Men, liquor, punk and pregnancy
27 April 2011 11:27 AM Categories: Childhood hangover
Longtime readers have heard it all before. First I shared it, then I shaped it. Now I continually reinterpret, run my fingers over the words, trace the abandonment, part of the story that led me to where I am now. I've gone from openness to control to anger twice removed.
My fabulous writing group met on Monday night. I finally passed Reconciliation on to them, the story of the end of Kevin's life, how we supposedly reconciled through his long last hospitalization. Kevin was my mother's boyfriend from 1984 until his death in 2002. He was a mixed bag, more rotten than good, and his presence in my life led to the troubles, continued and expanded my narrative of never-good enough, of self-blame, the dance of convincing and wheedling, of proving my worth to the unworthy and congenitally reluctant.
I passed the story on to the group, but I didn't want to go there. Life has been emotional enough lately without retracing the days of ventilators and morphine. But there I sat with these wonderful supportive women, who had kind words and useful feedback, including the desire to hear more of my story with Kevin, to have the payoff, to understand why reconciliation was required in the first place and what led to it in the end.
I'm thinking. I'm thinking. It's complicated, of course. Unfortunately, the upshot of what I am thinking is that there was no reconciliation. What went on for those six and half months of Kevin's final hospitalization, of all those hours I spent next to him in the hospital, was another one of my attempts at healing, at proving how good I was, at trying to remake the old story in a different way. The guy was a bastard who didn't deserve my goodness, but I was -- and remain -- too fucking kind to have treated him any other way. It's the same kind of empathy that keeps me from being able to direct too much anger at my mother (with her own troubles) or at a person who recently did me wrong, who hasn't manned up and never will (poor kid: it's hard to be strong when you're an emotional mess).
I started this post yesterday, kept on typing and erasing with the usual worries about pulling up the past on a thick narrative rope. I don't write this to keep the past alive, I write it to interpret it and my interpretation keeps changing. Conveying the depth of my abandonment -- my abandonment "issues," as cliched as they are, as typical, as shared with the masses -- without resorting to maudlin description is almost impossible and yet I am compelled to write about it, to share it, to neutralize it.
We could take my history with Kevin scene by scene, ugly fight by nasty canard, that first dinner where Kevin tore into 14-year-old me for being quiet and sullen followed by my mother having dinner at his house every night followed by her telling me that Kevin said I was evil and she agreed followed by my move to the Little House, the stillbirth, the continued life in bad circumstances. I could add in the confusing bits: his sit down with me and my boyfriend D after the pregnancy, lecturing D about our relationship "because her father isn't doing it;" his confidence in my intellectual abilities and advice to get a library degree; his funny stories that left the impression of uproarious laughter long after the plots were forgotten.
My child's mind fit the pieces together, they already were set in place, but the neglect of my teen years cemented the image: I was the catalyst for the bad things that happened to me. I caused it all. I was a bad person. I deserved what I got. I was a liar and a cheat, irresponsible and evil, too quiet or not quiet enough. Because of the evil within me, the evil I spread with my bad words and dark looks, I was left behind. I was to blame for my own neglect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the history. I know it's bullshit. And I know that writing it out in such bald language doesn't really help. It does get me angry, which isn't such a bad thing -- though the anger remains directionless and sometimes turns on me. Lately, with the help of my therapist, I've been feeling the feelings -- the sadness, the need that once had no end, the anger -- with the understanding that they won't destroy me. That they are totally appropriate. It's the only way I know to heal at this point, letting them out in fits and starts when they need it, giving them a voice, that and being brave, knowing I'm not a child anymore.
It's less about the history now, it's about the effect, the acceptance, the march forward. The feelings are with me in the room, they know why I've called them here, and we're going to hash it out together. We will gut and rebuild my psyche without looking back.
Enough about this. You were expecting stories about men (the gropings), liquor (siphoned gin leaking out of jars on the bus from Wilmington to Newark), punk (fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck her fucking brat), and pregnancy (pushing out silence). But I'm sure you have some of your own stories of love and the bottle and the music that saved you, that kept you from smashing something, that tapped into your anger before your head exploded.
I will leave you with a bit of punk, Riot by the Dead Kennedys, something I listened to on my headphones as I walked through the Wilmington night, lit cigarette resting between my fingers. I was a little unsteadily from the gin, from the vodka, from the amaretto, but I kept on going, turned the anger in on itself, gave myself another scene for future narrative.
Image: Legs, Little House, 1985ish, one of three in the "Legs" series, probably taken when I was up late and liquored, waiting for a man.
Title comes from a comment on my essay from the writers' group. I tacked on the last word.
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