I feel it. I name it. I let it go.
So it might surprise you that one quarter through that first margarita we started fighting. We don't fight often these days, and when we do it's usually quite civil. This was an old-style fight with incredulous looks and just-caught nastiness. Each of us thought the other was clueless, wasn't listening, was going off on some crazy tangent. Ultimately, we pulled it back together, reached a deeper understanding, but for fifteen tense minutes, I fought the urge to run out of the restaurant into the cold rain. I fought the urge to be by myself and pretend that it was better this way, to live without risk, to be warmed only by my own intellect and senses.
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.
Chiaroscuro
Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.
I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon: develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.

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.
Living proof at my fingertips
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.
Foundation

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.
The intersection of food, love, and memory
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.
Marked by heavy hands

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.
The time before
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.
Who are these people and what are they doing in my blog?
DATE: May 1981
OCCASION: My mother's second wedding.
LOCATION: Eastern Shore, MD.
PERSONNEL (from left to right):
Mom: Barely 31 years old. Obscuring new husband's mother.
Grandfather: Looking pleased. The bridegroom had a reputation as a good guy. Even though he had spent the year before the wedding happily unemployed, lifting weights in the Little House, and waiting for my mother to come home from work and make dinner (though perhaps this view is a little one-sided).
Me: Eleven. And a half. Wearing my mother's dress
Best friend (from ages 8 - 14): Total support. Very funny. We went from childhood to rebellious adolescence together, from dancing around her living room listening to "Goofy Gold" to sneaking cigarettes and chugging 7-oz Budweisers. I miss her.
Cousin: Seven years old. Now an Episcopal minister. I haven't seen or spoken with her since my first wedding in late 1995. Our mothers don't speak either.
Oh, and I almost forgot. Here's a better look at ...

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.
What are words for?
So here are some pictures, a little holiday filler. I'll see if I can dredge up some writing before the end of the year.
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 ...
He sees you when you're sleeping
Inner battle
Grappling with myself.
Photo by my husband, taken from the vast Santa
collection of my father and
stepmother.
The things I am supposed to be
doing and don't want to do, the shoulds, they
sometimes control me. They become obligations
body-checked by anger. Or maybe it’s the should nots,
the tamping down of what rises up naturally: I should
not be feeling angry. I have no right to be upset.
This is not supposed to be a blog about current angst
(except for the mundane, piles of laundry, sick kid,
dog-walking variety). Most of the anger I carry
around is the nostalgic sort, dealing with that stuff
that happened when I was a kid, the things I can’t
change and must make right in my mind in order to
live a full life. It’s been working, for the most
part. I’m letting go.
Yes, I have complained about my current relationships
with my parents, have brought up marital discord from
the not-so-distant past, but most of this has been in
the context of grappling with painful memories,
revealing old scars to healing light.
But I haven’t talked about my stepmother. Part of the
reason I don’t talk about my stepmother is that she
is practically a saint. She is my father’s total
champion, and if anyone needs a champion, it’s him.
My father has treatment-resistant depression, a
condition he has been grappling with from the time he
entered college. It was because of depression that he
stopped working in his early 40s. The man has been on
many different varieties of medication; he’s been
through research studies; he’s done electroconvulsive
therapy (ECT) and lost a chunk of his memory in the
process. Eventually the drugs lose effectiveness, the
troughs get deeper, he stops functioning.
There are physical problems, too. Diabetes. Obesity.
Arthritis. Within the last two years my father has
developed debilitating back pain and can barely get
out the door. At the age of 57, he is practically
housebound, a predicament he and his wife have taken
on with characteristic stoicism. Throughout it all,
my stepmother has been a rock, always supportive,
never complaining, a breadwinner, maker of meals, and
vacuumer of a four bedroom house.
Why am I angry with this woman? Why am I carrying
around this stupid useless feeling? Because I am
invisible to her. Because when I was pregnant with my
second son, she talked about it being my first baby
(perhaps a teenage stillbirth doesn't count). Because
– stupidly, since I really should let go of this one,
but couldn't they have waited a week? – she got
married to my father two days before my fourteenth
birthday. Because she never even so much as e-mails
on my birthday. She has no idea why I might be
feeling pain and apparently doesn’t want to know.
Perhaps she feels she might be implicated in some
way. I don’t know.
My father loves me, but he has not been a very good
father. It's just the truth. Four years of every
other weekend visits does not a good father make.
Financial support for one's child – which I do
appreciate – doesn't make one a good father either,
though certainly there are many absentee fathers out
there who don't even do that. He laid the foundation
for distrust early. A little recognition of this past
and his part in it would make a huge difference.
After he read
the blog,
he acknowledged it in a general way, though we've
never talked about it. But what about her?
I know she thinks I'm a bad daughter and in many
ways, I am. Phone calls sometimes go unreturned for
days. I'm late with birthday and father's day
greetings or send a lame e-card. I put off making our
travel plans to see them and have been absent for
multiple surgeries. I avoid discussions of Christmas,
a holiday that is an obsession for them. The guilt
floods over me, paralyzing and cold, and I feel a
surge of preemptive, protective, useless anger.
What am I supposed to do with this anger? What do you
do when you can’t talk to someone about your
feelings? How do I do the right thing while honoring
how I feel?
So many questions. Does anyone have answers?
(And when this particular angst is out of the way, I
have many awards and other kindnesses to acknowledge.
That's the next post.)
Another existence to be denied
So there my mother and I sat, sunk into opposite ends of a comfortable couch, leaning forward to tell the social worker our feelings, sketching out my genetic profile. We filled out reams of forms, information about family health problems, questions about my diet, my drug and alcohol use.
Who knew what mysterious weaknesses I might be carrying? My father’s side of the family had endocrine problems, heart disease, diabetes and a tendency toward dark moods. When the veil of depression fell, some family members took to alcohol or other substances with an addict’s zeal. An affinity for darkness and a desire, a need, to obliterate myself in its face are part of my hardwiring.
What about my maternal lineage? My mother’s family history was a big blank, an open field where the quality of the soil and provenance of the plant life was a mystery. Like my biological grandmother and my mother before me, I had gotten knocked up young and out of wedlock. Only my mother had chosen to marry, to keep me in the fold. This predilection for teen motherhood, the easy and careless ways of our womenfolk – did that count against me?
Adoption was a closed affair when my mother was born. In 1950, the presumption was that a “chosen baby” would grow up satisfied, would never want to know the story of her beginnings. The privacy of the birth parents was paramount. Mom, however, did want to know and set out in adulthood to find her birth mother. Through a third party the woman revealed the depth of her silence: she hadn’t spoken about her first child at all, even keeping the secret from her husband and subsequent children. She wanted no further contact, no dramatic revelation, no recognition of reunion. When pressed on the name of the birth father, she was especially vehement. She would “never, never tell.” It stung.
In private, we speculated, joked about the freedom bought by ignorance. Her missing history provided a unique vantage, a way to step outside of the American obsession with ancestry. We could build a story about her origins outside of the confines of family fact, but the story never got very far. Polish or German? (My orthodontist, after assessing her facial structure, was pushing for Polish.) Catholic or Protestant? (Well, she did seem to have a thing for Catholic guys.)
To imagine too much seemed self-delusional. Of course, her parents might have been love-struck, two highly intelligent beauties who consummated their love after much deliberation in a sacred act of commitment and rebellion. Imagining what could be the truth – sex forced upon a young woman not ready or pregnancy as the inevitable result of one night between two clueless teenagers – led to a sense of hopelessness. Her birth father was the silent partner in this transaction. A ghost.
The adoption process had changed in 36 years. My child would know my name, would be able to trace his genetic strengths and frailties back a generation or two. His new family would send me pictures. I would be permitted to write him letters. But when we were in those Golden Cradle offices, he was another existence created to be denied. I was young and angry, and what was happening didn't seem real.
My biological grandmother, my mother, me: we all played a role in the conspiracy of suppressed connection. It was a gift passed along the generations. A present for my firstborn.
The home of permanent in between
When my grandmother started to show, her parents sent her to the city. They dropped her off at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers. I imagine her emerging from the black car alone, tattered suitcase in hand, looking nervously up the set of granite steps. Inside, somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through the gray halls.
It is the home of permanent in between; the suppressed energy of smothered potential thickens the air. The girls, all going by pseudonyms, make very little small talk. In the nursery, rows of bundled babies silent as dolls wait, neatly packaged in individual bassinets. Once retrieved, the babies seek out their mothers’ faces, liquid newborn eyes encountering guarded glances. Both mother and child have learned not to waste energy on tears or outward displays of emotion. The bonding and the break are inevitable.
This is how I picture my mother’s birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” They undo the straps, let the drugs wear off. Hours later, my biological grandmother holds her swaddled daughter, names her Lois. Lois is tiny – less than five pounds – too little to be released to her adoptive family. Over the next six weeks the pair are entangled in the monotony of new life, the seemingly endless cycle of feeding, diapering, and sleep. They calm to one another’s warm, familiar scent. Their gazes become intimate. Bone-deep.

When the six weeks are up, Aunt
Ruth, a go-between, my adoptive grandmother’s sister,
comes to take the baby. Waiting in the home's
entrance, the young mother frantically bounces her
silent infant, dreading the break. Finally, Aunt Ruth
appears, says her hello, and waits.
“It’s time.”
The mother hands over the baby. It is as clean as a
guillotine strike.
Before she has time to reconsider, she races inside
to the central staircase and runs up two flights of
stairs to her room. Her breathing is contained,
shallow, a precaution against tears. She’s been
trying to memorize every inch of her daughter, the
moon face framed by white-blonde hair, her blues
eyes, dainty toes and impossibly tiny hands, but
already the image is fading. She reaches her room and
slips inside, leans against the closed door taking
short, sharp breaths. A glass baby bottle sits on the
bedside table, a remnant from the final feeding. The
girl eyes it, finally reaching out. Then, the
satisfying sound of glass irrevocably broken, the
implied threat of jagged shards.
Taking several deep breaths, the young woman calms.
She begins to push the glass into a pile with her
shoe and decides to find a broom and dustpan.
There will be no tears.
That was then, Part II

October 1972, Hollywood Beach, my 3rd birthday?
The above photo was taken at my grandparents’ house
during the John
the Murderer era.

Christmas 1976, Wilmington
Jim, the future and former
stepfather,
took this holiday shot. Memories of this apartment:
no car; no money; asthma attacks; three dead cats and
one poisoned hamster; the bus ride to a movie theater
showing Star Wars; juicy cherry tomatoes straight
from the garden out back (the garden that also
contained a kitty graveyard with little wooden
crosses); iced chamomile tea; hot carob instead of
hot chocolate. For my mother, it was a time without
hope. A year later she returned to college to
complete her bachelors degree, thus solving the
hopelessness problem for a time. This is now:

August 2008, Berkeley
My son and my mother, having a good time. We had a great visit. And yes, no one ever seems to look directly at the camera in this family. (That was then, Part I can be found here.)
The pain that is invisible
In a conversation last night, she casually tossed out a line that I had to follow up with, because it indicated how bad things were for her at a couple points in my childhood. I’m sure she’s dropped this line with insouciance before, and I’ve just followed her laid-back lead. But it’s deadly serious. And frightening. And sad.
Of course, my mind is buzzing with thoughts, about secrets, about forgiveness and the pain that is invisible when you are growing up, the pain of the depressed, hopeless parent. Maybe not totally invisible. I was a sensitive kid, the little mother, always worried. Part of the worry, however, was about me: what was going to happen to me if something happened to her? Today I feel mainly empathy for her pain and sad that she’s felt so hopeless.
I’m sure she’s awake downstairs, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times. So, off I go to start the day ...
From the inside
Part of what unsettled me was the link back to my own words (which I’ve changed to better reflect my feelings). The “why” of writing to survive was initially a rather bleak description of what life was like for me for the first two years of my son’s existence. This was a difficult time with many struggles to maintain eveness. I lost a lot of myself, my marriage changed, and I’d have to say there was some depression tossed into the mix, too, though I was never treated.
So. I love my son. I am lucky to stay home with him. He makes me laugh. We dance and sing and talk and read together. He has also been an impetus for change, a reminder to slow down and enjoy. With him I am able to remake my own childhood, borrowing the good bits and discarding the bad. I am lucky to be able to do this AND write.
Which brings me to my husband, an amazing man who is my biggest supporter. When I need reassuring about my parenting skills, he is quick to soothe. He loves to read my work. He gets take-out when I am tired of cooking. He understands when I use naptime (when naptime happens) to write instead of clean. We are truly a team. I love you, H.
There are nuances to this angst, and as I’ve been writing here and privately, the angst shifts and dissipates. The words have saved me.
This is writing to survive.
Louise Peevish
"Oh, Louise is being peevish again," we'd say. "Louise Peevish."

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.





