Yes, here they are again. My parents after their wedding, June 1969, staring off into the misty future. It's too late now ...

Earlier that day, my mother and I had been talking about trust and infidelity. I explained how how I learned some time ago that to trust in others blindly is foolish because no one is perfect. Other people can let you down, not out of cruelty, but because they are human and bound to make mistakes. If you expect perfection or total fidelity, you may end up very disappointed, so why not keep an open mind about it? Not to expect to be let down, but to not let yourself get crushed if it happens?

The words had come out with more vitriol and less clarity than I felt. I sounded angry, specifically with my husband, and Mom asked me if he knew I was so angry. Strange. I didn't feel angry. But there Mr. Trinkle and I were in Fonda a few hours later, raising our voices. For the last half of the fight, I'd been dabbing at my eyes with the corner of my cloth napkin, trying to hold back the tears. It felt like I'd been willing them not to fall for weeks, maybe months, while I kept the rest of life together. When it was over, when we reached détente, the tears came out, along with the sudden understanding that this whole thing was all about my mother. Or maybe it wasn't that simple. It was also all about my father. And let's not forget to point a finger at the dissertation and the feelings it stirred up in its death throes. That thing was once used as a wedge, a separator, an agent of my perceived rejection. The diss is dead and buried now. It hadn't been an issue for years. What could I hold against a corpse?

Here is my mother, more present than I ever remember. There is no demanding, angry Kevin, no Baltimore petty criminal heroin addict boyfriend, no personal life drama to get in the way. When Mr. Trinkle and I left the East Coast, the addict was the center of her life. Interacting with her then felt like a continual rejection, an extension of the loneliness of childhood, though I see now that that the rejection has never been personal. In the past two and a half years, she's changed her life. The addict is now on the periphery, no longer the center of her world. There is no drama. She is here, flawed but available. I have just enough safe space for the anger to emerge. It's wordless, this anger, and scared, too, rage coupled with fear. I know she is capable of turning on me, of causing great pain, of making me wish I never existed. Or at least that's how it used to be.

Here is my husband, present and loving. The days of avoidance by dissertation are long over, but I remember them, remember how neatly our neuroses fit together, his reluctance dovetailing with my grasping need for absolute acceptance, with the tests and the tantrums, the nastiness and tossed objects. We have a history, a time when I felt very rejected, unloveable, and even though we've talked the hell out of it, there are still those tight corners in our relationship that remind me.

Combine my mother's visit with the completion of the dissertation and those deep feelings of unworthiness rise up. They poke and prod. I want to run out in the rain and be alone forever. I want to ball up my fists and shadowbox in the cold attic. I want to be invisible, the observer who cannot be observed. An old self-protective voice whispers if you let them get too close, they could destroy you. Keep your distance. But this is not the only way to see things. I have choices.

Now the struggle to be present, to be in the moment, is mine. If I don't give all of myself over, if I hold back, I don't risk absolute rejection. It used to be that I would test the ones who loved me, would stamp my feet and pepper every fight with threats to leave. These days I hide under a carapace of calm. I hold it together and when I do break, I tend to downplay my vulnerability. I maintain a friendly facade, a protective attitude. Intimacy equals risk. Oh, it's easy with you, reader. We have geographical distance and thick words to separate us. The pull of the everyday, the undertow of the mundane, doesn't come between us. We can pretend for a few minutes that we are intimates, reach an understanding without touch, and then return to our real lives unscathed.

Already all of this is changing for me. By the time my thoughts get to you, I'm working them out, naming the feelings, articulating them so I can put them away. One of the reasons this blog was so important to my recovery process (I call it a recovery process because I don’t know what else to call it) is because it gave me a place to name my fears, to articulate my ugliness in a relatively risk-free environment. Still, there are risks. When I find out that someone I know in real life or from my past has read the blog, I feel a panicked thrill – they know! (Depending on how far they've read, of course. They may know very little.) And then my stomach sinks and I feel a different sort of panic. I'm afraid of being judged for the things I've done, for those I've scraped up along the way. But I also worry that they will read and think: She deserved it. They will wonder about the intrinsic evil in me, about the horrible things I must have done to cause my family to abandon me. Rationally, I know this is crazy. Emotionally, it makes my heart ache.

I feel it. I name it. I let it go. But it isn't easy.

Tags: guilt, child neglect, existential angst, family, secrets, shame

Part II: Resonance

OK, OK, OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was going through my old stuff, looking for something, saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my mother, though Kevin's absence would still be palpable.

Sometimes I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I prefer to dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and light.

I write about what resonates and I have a complex relationship with both happiness and the past. The past is always present for me; it informs the present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with great material. Don't even have to think about it. As for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm generally happy, except when I'm not. The hollows, shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough patch here and there, a little complexity and strife to make it more interesting.

But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough to eat.

Tags: family, family visits, holidays, NaNoWriMo, Round Robin, Thanksgiving, writing prompt

It was one of those conversations that I'm tired of having, but I couldn't seem to stop myself.

Mr. Trinkle and I were standing against the wall at the Fox Theater in Oakland, this over-the-top restored venue from the late 1920s, drinking our beers and waiting for the group Echo and the Bunnymen to come onstage. We'd already had a lot of laughs that would be almost impossible to explain here (for example, the image of us wearing cucumber and cabbage outfits, just to find our moment of glory in the truly ridiculous [but very cool-sounding] Echo song Thorn of Crowns). Without warning my dead son winnowed his way into the conversation, which lead to talks of alternate lives and then my father showed up, too, unrepentant, demanding the old song and dance of anger.

My father and stepmother visited us last month, which was a truly wonderful visit, one for which I am grateful. As a result of nerve damage in his back, he is in constant pain and traveling is very difficult on him, but they made the trip and we all had a good time. There was just one ripple in the visit, one that I tried to ignore, in a discussion that would have been impossible without the blog. He found writing to survive over a year ago and read through it in its entirety. Eventually he apologized via email for any pain he had caused me, which was the extent of our interaction on the topic. During this most recent visit he asked "Are we ok?" meaning, I suppose, "Is everything all right between us?". Yes, I said, we were ok -- when he read the blog I felt like he was listening to me. Did he feel like we were ok?

Well, sure, but he wanted me to know that, despite my accusations to the contrary, he had tried. I had no idea what he was talking about, but his response was probably to this post, where I write about my anger at my parents for doing nothing when I desperately needed help: "My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth." It's a heavy accusation and I stand by it. The truth hurts. We didn't dig any deeper into that particular pit, but our discussion bothered me, still does, and that was what I was talking about in the lobby of the Fox Theater, that and imagining my never-to-be-24-year-old son, dressed in skinny tapered pants and an ironic t-shirt, angry at me for my own form of neglect, of the fetal variety.

The band started. We hustled to our seats, suddenly surrounded by the music that was a part of the soundtrack of my mid-teens and I started to cry. I sobbed through the first three songs while Mr. Trinkle patted me reassuringly, probably feeling bad about the tickets, which were a birthday present. The music transported to a bleak time in my life, when things started really getting bad and I was indescribably alone. I felt the direness of my situation at fifteen and sixteen, combined with the beauty of my current life. I am forty years old, married to a good, supportive man. We have a healthy, creative, wonderful child. My life is in enveloped in love and warmth. How did I get so undeservedly lucky?

Our conversation in the lobby -- the clinical look at my father, the ghostly appearance of my son, my guilt over that time of terrible fear and anger -- began to make sense. No matter how much work I've done here on revealing secrets, writing out my pain and anger, trying to forgive my parents, I can't take the experience of what happened in the Little House away. Even thinking about the music we were about to hear brought me to the edge of that past, to the isolation and neglect. And my father's main reaction upon reading this entire blog, apart from a generic, though I'm sure heartfelt apology, was to tell me that he tried. He has never acknowledged any direct responsibility for (or curiosity about) that time. I wish his acknowledgement didn't matter. Maybe someday it won't.

I've put so much effort into trying to forgive the unaware that I've forgotten to pay attention to my own grief. I still carry around sadness for things lost, for not mattering enough, for acknowledgment that will never be. So I cried and cried until Ian McCulloch started singing about vegetables. Mr. Trinkle turned to me and raised his eyebrows. We started to laugh.

I really am lucky.

Echo and the Bunnymen play "Silver" in Oakland, courtesy of some fellow fan:


Image: Living proof at my fingertips, or me and family at Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by my mother.

Tags: The Little House, Echo and the Bunnymen, 80s music, child neglect, family, guilt, grief

The story was that he and Willard were drunk when they poured the foundation. It was a hot day, unusual for May, and the sky was cloud-veiled, the sun nothing but a glowing round cloaked in grey. The men mixed the cement by hand in a wheelbarrow, kept taking slugs from the whiskey bottle. Vi and the girls started out planting flowers, then prepared a lunch of liverwurst sandwiches, sugary potato salad, and coleslaw. Finally all there was left to do was to sit on the metal lawn chairs and watch.

Everything went down so easily. The cement had a nice resistance, just yielding enough, like Vi on a good night. It was a perfect mix, Willard agreed, as he passed the whiskey bottle back. Running a trowel over it was soothing, could almost put you to sleep. Dusk was enveloping the neighborhood as they wrapped up. One of the girls had fallen asleep on a blanket on the dirt, and the other one glowered as she kicked up clouds of dust in the rutted driveway. Al struggled with the wheelbarrow until he decided the hell with it, it was just a rusty piece of shit anyway.

Vi finally had to drive everyone back to Delaware, the men singing a song she didn’t recognize, the girls bleary-eyed and hungry. When they returned the next weekend, excited to start building the cottage, Al ran his hands across the foundation and groaned. It didn’t take a level or a plumb line to figure out that they had to start all over again.

Image: The house at Hollywood Beach, August 1957.

Tags: faction, family, alcohol, family stories, flash fiction

If it wasn't frozen, processed, or heavily laced with sugar, my grandmother didn't cook it. I have her old recipe box, which includes many selections from the "Kitchen of Duncan Hines," as well as things like Pow-Wow Sandwiches, English Liver Bake, and salad molds, recipes that are products of the sixties and seventies. My grandfather made the box, designed it to hang between the refrigerator and the stove in the kitchen at Hollywood Beach. We use it to hold keys now. One of the first things I do when I move to a new place is to hang it by the front door, a reminder of a past so long gone that it feels like fiction. I may look through the recipes, but I never feel an urge to actually make any of them.

When the corn and tomatoes are at their peak, however, and I steam a dozen ears to eat for dinner alongside a salad of freshly-picked tomatoes, I feel a tug on the line that connects me to those long-ago meals. Corn on the cob with butter sits at the intersection of food, love, and memory for me. It has the power to bring me back to a time before I was born, to Hollywood Beach in the late fifties and early sixties when my mother and aunt were still children, before my grandfather was injured in an industrial fire. On late July and early August evenings when my grandfather was working late at the plant, Mom-mom could be persuaded to abandon the freezer and let the canned food gather dust in the cupboard. She would prepare farmstand corn and sliced tomatoes for dinner, maybe add some sliced bread on the side. Perhaps she was feeling as lazy as Ludlam's dog, unwilling to turn on the oven or chop loads of vegetables, happy with simplicity.

It's the only meal she made that my mother and I still talk about. When I was a kid, my cousin and I were given weekend corn shucking duty, sent outside with paper bags to do the messy work of removing the husks and cornsilk. We would sit on the white-washed metal lawn chairs out front under a canopy of maple leaves, kick our heels against the grass. After passing the naked corn to my aunt through the side door, we would wait for the moment at the table when we could smear the cooked kernels with squeezable Parkay. I was fascinated by the prongs, shaped like tiny ears of corn, that Mom-mom stuck into either end of the cob, and studied them between bites, felt the neat rows of miniature kernels like braille against my fingertips. We ate until we are too full for anything else but a thin slice of tomato.

You probably have summer food memories of your own, can bring back an evening lit by fireflies, your lips stained purple by blueberry cake. Your parents didn't care how late you stayed up and you got to light a sparkler even though the fourth of July had been over for days. Or maybe you remember your mother, already unsteady on her feet, placing a platter of swaying Jello on the picnic table. You swirled the first bite against your gums, pushed it between your teeth before swallowing and then refused to eat any more. After dinner you and your brother played tag in the dark while the grown-ups drank bourbon on ice and talked in voices too low for you to understand. When you slipped in a pile of dog shit, they laughed until you started to cry.

Image: Recipe from my grandmother's collection.

Tags: grandmother, summer memories, recipes, lazy as Ludlam's dog, corn and tomatoes, family, salad molds, summer cooking, Jello, Cape Code Cranberry Salad Mold

This is the sensory soup of childhood. It is a mix of family and location, of bad luck and lucky streaks. We continue the pattern with our own children, begin the silent lessons, mark them with heavy hands: this is who you are, who we are. Whenever my son smells oatmeal pancakes or plucks a plump blueberry from a glass bowl, the past will live. "You Are My Sunshine" will conjure up a darkened room, my soothing cuddle against impertinent wakefulness. He may spend years in therapy trying to get my voice out of his head, only to find that same voice coming out of his mouth in middle adulthood.

I can only hope that his experience is as painless as growing up can be. Sometimes my best won’t be good enough.

I remember being seven, lying on that flowered couch in my grandparents’ family room, my hand sunk into a plastic bag full of cherries. Cold from the manufactured air, goose-pimpled, I clutched a pillow for warmth. The television, which was as much a piece of furniture as an entertainment device, was showing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat.

That night I would have another asthma attack, whether it was because of mildew, cat hair, cigarette smoke, or my own melodramatic emotions is up for debate.

Image: Me and my grandmother, Hollywood Beach, 1973.

Tags: soup of childhood, drama queen, family, grandmother, grandparents, meals, Nostalgia, Therapy, imprinted by family, parental guilt

Maureen, hanging from a tree, 1982

We stayed after school that day, dismantled the lice bridge and went to the playground, squished our Docksiders against spring-rain damp turf. The middling March air was cool against our faces as we ran to the swingset. In warmer weather the game was to fling off our shoes to see who could kick them the farthest. Today we passed a hairbrush back and forth, hurtling through the air on wooden seats, trying to make the other person drop it or chicken out.

“Want to play Space Invaders? Let’s go down to the Hole in the Wall.”

Maureen’s grandfather owned a bar by the canal, a basement space in a building from the late 1700s. In the afternoons it was quiet and we were allowed to play pool or a video game while her father got the bar ready for business. The walk from Chesapeake City Elementary School to the bar took us past the funeral home, white and windowless, past boarded up storefronts and ramshackle houses tumbled against the sidewalk. The Eastern Shore town was not yet thriving, was a decade away from becoming a boutique village. We decided against stopping at Pyle’s, a small convenience store that sold things like Push Pops and sticky Bubble Yum and Dixie cup ice cream that came with a wooden spoon. There was plenty of non-nutritious crap awaiting at the Hole in the Wall, cheese curls and barbecue-flavored potato chips and candy bars. I’d get to mix the drinks, sugary combinations of Coke, 7-Up, and orange soda over ice. We called them “Suicides.”

The tendency – or my tendency, at least – in writing about childhood is to make it sound either impossibly idyllic or like a living hell. So here is a list of the good stuff: Hanging out on Maureen’s porch swing after Canal Day, holding a 20-inch sparkler in full glimmer as we watched a line of cars heading for Route 213. Playing Atari games – Asteroids, Adventure – while eating junk food. Dancing around to “Flying Purple People Eater.” Eating an entire meal without using our hands, “like cats.” Annoying her sister by making Three Stoogesesque snoring noises as she was trying to get to sleep. Organizing slumber parties with shrieking and séances and morning-after pancakes a la James Beard.

Behind the idyll? Turmoil. Children are the unwitting passengers in the lives of others. Best friends only offer so much protection. I felt like a freak, too smart and too quiet and odd, living in an increasingly uncomfortable situation with my mother, grandfather, and soon-to-be stepfather. This was the year I actively threatened suicide, when I kept track of my thyroid and asthma medications in preparation for an overdose. The year I carried around an Ouija board, desperate to get in contact with my dead grandmother, the year when the girl wars were beginning and teasing about one’s physical development or lack thereof was common (“We must, we must, we must increase our bust!” was the recess refrain.)

Anyone who thinks that childhood is all carefree is delusional. Or an amnesiac.

But I didn’t kill myself and our friendship survived my seventh grade move back to Wilmington. Outside of the machiavellian middle school environment , Maureen and I became closer, with frequent overnight visits and some very funny correspondence. She wrote me weekly. I was so proud of her letters, of her sense of humor, that I would bring them into school, my address carefully blacked out so that no one would discover that I lived outside of the school district.

The weekend my mother told my stepfather to pack up his things and leave, I had plans to visit Maureen. I still went, though I was not in the mood. Yes, Tim was an asshole (since reformed, apparently), but he had been a part of our lives for eight years. We spent holidays with his family. We needed his income. And I hadn't seen the break coming. What was going to happen to us?

DEATH at moment of reading! Envelope from February 1983 letter.

I sludged through that October 1983 weekend, trapped in a quicksand of worry. On Sunday, I was surprised to see Tim waiting for me at the usual rendezvous point, the Newark Howard Johnson's. Maureen and I hugged, I waved at her mother, and slipped into the Cutlass. Tim and I were unaccustomed to making small talk and there wasn't much to say. He was staying with his parents, had hopes of repairing the marriage, though I doubt we talked about that. He didn't linger in front of our inner city rowhouse and I didn't look back as I unlocked the door.

Inside, Mom was sitting in the living room reading with Frank the cat on her lap. She looked up when I came in, glanced around the room and asked "Notice anything different?"

"Sunlight."

One of the first things she had done upon Tim's departure was to open the living room shutters. They had been closed since our move to the house, a bizarre cost-saving measure. The room seemed unnaturally bright. Light bounced off of the white walls, pooled in the corners. Our other cat, Liz, was basking in a patch of it. She held our a paw and trilled. Could you get more symbolic than this, darkness transformed by light, a closed off room now open? A little foreshadowing, a portent of good things to come?

House in Wilmington during the Tim era.

Don't be so gullible, so easily blinded by the sun. Sometimes a patch of sunlight is just that and nothing more. An open shutter can be closed again.

The end of the Tim era did turn out to be free and glorious, five months of mother-daughter bonding. We enjoyed the sunlight. Bought 100% orange juice and name-brand yogurt. Mom acquired a moped and zipped around town picking up freelance writing work and groceries. I arranged rides to and from games, kept up with my studying, memorized lists of German words, puzzled over teutonic grammar. Maureen and I continued as best friends. For Mom's 34th birthday I got her a card with a guy in drag made up to look like Elizabeth Taylor: "Birthdays are like husbands – after a while you stop counting!" Ha Ha.

Adolescence, the process of pulling yourself into burgeoning adulthood, shakes the seemingly solid foundations of identity. The sweet boy, lover of plaid shirts and belted khakis, suddenly starts dressing in black, from hair dye to nail polish to skirt and shoes. The athlete takes up drugs and loses motivation. Best friends drift apart. I started ninth grade in pastels, a nondrinker, a German-studying, Duran Duran-listening cheerleader. I finished the year close to that, too, though internal changes were taking place in preparation for my metamorphosis.

The shift may have happened anyway, it might have been destiny, but I can't deny that there was a catalyst. He moved in down the street that spring. Kevin the poet-carpenter. Kevin with his plumb lines and his radial saws, with his collie and his poetry books. My mother met him and dropped everything.

By May I was essentially on my own.

Next installments: The Little House, demon rum, Dirk, and a friendship that doesn't survive.

Tags: family, friendship, sixth grade, step-father, suicide, ouija boards, alcohol, Dirk

The car: Then-stepfather's 1968 (?) Oldsmobile Cutlass, permanently awaiting a paint job. I hated that #%*& thing, though it did get us from Point A to Point B.

Yeah, I've been going through my boxes of life detritus, old photos, letters, embarrassingly boy-crazy journals. The process has has brought up thoughts about friendship, loss, and connection. This picture stuck out, less for the time and situation (which, wonderfully, have lost their power for me) but for the strange posed/not posed quality of it, and for the relationships that have slipped away.

There's the next post, though I'm not sure where I'm going with it. And hopefully fiction will be returning when my writing class starts up again next month, or even sooner if I can pull it off.

Tags: family, grandfather, friendship

Christmas morning pteranodon, courtesy of Uncle B.


Preparing the cioppino.



The final product.


Homemade Mexican chocolate ice cream.


This year's inadvertent (but popular) theme: dinosaurs.

I'll be catching up on comments here, there, and everywhere in the next couple of days.

Until next time ...

Tags: Christmas, family, Photos, filler

Family will be descending upon our household tomorrow. I'm looking forward to the visits (really!), but may not be posting, commenting, or dropping many cards until the new year.

Have a peaceful and relaxing holiday! If you can, with that guy staring at you.

Tags: Santa, family, Christmas, holidays, Entrecard

Grappling with myself. Photo by my husband, taken from the vast Santa collection of my father and stepmother.

The things I am supposed to be doing and don't want to do, the shoulds, they sometimes control me. They become obligations body-checked by anger. Or maybe it’s the should nots, the tamping down of what rises up naturally: I should not be feeling angry. I have no right to be upset.

This is not supposed to be a blog about current angst (except for the mundane, piles of laundry, sick kid, dog-walking variety). Most of the anger I carry around is the nostalgic sort, dealing with that stuff that happened when I was a kid, the things I can’t change and must make right in my mind in order to live a full life. It’s been working, for the most part. I’m letting go.

Yes, I have complained about my current relationships with my parents, have brought up marital discord from the not-so-distant past, but most of this has been in the context of grappling with painful memories, revealing old scars to healing light.

But I haven’t talked about my stepmother. Part of the reason I don’t talk about my stepmother is that she is practically a saint. She is my father’s total champion, and if anyone needs a champion, it’s him. My father has treatment-resistant depression, a condition he has been grappling with from the time he entered college. It was because of depression that he stopped working in his early 40s. The man has been on many different varieties of medication; he’s been through research studies; he’s done electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and lost a chunk of his memory in the process. Eventually the drugs lose effectiveness, the troughs get deeper, he stops functioning.

There are physical problems, too. Diabetes. Obesity. Arthritis. Within the last two years my father has developed debilitating back pain and can barely get out the door. At the age of 57, he is practically housebound, a predicament he and his wife have taken on with characteristic stoicism. Throughout it all, my stepmother has been a rock, always supportive, never complaining, a breadwinner, maker of meals, and vacuumer of a four bedroom house.

Why am I angry with this woman? Why am I carrying around this stupid useless feeling? Because I am invisible to her. Because when I was pregnant with my second son, she talked about it being my first baby (perhaps a teenage stillbirth doesn't count). Because – stupidly, since I really should let go of this one, but couldn't they have waited a week? – she got married to my father two days before my fourteenth birthday. Because she never even so much as e-mails on my birthday. She has no idea why I might be feeling pain and apparently doesn’t want to know. Perhaps she feels she might be implicated in some way. I don’t know.

My father loves me, but he has not been a very good father. It's just the truth. Four years of every other weekend visits does not a good father make. Financial support for one's child – which I do appreciate – doesn't make one a good father either, though certainly there are many absentee fathers out there who don't even do that. He laid the foundation for distrust early. A little recognition of this past and his part in it would make a huge difference. After he read the blog, he acknowledged it in a general way, though we've never talked about it. But what about her?

I know she thinks I'm a bad daughter and in many ways, I am. Phone calls sometimes go unreturned for days. I'm late with birthday and father's day greetings or send a lame e-card. I put off making our travel plans to see them and have been absent for multiple surgeries. I avoid discussions of Christmas, a holiday that is an obsession for them. The guilt floods over me, paralyzing and cold, and I feel a surge of preemptive, protective, useless anger.

What am I supposed to do with this anger? What do you do when you can’t talk to someone about your feelings? How do I do the right thing while honoring how I feel?

So many questions. Does anyone have answers?

(And when this particular angst is out of the way, I have many awards and other kindnesses to acknowledge. That's the next post.)

Tags: stepmother, guilt, anger, depression, family, father

Tags: adoption, Mom, teen pregnancy, family, the stillbirth

When the six weeks are up, Aunt Ruth, a go-between, my adoptive grandmother’s sister, comes to take the baby. Waiting in the home's entrance, the young mother frantically bounces her silent infant, dreading the break. Finally, Aunt Ruth appears, says her hello, and waits.

“It’s time.”

The mother hands over the baby. It is as clean as a guillotine strike.

Before she has time to reconsider, she races inside to the central staircase and runs up two flights of stairs to her room. Her breathing is contained, shallow, a precaution against tears. She’s been trying to memorize every inch of her daughter, the moon face framed by white-blonde hair, her blues eyes, dainty toes and impossibly tiny hands, but already the image is fading. She reaches her room and slips inside, leans against the closed door taking short, sharp breaths. A glass baby bottle sits on the bedside table, a remnant from the final feeding. The girl eyes it, finally reaching out. Then, the satisfying sound of glass irrevocably broken, the implied threat of jagged shards.

Taking several deep breaths, the young woman calms. She begins to push the glass into a pile with her shoe and decides to find a broom and dustpan.

There will be no tears.

Tags: Mom, adoption, grandmother, family

October 1972, Hollywood Beach, my 3rd birthday?

The above photo was taken at my grandparents’ house during the John the Murderer era.

Christmas 1976, Wilmington

Jim, the future and former stepfather, took this holiday shot. Memories of this apartment: no car; no money; asthma attacks; three dead cats and one poisoned hamster; the bus ride to a movie theater showing Star Wars; juicy cherry tomatoes straight from the garden out back (the garden that also contained a kitty graveyard with little wooden crosses); iced chamomile tea; hot carob instead of hot chocolate. For my mother, it was a time without hope. A year later she returned to college to complete her bachelors degree, thus solving the hopelessness problem for a time. This is now:

August 2008, Berkeley

My son and my mother, having a good time. We had a great visit. And yes, no one ever seems to look directly at the camera in this family. (That was then, Part I can be found here.)

Tags: Mom, family

Tags: secrets, forgiveness, Mom, family, depression

Tags: Reviews, existential angst, emotional striptease, housewife, family

It was the move back to Maryland that did her in. There were stories of other dogs that had cracked after hearing the tests at Aberdeen Proving Ground, dogs that pushed their way through second story window screens, desperate to escape the sounds of the bomb and munitions tests across the river. The aural bombardment contributed to Louise’s general nervousness, but now when a thunderstorm blew through town, she was absolutely inconsolable. No drug calmed her. By the time you got the pill down, the storm had passed.

One afternoon, my mother drove with Louise to the local grocery store. Mom rolled the windows down a safe distance, locked the doors, and entered the market.

She was filling a plastic bag with green beans when she heard a little girl’s voice. “Look, Mom, there’s a dog shopping in the Acme.”

“Not my dog,” thought Mom, as she weighed the beans and continued to the toiletry aisle. The little girl spoke again. “Look, Mom, the dog is still shopping in the Acme!”

“Not my dog,” thought Mom again. She glanced past the row of shampoos to the plate glass windows – were those thunderclaps she heard? – when she saw Louise, panting heavily, on the run from one of our favorite check-out guys, a kid who worked his way up from bagger and always made friendly conversation. Louise darted for the automatic doors, heading along the sidewalk in the direction of the Chat-n-Chew.

Abandoning her cart, Mom also ran for the door. Outside, storm clouds were gathering force. She watched Louise scatter a school of carpenters, men in dirty jeans and mud-caked work boots, as the dog passed the restaurant and made a left into the hardware store. Mom followed, pushing past customers, until she found Louise in the back of the store, trembling by the PVC piping.

My mother stayed there with her until the storm passed, then walked her back to the car and drove home, sans groceries. Apparently, the dog panicked when she heard the approaching thunder, pushed through an open car window and went looking for Mom. We were grateful that she wasn't hit by a car.

About two years after the Acme incident, I came home from grad school for a visit. Things were grim. Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, had been diagnosed with a rare bone marrow disease. My mother was close to declaring bankruptcy. And Louise was getting more peevish and skittish.

Her fits of panic weren't limited to thunderstorms; now the dulled explosions from Aberdeen were having a similar effect. She was terrified. If no one was home, she would attempt to escape -- Mom was afraid she would force her way through a closed window, pictured a return home to bloodied shards of glass and no dog. If someone was home, she would scratch and pace, pant and whine. Louise was suffering.

I went with my mother to the appointment. We sat with Louise, stroked her as the vet depressed the needle. It was over quickly.

On the ride home, we didn't speak.

Tags: family, Pets, Kevin

Now:

Tags: family