping off in Facebook participation, I’ve dropped out of Facebook (temporarily, most likely).* I have no desire to meet anyone for drinks or coffee or lunch. I barely email my friends. Maybe this is the chrysalis stage. I could need time to just be, to let the wheels continue to turn until I reach my destination.
There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home. And home is here, within me.
*FB friends -- you can email me at writingtosurvive(at)gmail.com. I dropped out without announcement and would like to "talk" to you (and I am thinking of you, Anne, in particular! xoxo).
Image of a cloudy blue Berkeley sky by me.
Edited on 10/12 to take care of an awkward mixed metaphor (how can wheels keep on turning until I get to the other shore?).
Mea culpa, mea culpa
I like to pretend that there are no mistakes, big or otherwise, not because I believe we build our own faults out of the rotten parts of ourselves, or that we somehow court danger, flirt with falling, but because nothing is as simple as just doing something wrong. There are always steps, prior decisions, circumstances.
The circumstances that led me -- no, us, though the boy, who is now a middle-aged man, remains clueless – to my mistake were old and complicated. Maybe it started in a darkened room when I was younger and even more helpless and that defining moment was covered over by confirming experience, the hints at my worthlessness, the attention people paid to appearance versus inner reality, the atmosphere of parental distraction that led to the scene on the bed. From the outside, statistically even, my behavior leading up to this moment and what happened after it were extremely predictable. Can we really call it a big mistake?
Of course, despite my philosophical weaseling out of responsibility (so says the large part of me that wants to pin it on me, for the comfort of control, of being the center), I constantly make mistakes, choose the wrong path, decide to hide when I need to stand up and shout. I see my flaws and how they lead to perdition. If I let myself go down this brittle path of self-hatred, of acknowledgement of fault without forgiveness, without looking at the circumstances and how I got there, I will break into a thousand pieces.
Still. I am sorry to all I have wronged. I am sorry for not being good enough, talkative enough, agile enough, calm enough, kind enough, self-confident enough. I apologize for not getting the cat off the chair more quickly before you collapsed. I apologize for that time when I was twelve and I did something strange to the washer. I apologize for being too quiet at the dinner table, or too full of teenage smolder, or too full of myself. Maybe if I had been better, different, you wouldn’t have died or wanted me out or abandoned me. I am sorry for killing you with anger and selfishness and neglect. I apologize for not talking before things fell apart and for directing the anger of a lifetime at you who were most important to me and to practical strangers, too, the ones who unknowingly probed where it hurt the most.
I am sorry, I am sorry all of you. But there are no mistakes, everything has a context. I promise to let go of my burdens before I burden all of you again, before I cover myself over in never-ending regret.
And now for something completely different, two great things that acknowledge the blog that I have not mentioned, caught up as I am in the Round Robin.
Dieter Moitzi, writer and creative force behind the fine blog confessions of a wannabe writer passed on the Liebster Blog award to writing to survive and a few other blogs he admires. Please check out his blog for the prose and poetry or, even better, take a look at his ebooks. Thank you, Dieter!
writing to survive was listed as number three in a list of the top fifty personal memoir blogs by adulteducationcourse.org. I'm in good company, with fellow blogging friends La Belette Rouge, Elisabeth from Sixth in Line, earth to holly, and Storied Mind. The post highlighted by reviewer Tracy Myers (a name I've gleaned from other awardees) was In My Defense. Thank you very much, Tracy!
*********
From the prompt "A big mistake." My reaction to it was surprisingly dark -- these thoughts are what I have been fighting against daily for months now, trying not to indulge, trying to change the way I react, even when I am not aware of the mechanism or reaction.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited a bit.
Image by Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com).
They hover in the air
My dreams are all about train stations and men in suits and lost dogs. I walk across moonlit fields against the sound of rustling in the trees. In the dark, I reach out to touch the gnarled bark only to discover old bones grasping back at me, my predecessors. It’s a dangerous journey, alone at night, and sometimes I wish I’d brought a dog or a cat or a friend. I am lonely and the people I’ve chosen to surround myself with (this loose cadre of disconnected souls) are wrapped up in their own lives. They emerge out of the evening fog only to let it swallow them back up again after a hug, a supportive talk, a shared beer in bar laden with the memory of smoke.
This is what scares me, this stepping through the swamp of loneliness, of total reliance on self while still trying to be open to the wills and ways of others. I remind myself that I am lucky to feel, to palpitate the heart of darkness, quivering and clammy where its exposed to air. I am being here now, that’s for damn sure, and I allow the feelings their moment when I can. There will be no suppression, but it all feels like a juggling act, a balancing act, like I’m in some sort of fucked up circus with the tightrope and the scuffed ballet shoes and the bowling pins hovering in the air in their struggle against gravity.
But I am here, trying my best. Sometimes I comfort myself with thoughts of a different age, the wake-up in a room spicy with Vick’s VapoRub, the green glass of the humidifier lit up by nightlight a glowing beacon. My breathing is tight, my flannel nightgown is sweat-soaked, but I know that soon my grandmother will be in with a cool washcloth and a warm dry hand.
I hold it all together myself, I have to, I’ve always had to, so this is no different. The difference is that I am grasping my own hand, pouring the cool glass of water, hugging myself in the dark, knowing that this is what we do when no one else is able to, that this is the reality of life.
Still. I want to lie on cool sheets and have them minister to me, bring me weak tea and cinnamon toast. I want them to talk to me, to tell me stories. I want to know their problems. I want an even exchange. But none of us are there yet and so I wait, I prepare, I make my plans in the darkness of four a.m., waiting for the comfort of another life.
From the prompt "Looking up."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Double-M.
And so I emerge
But also: love and its loss and what the others are saying about me, judging my value by what I provide, saying that if I can’t do that, then what am I good for? Oh, it still scares me, love and its exit, its decisions about me, my value going down, down, like the stock market and housing prices, like interest rates. This is part of my shifting thinking, realizing that I am not a commodity, that I have intrinsic value, that sometimes love does a turnabout and it isn’t necessarily about me, it’s about chemistry and its lack, or the way history piles up on us and changes us and our viewpoints. It’s about someone else’s history and what they are capable of, too, something that is out of my hands.
It wasn’t until a few days ago, with all this practice at staying in the moment, feeling the fear without trying to buffer it, feeling the pain, too, that I realized this was part of my underlying assumption about myself, that my value was only in relation to what other people thought of me, to how they felt about me, that I had to keep on dazzling them (with words, with deeds, with a show of my goodness) to keep the feelings alive. My feeling of self has moved here and there, attached to those who attach themselves to me. Love and its loss means my creation and destruction. It’s no wonder that I avoid getting any deeper into it. Immersion into the other means potential death, my self reflected in black, fading into nothingness.
And under all of this was a self that I had submerged, something that felt ugly and wanting and bad, just plain bad. Well, she’s here, she’s scrubbing off the blood and dust, she’s exposing her wounds to the sun. Underneath it all, her skin gleams and her smile surprises and she has things that anyone would want to be close to, an agile mind, a quick step, a surprising viewpoint. She is me and she’s not perfect, but she has a right to be here, to exist in the world, and we’re still scared, we’re both scared, but getting stronger every day.
From the prompt "I am no longer afraid of it."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of a Wonder Woman wall mural in Rio de Janeiro by Digo_Souza
Risky business
This is not the time to worry about how you look, about the sags and the stretch marks and the jagged lines. This is not the time to insist that the other does the same. Just stand there, vulnerable, naked, open to whatever happens next. Yeah, you try it, lady, you tell me with a roll of the eyes. You’re right, you’re right. I don’t know if I could do it either.
There are certain kinds of risk-taking that are appropriate, times when you make the leap off the cliff knowing that the drop off isn’t far or that there is a soft surface waiting to envelop you below. There are ways to game this, though the word game implies a calculated process. There are ways to remember that risking connection doesn’t mean risking your soul, baring yourself before the fully clothed. There are ways to practice it, too, ways to take little steps towards emotional freedom.
I’ve been reading lots of self-help books, oh so many, not so much on the cheesy side of things, but still, they are self-help books. The latest is about relationships when one of the partners has been through childhood trauma. Not PTSD trauma, necessarily, but, well, trauma. It’s taken me a long time to think of myself as someone who was traumatized by parts of my childhood, but now I, umm, own it. Not in a self-pitying way, but in a “yep, that was pretty bad” kind of way.
Not surprisingly, as someone who was abandoned at times, neglected and left to deal with overwhelming circumstances on my own as a child, as someone who was specifically told how bad I was and then saw how the people around me acted to prove it, well, getting naked (metaphorically) isn’t so easy. Oh, sure, it's become easier, especially in my writing. And I was reassured to read that traumatized people who can tell coherent stories about their childhoods tend not to pass the buck on to their own children, though I know I still have a ways to go there. It’s the closeness, the skin to skin stuff, that has me flummoxed, that has my heart pounding in the middle of the night, that wakes me up at 3:00 a.m. with soothing dreams of escape, of sweet sweet aloneness.
My childhood was a set up that made any deeply intimate situation feel like soul risk. It was also a set up that led to poor boundaries, to giving myself over to those who retreat, the constant pursuit of approval. I understand it more now, I do, and I think I am on a different path, but it’s still so fucking hard. To stay in the moment, to stay in my head, to read these reactions of panic as vestiges from long ago. What you think about me says less about me than it does about you, and your reactions come from your own place of darkness. It's not me, it's not me, and what is me I see with clarity now, with the distance of someone who lived those things long ago. Or I am slowly slowly getting there, on the path to freedom of a sort.
From the prompt "Time out."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Gaellery.
Adulterated joy
Except for me, it’s all at the surface, I have a direct line to my emotions, to what is going on, though I don’t always know the source. I knew that the very idea of family was threatening, the translation of woman/man/kid into me against them, but it had never occurred to me why. Years of threes, me on the outs, the sacrifice, the undesirable, the way I had to build a framework to protect myself, the avoidance even now, now at 41 -- it pulls me back to the days of John the Murderer or Jim the Silent or Kevin the Troubled Genius. That's the background, anyway, for my internal tightening, my bracing against rejection. I am not thinking of these people when I am locked away inside my own head.
I walk past whitewashed bungalows in our neighborhood, grandparent houses with stiff drapes browned by years of cigarette smoke and television rays. Inside the furniture is dark and it smells like sauerkraut and over-boiled hot dogs, like coffee and fake cream, like sewing machine oil and old man sweat. I ache for my grandmother, for the simplicity of two, of being enveloped by love. The year I lived with her and my grandfather is summed up by memories of breakfast on a tray in the kitchen, toaster waffles with margarine and syrup, sausages, and a jelly jar of orange juice. The filtered light of a winter Eastern Shore dawn comes through the casement windows. The kitchen is warm. I am safe. It mixes in with the memory of getting into her bed on snowy weekday mornings, cuddling up close and listening to the radio for school closings. There were quite a few in the winter of 1977-78.
If you ignore mourning, if you try to pretend that loss is all about self-development and looking on the bright side, or if you’re a kid and don’t know how to deal with it, it pops up at the oddest times and years later. The bungalows tell me of other peoples' grandparents, of love going stale in empty houses, and the television is on constantly and the threat of loss hangs everywhere.
My mother and were sometimes two and then a man came along and we were three and I was on the outs, the three-year old standing every night at a dinner table set for two, the melodramatic seven-year old shunned, the preteen who was excluded from dinner conversation the teenager eating alone and living on her own in the year-round coolness of a summer bungalow.
My grandmother and I were always two. She shared her Coke on ice with me, let me lie next to her in her bed. She taught me about double-lined two-way streets and the rules of swimming after eating. She was there on weekends and school holidays. And then she died in front of me and I could do nothing about it, watched helplessly as she slumped on the chair. Nine years old without an advocate.
Maybe this is the tension I’ve been carrying all week, since that session of threes. Connection means loss and relying means loss, too, and so I see the lines of it all, I see it, but you still can’t remove the truth from the matter. There is no pure joy, no happiness without pain, no life without death. Someday I’ll be the one going out, or the one left alone, and my heart tells me “don’t’ get used to it. They all leave and no one will care about you when they are gone.”
From the prompt "Pure joy."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This one was lightly edited. Yes, I skipped yesterday. It was taking too much time, had too much to develop. Maybe I'll post it someday.
Image: Me at around three years old, my grandmother's cigarette smoldering in her hand. I've posted this picture before. Unfortunately, I don't have any other pictures of my grandmother and me.
Desk neurosis
It's exciting and scary at the same time, this continual shifting, the feeling that bravery is required and I am up to it, or have to think that I am. I wish I could go into more detail , need people to share this stuff with, but I don't know how to do it safely. What am I capable of doing? How will facing my fears and going forward change my life? It's easy to speculate about it, much harder to do it, but I am almost there.
***
In middle school I rifled through the drawers, looking for proof, for my mother’s journal, not hidden enough, somewhere in the bottom drawer perhaps. I opened it to look for evidence, to invade her privacy, to make sure that no one would leave me in the middle of the night. In it I found deep unhappiness starkly sketched. The journal verified my stepfather’s dislike of me, my role as a roadblock, the tight arguments they apparently had about my existence.
When she kicked him out two years later, she used me as an excuse.
Before I was aware of the desk, it traveled with my mother and me from apartment to apartment. It witnessed dead air, electric violence. When I was three years old, it came with us to live with a man named John. Here it absorbed fights and alcohol fumes, witnessed slaps and yells and John’s large hands moving toward my mother’s throat. Stoic, it watched as I stood at the dinner table night after night, the desk as silent as any adult in my life, foretelling my future. When my mother left in a hurry, me safely ensconced at my grandparent’s house, the desk migrated to the basement of John’s apartment building. Someone broke into it and stole all of my mother’s records, the Beatles, the Doors, the jazz albums that originally belonged to my grandfather.
She gave the desk to me when I got married the first time. It’s inhabited apartments and houses. I keep the checkbook in here, bills that need filing, old cell phones and computer cables. In the bottom drawer I keep old love letters that no one but me cares to read, the ephemera of what went before, when everything about life was unsettled but exciting all at once.
This bottom drawer contains emotions lost and volatile. I keep the journals my grandmother wrote after my grandfather was burned in an industrial accident, two notebooks of medical scares and bitterness, next to the love letters. Kevin’s teenage angst and poetry notebook lies on top of the burn diaries. The drawer contains them and so do I, these two suppressed lives gone, the words of the dead. I am the keeper of memory and severed connection, of history and sadness, of other peoples’ secret thoughts.
The desk holds hidden lives, realities experienced behind a mask. It reveals the deceptive moments when everything is either clear and bright and easy or muddied with uncertainty and censored thoughts, as if these were the only two possibilities that life and love offer. It holds privacy invaded, shows the way that thoughts living in isolation wither, how I hold on to our idea of other people without their input, keep them frozen in time.
I keep the evidence of infatuation and anger, the proof that once I dazzled strangers, that love and hatred interlink.
From the prompt "On my desk."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited beyond the 12-minute prompt mark.
The fallacy, the push-pull, the conflict
Here’s what I can tell you: I still struggle with mattering, with being heard, with feeling invisible. I shadow box with copies of life from days long dead. The film projector gets caught, we run it backwards (remember how funny that used to be? The belt returning from the ground to the Easter coat, snaking around my waist, proprietary, the pile of leaves reassembling itself as my friend flew backwards onto the porch steps? I laughed until I almost peed my pants watching those things, at the way living life backwards makes a backwards sort of sense, but is impossible. You can’t make life the way it was before. The leaves will never be the same and the belt doesn’t care where it lands.) I point a finger, just like a toddler, the point of recognition, but there is nothing to point at but faded images from almost forty years ago. The moment of imprint. Let’s set the film aflame, shall we? But destruction of the images is useless. They are written on me.
We’re having a heat wave. The tomatoes blossoms are turning into fruit, not dropping off in the fogchill of a Berkeley summer. The ground out back is parched and cracked and the boy finds baby praying mantises hopping from leaf to leaf in the front and back yards, newborns from the egg cases we bought at the garden store. Nick the cat wants to be part of it, wants to lie in the dust, to sleep in the bamboo patch, to kill mice. He got out while we were away last weekend, an escape that whetted his appetite for freedom, and now he howls at all hours to let him out please let him out.
It is cruel to keep this animal trapped and we keep on talking about ways to make it work, some sort of personal cat door, a set of protective inoculations against outside disease, the acceptance of the risks of an outdoor cat (injury, disappearance, early death). This morning he and Asher were growling and meowing at the back door at a puffy-faced lanky grey kitty who was taunting them on the other side of the glass. I remembered the dangers of outside life, of others, of cat fights and attacks in the dark. What do you do when you feel stuck and then you force another living creature to be stuck, too, for their protection? It’s for our own good, Nick, better that no one opens the door so that we can dart into the dark corners, hide in the vines, get ourselves in trouble and have the family cry over our bloodied bodies.
Still. The two of us could slip out in the middle of the night, me in dark formfitting clothes, Nick dapper as usual in black and white. We would part on the sidewalk and I'd shamble toward University, walk on to the water. In the moonlit fantasy of a clear summer night, the wind at a standstill, my short sleeves mysteriously comfortable, I would stare at the glowing apparition of San Francisco across the water, the Bay Bridge lit up like the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island. I'd imagine a life where I am not me, where everything within shines like gold, the gold that can always stay, I am a goddess, untouchable without a need for touch, pure, good, inhuman.
I am a sucker for the fallacy of independence, of not needing, but even Nick craves human touch, wants to curl up on my lap. He purrs in my presence, drinks the fresh water I provide. This isn't a zero-sum game he reminds me as he brushes against my ankles. He can be free and I can, too, free and connected, the tiger in the grass one moment, contented homebody the next.
So teach me how to do it because I have no idea how to get beyond my emotional perimeter. I'm tired of feeling it, of writing about it, of pressing my face against the glass. Or tell me that I am getting there, that the glass is cracking, that you will be there with a hand outstretched when I emerge, or that I am perfectly capable of doing it on my own, that I need to embrace the fallacy of independence before I reject it. Tell me it will be ok more sooner than later, that this transition is only months and not years to the finish. Lie to me. Smile sincerely. But please don't reject me for who I am. That keeps me in the box.
I need you. I can't remake the past without you. Or maybe I can. So go ahead and turn your back. Let me prove to myself how strong I am. But don't walk away. Or go ahead.
I don't know what I need.
Image of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge from Berkeley hills by ianan.
Box it up
These are recurring dream settings, the vast above-ground finished basement that we never venture into because of what was left behind, the dark corners and creepy bathroom with wall-to-wall shag and a shower stall like a movie version of a cryogenic freezing chamber, the jacuzzi tub clogged with unfamiliar hair. Last night I took a friend downstairs to show her why we kept the basement door locked. She counted thirteen rectangular windows in the sitting room. We walked into the bedroom together. His stuff was still there: a stiff and formal robe, the shapeless sweatsuits draped over a golden-quilted bed. Up by the pillow was a copy of Dutch Life, some sort of travel magazine. He died in this room and they took him away and no one ever came to pick up his things.
Maybe it was grief or maybe they were too busy. Maybe those left didn't think he cared about the room, the medicines on the side table, the layers of dust accumulating on the clock radio. He left behind echoes of his humanity and suffering and maybe he was still there, maybe he wasn't, but it was time to take care of the room and what he left behind. I stripped the bed, put his last outfits in the wash, made plans to reclaim this space, to sell off the stuff and fill it with things of my own taste. I was going to sit in this room in the mid-afternoon light and bask in the sun with my eyes closed, curled up like a cat, a book resting next to me.
I have to hand it to my subconscious: it lacks subtlety, it knows how to hit me over the head with a metaphor, shows me that what I am doing, all the blah blah blah and the 6 a.m. pill and the being here now (when I can) is having an effect. I'm cleaning out the haunted house! I'm reclaiming the space! Sure, sure, sure. It may feel like I'm doing it one thought at a time, so slowly that progress seems impossible, but there are changes.
Still: why can't it tell me the outcome, lay out a path for what I should do? I expect too much of my subconscious, expect my dreams to be oracles, emotional barometers, to show me what the future brings. I want to believe in fate. It's a comforting feeling, that some of this is preordained and I have to follow the path set out for me by the cosmos or laid in some random pattern by an unseen being that I don't believe in. I reconcile my gut feelings, my intuitions, with the fact that sometimes our guts are mangled by experience, are hair trigger in their decision-making skills. I scrape away the past, expose how my fears can control me, but ... but ...
The ride continues, I steer sometimes, I try and fail and hope that the next try works. My future consists of the hours in front of me, the appointments I've made for the next week. But my subconscious is optimistic, is pulling for the cleanup. I'm just not sure what kind. At least I'm sleeping. I'm dreaming. And in the morning, if I am lucky, if the time is right, I tap out my thoughts and send them to you.
No time for writing lately. We were away for several days and since we've gotten back it's been me and the boy hanging out. And I've been sleeping! Almost eight hours for the last couple of nights. I wake up a little after five and then the kid is up and the day begins. Missing the words, but know they will come back. And it won't be all about my dreams next time.
Image by rpeschetz.
Stay
In the middle of the night, when the dreams wake you up (always a bus and an almost stranger, the meeting in a restaurant turned to a mysterious journey. Last night it was Emily with her magic eyes and her reserved manner and there you were on the bus and there she was behind, dragging a fifteen foot bench they had left by accident), quiet your mind, tell your brain to rest, that nothing is so important that you need not sleep. The night is a dark time for thoughts and love. It is the time that ghosts steal souls, that your life leaves through your breath.
But don’t think about that. Think about small, soft things, sleeping puppies, the tomatoes growing out back, the feel of butter sauce in your mouth. If you must go to the bathroom, walk there with your eyes shut and ignore the cat as he rubs his scent against your calves.
The truth is that nothing is really important, that life is a series of moments connected by time. Yesterday in the sunlight you thought you were happy. On the Bay Bridge, the traffic inching for a reason that had not yet been revealed, you thought of the repetition, its “here-you-are-again” nature, the bridge above and below, the bay gleaming out the window .
Then you passed five police cars – it’s a habit now to count things, so goes life with a kindergartner – and a tow truck, but no car. The police officers were looking over the edge of the bridge and you thought: oh no. Oh no. The boy asked you and your husband what you were oh noing and neither of you really wanted to talk about, so you glossed over it instead and besides, the scenario you were both imagining was unlikely.
But you knew the feeling, the desperation, the substrate of nothingness that might lead someone to the edge of a bridge in the mixed weather of a June Saturday. Another person out there who thought that nothing would ever get better, that they were evil to the core, or so sad that they should end the dance early. It’s an edge you’ve been on, though not quite as precipitously, and you wished that you could hold out a hand to all the people suffering, could hug them and reassure them. Together you would form a community of black humor and heavy sighs, a mutual support group of deep sadness, everyone rooting for the fleeting moments of sunshine.
It wasn’t a group that you thought you belonged to, but now they are your brethren, the depressed and desperate, and you love them for their depth of being. Stay here, you tell them, stay here with me and we will prove that we can live.
From the prompt "Good advice."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. Turns out the reason those police cars were on the lower deck of the bridge was because a man had stopped his car on the upper deck and was standing on the ledge. He was later arrested for a suspected DUI.
Image of the Bay Bridge by Thomas Hawk.
Taut framework
So. The framework that I built to survive, the carefully constructed structure? I’m dismantling it. Rather violently it seems. I’ve got the claw end of a hammer, I’m not only pulling at nails, but I’m ripping at the plywood, at the 2x4s, at this 70s construction of formaldehyde-soaked particle board. The photographs on the inner walls are faded, I can barely see them, but I feel the heat emitting from them, the danger. Part of me wants to just burn down the framework, maybe I’ve even started a fire in the corner with the lighter my grandfather left behind and the tinder, too, the piles of magazines, the candy, the sawdust. It went out on its own, I discarded the metaphor, or rather I am right now discarding the metaphor, realizing that I am in control here. It doesn’t have to come down all at once and if I burn it down, I destroy not only a part of myself but my ability to access it.
But the feeling. I carry it around with me, we’re familiar with each other, the tension and me, my protection system. It asks me if I really want to go there and I say I don’t have a choice. Together we go to our appointments, we wake up in the middle of the night. The feeling informs my writing. And yesterday, the two of us lying supine on the couch at my therapist’s office, enjoying the stereotypical position (we usually sit), we went down a path in the woods and met the best part of me. She was tall and maternal and kind, pale with red hair, and she enveloped the two of us in her satin cloak while we cried.
I hate the weakness, the feelings I can’t put into a framework, the little girl so controlled and angry. I don't want to forget her, I don't want to dismantle her world. But I have no choice.
Still. It all scares the fuck out of me.
From the prompt "In the middle." This is the sort of overwrought stuff I would prefer not to post anymore. Not that I think it is poorly written, it's just personal and intense in a way that I am tired of sharing. But here it is, small group of readers.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Dave Anastasi.
Mind slip
I spent yesterday in a serious funk, an I-don’t-want-to-get-out-of-bed funk. It was Mother’s Day and I wanted to be left alone, to not be reminded of familial connection or maybe pressure or I don’t really know but is the point of that day to separate from the family, from the offspring, to pretend they don’t really exist? It was like a day of real depression, but since my brain is constantly connecting the subconscious dots, choosing its moments of flatness at the most appropriate symbolic times, I think my feeling of being down was directly tied to this idea of Mother’s Day and being a mother and the daughter of an ambivalent mother.
Another thing to bring up to therapy, to my lady of privilege chatting sessions, where I feel so self-indulgent and can go on and on about my self-fulfillment. During my last session, I brought up this dream I had, a very boring dream involving moving clothes from one place to another at my grandfather’s place at Hollywood Beach, moving them for some young women who were moving in. I took them in small batches from somewhere to a shed, a temporary storage place.
The week before in therapy had been tough, with lots of tears and the apprehending of my feelings about being weak, about childhood and dependency, and now I felt the pressure to come up with something, but this? The movement of clothes? Somehow, my therapist pulled me to a different place, put me in the position of the clothes, and then the tension, that feeling of taut energy thickening in the middle of my body, came to life, being shuttled from here to there, anger at the clothes, anger at the task. I even started to cry.
But it sounds so fucking ridiculous, doesn’t it? I struggle with being in therapy, with having the kind of life that allows me to schedule various appointments and go running afterwards, a life where I can write in the daylight and document my post-therapy meals on Facebook. Lucky, yes, perhaps self-indulgent, yes, and the guilt for being me goes on an on.
I forgot to get another job, I forgot what it was like to need something, I forgot my own mind and origins and yesterday I wanted to forget everything. So I kept on reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, got myself lost in the story of a family falling apart, a woman who became a stay-at-home mom in reaction to her own upbringing, the pull of danger, of not being nice, under the surface.
From the prompt "Mind slip."
Image: Boy with his "spaceship" in the back yard, taken using the Hipstamatic app.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Kind of blue
Sometimes my most profound (or so they seem at the time) lines come late at night, after my brain has been stretched in ten different directions by the day, by sunlight and twilight and stacks of children’s books.
Last night I thought about the area around my eyes, salt-cured by post-dinner tears, the skin made pale with deposits left by sadness. I couldn’t tell you now what those tears were about. When I told my husband about them, he asked if I was just feeling emotional or if it was a reaction to something, I had to say it’s the same thing I’ve been feeling for a long time now: Sad. Sad. Sad.
My father called a few days ago and we had a long conversation. It’s been going that way more these days, the long conversations, which I like, though I don’t always feel like I can share everything about my life at the moment. He asked me how I was doing. “Eh. Not so good.” And then he started – politely, not like a proselytizer – talking up antidepressants as a way to clear out some of the darkness.
When comedians go blue, they talk dirty. When people feel blue, they are sad. It goes beyond blues for me, it’s true, but I am functional. I feel, I move around, I do what I need to do. When I take those depression quizzes (online, in my therapist’s office), I am on the borderline. I just don’t feel depressed enough to go pharmaceutical.
Still, I imagine not existing, imagine the pain of being human wiped away. It’s not that life isn’t worth living – it is, it’s the only thing we’ve got – but I am not enjoying it and am having a hard time imagining it being joyful again. If I could take the darkness of my blues, the midnight pitch, and lighten it, make it more like the dawn sky, well, that would be the trick.
My past obscures the rest of me like a heavy blanket or a stage curtain. Or maybe it’s my present: I don’t know. Take action, people tell me. Get moving. But I am muffled by all of this, I move slowly – though I do move – and I can’t see the path clearly. I distract myself with emotional candy and I soothe my brain with wine. Instead, I need to take a clear-cutter to the forest, to the vines, I need to machete through the curtain. I need to rip off the blanket. Maybe it will take drugs, but I’m not ready to go there yet.
From the prompt "Blue."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by shiftingpixel.com
Joe Lencioni, shiftingpixel.com
Wish engine
I want to give you the details, want to tell you about the quality of light, how it changed from charcoal to puce to mist, how the blinds were slanted against it but still couldn’t keep the light out, how I was there, in my wish thinking be careful what you wish for, feeling the truth of it.
The fulfilled wish is a dangerous thing, the fantasy come to half-life. We don’t think it through when we will a wish to happen. Some vital detail goes missing. We want the man, but we don’t want his baggage. We want the move, but we don’t want the loneliness. We want the career change, but we don’t want the burned fingers and scarred knuckles, the knees blown by years of crouching, the feet calloused and ruined by the end, us with no money, youth gone, eaten up, more cynical than ever.
I’m tired of writing enigmatic posts that leave the reader in the hallway of the narrative, blocked by confusing metaphor and half-truth. I want to give you the details, like a confession, like a message. Gossip straight from the source.
You will have to settle for enigma.
It was like a hotel room, but not. It was like a connection, but not. It was simultaneously comfortable and strained. But what a moment it would have made on the stage, the scattered stuff, the awkwardness, my internal monologue, the stilted dialog, the interpretations on both sides. My story about the fulfilled wish is as full of lacunae as its aftermath, the conversation where the weight of the unspoken thickened the air. Walloped by my own silence, I had to leave, wanted to breathe freely again, wanted the purity of my thoughts in isolation.
They are still here, the thoughts. Unspoken. Unwritten. Sometimes I pace and talk to the cats, gesture with my hands as I make my points. I want to be heard. But I can't get the words out unless I am alone.
Years ago, after I asked my father for support for a fifth year of college and got back an extremely nasty letter, I cut off all contact with him.* We made up six months later, sat alone together under the shade of a sycamore in a Delaware park. I tried to talk. I tried to tell him everything, about why I was so angry. But I couldn't. I would not let him destroy me, would not put myself in a position of vulnerability. I would not be two or five or sixteen years old again and the likelihood that he would be able to really hear me anyway was low.
The engine of the wish, its motivation, is a desire to be vulnerable, to be in a position of openness, where I can show my heart and speak my mind without feeling like my very being is threatened. It's a wish of closeness, of an aching desire to be in the moment with someone who is able to be there with me. It's about love and acceptance and clear vision. I make the wish again and again, I persist in situations where persistence is futile, trying to remake the past, to redeem myself by winning over the blind, the frightened, the selfish or incapable. I try and fail and am simultaneously thwarted and safe, my scarred being untouched.
This is a compelling process, one of redemption through magical acceptance, one of healing through the alchemy of love. I remake the past again and again, trying to get it right. The wishes beckon, they call to me to escape, to try again until I am saved. They tell me they will come true if I behave correctly, if I mold my behavior and ignore my emotions. Instead, I must ignore the wishes. I refuse to live a half-life, to jam my being into the corner for the sake of malformed acceptance.
I'm getting beyond the wish. Though the trajectory of my journey is still unclear, I am optimistic. Not so much about wish fulfillment, but about the possibility of closeness. It won't come by magic or by being a good girl. It will come by opening my heart cautiously, without malice, by separating the pain of before with the reality of now.
*"Support" for some living expenses. I was graduating at the end of that year. I cut off contact because of the nastiness of his letter, which I've kept. It's still nasty after all these years.
Image by Martin Neuhof, though I don't agree. My heart is as vulnerable as an armored butterfly wing. If I'm going to imagine a positive type of vulnerability, I would say that I would like my heart to be as vulnerable as an old growth forest: living, adaptable, teeming with life. Because our metaphors shape how we see ourselves and the world. Still, I liked the photo.
Learn to . . . forget??
It was as spicy and disgusting as I remembered. One puff and the familiar feeling of sickness came upon me. I let it burn out and replaced it in the half-filled pack.
This is what I find myself doing right now: thinking of smoking, if not cloves, than Marlboro Lights, just like I did (briefly) in high school. Yesterday afternoon on the way home from my son's school we followed a man with a cigarette, walked behind his dusty cloud of exhaled smoke. I craved it. I wanted to bum one off of him, wanted the comforting ritual, the badness of it.
Cigarettes and booze, that's what I want (and maybe rock and roll). If I wanted to talk about the absolute right now, the present as it unfurls before me, I'd have to say the focus is on the nightly beer followed by a glass or two of wine or maybe another beer. Lately many of my nights have been deliberately hazy with a tad too much alcohol. When I lit that clove I was halfway lit myself. I haven't gone out and purchased a pack of real cigarettes yet, but I dreamed about it last night, the exchange of money over a drugstore counter, the secretive moment on the back deck, the acrid remains on my fingers and lips, the late night beer and cig, the way the spark punctuates the dark.
"I light another cigarette . . . learn to forget."
This is not in my nature, this drinking to almost excess, this craving for cigarettes. Part of it is the odd state of my personal life at the moment, the attempt to escape or to smokescreen my emotions. But I am starting to realize that another part is that things are bubbling up from the past for me. Big things. Things I have to face directly. Things I don't want to face directly, want a opaque wall of distraction between me and them.
You can tell me to ignore them, that if I do, they will go away, that writing about them or talking about them or focusing on them (which I am emphatically not going to do here directly, at least not any more than yesterday's post) gives them new life. I say that by ignoring these things, I have allowed them to take over, to rule me. I know. I live in this body. I occupy this mind. I experience this emotional life. I see what needs to be done.
Just because I'm doing it doesn't mean you have to. But if my focus on what came before seriously offends you, you might want to think about why.
So my booze consumption has to ratchet down. At least I have not yet smoked a real cigarette. Today's therapy session was useful and affirming, a reminder that I have to feel what I feel even when I don't want to feel it. Some emotions will not be managed. I will keep on facing the things I've been running from -- the fears, the body-memories, the intangible threat of true closeness. And someday I hope to feel better, to be able to box the past up and bury it in the ground. When the time is right.
Image: The pack of cloves.
The ever-glorious now, the ever-present now
This morning I added to my dream adult life. In it I am alone by necessity. I am alone, though I don't know where I stand, because I keep on moving, relentless in my escape. I want to return to the earlier vision, my feet flat against the noir kitchen linoleum, stockinged knees bumping against yellowed cabinets, the clean lines of a sensible outfit obscuring my curves, but I know too much to go down that road.
So. I am alone. I eat alone. I sleep alone. I wake to the sunrise and I hold out my hand to block the sun. I make appointments to not be alone, to talk to others. I walk my dog and am not alone. I talk on the phone and am only partially alone. And all around me is art, the making of it, thinking about it, the creation of an alternate reality. Is it delusional to imagine that the safest thing in the world is to create your own life, your own reality, to live for something like art, and let the rest of it, the rest of humanity, just flow along outside of you?
For years I've had a project in mind, taking a glass-paned door or window and building a framework behind it, creating little scenes for each of the panes, something along the lines of Joseph Cornell's boxes on a larger scale. I have the window, a huge oak multi-paned frame that we dragged here with us from Washington, DC. This is part of my dream life, the small steps toward the creation of something useless and idiosyncratic and beautiful and quirky, a mirror world that is more real that the actual one. Because that's what art should be, or some kinds of art should be: useless and true, an illumination of reality.
I make the box, I create lives behind each pane, lives with back stories that form the backbone of a book. For years I've also wanted to write a series of stories based on the inhabitants an apartment building in Washington, DC, like the one I lived in my last year of college where everyone is on the skids, damaged and battered, where the neighborhood around is all business and the homeless, where the city is bleeding out the last of its crack cocaine angst.
Being alone is simple. Easy. I may invite you in for a cup of tea, for a tryst on the couch, for a moment against the wall. Don't judge for my risk-taking or lack thereof, for my finely tuned sense of responsibility. To be human is to be fucked up in one way or another. I want to embrace my subtle scars and gut reactions, embrace the things that make me who I am. I don't want to hold the feelings at bay. I can't hold the feelings at bay (thank goodness: after days of stoicism, today I cry). I want to live for art, for my son, sometimes for other people. I want to be let alone. I want the ability to make questionable decisions. I want to let go of all of my assumptions. I want no future, just the ever-glorious now, the ever-present now.
I want. I want. I want.
Perhaps it's no coincidence that I wrote this after spending five days home alone. The post title comes from Sharks, a Morphine song, but I almost called the post Garboesque.
Image of Joseph Cornell's 1948 box Untitled (Medici princess) from Digital Arts New Media wiki.
The texture of sorrow
We shine them up, facet the edges, take the sorrow and make it into something else, muffle it. The transformation leaves me cold. It’s a burial, a way to take the depth of sorrow and buff it up, make it reflect light, refract it. I prefer my sorrow rough and real, my regret salty, dirty, unwashed.
It was only after my nap today (a nap after another night of four hours of sleep) that I felt real regret. I’ve been having a hard time with that, teasing out my confusion and emotions from acknowledging the pain I’ve caused. I feel regret. I don’t feel shame (I’ve read a lot about this, shame versus guilt, how shame in some cases is about getting caught, about worrying how others will perceive one's transgressions, while guilt is about not doing the right thing, is more internal, not that this is the whole of it). I make my decisions willingly for concrete reasons. I own them. But I do wish I had handled things differently, had been braver a long time ago.
There is a creek bed, a stream running over rocks, not enough water because of the drought, even after all the crazy March rain, but still the water rushes and plays. I’m at the side, I carry heavy amethysts, raw, stone mixed with stone. I walk to the water’s edge, let its coldness envelop my hands. It rushes over the amethysts, carries the confusion away. I am left with pure clean emotion. I throw the crystals one by one across the creek. I watch them arc through the air before the grasses on the other side swallow them up.
What am I to do? Do I let sorrow trump action? Do I let guilt keep me trapped? I have to acknowledge the pain, the complications, the fears in all of this, and then move forward. It’s the direction of movement that paralyzes me, the decisions that are clouded by mud, history, and the unknown.
From a prompt: amethysts.
Confidential to my Google friend: I'm ok. Maybe not well. But I'll be in touch soon.
The forever passenger?
At 41, I'm still more than half a lifetime away from old old age. I don’t feel like I’m in my forties, though I am more tired and less connected to pop culture than I ever was. I am afraid for the future, for what is to come, and once again, I wonder what the point of it all is, living. This isn’t a new thought for me, worrying about the meaning of life in the face of sadness, seeing life's trajectory as expansiveness followed by loss after loss after loss (and the losses start early for some of us). I am prone to seeing life through cracked and blackened glass. Still, if we’re lucky (??), we get old. Our bodies melt and harden in place. Our minds leak information. We lose ourselves to time and free radicals and the sun. It’s built into us. We were made to deteriorate, to go from growth to rot in an alarmingly short period of time.
The best that I can hope for is that my memory will hold the beauty of my youth, the baptism in muddy river water, the singing in my bones as I walked under cherry blossoms, the spring night I pulled my boyfriend into a spreading azalea in full bloom near the Capitol building, the taste of good bread and ash-covered goat cheese and basil on a slow Illinois summer day. Imagination and memory allow a perpetual escape into youth, into love, into a rich internal world that almost mimics reality. Slowly my body will give up and fade. My eyes will become watery, my eyesight hazy. I will hear nothing but the buzz of my own fritzed mind. The past and present will intermingle in the never-ending movie in my brain.
I want to remember the good things: the feel of my grandmother’s bed in the air conditioning on an Eastern Shore July, the sway of my swing as I pushed against the maple tree, the first time I felt love, hot, intense, sensual. I want to remember the leafy smell of spring at Hollywood Beach, the thrill of first touches here and gone, the feeling I get when the words rush out of me and make sense without effort. Memory is the only escape I have. I am setting the stage now for the good ones. I don’t want to spend my last years caught up in the Little House, the waits, the quietness at dinner tables, the feeling of grief revisiting me again and again and again. That scares me more than losing my ability to walk, to see, to hear, this idea that at the end I'd be trapped, stuck in childhood, weak and dependent, the forever passenger.
The forever passenger. A funny thing to come out of my fingertips, rushed and without effort. Because that's what I am at the moment, a passenger. I'd like to believe I could just think my way out of this one, come up with the proper memories (the sweating glass of Coke on ice on my grandmother's bedside table; the moment of escape from school, pulling out of the parking lot in Lisa's car on our way to somewhere, anywhere, else; the conversation that doesn't stop, that is pure comfort and challenge and attraction) to inoculate me against the bad memories (waiting for my Dad to never show; waiting for D to eventually show; the ache of never being good enough, for being left in bad circumstances). But the first step is to leave the passenger's seat, to take control, to propel myself on my own power.
How long can I write about this shit without taking action? What does action look like? If I start at the beginning of this blog, go back three years, I can see progress. So I'll have to trust in the process. I'll have to give myself a kick to get started, too. Tomorrow, tomorrow, right? After the tears have dried and my heart has healed. I'm taking small steps to get there. I'll be there eventually, in spite of my current emotional wasteland. I'll make a plan. I'll trust in small things. And, hopefully, I'll stop writing about it, letting off steam in this safe contained way.
From today's prompt, the winner. Edited and expanded.
Image: Chair outside the Little House, circa 1986? I've used this before, but just like I have certain songs I return to, I have certain images that stick in my mind. The earlier incarnation was in the post Thanks for the memories, from a little over a year ago. It starts "To scrape your memory clean, you need only a handful of pills washed down with gin. You need a good wallop to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp granite." Memory and selective forgetfulnes. A theme.
The longest strangest shortest month
Because it’s been a crazy unstable reach into my chest and rip out my heart kind of month, with all the intensity of tsunami, the build-up, the actual crash of the wave, and the aftermath, the search for the dead and injured, the extrication of belongings from the mud. I’ve been exposed and hidden all at once. I’ve courted danger and have turned my heart to stone. I walk along the muddy avenues, giddy with relief and fear for what I’ll find.
My legs are taut, my face is scratched, my hair tousles around me. Underneath my fingernails are mud and grit and blood. I look at my hands and remember what I’ve lost, remember what functions in my life, the careful tenting of various feelings and insecurities, the cordoning off of emotion.
Is that so bad? To live a functional life? I don’t know yet how to balance the two, the great chasm of emotion within me and the stability that I crave. They pull me in opposite directions. They threaten to split me in two. Can I figure out how to marry them so that I have stability and emotion all at once, without throwing over the rest of my life?
I give the appearance of calm, can even feel calm, when somewhere in my chest, in the bone, the feelings crackle and sizzle. I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m guilty, I’m culpable. I don’t trust my emotions anymore, my barometer on the situation. It’s both hair trigger and totally off. I see the tsunami coming and I walk on the beach. I see the gentle lap of waves against sand and I run for higher ground. I misinterpret my gut and go for melodrama.
February is almost over, thank goodness. My heart still beats and the ache has lessened. But it's changed me, this month, it's distilled my will into something strong and shiny, metallic and hard, a protective talisman. I will find balance. I will figure out what need to change in my life based on knowing my own mind. I will not return to ignorance. I will write my way into newness, will take the anger that encircles me like smoke and form it into wings. Into a cup. Into something that I pour the rest of myself into, out of, the small slow transformation, the alchemy of rationality plus emotion plus art.
From a photo prompt with a sweet-looking yellow lab on a couch. Behind the couch was a little sign saying "What the fuck?" Edited a tiny bit from the original for clarity and expansion.
Image: My twisted hands.
Soothing the unquiet mind
Yes, I'm trying to stay in the moment, to be one with my fear and sadness and feelings of inadequacy. I'm picking apart the emotions when I can, but I also need to keep from wallowing. I need to turn that panic upside down, make it useful.
When I was going through my divorce in 1998, I woke up at odd hours. I cried at strange times. I tossed and turned and when I couldn't sleep anymore, I got up and cleaned. This was before I had a laptop and wireless, before I could sit in a chair and let my mind be stroked by too much information. Trust me, it's more calming to clean than it is to hang out on Facebook or to hit Google up for more information on subjects that I don't need to know more about.
I've come up with a list of things to do when I'm falling, when it feels like my heart is going to collapse in on itself.
Here's what I have so far:
- Move around -- dance, sing, clean, organize
- Read a good book
- Make a plan of action
- Implement it
- Look for a job (part of making a plan of action and implementing it)
- Find something, anything, to make me laugh
- Reach out to a friend
- Write about something other than myself, my moods, my life, my past
Please let me know if you have other suggestions on how to quiet my mind in a positive way. I know this is temporary, that I will come out the other end intact (or that's my hope, anyway). I just need to develop my mind-soothing techniques.
Bringing on the heartache
The scene in the therapist’s office this morning, a walk through damp breezes with the threat of rain behind sunshine, another chance to get soaked, and there I am with this motherly thoughtful woman. It was our third meeting and right away I launched into it.I can’t tell you about that here. That’s private stuff, things you are not yet privy to, things that need airing out in other areas of my life before I go there with you. Gentle Reader.
There are some things I can tell you, about threat and invisibility, about boxes and strategies and avoidance. Let’s say you feel invisible to the ones who love you. Let’s say this is a very familiar feeling, the invisibility. Combine it with another deep feeling, of being unlovable. OK. You feel unlovable. You also – lucky you – feel invisible. Maybe it’s safer to stay in a place where no one sees you, where you are invisible, because then you don’t need to deal with the push/pull of self-hatred and worry.
You’re there already, though, and trying so hard to stay in the moment. Your therapist tells you to be with your feelings, in the moment, too, and you keep on working at it, to let the feeling be without escaping (not that you always succeed on this one). The ache in your heart that you’ve been carrying around for so long? It extends low, deep, and high. Your torso is pain. You feel the pain and it doesn’t destroy you. In fact, you feel more alive because of it.
And not. See how I distance myself from all of this but using the term “you”? Do you think I’m scared? Yes. Do I have reason to be? Of course.
Outside the sun is being pushed out by wind and clouds again. The moment in the sunshine, the moment of clarity, is covering itself over. When the clouds come, I’m even less rational. How does my body feel? My chest aches. My throat hurts. My head is tight and dry. I am in the moment and I want to know when the moment will end.
I took on a man once, took him on because I wanted to, though I didn’t know what I wanted. I took him on and he me, and then he left. And I wanted to know: was it me? Or my situation? It's me, it's always me. That's the old story, anyway, one that I fight even as I let it exist. And the ache, it gets even deeper, if you can imagine it, straight into my heart. It amazes me, this feeling, how symbolic and true it is all at once. Heartache. What’s the physiology of it?
How are we centered both in our chests and in our heads?
From a totally unrelated prompt: No plastic surgery. I wrote about what I wanted to write about. Also barely edited. I'm beginning to like these spur-of-the-moment insta-blog posts.
Image by GrungeTextures.
Thin end of the wedge
Where does this couple come from? They show up sporadically, once a month or so, time travelers in their denim and leather, the woman wearing pointy-toed boots that demonstrate the thin end of the wedge, the toe jam, the man with quirkily British brothel creepers, thick-soled and wide. Both of them have artificially blonde hair, tousled, the roots a shade of anonymous brown. The quick intake/exhale, the sideways glance, the tabby or calico, all of it incongruous against a stucco house the color of French’s mustard.
This is one of my dream lives, beholden to substances, a life of no obligations, romantically influenced by the 70s punk scene, where I could reasonably write something like this:
I paid for it
A lifetime of clean living doesn’t show on the face. The late nights, the whiskies and tequilas, the hovering over a mirror with a tightly rolled dollar bill: eventually, those years catch up with you. It starts out as a slight dullness in the eyes, a yellowish tinge to the skin. One night you go to sleep almost young, the next morning, the fine lines start to appear, the fissures, the sags and bags.
At that point, it’s too late. No amount of detox can save you from the destruction you’ve brought upon yourself, the physical ruination.
At that point, then, why stop? Why not go out in a hazy glare of glory, the afternoons fuzzy, the mornings cotton-mouthed? We’re all dependent upon something. Some people need sweet-as-candy positive thoughts, the cheery aphorism, pep talks written on the bathroom mirror in styptic pencil. Others need human touch, have to feel skin against skin, insist upon hugging every acquaintance, on touching palms with strangers. You, lover of chemicals, of the products of ferment, find this need pathetic. It’s nothing that sour mash and cheap wine followed up by a pack of Pall Malls can’t solve.
So you examine your face, pinch the sagging skin on your forearms, remember the long ago days when you were young and naïve. That first drink was bitter, but the next one went down easy. It wasn’t just the taste, the feeling of looseness, like drifting on the ocean, it was the camaraderie, the friends around the bonfire, the people stacked against the bar.
From a prompt, I paid for it. The next Round Robin starts up this weekend, thank goodness. Feeling very dark today, despite my night of long-enough sleep, but there's good news: we're closing on the house on Monday.
Image by Diamond Farrah.
As speechless as this dripping heart-shaped stone
This morning's 3:50 a.m. wake-up involved a man -- not necessarily my man though we we clearly together in some way, were an almost-item -- who lived in a house attached to a library. He disappeared one afternoon with a pack of friends while I sat in on a lecture in the conference room and listened to library talk. When the lecture was over and the sky dark, the man still hadn't returned. I went upstairs to his room. I wandered the house, walked past piles of laundry. I paced. I waited for him as panic rattled my chest. Abandoned.
Or the less fraught dream where the library was an annex to a childhood friend’s house. In a room off the kitchen, her father sat surrounded by cats. He stroked an orange tabby. A calico tossed at his feet. The friend and I, in the full bloom of middle age, walked past him. She had her library books in a satchel tossed over her shoulder. I wanted to ask her about her mother, who has been dead for a decade now, but instead we talked of the mundane, of childhood paths through the woods and decades-old David Bowie videos. The library annex was dark and stark and full of people and I remembered how much I missed the smell of books, the hum of computers, the clearing of throats.
Or the good dream, the feeling of being at home in my grandfather's house. It was a thrilling realization: this was my place. The Little House had been razed and rebuilt. It was now a public building, three stories tall with a thin aluminum skin and walls of glass. Part of the roof was turf and on the middle level an art gallery reception room jumped with people. I watched my mother climb the metal steps to her top floor apartment and reminded myself to tell my husband how the Little House was gone forever, how comfortable I felt in the main house.
Hopeful dreams – feeling at home, watching a place of pain transformed – are chased off by those that make my heart ache: that evening spent looking for this nebulous acquaintance, the worry of the wait, my worthless abandoned heart.
In preparation for an assignment for a class I'm taking in creative nonfiction, I was looking up interview questions, ways to think about asking strangers about their lives. On one site devoted to interviewing elderly relatives was the question: Have you ever had your heart broken? It was such a ridiculous question that it made me laugh (derisively, I admit, a short bitter laugh). Who hasn’t had their heart broken? How can you be alive and not have had your heart broken? I pity people who die never having had a broken heart. They've missed out on a key human experience.
My heart has been broken twice, both times long ago. J was the first to break it, followed by the philosophy student in a quick one-two punch. After that, I wised up, though not enough to avoid a bruising a few years ago. Since I am a married woman, future heart breakage is presumably unlikely. Yet I find myself guarding my heart anyway, protecting it, thinking that if I ever were alone again, I would hide it away forever, knowing even now it huddles deep inside my chest, thankful for its cage of bone and muscle, still hurting and unsure.
This is what a dream of abandonment brings to life again, though I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately anyway and writing about it in various roundabout ways. It’s tiring to hold back one’s heart, to keep it protected. And what am I missing because of it? Only the world, love, life. Family.
I need a guide to help me set it free, to pull it loose from bad memories.
Image by Melina.
My new therapist search began today. I'm also looking for a psychic, which tells you where my head is at the moment. Floating off my body. I keep on editing this post, too, which makes me wonder if it's really finished.
A note on the title: While I was writing this, one of Kevin's poems was going through my head. It's short, so I will type it here. It seems that having Kevin write a poem for you or a poem mentioning you was generally bad news.
POEM FOR MY WIFE
Above the sleepy river
branches touch and whisper.
Earth is telling of a dying.
Let me touch your woolen sleeve
and tell you what I've lost.
Beneath the iced-tea water
my skin looks like persimmon.
"Here. I am as speechless
as this dripping heart-shaped stone."
Everybody plays the fool
This is my therapist's latest advice, her response to my list of anxieties, my worries about my death grip on stability (stability turns to stagnation), about feeling like an idiot, that I don't know what I'm doing, fears about how I waste time and the quality of my parenting. I complain about the worrying, about how neurotic I feel when my carefully constructed equilibrium gets off-balance. What I want is to feel like I am competent, in the know, but also to give the illusion of being competent. I don't want to make mistakes or look like a fool. I want to slip under the radar, do my thing, and disappear into a moonless night.
“So much judgment,” she tells me. “Eat ice cream with your fingers! Go into that classroom without knowing the teacher’s name!” Spend an hour being a fool. I think of walking around with my fly unzipped, my teeth smeared with spinach, a wooden grin on my face. I think of walking into sign posts, tripping on curbs, dropping bags of flour on floor of the Berkeley Bowl and kicking up the dust: "Hey everybody! It's snowing!"
I can't be the only one in the world worried about looking foolish, the only one with a mind that taunts me with worries. Right? Right??
In the same conversation, my therapist gives me unsolicited advice: hire a house cleaner. If we don’t have the money to pay for it, we can barter! She brushes away my house-buying worries with her relentless optimism: if the house goes into foreclosure, rent from the bank! Buy it from the bank! Be here now, loving every fucking minute of it.
I worry that her insane optimism is catching, like bedbugs. During an appointment it will lodge itself into the hem of my pants, only to creep out in the middle of the night and bite me. One morning I will wake up with a peaceful itchy feeling, will go out to trade a couple descriptive paragraphs for a cup of Caffe Trieste coffee. Sure, let’s pay our rent to the bank in dog walks and foot massages! I could get a group together down at the local Wells Fargo branch and read them my unfinished short stories in exchange for our monthly payments. I could clean someone else’s house and they could clean mine, making our bartering into a zero-sum game. But I didn’t ask for recommendations on getting a housecleaner and I don't want unrealistic house advice.
What I want is to feel complete. I’d like the anxiety to fade into the background. Some of it is just me, the relentless, obsessive brain, the tinge of worry about my failings and how I am perceived. I can temper it with technique and practice, but I will always have a nervous, stuttering core. I want to acknowledge it, to give it its due, and then let it sleep or read self-help books or take up meditation while I lead a less anxious life.
I am no optimist, but I think this is possible. I have some ideas on how to attack the problem, based in part on some of my therapist’s more useful advice. I have to go back to the origin of some of these feelings of inadequacy and acknowledge them without my rational intervening mind. I need to do things that are hard for me, with the understanding that they will get easier – a version of being a fool for an hour.
I know you are out there, my anxious brethren. Our hearts flutter, our fists clench. We want to be seen and invisible at the same time, are trying desperately to look like we know what we are doing. But chances are we do know. We must acknowledge the anxiety, then act. The more we do in the face of fear, the easier it will get. So goes the theory and I'm just optimistic enough to believe it.
Image, "fly you fool," by shoothead.
To watch Main Ingredient play "Everybody Plays the Fool," on Soul Train, click here. It's only relevant in terms of the title, but I have it going through my mind now.
Melancholic, baby?
If you are a regular reader, you might have surmised that I am a sad sack, always focusing on events and people long gone but still present in my emotions. If you followed me around for a few days, you might be sure of it, as I break into tears here, punch at the air there, as I growl and curse. But I also dance and laugh so hard that I have to catch my breath, feel the thrill of being alive.
Life is sweet even when it feels like it isn't.
A couple of weeks ago, my son and I were doing our usual evening routine, discussing the day's events before saying goodnight. "I love you so much, I'll love you even when I'm dead," he told me. Perhaps stupidly, I responded in kind, which led to a longer discussion about death and love. It ended, of course, in tears. He wanted me to stay like I was, didn't want me to change. Maybe the pictures we've shown him of his grandparents when they were young have been sobering. They look unfamiliar with their shining hair and the tight, unlined skin of youth. He doesn't recognize them as the people they are today and he imagines what will happen to his father and me, the sagging and bulging, our faces turning into topographic maps, our bodies weakened. But I also think he's mourning the moment, who we are right now, and feels the desire to hold on. He's confronting the painful inevitability of change.
When I was eleven, I felt adulthood looming. Growing up meant a loss of self. I mourned who I was before I was gone. I had already lost so much -- would I forget the perspective of the dependent child, helpless, attached to capricious and sometimes unstable adults? Here's where I start to cry again, with surprising emotion, and I think -- what the fuck? Can't you get over it already, Jennifer? Plenty of people had it worse than you. But the emotions are still here, waiting for permission to leave.
My son has a childhood. He has his father and he has me and we will let him be a child, will protect him when he needs it and will prepare him for adulthood. These temporary moments, the joy he has in playing and being with us, the way the imaginary is real and present for him, all of this will change or disappear. This is what is supposed to happen. But we will do our best to make sure that nothing changes prematurely, that he doesn't worry about us or feel unsafe or take on larger worries. I hope that he will be able to look back at his childhood with happiness, that the preordained loss won't sting too much.
I cry, but the tears are mixed in with joy and sweetness and everything in between. This is life. I am alive.
Image: The boy at his birthday party yesterday, wielding a balloon sword.
The weight of it
If you tell, everyone will know how bad you are. And stupid. And worthless. They will reject you.
Tired of the weight, you tell anyway. No one thinks you are bad. Or stupid. Or worthless. Sometimes they treat you with empathy. Others ignore what you tell them, but you come to understand that they don't know what to do with it, that it's their problem, not yours.
You start to feel better, like maybe you didn't cause your abandonment by being bad or being too smart-assed or being too you. Your abandonment was your parent's problem and not yours, even though now you are left to deal with the lifelong aftermath.
You think of her, the other girl, your biological grandmother, sixteen and pregnant in New Castle, Delaware in 1950, how she carried also carried a baby -- your mother -- probably in secret until almost the end. You think of her secret pregnancy, the secret father, the secret baby going off to live with a new family. Your birth grandmother grew up, got married and had two additional children. She held fast to the secrets.
You are angry with her for keeping these secrets, for denying information and empathy. You identify with her, remembering what it was like to be young, alone, and terrified. You want to tell her "I understand" (as much as you can). You want to punch her in the face. The legacy of suppression is a foul one and you need to blame someone for what happened to you. Someone distant and easy. But you can't. The people to blame, your mother, your father, other adults in your life at the time . . . oh, you're afraid of the mess your anger would make and you know now how hopeless they were.
You try to write about secrets, but it just feels like an emotional morass.
That's the problem with secrets.
Image: My mother, summer 1952.
A tale of necessary sadness, in two acts
Act I
Something is going on with me. I’m sleeping terribly, cry at nothing. Last night at dinner my son asked for another Dress Me Monkey story: “What else would Dress Me Monkey do?” This is our cue to come up with some fantastical new tale about how the toy would spend the proceeds from treasure he never manages to steal. I said the first thing that came to my mind, that Dress Me Monkey wishes he could go back in time to the nights when he ate with his mother and father and they told Dress Me Human stories. "His parents are far away now, and Dress Me Monkey misses those days. He would like to go back for a meal or two."
The dinner had been a difficult one, with the kid complaining about his food and telling me how the refried beans on his homemade nachos looked like dirt, like something worms would eat. I'd spent a lot of the day fighting my initial crabby responses to his normal kid behavior. I was tired. My past has been coming back and poking me lately, spilling out, and meals are one of those difficult times for me. So I came up with a Dress Me Monkey story that fit my mood, inappropriate though the story might have been.
"Why did Dress Me Monkey want to have dinner with his parents again, like he was a little monkey?" the boy asked.
“Because everybody wants that,” my husband said and started to cry. The boy was concerned and snuggled up close to his dad. We explained that Daddy was crying partially because he misses his mother, who has been dead for twelve years, but that also sometimes adults miss the past, the sweet simplicity of the family table. Then it was my turn to cry, because my childhood mealtimes were mainly horrible. The emotional tenor of my those dinners depended on my mother's mood and the man she was dating. She had only three boyfriends over the course of my childhood, but each of them had their own issues, would make me stand at the table or wouldn't talk when I was there or would pull me apart, show my every flaw. When the last one, Kevin, came along I ended up eating dinner alone most of the time.
So. I want my family meals to be happy. Full of love. The food I prepare is part of that love and I try hard not to force the boy to eat things he doesn't like, which is why he eats macaroni and cheese almost every night. Last night the meal was something he has eaten before, but it didn't appeal to him and the whole situation got to me.
I know that his rejection of my food is not a rejection of me, but sometimes I still have that visceral reaction, that and "You have no idea how good you have it, little boy." And I get angry at myself for thinking such a thing. He doesn't "need" to know that. He needs to grow up secure and happy and loved, without the burdens of my childhood thrust upon him. But right now the past is spilling out of me, surprising me with its emotional abundance. It can be overwhelming.
Last night, as I was getting him to sleep, he asked about our day. This rundown of our daily activities is a bedtime ritual. Sometimes I learn more about what happened at school or we go deeper an earlier discussion. When I got to the dinner portion of my synopsis, I apologized for the weirdness of it and asked if he had any questions. "Why did you tell a sad Dress Me Monkey story?" was the first.
The real answer was because I am sad right now. I am processing something deep and fetid, airing out emotions that don’t easily surface. I’m not sure why it's happening and while I don’t like the effects – waking up in the middle of the night or too damn early, occasionally scaring my child, being cranky and sleepy all day – I think what I’m going through is necessary. What I told him was that when I was little mealtimes weren't always happy times and I was feeling sad about it during dinner. And then we moved on to why Daddy cried at the dinner table.
Act II
It happened again last night, the two a.m. alarm clock. I woke up sad, obsessed with an aborted friendship. After a good cry -- quiet, intense -- into my pillow, I went into the boy's room to read and hopefully return to sleep. (He had already migrated into our bed.) When sleep finally snuck up on me, I had a complicated dream. In it, my husband's family was visiting (though, in typical dream style, an old boyfriend of mine showed up, too, looking very much like a middle-aged Eastern Shore type, with a baseball cap, greying beard, and a beer belly). It was a surprise visit. I hadn't had a chance to clean and I was ashamed at how the house looked and angry with my husband for springing them on me.
My dream self went stomping off into the night. Our oldest cat, Zoe, fifteen years old now and a sack of bones, dotty, constantly hungry, followed me. We wandered frenetic city streets, joined the rush of humanity. In one square, mimes performed acrobatic feats and played with fire. The glow of a neon sign drew me into a murky bar. The next thing I remember, Zoe and I were walking home. A rainstorm had blasted through the city and scrubbed away the people, leaving behind damp sidewalks and oil-slick puddles that reflected the shimmer of streetlights. It was spooky, the kind of emptiness where you expect to hear an echo of footsteps behind you. Zoe, frightened by a stray cat, fell behind.
One minute I could see her, the next she was gone. I screamed her name over and over again. I used the dinnertime call: Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo. And then I opened my eyes, totally awake, feeling the responsibility, feeling the loss.
But at least I was feeling something.
Image: Asher with Nick's shadow. Zoe has asked not to be photographed for the blog. She's an old-fashioned sort who values her privacy, though her name actually is Zoe. She also agreed that this photo was the best fit for the post.
Does it seem like my past is always spilling out? Maybe here. This is different though, like I'm working through something big. I sometimes discount the effects of my childhood and often think I should be over it by now. But it's not so simple, is it?
Where I am right now
I can hear a seagull screeching and the patter of rain against the deck, against the grass, against the faded IKEA play tent on its side in the backyard.
Sometimes I want to escape, but I don't know where I would escape to.
I've been wondering if the mailman is angry with me. This is code for something else. Maybe I'll write about it someday.
I've been thinking about turning off the comments in this blog. I'm thinking about starting a new blog. I'm thinking that if I keep on blogging, I'll never write anything of substance.
If I no longer belong to the East Coast and I haven't pledged my allegiance to the West Coast, where do I belong?
My fear of being invisible is coming to fruition.
No one can save me but myself and if I believe otherwise, I am delusional.
Lately I've been thinking that poetry, with its economy of words and strong imagery, would suit me.
And I keep on catching typos in this post, which means I have to make the changes, export the entire blog, and upload it all over again.
Tomorrow will be better, right?
Image: Neighbor cat on the fence.
Shoot him 'fore he run now
J. had a freezer full of goose breasts riddled with shot. His family owned property on Broad Creek with a duck blind right against the water, where the menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed me the blind that first summer, took my hand and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks gone brown. We sat close on the austere bench, hidden behind grass that had become hoarse with whispering over the years. I am sure he kissed me in that humid July air because we did a lot of that then, sweet lingering kisses in between fights and sarcasm.
He’d told me that a former tenant of the Sugar Shack, the house he and his brother were renting from their grandmother on the far side of the property, had keeled over one afternoon in the back bedroom, dead from a heart attack. By the time they found the body, the man’s faithful dog had chewed off half of his face. It probably started with wake-up licks that progressed to nips and then frantic biting. But J. was often full of shit, and I’m not sure if he was just trying to scare me. If so, it worked. I’d spend the night there holding it, too nervous to walk the ten feet to the bathroom, picturing the gory scene, the spiritual remains of this lonely person floating over the room.
One muddy November night, when lingering kisses had turned into the fire of post-fight sex, I realized I was on the edge. J. and I had gone from chemical intensity to a kind of in-between thing that wasn’t satisfying but was just enough to keep me hooked. We’d spent the evening at the bar, drinking and picking at each other. By the time we shoveled into the Sugar Shack driveway, my brain was crackling. We had a fight about something ridiculous or something deep-seated and heavy, it doesn't really matter, and at some point I grabbed a shotgun from the gun cabinet.
As I write this, I can’t believe that I did such a thing, so dramatic, so serious. Could I be making this up? No. I was drunk and sad and teetering on the edge of the abyss, so I grabbed one of his (unloaded) shotguns and pointed at my face. Maybe we struggled. All I can remember is me stumbling in the shabby living room of the Sugar Shack where it was cold and damp. J. was lit from behind so that his face was cragged in shadow. I was hysterical with pent-up emotion, struggling to keep hold of this unwieldy gun. Eventually J. took it away and returned it to the cabinet. We went to sleep. I woke up the next morning barely able to move, felt around for his sleeping form and remembered that he was probably hunkered down in the duck blind with his cousins.
I’m sure he chalked the night up to my overgrown sense of drama, another mark against me to go with my unfaithfulness and love of alcohol. Thank god I've tossed aside those crutches for the most part, though I miss the drama sometimes. Drama sparks up the night, shines a little light into the abyss. Without it, you have only darkness, have to bravely perch on the edge until the abyss slowly creeps away. And that's where I seem to be right now for reasons that are unclear to me, dirging it out until the fog lifts.
"Shoot him 'fore he run now," is a lyric to the song "Shotgun," originally by Jr. Walker and the All Stars. Click here for a danceable, levity-producing version from the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It features some of the original Motown sessions musicians and the late Gerald Levert as singer.
Image from the Washington College magazine.
Prognostication
In my dreams, the dead are silent. I’ve never had a good conversation with a single one of them, just offer my apologies, bake the bread, pour the coffee. What is the guilt about? The dead no longer care about my transgressions. Isn’t it enough that I hold them here in my subconscious, treat them as gently as I would a freshly-laid egg?
But this dream was different. We were going to visit Kevin, who has been gone for over seven years now. As in real life, I was nervous: would I react properly to him? Would he toss the verbal slings, so subtle and cutting, if I didn’t pick up on something, if I reacted too slowly? Or would he sit there, blue eyes glowing, as my mother and I circled him like butterflies, flitting here and there in our attempts to placate?
Kevin spoke. He used the ethereal language of dreams, of those who are now ashes and light, but in that nasal New Jersey accent that I haven’t been able to replicate in my mind for years. And he was funny, so funny, because Kevin was bitingly funny. I laughed and realized how much I missed him, how much time had gone by and then I woke up, not remembering a word of his complicated meta-joke.
Time flies on and I die a little every day, lose another connection, feel the pull of a long-ago past. Yet my grandfather still shows up at the old house. I smell his cigarettes, breathe in sawdust, too-sweet coffee and turpentine. He waits in his cell of a room, a voiceless old man in a flannel robe, unshaven and glassy eyed. I rush past the sink filled with dirty dishes, walk a path of slate to get to a mailbox that hasn't been opened in years. Sometimes we take his car for a complicated drive to Christiana. Maybe we are heading to the hospital, waiting for someone to hand me a small bundle, something I've forgotten.
The dead appear without explanation or warning. Carolin greets me in a too-bright dorm basement, fixes me with intense eyes. David Anderson sits in a classroom, shoeless, staring at the algebra equation on the board. Frank the cat meows for food that I don't have. And my grandmother, the one I ache to see, is sick of my inattention and has stopped showing up at all.
Someday, no one will know that I was sixteen and angry once. They will remember an old woman deeply lined, forgetful, with clouded-over eyes, demanding and harmless. Inconsequential. As though I had been born without desire, without the power to wound.
Image: Postcard, date unknown.
From you I get the story
Cherry tree on West Street.
I tell myself that when I am dying, leaving the things of this world, it will no longer matter that I paved the banks of that river, diverted its flow, moved the humming stream of desire to my imagination. What I want with an ache of jealousy, with the pain of something that was never meant to be, won’t matter to me then. The impulse – to covet, to pursue, to get – will be meaningless. Self-denial will have been the obvious course.
Don’t expect a description here, a list of lusts. It’s not all about lust (though sometimes, of course, it is. I am human.). It is the pull and push of expectation, sadness at the inevitable narrowing of life. Here I stand on a plank in the river, steering in the direction of what will be, trying not to gaze back. My husband is here too, pushing us through the water, sometimes reaching back to touch my hair or hold my hand. I love him. He is comforting. Real. I am free from want.
Or I’m not. What about the desire for lyricism? Luck? A publishing contract? Some days I just want to be left alone. I want to eat a meal in the sunshine, with my book and my thoughts, without guilt. I want 24 obligation-free hours. I want words that fly out of my fingers, practically effortlessly. I want to watch them take off and form themselves into unstoppable narrative. I am power-mad for deadly metaphor.
But even more strongly I want to be an image in someone else’s head, a character real and fully formed. I need an author, someone to flesh out the plot of my own life, someone who understands these redirected desires implicitly. He (yes) sees me, knows my lurid heart, feels the iciness of my thoughts. He loves me anyway. This is what believers get from God, I suppose. It’s an impossible task for any human being, given that we are opaque even to ourselves.
Pointless, pointless desire. But it does propel me forward.
Hello ... Columbus?
Capitol Plaza Apartments
The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved in August 1991.
To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a better paying part-time job working in a library at a high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.
Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to my fellow college students. We were both in love with DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.
Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and headed straight for the District. He would tell me stories of growing up the city, where his large family lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and insular.
Most of our conversations took place on my early evening library shifts where there was no one else in the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch), explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how the destructive energy fields from power lines were spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would stare out the window at the office building across the street, watch the after hours workers work or not work, watch them watching us. There was one man who was always talking on the phone, standing with his back to the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though the person on the other end would be persuaded by gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station on the corner.
A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont Circle.
I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings at Andy’s were blurred through multiple glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings generally ended in an argument over something petty. We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.
In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people to the surface.
In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing November winds, floating through the incredible sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the joy rise up in me).
The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every intention of returning to DC immediately after graduating from library school. But then I met a guy who got a job and we moved to a new town together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a moment.
“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood home.
Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another day). Photo from Old Towne East Neighborhood Association.
It was a strange coincidence. What were the odds?
The factoid with legs
At my grandparent's house during the John The Murderer era.
It was a dark place, with a cavernous bathroom, small squares of mint-green tile above the white, a pedestal sink, the tall window adjacent to the toilet covered by a pullcord shade. Outside of the bathroom, the rest of the old Wilmington rowhouse loomed: shadowy rooms; marked-up walls in need of paint; hardwood floors scratched and worn from decades of footsteps, the worst places covered by faded area rugs; a raggedy couch there, a threadbare recliner here; the folding tables with chipped veneer. Because the windows were painted shut, the air was stuffy, smelling of overcooked food.
I don’t remember other kids. I don’t remember playing. I do remember lying on the floor (or was that a cot?) for my nap, but not sleeping. Maybe that’s why the bathroom is so solid in this elusive memory – those that don’t nap are made to stand in the bathroom. Bad girl.
Tears and stubbornness. It wasn’t fair. No one could make me sleep in this place.
The woman who ran the home-based daycare knew John, my mother’s ex-boyfriend. So when he showed up after the breakup, after we moved out, when he came by to pick me up during naptime, she let me go. I was quiet and polite – this was important, to go along, to not make him angry, to stay safe. He took me to a store, had me pick out a huge stuffed animal to take home, and returned me without harm. It was a somewhat threatening attempt to get back into my mother’s good graces. When that didn’t work, he pursued us to my grandparent’s place, "kidnapped" my mother for a brief time, another sketchy story of violence that isn’t mine to tell.
Recently, when my little one, my sweet, sometimes maddening almost-three-and-a-half year old was behaving just like a preschooler should, testing boundaries, being frustrating, I felt the anger flame up inside of me, the low boil going immediately to steam. After calming down, I thought about my life at his age and how small and defenseless and maddening I must have been myself, a little person in the midst of some very bad things, trying to protect her mother, to keep it together. The past was reaching out to slap me in the face again, the suppressed anger of long-ago, the abuse I both witnessed and experienced.
I’ve asked my mother to tell me what happened while we were living with John. Some of it I vaguely remember (or know from past conversations)– being made to stand at the table for meals, his physical abuse of my mother, his tendency to drink – but there are gaps in my knowledge. I need to know, to confront it, to feel the suppressed feelings. It will be another step toward emotional wholeness, a step toward being an aware parent.
My mother has agreed, apologetically, guilty, worried that I will be angry with her. There is no cause for worry. I just need to know.
It's the next hurdle.
Everything around me remains the same
And the story is just about really, finally, complete. The final excerpt (still in draft mode) is below. For other excerpts from the work in progress as well as posts on the topic, follow the stillbirth tag.
I'm putting this experience to bed now.
Photo by PhineasX.
Gusts of words swirl around me that week. I walk right through them. Who needs to talk? Dad is explaining the baby’s name to his father: “She said it was the first thing that popped into her head.” “Jennifer didn’t know what was going on,” my stepmother tells the phone receiver. At an aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, we sit and hide behind the blast of televised football and the scraping of forks, my paternal grandfather’s frequent throat-clearing sounding a note of general disapproval. Six days after the birth I try the nightgown trick again, tighten it over my empty abdomen. Flat as a pancake.
On an unseasonably warm December day, wisps of clouds pulled across a cerulean sky, Dad drives me back to Maryland. There is clean-up to be done. He drags the stained twin mattress to the end of the driveway, props it against the fence, bloodied side in. (“Very tasteful of your father,” Mom tells me later, with more than a hint of sarcasm.) My parents share a laugh at the ancient pack of pilfered Pall-Malls I’d jammed underneath it – if they only knew about the empty beer bottles hidden in the box spring of the other mattress. Dad gives me an awkward hug, waves goodbye from the car. I open the door to the Little House.
Smells become part of the background of a place, as invisible as the color of the ceiling or the punctuation of electrical outlets against wallboard. You forget how a house smells, forget it practically the moment you close the door. The stale air of the Little House hits me like a slap in the face. It is the scent of bottled-up mildew, of pressed wood and formaldehyde, the smell of isolation. I take a canister of Lysol and scour the room with an antiseptic rain, spray the walls and floor until they are damp. Over the afternoon I slowly change the feel of the place, moving furniture and taking down photographs.
When the familiar urge hits, I walk quietly into the main house. From my grandfather’s room comes the sound of MacGuyver, then the jingle of a commercial. An ice-cream scoop sits in the sink beside a spoon and scraped bowl. Grabbing a large tumbler from the dishwasher, I kneel to open the china cabinet, reach for the Johnny Walker Red on the bottom shelf. I walk back to the Little House clutching my glass of whiskey and Coke between both hands, taking careful, deliberate steps on every slate stepping stone, as though one misstep onto grass means bad luck. After locking the door behind me, I take a sip. The drink is strong and bitter, cold and soothing. Humanizing. Some drink to numb the pain. I drink to feel it. I begin to cry.
On Monday morning, puffy-eyed and stoic, I walk to my mother’s for our ride to school and work. She is cranking up the ancient, oil crunch era Toyota with the nonworking gas gauge. An egg and scrapple sandwich lies on the passenger seat, on top of the paper. I hop in, open the Wilmington News-Journal, take a bite of food. Mom puts the car into gear and backs out of the driveway.
Everything around me remains the same.
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.)
Bloodhound
Image courtesy of In Praise of Sardines
Last year this night bled into Sunday afternoon. Following a trail of crushed blackberries, I traced the stains with my fingers and watched as we went from mud to cracked glass to bruise. Late night notes, an errant bike ride, “drama at Inspiration Point.”
In a year, total turnaround, but, as always, I focus on dates.
Tonight’s bad mood explained.
Crying the rodent death blues / The beast in me
Take the case of Happy.
Happy (short for Happy Easter) was a golden hamster my grandmother gave to me for Easter 1976. He came complete with a Habitrail, one of those cages with a main unit attached to smaller annexes via clear tubes. It was just like a wild hamster warren except translucent, plastic, and above ground. Watching Happy scurry through the tubes, from wheel to main cage to tiny den was amusing. He impressed me with his ability to get through tiny spaces. I would scoop him out of the cage and cup my hands around him, leaving an opening that got smaller and smaller over time. Happy was always able to make it through.
One winter morning, hamster feed in hand, I opened the Habitrail and discovered it empty. All of that time spent squeezing through my fingers had been training for Happy’s escape. His disappearance was upsetting, but even more devastating was the discovery a few days later of his tiny corpse in the basement. It was stiffened with rigor mortis, hamster toes stuck in a permanent curl. Happy’s last meal had been rat poison.
By the age of seven, I had lived through a few pet deaths, all of the feline variety. Sheba had been hit by a car, Amber was anemic, and Regis bothered his neutering stitches until infection creeped in. Each death brought tears, but with Happy it was different. For many months after the hamster’s untimely death, I rode a wave of grief. On long rides to my grandparents’ or on the walk to school, the loss would hit me.
Dinnertime was the toughest, with all that time to think under the monotony of adult conversation. My mother, her someday husband Jim and I would be sitting at the white picnic table in the kitchen and I would feel a pang. The spinach soufflé would grow cold on my fork as I stared past Mom and out the window into the backyard. Happy was buried back there, his corpse stuffed for one final time into a toilet paper tube. I imagined him in better days, pushing his way through my open-toed shoes, doing endless laps on the wheel, escaping from my fingers. I couldn’t contain my sigh, the big exhale of emotion.
“Do you know what I’m thinking about now?” Long silence, then another sigh, “I’m thinking about Happy.”
These words of grief, repeated many times over that year, were not taken seriously.
By age eleven I was ready to try rodent stewardship again, this time with a gerbil. Perhaps it is a sign of Happy’s hold on my heart that I no longer remember the gerbil’s name. He (or she) was also cut down in the prime of life, a victim of illness. He had been listless all day, sitting in a corner of his cage, not touching his food. The gerbil refused to open his mouth whenever I presented an eyedropper full of restorative honey water. I hovered over the sickbed into evening. As night came, a summer storm rolled in. The sky flashed with lightning and my gerbil took his final breaths in an echo of thunder. After it was over, I reached out and stroked his still-warm body with an index finger. And then – an indication of my future impulses? – I immediately wrote my version of the night’s events: “Death of a Gerbil.”
My mother and Jim teased me for what they interpreted as my overemotional response to almost everything. Jim also thought I was too serious and would describe the child me as being like a 42-year-old woman (as I approach the last year of my 30s, his description makes even less sense). The labels were applied with a grain of contemptuous truth to everything from my asthmatic coughing fits that led to vomiting as well as my often-expressed desire in sixth-grade to kill myself.
Over the years I’ve learned how to regulate my external emotional responses, but I still have a flair for the melodramatic that usually comes out in my writing. For example, I started this post with some ideas about the loop of deep self-doubt that occasionally runs through my mind. The initial paragraph read very differently:
I am afraid to see a psychic, for what she may tell me about what she sees in my soul. Will she feel the energy, the darkness that is eating me from within? One look in my eyes, a quick riffling through my internal dialog, and the extent of the rottenness at my core will be clear. She’ll have to make something up, be polite, get me out of there.
This is grown-up melodrama. Like my grief for Happy, when these feelings hit, they are genuine. I acknowledge that there are times when I feel rotten and hollow. This doesn’t mean I am rotten and hollow – my feelings are not objective reality, but to deny them and their origins would be denying part of myself, part of my internal life.
I fight these moments of darkness. But I am convinced they are part of being human and will never fully go away. We don’t want to acknowledge feelings of deep inadequacy, so most of us go around trying to pep-talk ourselves into feeling better. We don’t want to face the beast within.
The good in us, the light, is powerful. It can lift us above the void. But if you feel pangs of self-doubt, why not acknowledge the reality of the feeling, trace it as far back as you can, and move on? Don’t underestimate your ability to confront the beast.
The darkness within doesn’t define us. We are far more complex than that.
For readers who are now thinking of the Nick Lowe song, here it is, as sung live by Johnny Cash, a man whose life was defined in some part by his attempts to push through the darkness. Next post: blog of the month.
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.
From the inside
Part of what unsettled me was the link back to my own words (which I’ve changed to better reflect my feelings). The “why” of writing to survive was initially a rather bleak description of what life was like for me for the first two years of my son’s existence. This was a difficult time with many struggles to maintain eveness. I lost a lot of myself, my marriage changed, and I’d have to say there was some depression tossed into the mix, too, though I was never treated.
So. I love my son. I am lucky to stay home with him. He makes me laugh. We dance and sing and talk and read together. He has also been an impetus for change, a reminder to slow down and enjoy. With him I am able to remake my own childhood, borrowing the good bits and discarding the bad. I am lucky to be able to do this AND write.
Which brings me to my husband, an amazing man who is my biggest supporter. When I need reassuring about my parenting skills, he is quick to soothe. He loves to read my work. He gets take-out when I am tired of cooking. He understands when I use naptime (when naptime happens) to write instead of clean. We are truly a team. I love you, H.
There are nuances to this angst, and as I’ve been writing here and privately, the angst shifts and dissipates. The words have saved me.
This is writing to survive.
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.
The harvest
Now we’re clutched close, lost in a kiss, tender lip to darting tongue. His calloused carpenter’s hands stroke my hair, wrap me tighter. I think over and over: “This is what is happening right now, this is what is happening right now.”
Then, a fast drive through shuddering cornfields, car windows open, my hair whipping around in a pre-knot frenzy. The stalks are taller than I am, still green, with the threat of decay around the edges.
One morning, the fields will be brown. The next week, empty.
I won’t be seventeen forever.
A talisman against loss
Some children sleep though high fevers, resting up as their bodies fight off the germs. Not our little one. The heat disturbs his sleep. For several nights he woke up in the 2 - 3 a.m. time slot, asking "Is it wake-up time?" Well, no, but we didn't have much say in the matter. Time for a drink of water, maybe for another dose of Motrin, and then we'd settle in for cuddling and long attempts at getting back to sleep. Two hours later, once he was out, I would be able to sleep myself.
The combination of being sick and not getting enough sleep put me in a strange frame of mind. Everything seemed fraught with premature nostalgia. The Duplo block set he got for his birthday, with a castle and the toy knights? A relic of a childhood soon to be over, the toys destined to languish in an attic. The recent photographs of our growing boy? Documentation of a time we won't be be able to remember a year from now. My cuddly 3-year-old will change into a different person, perhaps several times over, and each stage will be as fuzzy in my mind as his first weeks of life. It cut, this realization of the slipperiness of time and memory.
Along with an ache for what has not yet passed, I started to see danger in almost every moment, as though I was preparing myself for an inevitable loss. The bee I saw crawling on our grass -- would it deliver a fatal sting to my son, sink its poison into his chubby bare foot? (Never mind that we have no idea if he is allergic. It is a genetic possiblity). Would this be the dog walk where I would lose my balance and fall backwards, landing on my son, strapped to my back in an Ergo carrier? (Oh, for those days when he insisted on wearing his bike helmet at all times!)
And what about me? Was I paying enough attention to the dangers that I faced? Is the morning coming when, groggy and uncaffeinated, I will accidentally dip my low-hanging robe sleeve into the burner flame, stare in shock as the sleeve is consumed? Would I finally miss that step and go tumbling into a crumpled heap of bone and flesh on the floor below?
Maybe if I tried to keep the dangers in mind, tried to remind myself that what we love can be taken away, that no moment is innocent, I would have a mental talisman against loss.
That was a few days ago. Sleep is improving and my outlook is returning to normal. Neurotic worrying is not what protects us from danger. I am lucky to live in an incredibly safe part of the world, with access to clean water, plentiful food, and good medical care. I don't have to dodge bombs or gunfire. I don't need a talisman.
But I am going to watch my step when I go down the stairs.
So. What would I write if ...
This has been a hard week of slog and attempts to think my way through a muddled, sad brain.
There could be at least one reason I am struggling -- the end of July marks an anniversary of sorts (some might call it an antiversary). This, coupled with an overnight work retreat for my husband next week, a true triggering event, is bringing me down. These dates will lose their meaning over time, but the first go-round stinks.
So. Maybe that's it.
(Ever since my mother sent me this quote from Seamus Heaney on the use of 'So.' as prelude, a call for attention, I've been using it as a sentence all on its own. The quote is below, Famous Seamus on translating Beowulf and using the term 'So.'
There you have it -- a little esoterica to balance out the angst, to confuse the crowd. Oh, for courage and greatness.)
"And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of [my big-voiced Scullion] relatives, [who had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. ] I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:
Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
peod-cyninga prym gefrunon,
Conventional renderings of "hwaet," the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with "lo" and "hark" and "behold" and "attend" and—more colloquially—"listen" being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle "so" came naturally to the rescue because in that idiom "so" operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, "so" it was:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness."
The smog
Maybe it was the week of haze, the sun a bright disk behind clouds of diffuse smoke, the smell of fire hanging in the air. Or I could be homesick, tired of a landscape of bungalows, thirsty for brick and marble.
That's it. I want to go home. Not to DC (though I wouldn't mind just a taste of that city), but back to my grandparents' house in Hollywood Beach, before it was ruined by death, back to some sweet summer when my grandmother was alive.
We'd drink sugary Coca-Cola over ice, hang out in her freezing bedroom. She had a perpetual supply of Cheez-Its (it was a land of hyphenated foods, tasty concoctions of flavored chemicals with catchy, meaningless names), and I'd jam handfuls into my mouth while we watched The Price is RIght. Sometimes I would listen to the sound of her sewing machine humming along as she worked on another outfit or colorful muumuu.
After lunch, I would walk down to the river, step in the soft tar by the side of the road, sink into its soothing warmth. Somebody's grandparent was always sitting on one of the benches overlooking the beach, smoking a cigarette, keeping an eye on the young swimmers. With a running leap, I'd arc into the water, trying to avoid the muddy river bottom, several inches of sludge and leaves. I was heading for the raft or for water deep enough for an underwater handstand, ready to emerge with handfuls of muck and dirty fingernails. When a container ship came through the channel on its way to or from the C & D Canal, swimmers fought the pull of its engines and treaded water until the ship passed.
I'd swim until the skin on my fingers and toes wrinkled in protest, until I was covered in a thin film of mud, sometimes until I was shivering. Then it was time for the walk up the road, a towel wrapped around my waist, looking forward to farm-fresh corn on the cob and summer tomatoes.
Nostalgic memories are free of pain. They do come with an ache, however, a longing for simplicity. I'm sure it wasn't so simple, but my grandmother's house was a safe place, a place where I could be a kid. As I've been working on the stillbirth story again, I've been thinking of the dramatic event as the final nail in the coffin of childhood. That it happened in the one place where I had truly been able to be a child, where I was safe for a short time, seems especially sad to me. The happy memories will always be tinged with loss.
So maybe this funk has been a little burst of mourning, more grief experienced years after the fact. Let's hope that getting it out will allow me to let it go. I'm tired of the mental smog. I want to enjoy the sun, revel in the blue sky freed after a week behind smoke.
Depression's child
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?
Nubbin brain
I'm 38 years old and I haven't written a creative word since I was an undergraduate. I don't expect it to come easily. The Mom and K project has an emotional heft that makes it difficult, too. And I seem to suffer from a twisted nostalgia, a real desire to inhabit the past, at least so I can write about it about it with some veracity. I'm trying to let go of my obsession with uber-accuracy, which helps when my literal mind gets caught up in the details.
Mark Doty has a good essay about memoir and truth in the latest Poets and Writers -- but now that I have H and C beside me reading a book, the nubbin brain is shrinking even more and I have a hard time bringing it to mind. Check it out if you can, though you'll probably have to get your hands on a physical copy.
Existential angst, Part 2
I had some doubts about whether I should post this -- nothing about writing here, nothing positive and chirrupy either.
Well, this is me. I can't make up what I am not. When I'm feeling better, it will be about writing. When life feels like a cruel joke to be endured until my extinction via death, that's what I'll write about. At least I'm still writing.
So, today: The dream hangover -- usually a nap thing, or middle of the night phenomenon for me. I don't always remember the dream, but I wake up with a sense of dread, or a feeling of failure that cannot be recovered from, or with the gnawing ache of permanent loss. Today I had a napless nap attempt in an empty house ideal for sweet sleep. I emerged from bed still tired, thoughts tangled and knotted.
I felt old and sad and crazy for thinking I could transcend anything with writing or thinking or interacting with others.
Life is a blind march towards death. When I emerged from bed, I knew my life was irrationally -- crazily -- lucky, and undeserved. I was sure my feeling of dread was because H and C must have been in a fatal car accident while I was not sleeping. The cheese stands alone.
They came home untouched, alive.
No K & Mom story writing today. Definitely tomorrow, though. I'm not that bad off.