Consigned to flames
Because we were both on the outs, both kind of snobby, we could make jokes at the expense of the rest of them, together at the beach bonfires with their bomb Libya talks (this was the Reagan era) and other conservative blather. We were on the Eastern Shore and this is what it was all about -- say it with a light country twang -- beer, bosoms, barbecues, and burning.
I’ve been thinking about burning lately. Burning journals. About a month ago, writer Dominique Browning wrote an essay in the New York Times about why she tossed years’ worth of her diaries into the flames. She didn’t want her sons to read about the ups and downs in her life, to know her through the lens of despair. She wanted them to remember her as strong and resilient: “Burning those diaries, I realized I didn’t want my sons to know how profoundly I had suffered from the slides down the chutes, the tumbles through the holes that gaped open in the scaffolding of my life. That would be too hard for them. I wanted them to remember me as one who clambers back. That’s the person they grew up with. A person who picks herself up and gets going again.”
At first, this was a very disturbing idea to me. Can't someone who has tumbled multiple times also be someone who clambers back? Was this diary destruction a denial of self? Aren’t journals the places where we reveal who we really are, with all our anxieties and secrets brought to life? Does destroying them mean that we are ashamed of who we were when we wrote them? Don’t our children deserve to know the darker parts of us and don’t we deserve to live on as fully fleshed out human beings in their minds? What’s the harm in that? And if the journals contain anomalies, something not us, then who are they about anyway?
Then the scene popped into my head, the boy grown, going through boxes of my personal effects, attempting to decipher my lousy handwriting, his eyes widening at what he finds in my journals. It’s not so much the me-ness of me revealed as who I was at a certain time. Some times were better than others. Perhaps none of us need to be reminded about those struggles.
I have several of my middle-school/high-school journals and some from my twenties and thirties, before his arrival on the scene. The middle-school diaries, cringe-inducing as they are with their obsessive attention paid to certain boys, are period pieces. I used the words “barf” and "blah" a lot and was just starting to hone my currently well-developed skill of over-interpreting the male gesture. These diaries may come in handy some day, perhaps when the boy is going through his own 12-year-old hell, to give him insight into just how dopey everyone is in middle school. (Of course, at that point he would probably want to burn them as well: who needs to be reminded at 12 that their parent was a kid once?)
But the rest of it? Does he need to know? Do I need to remind myself? Sometimes it’s helpful to see how far I’ve come, though that took years and there is a lot of repetitiveness, a lot of whining. Maybe it’s better if neither of us were able to look back, if the parts we focused on were the good bits, the end of the struggle. The final product may matter more than the process once the process is over.
I haven’t burned a thing yet. I’m considering it, though, consigning the former me to the flames. I've already been burnished through fire, transformed. I'm on the other side, a new creature built on the remains of the old.
For my Eastern Shore friends: Beer, bosoms, barbecue and burning are not really what the Eastern Shore is about, of course.
Writing this made me think of that tattoo I will eventually get, sometime in late 2012 when my appointment with Amy Justen at Sacred Rose Tattoo finally arrives. Still thinking about a phoenix, a la this, but probably much smaller.
Image by Chris Nixon.
Out of the box
I dreamed of men breaking into the house, of pursuit by swarms of angry bees. At night, the blanket held me to the bed and the bed was bolted to the floor and the earth turned but I did not feel it until I woke up with a jolt before daylight.
We drank chamomile iced tea. The tomatoes in the backyard were best straight from the vine. There were always too many cats and then kittens and then fewer cats again. I was melodramatic. A little actress. The sigher at the table who couldn’t let go of her memories of Happy the hamster or Sheba the slasher, the cat who once fell from a third story window onto a bush below and survived, but who couldn’t survive being hit by a car.
How do we learn how to be in the world, to accept who we are or to mold it into another shape? Are we all born sensitive and some of us learn how to box it up, compartmentalize? Is this a personality trait?
In the living room, the television flickered. We watched Roots. We fought over Halloween costumes and obedience and nobody knew what they were doing. I didn’t eat the dinners and gagged at the soft-boiled eggs and toast. I made fun of my mother's cookies, the wide flat things sweetened with honey instead of sugar, an unappetizing mix of crisp and chew. On the countertop milk fermented into yogurt.
She told me later that she didn’t want to break me (she herself had been broken), that she wanted me to remain free. In this, in some ways, she succeeded. We always talked about ideas and books and I could support my opinions and she listened (that letter from 1977 or so where she tells me I was absolutely right on the M*A*S*H plot amuses me now with its implications of a heated argument and her later consideration of it). Still, somehow I grew up thinking that something was bad within me, needed to be changed, suppressed. Something that cannot be suppressed.
It spills out around me now, it overflows. It is messy and me and I can’t help but share it no matter the outcome.
From the prompt "Muddy."
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.
Detail of The Cherry Tree Root Chamber by mandymama.
Pattern recognition
They went away on Canadian vacations. I sometimes accompanied them for weekends at his trailer near the ocean (but actually on a manmade lake dug out of red clay, the water too still, where mosquitoes bred in the relentless summer sun and once I came back from with a shimmering jar of tadpoles). My mother brought me carved wooden animals, maple sugar candy, books of Canadian stories. One of the stories angered me. It was about a girl who spent time with her grandmother, baking cookies, mixing up the flour and sugar and butter, dropping the dough by tablespoonfuls on a baking sheet. Another girl came along, an orphan or someone else with a sob story, diverting the grandmother’s attention. The orphan needed her too, needed her more, and eventually the granddaughter understood this. I never did. Wasn’t there enough love and time for both? Did one need to be excluded to save the other?
I was always jealous, there was never enough for me, and I was melodramatic, too, with my heavy sighs and foot stomps, my silences heavy as lead. I’m not sure what she could have done differently. I was raised in an atmosphere of debate and art and anger (suppressed until it exploded) and last night I realized how many dinners and afternoons of soothing, of ignoring, she must have colluded in back then. It was all fine, it was important that it be fine, when clearly it wasn’t fine.
There is nothing to be done about it now, as I make my own mistakes and accept my feelings as real. I recognize the continuation of a pattern (with a different flavor). I name the emotions, I tell myself they are legitimate and that I am ok for having them, I promise that I will always acknowledge those of the boy, and that I will never, NEVER tell him that I know exactly what he is thinking, that I knew he would say that. I won’t take away his emotions or his autonomy. I will not rob him from himself.
From a photo prompt that has nothing to do with my text.
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. It's probably a bit obtuse, this post, but I can tell you that it is based on a (calm) revelation and conversation I had with my mother last night, something that reminded me how far both of us have come and how separate I am feeling from the past (with a few exceptions). There are still some sore spots, of course. One thing at a time.
Image by godzillante|photochopper.
Seventies dream landscape
I woke up thinking of choices and communication and how to do things better. I tossed and turned and when the boy came into our room, I changed venues and covered my head under his sheets before my brain quieted and I went to sleep again.
Other peoples' dreams are often boring, especially when we don't know the scene (water flowing over rocks on the Brandywine, the paths alongside, the old bridges and the race, the cars parked on clear spring afternoons with blaring music, the Victorian era zoo with its sad roaring lion). I apologize. And why was my mind resurrecting this world from childhood, from a long-ago time?
My mother is in town and we picked the boy up from his first day of first grade yesterday. Ah. When I was in first grade, we lived on Lovering Avenue, so near to Brandywine Park. Life was glass-fragile. I slept in a winterized side porch without any heat. My bed was skinny and I had a Mickey Mouse blanket, red underneath with various illustrations of the mouse on the white top surface. I had asthma attacks in the middle of the night in that room and bad dreams about intruders. In the summer I drank chamomile iced tea and plucked Italian cherry tomatoes off the plants out back. I practiced kissing on the pipes that ran from floor to ceiling in our kitchen. I played with the kid down the street whose mother had a greenhouse, an amazing thing in an urban neighborhood. I had a birthday party with a piñata and pin the tail on the donkey and one of our cat had kittens, while another cat was hit by a car and another chewed out his neutering stitches and died and yet another didn't make it out of kittenhood because of anemia.
It was a time of six-year olds in empty houses, walking by themselves down the street, of frustrated mothers and seventies poverty.
Does that explain my dreams?
Maybe.
There are some days when I just don't feel like sharing my prompts and this is one of them. My writing is OK enough, I guess, though it's often hard for me to tell in the moment. But it's not going up here.
Images (all posted before): Me, Frank the cat, and Christmas, Lovering Avenue, 1975-77.
Making the break
Yesterday’s internal premise was about growing up. Not the physical process, the way that cells divide and hormones push changes, but the internal process, the maturity of mind, the separation of self from others, the necessary break. I realized that this was a break that I’d never really made, that a lack of childhood made me cling to childhood, that I’ve been wandering around in an adolescent (or worse: toddler) miasma half the time. Once you notice that, there is no choice but to grow up and it’s a relief, to let go of the need to be parented, the need to be seen by the love object, seen and supported like a babe in arms.
Lest you think that this means I’m “over it,” that what happened to me doesn’t matter anymore, I have to say that this just means I own it and the results, the hidden fears, the needs that I must meet by myself. I still cry about it, cry about her and what she went through, cry for her clueless sad parents who couldn’t help her, cry for the way she’s spent years being controlled in part by a past that is long gone. Her is me, a version of me, and I embrace her, but I also tell her that the time has come to let go of adolescent views on love and its expression, to embrace herself and what she wants, to reach out without being crushed when other people don’t automatically reach back.
I no longer stamp my feet when things don’t go my way, but I do have a way of disappearing when angry, of putting up a shield, of deciding that the mortals around me don’t deserve my delicate thoughts, that they are part of the problem and my solution is to disappear, to send out a cloud of ink and anger and blame. Now I feel the feelings, watch the others, separate myself from their reactions. I differentiate.
I take responsibility. Maybe I take the wheel, or control my own destiny. The clue is deciding how to balance connection and independence, to really feel that they don’t need to be separated, to keep on acting “as if.”
From a photo prompt (above). Image by Jane Underwood of the Writing Salon.
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.
The reliving
Adults often look at children with envy, think back to an era when time extended before us, when summers lasted forever and we had the luxury of being bored, of being full up on sleep. Children don't know about bills or about deadlines or about existential angst. We imagine their internal lives, the little pangs and sadnesses, but we believe they haven't been in the world long enough to experience the full terror of it. Covered over with experience, with joys and disappointments and fashion changes, adults see childhood as a time apart from the difficulties of life, a time before, a time you'd better enjoy because, well, it gets worse. The responsibilities accrue and time slips away and let them dream because we allow it, that brief period in life when anything is possible. Fools.
But: Adults also drag children along according to our foibles and whims and fucked up agendas. We take our childhoods out on our children or on other peoples’ children, usually unconsciously, sometimes not. Some adults repeat the cycle, in power this time, powerful and powerless all at once, the larger body lording over the smaller one. We forget how children are stuck with us, little people with no control over where we take them or what we do to them, primed to love us, primed to blame themselves for our bad behavior. The adult-child relationship is one we should take seriously and respect: adults should always try to remember what it was like to be little, to be dependent, while still holding our adult role of boundary enforcer, teacher, protector, and encourager.
A few weeks ago, in a dinner conversation sparked by our son’s requests for stories from "when you were a kid," I gave him a sixth grade excerpt. Our school had a closed circuited TV system and a video camera and I was part of a team that put on an occasional news show. Sometimes we played a morning song over the P.A. The joke – the joke – was that one morning we would put on "Hell is For Children" by Pat Benatar. Because at 11, we weren’t children, right?
By the time I was eleven, I had moved to at least eight different apartments and houses. I had attended four elementary schools. Mostly I lived with my mother, sometimes with my grandparents. My mother and I spent one brief stretch with a boyfriend who was an abusive drunk. My father, who was becoming a more frequent presence, had been on and off the scene for most of my life. At nine, I had watched my grandmother, the most stable person in my life, die in front of me as I panicked and called for an ambulance.
We played "Hell is For Children" and that last year in elementary school was the year I carried around pills and threatened suicide and got a secret racy card from my grandfather and dragged my ouija board everywhere. Maybe it was suppressed grief for my grandmother or maybe it was the accumulation of sadness. I wish that I had been capable of getting real help or that someone had stepped in, but who knew and who cared enough to suss out the details of my depressed state, to protect me?
I want to save children, to scoop them up from bad circumstance, to provide a stable and sympathetic presence, to give them the tools to survive. I think of Holden Caulfield’s image, him in a field of rye stopping children before they fall off the cliff. I get it. I want to be a catcher in the rye, staving off the premature ending of innocence.
This isn’t possible. I know. But I think there will be something I can do, someday, to ameliorate the pain children feel from being dragged into the adult world too early. This is not your doing, I would tell them, not your fault. And I would give them tools to recover, to let them rediscover their beauty, their wholeness, something to make them better adults someday. Adults who haven't forgotten what it was like to be helpless.
Image: Christmas 1980. My soon-to-be stepfather, grandfather, and me. I've used this photo before, but it seems very appropriate for this post. Because I look so ... comfortable.
Soul container
I like to picture myself in the mirror of his mind, constant, perfect, beautiful. He contains my soul in cupped hands, treats me gently, always wants to know how I’m feeling.
Thinking about this prompt this morning, how I dealt with it last week and how I always want to focus back on love, the love that I am not sure I believe in, the slipperiness of sex and the danger of it, too, I thought again to the theme of being a character in someone else’s mind, fully known, maybe even created by them, and totally loved. I want a man-god to contain me, to see me from fault to fault to cracked fault. I want to matter on some fundamental level to this idealized creature, this fiction.
What is this all about? Well, isn’t this part of why I am in various therapies, to expose this man for what he is, to rip off his corny toga and see my history written on his skin? It comes back to the original story, the neglected teenage years, though I know it goes further back than that. I still don’t understand how I was allowed to essentially live on my own from fifteen onward, how I stayed in that little unheated, unplumbed guest house even after the baby was born (dead, as my mother coached me to push), how the focus was on me taking responsibility and not on my withered and suppressed grief. I was invisible, I was a blank slate for meaningless platitudes and no one was able to come in and rescue me from the situation.
I say that the antidepressants have separated me from my stories, from my past, and its true. I don’t have as much of an urge to tell the stories over and over again. I’ve contained them with words and made them public. But this story is so huge and meaningful and layered.
When I went to the psychiatrist, when I finally was ready to admit that I was depressed and needed pills, I told her the story. She was appropriately sympathetic and said something interesting: that a year or two of therapy was not enough to deal with this sort of trauma. Of course, she’s working from a therapeutic perspective. But it made me realize that yes, this event did matter, that I have to deal with it, that maybe I’ll be seeing my therapist for a while on this one, despite my urge to just pretend that with the dissipation of my depression, all is well.
So: the man-god who grasps me with his mind, who sees all? He is a vestige from the long time of invisibility, he is my childish desire for parenting, for the hand hold across the street. He plucks me from my past and saves me from myself. It’s effortless, the dance between me and this man. He massages away the scars and heals my soul.
He doesn’t exist.
From the prompt "The best feeling in the world." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take.
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 from the Pime Missionaries of North American (who knows where they got it from). It hasn't escaped me that some people get this feeling of being seen and held from religion, from an idea of G/god. But this is not an authentic path for me.
Shoeless
The bottom of the Elk was mud and leaves, a thick layer of it, and no swim shoes, just my feet pressing pressing, the mud getting between my toes and wasn’t high tide the best, when you had to swim out to the raft without touching? I swam until I was shivering, until it was time for dinner (5:00 p.m. sharp) and then back up the road I walked, towel around my waist, hair clinging to my shoulders, body browned by sun and mud.
It was the ethos of summer, no shoes unless I absolutely had to, the freedom to walk down to the river by myself because there was always someone familiar there to watch over me, a grandparent, generally, not necessarily mine, someone who knew my mother and her parents since my mother was a little girl. But I barely remember their names now. My grandmother died when I was nine. The other grandparents got older. I got older, too, not so cute, rebellious and angry and sneaky and can you believe the way she took advantage of her poor handicapped grandfather like that?
Still, bare feet in teenagerhood, bare as I walked the slate stepping stones from the Little House to the main one, for the shower, for the bathroom, to use the phone or make something to eat. On late summer nights, I walked barefoot down to the beach, to the parking lot with its cars and guys and beer and pot. Drunk, I drove my grandfather’s golf cart without shoes and Maureen and I were probably both barefoot when we took out my his car on that early summer night. A mistake. Not the lack of shoes, but the action, with predictable consequences.
Late that fall, I may have slipped on shoes before the ambulance took me away. More likely my mother packed me a bag, since I was half-naked anyway. It was cold that morning, but when I went into labor and had to call her, had to make the walk to the main house to use the phone, I doubt if I put on shoes, distracted by pain, by what was happening to me, by the threshold I was crossing too young.
From the prompt "Barefoot."
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: My feet.
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.
Parade of innocents
Desire is a tricky and learned thing, at first it is just hormones, the call of the body to make copies of itself, to love. It is green and pliant and we learn what makes it so from our environments without being aware of the influences. The ads, the television shows, the online pornography, the early experiences with babysitters that smell like apples and cinnamon and can talk lizards and salamanders with the best of them.
Over time, the desire deepens, it grows smoky and contains different sorts of experiences, the boyfriend with the penchant for holding you down, for showing up late and toying with your emotions, the sudden pull in your groin on the train, the pleasure of not getting what you really want, the replayed scenarios remade at midnight. Childhood comes up again, it does, but in sepia tones, and the influences are darker, less innocent, more obvious, and there you are trying again and again to recreate green.
You are left with the scent of whiskey melting the ice, the sticky barroom floor, the orders, commands really, and the babysitter is suddenly wearing a leather bustier and she’s older now, too, though not too much, and everything that was innocent is covered over because that’s the way it is.
So why cover it over early, children? Is it because this world doesn’t admire innocence or naivety, because it’s tough out there and you have to prepare yourself, develop a thick shell to cover your vulnerability? Do you have to think about the seductive dance so early, learning your moves from the media? Can’t we protect you for a few more minutes? The rest of the dance is long and in the end you’ll be wishing for the days of innocence, for the school-boy crush, for the girls with their freshly-shampooed hair and knee socks.
From the prompt "Smoking."
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 dudua.
Last night, verging on sleep
When we wake up in the morning (he thought), it's the first task that lies ahead of us: the separation of the true from the false. We have to dismiss, to erase the mocking kingdoms made by sleep. But at the close of the day it was the other way round, and we sought the untrue and the fictitious, sometimes snapping ourselves awake in our hunger for nonsensical connections. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
Here's an experiment: me sitting at my desk, hot water on one side (in the Advertising Age mug my mother got for me when I was twelve: JENNIFER CASEY WINS "MARKETING GENIUS" AWARD it reads), smoldering cigarette on the other. Hold on while I set it up.
OK. My ashtray is a cat food bowl. I've got the kitchen matches. My water is freshly heated. Here we go. Yes, I am smoking in the house. I tried this on Saturday (outside) and it didn't go over well. Today it's easier. But disgusting. How does the cigarette stay lit? Chemicals and tobacco technology, I guess. The trails of smoke make me think of my grandparents, the ubiquitous cigarettes in beanbag ashtrays, the stink, the smell of coffee and burning, my grandfather's hacks in the bathroom trash can.
It's the exhale that's the worst, that weird feeling of dryness in the throat. Sip of hot water, please. Ah, the light head rush. I should be outside on a gray Delaware day in January, my back against a brick wall, hanging out with the stoners by the dumpsters, the boys with their stringy hair and the girls with their poufs, some guy in a acid-washed jean jacket asking me for a "cancer stick." Am I really wearing a letter jacket? Is someone quoting from Frankie Goes to Hollywood? What decade is this, anyway?
The cigarette, half-finished, is now extinguished. The cat food bowl has burn marks on it. I have returned the pack to its hiding place behind the envelopes in my desk.
But what about the quote at the top of this post?
I've been waking up in the middle of the night again, wide-eyed in that space between the close and opening of day, trying to sort out the true from the false, the real from the unreal. One a.m., two a.m., three a.m.: these are the most desperate lonely times when thoughts refuse to be corralled. After tossing around a bit last night, I got out of bed around 2:45. I walked downstairs in the dark with my faithful feline companions, did the usual Facebook thing. I responded to my partner's Round Robin write and tackled today's prompt, which was Last night, verging on sleep ...
Last night, verging on sleep, I closed my book, The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis (after taking a break from it, I've picked it up again). I was tired but my body was unsettled and I had a feeling that I would be up, would be crouched over my little screen or tapping away at the iPhone at some obscene hour. The best thing for insomnia is to stay away from screens of any sort, to grab a book or a magazine and read in some relatively low-lit place until sleep overtakes you. But the screens are too tempting sometimes.
Insomnia is boring and insomniacs are dullards, their minds fried by too little sleep, their anxieties focused on what will happen in the middle of the night, the flip flop, the ceiling stare, the wandering mind. My last knock-down, drag-out with insomnia lasted months and was a byproduct of underlying life issues. And it went away. The insomnia went away.
The bitch may be back, but I still eventually returned to bed. I wedged myself between my son and the edge. I warmed myself against him. When we woke up this morning, both of us still trying to separate the true from the false, to wipe the dreams clear with daylight, he said, "Mom, tell me about when you were a kid."
I'm glad he didn't ask at night, when all I could give him would be sad half-truths, the bad bits. Instead, I left those out. I talked of the days when my mother and I lived in Hollywood Beach and had four cats, two birds, two rabbits, a dog, and a gerbil. I talked about the hamster my grandmother gave me, Happy Easter, and how I would make him squeeze through the smallest apertures possible. I talked about the time Liz had kittens in a bureau drawer, how they were orange tabbies. "Orange? Like my favorite color?" he asked.
But the best part was telling him about the tents I used to make in the backyard, four blankets pinned to a clothesline, a quilt for a floor. I spent half my summer nights out there, alone or with friends, reading by flashlight, letting the dampness of the night cover my sleeping bag. In the morning, I'd wake up to a dewy world. Inside, pancakes awaited, delivered to the table by my mother as my grandfather sat in the living room in a cloud of smoke.
The cigarettes remind me. It all feels so very long ago. The memory is washed out like an old photograph, part of it has burned away, and I choose to focus on the good, the stars above the yard, the safety in the dark, the old man in his wood shop working the lathe, a Pall Mall dangling from his thin lips, lost in the dust and the ash and the smoke, occupied for the moment. Real as anything.
Image: Still life with cancer stick.
Most of the memories I told the boy this morning come from a time that I would describe as being one of the worst in my childhood, when we moved in with my grandfather after my grandmother's death. It's refreshing to remember the good stuff, a reminder that life is all mixed up.
Some of this is from the prompt mentioned.
Goodbye girl
It made me wonder what the big deal was, why I waited so long to just get on a fucking bike. My husband and I went on a bike tour when we were first dating -- though I didn't actually bike more than half an hour or so -- so it's not like I haven't been on a bike in adulthood. But it wasn't comfortable. I was still nervous. I wasn't ready.
This is what I have to admit and hate to admit: bike as symbol. I am so tired of carrying around these symbols, these heavy burdens of a non-childhood. What do children do? They learn how to ride bikes. They have bikes. They take the minor risk that getting up on two wheels entails for a taste of freedom, for the feeling of wind and legs pumping and sweat. I wasn't a child who liked to balance, to fly along on my own (much like my son, but through patient instruction with his dad, he's getting there). I could point to the tense learning sessions with my mother, whose temper was short. She was impatient and gave up as easily on me as I gave up on the bike. But my mother's teaching techniques are not the issue here.
Bike riding attached me to a stage of childhood I wasn't ready to leave. Because I never experienced it.
Sometimes to know that something is true, you have to write it or say it and then let the feelings emerge. I've been thinking about this for a few days now, have talked to my husband about it. On some levels, it feels ridiculous, the idea of not being able to do something as simple as get on a bike with confidence based on now-obscure history. It feels stupid, too, or weak. But I write it and it makes me cry and I know it is true.
An acquaintance recently (and repeatedly) called me "sweet." This is the female equivalent of being a nice guy. It's bland and simple and erases any number of my darker finer qualities. It's the kind of thing you say to someone when they are a little boring and clean. Too clean. Scrubbed clean. When I challenged him, this person pointed to my girlishness, among other things. Girlish is not how I think of myself, but I also see how trapped I am at different ages, how my past has been a roadblock. When it comes to certain experiences, I am totally a girl, from preschooler to teenager. I don't enjoy being a girl, trapped in helplessness, a passenger in my own life.
When I rode that bike this morning, I felt like an adult finally accomplishing a child's task. The bike has become a bike, the ride something that I just do. I'm sure that there will be some challenges as I take on traffic and hills, as my rides get longer, but its symbolism has been almost scrubbed clean.
I wonder as I take on my various fears and face those blocks if this will be the case with everything. Will I suddenly become a confident driver? Will social situations become easier? Will my tolerance for looking like a moron shoot up so that I attempt the things I have not yet perfected, the things I know I'll look stupid doing? I'm not expecting a personality change, but I do hope for a grownup attitude, the freeing of the girl.
She's not really alive, you know. She lives in the 1970s with her long hippie hair and her quick temper and her summer tan. She reads and reads and sits in the air conditioning by herself. She wants to punch you but she's afraid to, and that will be her last action as she is set free, her fists at the ready, ready to take down every person who told her that she wasn't good enough to live, that she was only good for one thing, that what she wanted didn't count, that she should be quiet and take it.
What she wanted was eternal life. She wanted to stay trapped forever until she got it right. Together that's where we are right now, me and the girl. She's sullen. When she gets angry she bites her tongue. She's lonely. I hold out my hand and she doesn't look at me.
Eventually she will take it. "Let me get you out of here," I'll tell her. And she will smile as she reaches for me and disintegrates into light.
Image: Me on the new bike (before the seat adjustment).
Red
Primary colors are unambiguous, unadulterated, pure. When I was a child, my favorite color was red, until the world began to enter my mind. Then my favorite color became maroon, or burgundy, the color of blood after it dries on the t-shirt, on the towel, on the sidewalk.
I was a dramatic kid, took acting lessons and went to drama camp. That all faded away as adolescence with its neglect and late nights and pursuit of boys and beer came in. The last drama camp I attended included lots of song and dance and I remember singing in a circle, each of us with a line about our favorite color, looping it into the rainbow, me singing way too low for a twelve-year-old : burgundy in the rainbow. Ah, the melodrama, me singing low and deep and too seriously about the color of spilled blood.
People like to ask children their favorite things. Sometimes they ask adults this, too, their favorite dish, their favorite place to go on vacation, their favorite television show. My five-year-old son has problems committing to favorites when pressed. There are too many nuances, too many variables. But he does have a favorite color: orange, the color of the flame, of the sky as the sun extinguishes itself in the bay, the color of pumpkins.
Committing to a color is easy at first. You know what you like. You only have so many choices. But then the rest of life marches past, the periwinkles, the variations of flesh tones, the espresso and eggplant. How can you choose?
I don’t do favorites. OK, I may have a favorite block in my favorite city (The 1700 block of Q Street NW in Washington, DC). Sometimes I have a favorite beer. I can list a handful of writers who are my favorites. But there are too many subtleties out there to hold tight to one thing and say that it is the one I prefer. I dress in blacks and greys. The room I sit in has shades of ocean green and earth-bound tan. My blood is scarlet, then burgundy, sometimes black. It is life in its infinite variety.
From a prompt, red, barely edited from the original. Last week's writing partner picked it as his favorite of my writes, so here it is, a little blog filler. More in-depth writing coming. Eventually.
Image by nahlinse.
Reconciliation
Rockville, Maryland, March 24, 2002
Kevin’s last day started with a predawn pantomime, a fluttering and flapping of his thin-boned arms, his blue eyes serious as he gestured to his throat and chest: I can’t breathe.
My boyfriend Stephen and I were keeping vigil in his hospice room, taking over that night for my mother and Kevin’s 24-year-old son Ian. The cots were rigid, thin, like subpar stretchers but low to the floor. We would periodically awaken to the creak of the door as the night nurse checked on Kevin, the widening wedge of light from the hallway prying our eyes open.
Hospitals and hospices are yellow-tinged at night, their lights low, the rectangles of frosted glass over the bed or ceiling fluorescents dimmed just enough to give the nurses light to pierce a vein. The effect is barroom dingy and sordid, the supine patients the barflies, the nurses cocktail waitresses plying pharmaceuticals and sympathy. Still, in the dim glow of the light over the bed Kevin looked at least a decade younger than his 55 years. His skin retained its tanned, smooth quality and his hair was still chestnut brown without a trace of grey. It was his weight that gave him away, that and the tubes, the hissing oxygen tank. After nine years with the terminal bone marrow disease myelofibrosis, after almost seven months in and out of the critical care unit at Georgetown University Hospital, Kevin’s five foot ten frame had melted down to 86 pounds.
With his tracheostomy speaking valve removed, Kevin could not talk, but his distress was clear. I groggily rushed to get help. Kevin again fluttered his arms, too earthbound to be wings, too light to be useful, at the nurse. Thinking a change of position would take the pressure off his fluid-filled lungs, she and I turned him on his side. She administered a bolus of morphine through his IV.
Kevin’s body slumped. His eyes closed and his breathing took on an autonomic quality. It was as though she had flipped a switch. Kevin’s panicked pantomime was his last conscious act.
“You’d better call your mother,” the nurse told me. “There’s been a change.” It was 4:15 a.m., March 24, 2002. Kevin was dying of untreated pneumonia.
Wilmington, Delaware, 1984
Kevin Sheehan, poet, philosopher, carpenter, moved down the street from my mother and me in late March. Pale pink cherry blossoms feathered the tree out front. April’s candy-colored tulips foretold of May’s riotous azaleas. My mother invited our attractive new neighbor over for dinner, plied him with Szechuan chicken, coarse red wine, and talk of the Romantic poets. I was fourteen, a high school freshman, a volleyball cheerleader and devotee of German class, obsessed with the pop groups Duran Duran, Wham!, and Haircut 100.
He entered our lives like an explosion, tossed our world this way and that. That first dinner led to more. Kevin objected to my teen angst, my silence at the table, so my mother started cooking meals in our kitchen to bring to his house every night, always leaving me a plate. Most weekends I abandoned Wilmington to go to my grandfather’s place in Maryland, where I stayed in the Little House, an adjacent summer cottage that had no heat, plumbing, or phone line. My grandfather removed his prosthetic foot and hearing aids at night, leaving me completely unsupervised. I embraced the blurrying effects of alcohol, raided my grandfather’s liquor cabinet (the Johnny Walker Red, the sour Paul Masson wine) or siphoned my mother’s gin into a jar to bring with me.
That summer I met a 20-year-old college student who liked to visit after midnight. I learned to anticipate his knocks on the door as I watched Kung Fu reruns in the dark and yearned for his kisses with their heady taste of Budweiser and pot.
By September, my wardrobe darkened to black with fluorescent accents, safety pins dangling from my ears, I had discovered the saving power of punk music. At Kevin’s house he and my mother ate by candlelight, drank bottles of Sangre de Toro or gin and tonics, light on the ice. They talked Keats or Nietzsche over homemade French fries and garlicky chicken. At home I poured slugs of amaretto, made bitter screwdrivers, the orange juice bleached pale by vodka. I walked the streets in the dark, smoking clove cigarettes, my Walkman blasting the Dead Kennedys.
Washington, DC, March 21, 2002
“But I’m only 55 years old,” he cried out. “I’m not ready to die!”
Kevin spoke from his bed in the critical care unit, a thin thing, all stretched skin and solid bone, solid from the myelofibrosis.
With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow fills in with scar tissue, becoming fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in the body’s last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. The blood these organs make is inefficient, practically useless, the cells misshapen and immature. Already overloaded with the task of filtering out the extra white blood cells the body produces as part of the disease, gorged with their own blood-making, the liver and spleen swell dramatically.
People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage the disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell or bone marrow transplant, which are both dicey bets. If you have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will cease to work.
Myelofibrosis was killing Kevin in its indirect way. It dodged the blame, pointed its finger at the hospital, the pneumonia, the fact that Kevin’s body had stopped digesting the food that was coming to his stomach via a surgically-installed tube.
Delaware and Maryland, 1984-2002
This is what happened during my mother and Kevin’s 18-year relationship: Thirteen moves, three mortgages, one bankruptcy and foreclosure. Scores of fights. My move to the Little House at fifteen when my mother bought a one-bedroom house down the street. My labor in the Little House at sixteen which resulted in one stillborn child. My return to the Little House a week after the stillbirth. Four lousy cars. One new car totaled. One new car driven into the ground. Four dogs come and gone. A summer of no communication between me and them. One (empty) refusal to attend my first wedding. One spleen out. At least three breakups. One Ph.D. completed by Kevin at the midpoint of his illness. Dozens of philosophical conversations between the three of us over red wine, candlelit, intense, perfect. Laughter – at Kevin’s jokes or our shared ones -- the biting wit, the piercing eye. Seven hospitalizations.
Maryland and Delaware, 1992
The biggest fight I remember took place right before I left the East Coast for graduate school in Illinois, only months before Kevin was diagnosed. It was a fight that stretched out over a day, with deceptive lulls, lacunae of calm. There was a truck ride along a ribbon of asphalt, the tall green corn of an Eastern Shore August tunneling us in, and the yelling, about what I no longer remember. “Get out!” Kevin screamed at my mother as he pulled off the road. She slipped out the door, squawking all the while. As I slipped along after her, Kevin said, “You don’t have to go, Jen.”
“Why would she want to stay here? You’re not her father!” my mother screamed, a moment that clicked a switch inside of me: like I needed a father? Had she been looking for one?
I followed my loyalty out of the truck.
That night, back in Wilmington, my mother and I ordered a black olive pizza. Kevin, who was not planning on eating pizza, walked into the kitchen as we were opening the box. He hated black olives. Our choice was a choice against him (you were either for or against Kevin: there were no other interpretations). Spit flew. He flung a plain yogurt container across the kitchen where it exploded, heavy and white, against the oak cabinets. More screaming, my mother’s hysterical rush into the night, the dog chasing after her.
Kevin looked at me icily over the banister as he walked upstairs, his belly swollen, his spleen secretly filtering out excess white blood cells, heavy with blood-making.
“This only happens when you’re here. You cause these things.”
“No. No, I don’t.”
I was defiant. I knew he spoke lies. But a lifetime of blame comes home to roost at some point.
Washington, DC 2001 - 2002
In early September 2001, almost nine years after his diagnosis, Kevin checked into Georgetown University Hospital for shortness of breath. His pleural cavity, the space that houses the lungs, was filling with fluid.
I imagined the sharp straw they used to drain the fluid out, thin, metallic, pointed like a quill at one end, the flow of a liquid as viscous as a milkshake, as red as blood. One of the effects of end-stage myelofibrosis is a low platelet count, which can cause difficulty clotting. The internal puncture wound from the drain kept bleeding. Blood drizzled and oozed. It pooled in his pleural cavity before finally solidifying into a gelatinous mass. The mass interfered with his ability to breathe. It had to come out.
September that year was all clear blue skies and fluffy clouds, superior, deceptive mornings of pure sunshine. On September 11th, after being belatedly evacuated from the U.S. Senate office building where I worked as a librarian (the march home with other federal and nonprofit workers, the quiet skies and scary rumors, the unreality of it all), I took my unexpected afternoon off to visit Kevin in his hospital room. Stephen and I walked from our Adams Morgan apartment to Georgetown, a walk I would repeat countless times over the next several months. It was a liminal moment, the time of change. It was one of Kevin’s last afternoons of relative normalcy.
This is what happened to Kevin in seven months of hospitalization: Three thoracic surgeries to remove blood clots. One unnecessary hernia operation that landed him on a ventilator (aka respirator) for the first time. Several emergency intubations, a procedure that takes place when one’s oxygen levels fall precipitously and medical personnel force a breathing tube hooked to a ventilator into one’s lungs. One intubation-scarred epiglottis that let food and liquid enter his compromised lungs, making them more prone to infection. Two failed swallowing tests. Installation of a tube that went directly from his stomach through his abdomen to a drip bag of nutrient-rich sludge, Kevin’s “food.” Ten days of almost-fatal bleeding. Two expensive doses of blood Factor VII to stop the bleeding. Three tracheostomies. Numerous bouts of pneumonia. One nasty bedsore that went down to his tailbone. Endless bags of fentanyl, of hardcore antibiotics, of morphine. Several triumphant February walks around the critical care unit, Kevin gripping a walker, all 86 pounds of him getting along on pure will.
We watched over him, my mother and me, were at the hospital together almost every day for six and a half months. When she got the flu, when she moved from her apartment to a condominium, when she had to complete something on deadline, I took on her role at the sickbed. After Kevin emerged from a drug-induced coma, when the bleeding had stopped, he talked of angels and devils, the murk of being subdued by drugs, by the ventilator, how my mother and I appeared as saviors in the darkness.
He apologized.
I continued to keep watch. I listened. Sometimes I read to him. One afternoon a favorite nurse talked about an unnamed patient who didn’t get visitors: “That’s what happens when you’re not nice to people in your life.” If you only knew, I thought.
I was there because I cared. I was there because I wanted to help. But I was also there to redeem myself, to erase my own sins, for being the kind of person parents abandon and people are cruel to, for not being able to love the baby I gave birth to when I was sixteen.
Here, with Kevin trapped in the hospital, I could show my goodness. I could show him his goodness, that even those who do bad things deserve to be treated as human beings. It was absolution for both of us, hope in life, in the power of human beings to forgive and be made new.
Rockville, Maryland, March 24, 2002
My mother woke quickly to my call, roused Ian with a shoulder tap. They rushed without panic in the manner of people used to medical emergencies, pulled on yesterday’s clothes in the dark and splashed cold water on their faces. Casey House Hospice was in Rockville, Maryland, about 15 miles away from my mother’s Takoma Park condominium, a journey from one set of desperate concrete strip malls to another, up Georgia Avenue past the bodegas and Chinese grocers to the rolling greenery of the distant Washington, DC suburbs. In good traffic the trip took about 40 minutes, a buffer zone between my mother’s life and what remained of Kevin’s.
The morning was cool. Optimistic. Spring coaxed green out of brown earth and black branches. Forsythia bushes flamed across the landscape and daffodils sprung from dampened ground. A few hours after my mother and Ian arrived, Joe, Kevin’s closest brother, drove in from his hotel. We began our death watch.
The day before, the hospice minister, an Episcopalian, had visited Kevin. Stephen, Ian and I were there, sitting in the dusty afternoon, quiet under the oxygen hiss. Kevin had something to confess and he wanted us to witness it. He told of something bad he had done, bad enough to send him to hell. The minister was sympathetic and kind, told Kevin that he was not damned.
“Does that sound ok, guys?” Kevin turned his head to face us, without irony, sincere. We reassured him.
Each of us dies an individual. Some people go on the off flutter of the heart, the sudden starburst in the brain. Others may slip into a coma and then just stop breathing. Kevin went out slowly. Six of us – me, my mother, Stephen, Ian, and Joe, sat in the room. Woody, Kevin’s golden retriever, panted on the slick floor. We watched Kevin’s chest rise and fall, rhythmic, machine-like. His jaw was slack, the mossy tombstones of his teeth showing just under the lips, and with each intake of breath his mouth opened, only to drop again on the exhale.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The hiss of the oxygen tank. Sickness has a smell, a kind of fecundity, the triumph of bacteria, rich and thick. The room smelled of mucus and rubbing alcohol, of pneumonia and plastic. We sat and watched Kevin breathe. We wondered how long dying could take. We looked out the window at the incongruous spring-in-the-country scene. We excused ourselves to escape into life, to go for a walk, to read a magazine in the mauve and grey common room.
You might imagine that hospices are full of ancient people, wrinkled sickly husks, people who have had opportunities to live full and hopefully happy lives. The only other patient I remember was a woman who couldn’t have been past her thirties. She sat in her room with the door open, watching television in her hospital gown, the remote in her pale hand. A layer of fuzz covered her scalp, the aftereffects, I assumed, of a failed chemotherapy regime. Most people went to Casey House Hospice because they required serious medical attention to be comfortable: pumped-in oxygen, help in being turned, an IV, a catheter. Kevin, who could barely move and was dependent on oxygen and constant pain relief, fit into this category. This woman must have as well. But she looked so young, so alive and alone, free of tubes, with the enviable ability to move on her own power.
Back in the room. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The slack jaw, the shock of brown hair, the fluttering of Kevin’s heart underneath his solid thin bones. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Outside, robins tore into earthworms, tulips inched towards the sun. A spring breeze, hopeful, but with a touch of winter, pulled through the soft green new leaves. We didn’t speak. We watched. We wondered how long it would take. He took another gulp of air, his chest swelling, before he discarded it again.
Midday, Stephen and I escaped to get lunch for the family. We left the hot heavy air of the hospice and leapt into the car. The outskirts of Montgomery County were unfamiliar, the high and wide malls with their box stores, the restaurants with heavy meat and fried food. We drove somewhat randomly, would stop and look at menus and report back, finally bringing back bags laden with fat-crisp food, comforting and rich.
The room hissed. Kevin breathed low and wet through the pneumonia. Each member of the family took a break to eat in the common room, nibbled at the French fries or the fried chicken or the veggie burgers with cheese. We ate without tasting, ate because we had to, because that’s what the living do. Back in the room, the rhythm slowed, but the pattern remained the same.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The fluttering was fainter, Kevin’s heart still hard at work, the lungs doing their duty, slower now. Slower.
At 3:00 p.m., I went outside to call Martha, an old college friend, someone who knew the stories about Kevin, knew his effect on my life. The expansiveness of Kevin’s last hospitalization was almost impossible to convey. How could I explain the deathbed, his relentless heart and lungs? Typically, Martha kept on talking and talking. I could have left the phone on the path and gone back in, I could have just hung up or claimed a low battery. Instead, I paced. I listened to the swish of car tires on the interstate. I looked back at the window. I stepped on the cracks and watched a line of ants invade the grass. Finally, I cut her off mid-sentence. “I really have to get back to the room.”
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
We were tired with Kevin’s effort, with the winding down, almost bored with it. His body clung to life. The pneumonia had taken over his lungs, it was slowing down his heart, the two organs were working together as always, going out as a pair. The hiss of the oxygen. The rise and fall of his chest. The crazy tappings of his heart. Outside, the sunlight thinned and the bushes shivered with afternoon’s end.
Kevin took a deep breath. His heart gave a feeble beat. He exhaled. My mother gestured to his chest, Woody barked, and we clung to each other, my mother, Ian, Stephen and me, while Joe looked on.
Kevin went out in a flash of light, my mother told us. After the flash, she had a vision of him walking along a riverbank, his old collie Augie by his side.
That night I thought back to the afternoon that I had massaged Kevin’s scalp. His skin was thin as vellum, his hair hadn’t been washed in weeks. Kevin closed his eyes contentedly, like a cat in the sun, as I worked my fingers through his unkempt hair and palpitated his forehead. Why couldn’t I have done more of that? More handholding, more touch? Hospitals are impersonal anonymous places. Most of the touch he received was the medical kind, invasive, bloody, painful. I wished I had massaged him more, had held his hand more. It was all too late now. His body was heading for ashes.
I woke at 2 a.m. to the feeling of Kevin’s hand upon mine, his presence in the room. “You were there for me, and that was enough,” he told me. “Thank you.”
I went back to sleep.
A version of the personal essay I wrote for my creative nonfiction class (edited version added Sunday afternoon). If you got through all 3300 words of it, I thank you.
The stepchild
I spent so much time at my best friend Maureen's house that her mother, Meredith, called me her stepchild. Meredith was tireless, a blur of movement. When she wasn't at work, she was making dinner or doing the dishes or gardening or hovering over Maur and me as we baked a cake. Their house, a boxy Colonial in a small Maryland Eastern Shore town, was a work in progress. Meredith repaired walls, restored furniture. She painted. She waxed the floors. I don't remember her sitting in the TV room watching a show or reading a book on their expansive porch. There was no time.
Meredith's face was long and smooth. She had thin lips and auburn hair styled in a poufy permanent. Her eyes were unreadable, glossy and cool whether she was happy or teasing or angry. She was not one to hold her tongue. A self-taught artist, she preferred to paint winter landscapes, liked the simple beauty of the naked trees, their limbs chafed by cold, their bark furrowed and complex. The bone-bare limbs of a tree in winter remind me of her, of the oil painting in the kitchen, a tree's dark silhouette against a grey sky.
She grew up on a farm in post-Depression Alabama. I imagined cotton fields and sticky summers, a pre-Technicolor landscape, the women in house dresses and aprons grey from too many washings, the men in straw hats. Everyone spoke with a syrupy drawl, though Meredith's accent was sharp, like the smell of crushed ginkgo berries. She told us stories of poverty and farm life. The only detail that stuck with me is that her family used corn husks for toilet paper, probably in an outhouse with a crescent moon carved into a door, a stack of husks next to the seat. It was best when the corn was still green, pliable and fresh, but people who use corn husks for toilet paper take what they can get.
From third through ninth grades, I slept over at Maureen's house at least once a month and spent many post-school afternoons hanging out there. We walked down to the corner store for Dixie cups, flung ourselves off the backyard tire swing into piles of leaves, annoyed her older sister Karen with our Three Stooges fake snores. In the early years, Maureen and I danced around the spacious living room to Goofy Gold, with songs like Transfusion and Mr. Custer, her younger brother tagging along (later it was Prince and Duran Duran, the brother supine on a couch in the den, a wet washcloth plastered across his temple, the television humming in the background. He spent most of his early adolescence in this position.). The living room flowed into the dining room, with a cabinet stereo and a gravity heat register in the corner by the stairs. Maureen and Karen dried their hair over the grate every night, tipped their heads upside down into the heat and let it lift the strands.
I learned how to properly hold a fork at Maureen’s house. I regularly gorged on junk food there, too, barbecue-flavored potato chips, cheese curls that I would let melt in my mouth, smoky Slim Jims. For a kid from a health food household, it was the stuff that dreams are made of. I played endless Atari games and savored leisurely baths in the old-fashioned tub on the second floor. The weekend my mother decided to kick my stepfather out, I was at Maureen’s, a weekend I remember as being hazy with worry about what was to come. My first cigarette was in the woods out back, I had my first joint on the side porch, and heard Madonna for the first time in Maur’s third story room.
Then, in the spring of 1984, my mother met Kevin. I quickly became peripheral to her life. By that summer, I spent most weekends at Maur's or my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach, a small community on the Elk River. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes Maureen came for a visit. We slept in the Little House, an unheated guest cottage without plumbing or a telephone line about 20 feet from the main building. My grandfather, who had been in an industrial fire in the mid-1960s, was almost deaf. He had a prosthetic foot that he removed at night at the same time that he switched off his hearing aids. Maur and I were completely unsupervised.
We did what many rebellious fourteen- and fifteen-year olds would do if given the chance: siphoned liquor from my mother and grandfather's supplies, (I can’t smell whiskey and Coke without being immediately brought back to that mildewy house, to the puking and sneaking and the excitement), stayed out all night, brought older guys back. Stole my grandfather’s car.
Well, not exactly stole. That late spring night in 1985 we had been drinking, me much more than her. Maureen had recently gotten her learner’s permit. I cajoled her into taking the car, actually an old loaner from the dealer while my grandfather's was being repaired, down to the river. Maureen wasn't sure it was a good idea, but I pushed her until she agreed. It was less than a mile’s drive along quiet neighborhood streets. What could go wrong? When we were almost to the beach, almost home free, she noticed that the driver's side door was slightly ajar. As she moved to close it, she accidentally turned the steering wheel sharply to the right. The car tumbled into Mr. Polke's yard, scraping against the decorative log border. The impact loosened the exhaust.
That's when things got complicated. My erstwhile boyfriend, D, who was dating someone else and usually showed up at the Little House after midnight, drove by shortly after it happened. He stopped to help and Mr. Polke, who had come running out of his house when he heard the commotion, became convinced that D had run Maureen off the road. Concerned for our safety, Mr. Polke backed the unmuffled car carefully out of his yard (the tire tracks! the logs askew!) and drove us back to the house. And then – my memory may be wrong here, pickled from too many nights of Johnny Walker Red chased with Budweiser – Maureen went out with another friend for most of the night. I sat up drinking, alone, hysterical. It was getting light when Maur finally returned. I was still awake.
A few hours later, me bleary-eyed, Maureen half-asleep, we told my grandfather the story, minus the drunkenness. It was an awkward conversation that started as all conversations with him did, with a pantomime to turn on his hearing aids. He took the news stoically. Meredith, however, was livid. We had taken advantage of my grandfather's handicaps in addition to stealing his car. She made a special trip later that week to apologize to him and give me a scathing lecture. Maureen was forbidden to visit. We split the cost of the exhaust pipe repair. Sometimes we talked on the phone. But the friendship was over.
Of course, my mother was angry, too. She probably made a venomous call to my father, see what I have to deal with in your absence, the same call she made when she returned from Kevin's one evening to find me drinking. She screamed, she kvetched -- what to do with me -- but she didn't stop me from going to my grandfather's house. In fact, two months later she bought a small house down the street from his and I moved into the Little House permanently.
This could simply be a story of teenage hijinks, the ill-advised “borrowing" of a car, the stupid, relatively harmless accident, the appropriately strict parent. I see the aftermath as being another abandonment, a confirmation of my battered self image, an unsettling thing to happen at a critical moment. I was fifteen years old. I shouldn’t have been in a position to stay out until dawn, to drink my grandfather's whiskey and sour Paul Masson wine, to be spending the night with a 21-year-old man who was someone else's boyfriend. Bad things happened, I courted those things, and even when my parents figured out the extent of the trouble I got myself into, nothing changed. It was enough for decades of therapy and a lifetime of writing material. It's material I wish I didn't have.
Maureen and I diverged. It would have happened anyway, as it sometimes does with childhood friends in adolescence. One goes punk while the other embraces pop. One picks up a drug habit, the other becomes a straight edge convert. Hormones and peer groups do their damage. I was lost and I lost her, I lost her family. The few times I was with them as an adult – I was in her wedding several years ago, a nostalgic nod to a childhood promise – I was uncomfortable. “You turned out to be a good person,” Meredith told me a while back, after the struggles of adolescence were long over. She seemed surprised. I’m not sure if it is because of what she thought I had in me, or if she understood, years after the fact, what I was up against.
I wish I could stand before her, stark and bare, honest, and tell her how much I missed that time when her house was a safe place, where I could swing from a tire into a pile of leaves or play endless games of Space Invaders and forget the rest of my life. It was childhood and it was wonderful, until it crumbled. Meredith did what she had to do as a parent, but I wish she could have seen the trouble I was in. Maybe she would have reached out for me, would have helped me out of a situation I didn't understand. But she was as blind as the rest of the adults were around me, human, unaware. And so I went on living as though I was fully grown, alone, independent to a fault.
This is from a photo prompt, a picture of a streetlight and telephone pole. I looked at the photo and stared out the living room window at the bare branches of a neighbor's tree against the dawn sky. It brought Meredith (not her real name) to mind and the end of my friendship with Maureen (also not her real name; none of these are real names). I've tried to write about this before, but have been unable to make it work. Still a lot to unpack, like so much from those years. I'm not sure if I've succeeded in transforming it here.
Confidential to Maureen, if she is reading: My apologies if I have misrepresented anything.
Image by lovestruck. I'm having scanner issues, hence the many photos from other people.
Oh, baby
Sure, you may see a sweet little bundle of innocence, quiet for once (thank god), but what I see is a life-changer, a preverbal beast that will wake you up every two hours for the next two and a half years, that will still be coming into your bed five years later, tossing and turning with that cough that refuses to go away. Between his hacks and the exploring feet (depending on his position, thrust between your thighs, wedged into the small of your back, playing against the back of your neck) and that damn cat, you’ll never get a full night’s sleep again.
Whenever I hear that someone is having their first baby, Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N’Roses pops into my head. This is especially true for the older parents, the ones who have spent a decade or two sleeping in and going out to dinner whenever they want. Having a baby changes things and at first the change may not be so welcome. Here is this tiny dependent creature, so sweet (truly), who can’t really tell you what he or she wants yet demands you take care of all of his needs. “Demands:” it isn’t a fair word at all. Babies need us and sometimes that can be totally overwhelming, especially when you don’t get more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep for years and when you feel like you have no idea what you are doing.
Then there’s the way a baby can slam you into your past, the past that may be present anyway. When my son was born a little over five years ago, we lived on the East Coast, close to my mother and a four hour drive from my father. We had naive (and perhaps unfair) hopes that my mother would help with the baby. At the time, her life was a bit chaotic, as it was for most of my childhood. She was entangled in an unhealthy relationship with someone who had a serious substance abuse problem. This person – let's call him Ricky, the addict with the little boy's name – had access to her car even though he was unlicensed. He brought strange characters into her house. He drove her around town on scrap metal hunts, adventures in Baltimore's underbelly, and borrowed money from her when his ran out. The night I went into labor, he had "borrowed" her car. Our plans for her to help that first week were scrapped as she tried to locate her car and dealt with other Ricky-related problems.
Being abandoned by my mother at a critical moment was a familiar feeling. Having a tiny being that depended on me when I felt so incompetent and unworthy didn't help. The switch from a life of controlling my own time and being out in the world independently to being on baby time and hardly ever leaving his side was a difficult one. Meanwhile, the boy didn’t sleep in general or at all without a warm presence beside him in the bed. My mother problems, my “abandonment issues” were kicking me in the ass. Welcome to the jungle . . .
We adjust. We find our way as parents. Still, I can’t look at a picture of a baby without remembering my son's first year and wishing I could do it all over again with a clear mind, letting the baby be a baby and me be a mother, competent and necessary.
The photo was the prompt. Jane Underwood of the Writing Salon is the photographer.
From what I remember
The sky was leaf and branch. Mayapples sprung out of a thick mulch of dead leaf and rotten wood. Beams of sunlight broke through to highlight a tree, a cave made of briars, a pile of animal scat. The path crumbled at each footstep, releasing the wet scent of autumn, the stillness of winter, the deceit of spring. A woodpecker harassed a poplar trunk while robins and chickadees chorused, their trills high-pitched and showy.
Imagination lived: this was a swimming hole; the place the village women took their washing; a natural bath fed by a stream. Spring rains overflowed it with water clean enough to drink. A walk with a plastic bag stuffed with fresh clothes and a sturdy towel, the brace of water that held the memory of ice, cloying red clay against bare skin. Damp, mineral-laden earth spiced the air, made it hard to breathe.
Closed eyes in dappled sunlight. Fluttering darkness. Toes pressed into mud. First he was a shadow, then a silent moment, finally, a heavy weight.
Trust only what you can see, what you can gnaw or scratch, the smell of right now.
Image by stevebkennedy
Hidden in plain sight
Visiting the snow, the long drive, the feeling of dampened jeans and chilled hands, this is what he thinks about as he hides in the bushes by his elementary school. His mother has dropped him off early for afternoon kindergarten and he doesn't know any of the other children. He is scared. He waits for the bell.
Maryland's Eastern Shore, the mid-1970s
Her classmate comes closer. The girl presses her hands against the blacktop, just in case. Her cheeks flush. Slow and deliberate, the boy rounds the corner. Her heart is fluttering. There are wings in her chest, delicate, the feathers fine and white, struggling to lift her up.
“Goose!” he shouts as he taps her barrette. She thrusts herself up, but he is fast, too fast. He makes it back to her place before she does. She feels foolish, ashamed of her performance. Now it is her turn. She will have to go through it all over again.
East Bay, 2010
The boy lines up with the other children to go to the cafeteria. He is fascinated by this room in almost the same way he is fascinated by minotaurs and werewolves. It is big and epic with unknown corners and secret powers. The space is dark, as dark, he imagines, as a torch-lit labyrinth. The other kids, too many, 20, 40, 60 of them, are unpredictable. They ask him questions that he ignores. Their voices echo around the space until they blend together, a constant mumble, nothing to do with him. He concentrates on the small, immediate things, finding a seat, pulling his lunchbox zipper open to get to the confounding containers inside.
There are fans hanging from the ceiling. He carefully counts them out: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8. Eight. He counts again. He thinks about what will happen when someone turns them on. The blades will whir and whir. Their strength will pull him from his seat. They will chop him to a million pieces. He imagines tying his legs into a knot around the table leg or grasping his seat as tight as he can against the pull. He practices his grip. The fans are never on. This both relieves and worries him. He knows he must keep watch.
****
This post is for the quiet children, observant and quick inside their heads, but slow when it comes to speaking, the ones who are overwhelmed by crowds and noise, who are sometimes afraid to tell grownups about their fears. It is for the perfectionist children, too, anxious, wanting everything to be right on the first try, who don't want to be observed while they figure things out. Really, it's for my son, beautiful, smart, and incredibly imaginative, hidden in plain sight.
I want life to be easy for him. I want him to have fun playing games, to feel free and loose when he draws or forms letters. I want him to sail through the crowd, to tell jokes to the classroom just like he does at home. I want him to regale everyone with his stories and silly rhymes and to let go of his anxiety about getting things just right. But those things aren't easy for him. They weren't (and aren't) easy for me or his father.
So. I promise to support him, to not try to make him into something he's not, to gently help him push him through when necessary. Because I was a child once, too. Because I want him to be happy with who he is. And because I know how hard it can be to feel comfortable in the world.
Top image of San Gabriel mountains by danorth1.
Middle image: Me, in kindergarten.
Bottom image: The boy in plain sight, playing with the saber tooth cat sculpture on the UC-Berkeley campus.
All stories based on actual experiences. We did reassure the boy that the fans wouldn't pull him up to ceiling or chop him into a million pieces.
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.
Breaking the chain
In the midst of our trip to New Jersey to visit my father and stepmother (the long flights, the Christmas presents, the one-sided conversations), I realized that I was no longer angry with them. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, a kind of lightness or a shifting of a burden. Of course, this new feeling didn’t save me from the usual visit hangover, a subtle thwack to my equilibrium. My emotions always need time to settle after these visits, though I've gotten better at recognizing that over the years.
It is possible to let go of anger without shedding sadness and guilt and that's where I am today, a little sad and perpetually guilty, replaying conversations from the trip and wondering what to make of them, how to fit them into my new vantage. My stepmother told a story of a breakfast in Bryn Mawr when I was nine or so, a scene at the diner with gleaming chrome and murals of 1940s college scenes on the walls. Apparently I had cut into my waffle with too much force and my plate flew onto the floor. As it shattered, so I did I, started to cry while they tried to comfort me. I didn't remember a thing about it, but I do remember being constantly on edge during my visits with my father, on alert, my guard up. It took very little to shake up my practiced calm.
So what can you do? For the first nine years of my life, my father wasn’t always reliable. He was intermittently present (despite some rosy memories on my stepmother’s part; she’s an optimist and my father’s protector and she wasn't around then anyway). His child support payments were regular, his love was constant, though often from a distance. Everything else shifted around. And then, in adolescence, he failed me. They failed me. How can you tell someone that they can’t make up for the first nine years? Or that maybe they aren’t as safe as they think they are?
You don’t. So I won’t. All I can do is approach them warily, be mindful of the gaps in our experiences, acknowledge their efforts and their love, see how blind the compassionate can be and hope to keep my own sight.
But the guilt, the uncontainable guilt. It's about not being good enough, ever, then and now, and it carries over in ways that can be paralyzing. Once again I'm left with the idea that I still have a lot of work to do before I forgive myself. How do you let go of the feeling of being wrong-hearted from birth?
I have no idea how to go about it. I am open to ideas, though. Suggestions are welcome.
Image: My father, mother, and me, Easter 1971. I know that by writing this, putting it out there on the Internet, I take risks. So they might read it. If it would make a difference in what we talk about, wonderful. If not, well, at least they are reading. And I'm sure they have their own ideas about the past. Perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps.
As for the song, it's going through my mind and feels appropriate in some way.
I carry the heavy water
People tell me that they would like to know more about my mother. Yes, she really wanted to be a horse when she grew up. She writes poetry, makes pots, gathers detritus for ornament. She put herself through school when I was small, owned a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay, was involved with men who were interesting in divergent ways. In a neighborhood of tight short grass, she let her front yard become a meadow and spent one carless year getting around on a moped. She has always been left-leaning, was even briefly a Communist in the early 1970s. When I was a teenager we would remove real estate signs from former corn and soybean fields in a vain protest against development, would fishtail down country roads with these huge signs sticking out of the back of her battered 1973 Corolla station wagon. Other times, I would roll my eyes when she pulled over at the sight of mayapples in the woods. Fuming in the passenger seat, worried that someone I knew might see us, I would wait for her to dig up a few plants for her shady backyard. After my stepfather moved out of the house, Mom and I traced the outlines of our celebratory forms on the walls of his workout room, poses of joy and freedom, and shared a laugh at imagining how the drawings would mystify him. He wouldn't have known happiness even if he was bench-pressing it, but we understood: happiness was being on the run.
She was an unconventional parent, loving when she wasn't blinded by circumstance or her own sadness, and supportive when she wasn't worried that I would disappear into an unsuitable life. But she also had a fiery temper and a tendency to neglect. Our past together comes in shades of grey, from the light mist of early morning fog to the dark moment before your eyes adjust to the blackout. Would I have chosen a stable, boring parent instead of her? No. After being out of her house for twenty-five years, long independent from her moods and moves, it's easier to say that. I've written through most of the pain, have decided to show the scars of my childhood to the light.
Without those experiences, without my mother, would I be writing today? Is there value in being scarred, in the bittersweet ache of having survived relatively intact? I have forgiven my mother. I still work on forgiving my father. But the largest task is grappling with the effects of their behavior. Sometimes that old pain of abandonment feels a part of me, impossible to escape, something that flows through my veins and arteries and regenerates in my marrow, the cell memory of neglect.
I'm working on it, I'm writing it out. I'm giving it a voice. And slowly, slowly, it's working.
The scars sparkle like broken glass. The light makes them golden, supple, gives them a hue that I never appreciated in the dark. These are who I am, who my mother and I were, what we were capable of, and I’m here, I’m here, I float above the earth. I’ve known life and death. I carry the guilt, I carry the heavy water. I shine with the brilliance of knowledge of the grave.
Image: My mother and me, December 1982. Isn't being thirteen with braces just wonderful?
Most of this is from a recent prompt, Gold.
Wild horses
Summers when I was a little girl we would drive past the horse farms owned by the Duponts, would pull our rusty Datsun over to the side of the road and tiptoe up to the fences, holding hidden handfuls of Dominos sugar cubes. Two cubes in each flattened palm, we would wait for the horses to whinny and walk over, for their soft lips to graze our hands as they picked up the sugar.
The memory is faded now. I hold the fact of it rather than any sensation, and what I see are long grasses and dark, tall fences, a blue sky with clouds raked across it, the vague sense that we were getting away with something.
Image by Jane Underwood. The image was the prompt.
The low spark of a high-heeled boy
Every day at preschool, my son dresses up in costume. It might be as basic as a police officer hat. Sometimes he adds bat wings or an elephant nose. At home he puts on his batboy costume and flaps his wings as he takes flight in the living room. Playing with the concept of name and identity, he uses aliases at our Music Together classes. The alias used to change weekly depending on his book-obsession of the moment -- Art Dog, Mrs. Grizzle, etc. -- but now his chosen identity lasts for months. After weeks of singing "Hello to Chipmunk" one of the summer session parents had assumed that was his name. "You know, Berkeley," she said with a shrug after I set her straight. "You never can tell here." Last week he went to class in full pirate regalia, from scarlett hat to skull-and-crossbones vest to sword. "Nobody will know who I am," he told me with a sly smile.
Part of his dressing up and taking on identities, his love of costume, has something to do with shyness. These are ways to be in public with being totally seen. But I also think he has a bit of the dramatic in him. Like all children, he has a rich imaginative life. He makes a set of bike wrenches into a train, builds a boat out of a pile of sticks, creates robots out of spare toys and junk. My son truly believes that if he runs and jumps fast enough, he can fly. I remember flying, too, that heady moment of lift as I raced across my grandparents' family room and landed in the dark green chair in the corner. It happened. I can't deny it.
I worry about the future of his imagination, about the coming imposition of what it means to be a boy. When he goes to school full-time next year he will be immersed in the culture of the group, where rule-happy children and adults start forcing kids into slots. I remember school as a place where creativity isn't valued and anything different is quashed. I want to protect him, to take his imagination and cover it in gleaming armor, to let him know that flying will always be possible.
The change will happen. It is inevitable. But I hope that he will hold tight to his creativity, protect himself when he needs to without smothering his imagination. The further he gets out in the world, the less control I will have. All I can offer is my love and support.
Image: The high-heeled boy at home, October 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
New selections from the back catalog of the blog in Best and Rarest!