The present of presence
It may not surprise regular readers to hear that I have problems with family and connection, that it’s easier for me to remain self-sufficient than to ask for help even from those closest to me, and that even though I have a small family of my own, it has been difficult for me to be present with them. This is something that has come up in various therapy work, how to feel like I am a part of things, how not to stay separate, how groupings of three are threatening, especially for those who have generally been excluded in such groupings (child, parent, parent; child, parent, parent’s love interest).
And you know what? It’s gotten better. Not perfect, but better. There is a thread of connection between us. I’m less absent (again, not perfect, but so much better) when we’re together. I didn’t want to run away from home on my birthday, though I thought about it a lot the week before. We have had times when all three of us could sit quietly in a room, comfortable in our separateness, connected, too, without fraught, silent history hanging over our heads. This was the first year that my husband and I coordinated on the boy’s Christmas and also worked out a Christmas Eve misunderstanding without me exploding (tough, especially when the house is full of people and I am tense with the requirements of it all).
I worry about my parenting and the worry gets in the way of figuring out what is good for me. Sometimes I imagine going up in a poof of smoke, the midnight disappearance, the running off to another town, just to be free of the potential pain that connection brings – the threat of loss (it is inevitable, no matter what), the future break between child and parents, the wrenching ache of death and abandonment. I’ve created a life of total submission to child and home, which only makes the stakes higher and the center of my life more fragile, which ramps up the anxiety, the feeling that the walls in my small room are closing in on me.
I’m figuring it out. I focus on the future, on the grad school path, while keeping an open mind. No matter the path to external happiness, to contentment, to self-sufficiency, I will not lose the connection. I will be present.
So this is Christmas … a holiday I don’t totally care for, one that takes over, all macho with its Christian origins and its focus on consumerism. Today I focus on the rest of it, the boy, the greenery, the lights, the feeling of gratefulness for my wavering yet strengthening ability to be here, and for my friends, those of you I’ve known for years and those of you with whom I’ve developed a friendship across the mysterious Internet ether. I am so lucky to know you.
I am grateful for family, too, for the spark of connection, the elusive silver thread. It's not a trap. No matter how things change and shift for me – how I make them change and shift – the connection will be there, the history, the shared, ineffable love.
Merry Holidays!
Image of the boy playing at the park yesterday.
Obviously, I was able to carve out an hour or two for writing -- it's one of the benefits of waking up at 4:30 in the morning!
Six kids and a minivan
True story: I once wanted six kids and a house big enough to hold them all. I was young and in love and I needed to surround myself with friends, with relatives, with extensions of myself who might love me or accept me. I was young enough to not worry about the fuck-ups and the way we mold our children accidentally or the way we try to mold them one way and they come out another. I thought it would be easy, because I was a child and I knew what children needed and I often sat in judgment of my own mother, who was clearly clueless about it, not self-sacrificing enough and too angry and sometimes barely there.
I was going to have these children with a man who grew up in a house of kids, was the youngest in a large family, and his extended family was big, too, with these fabulous dinners for twenty or more in his parents’ expansive dining room. You could get lost in the crowd at those dinners and you could observe at those dinners and everybody drank and sometimes I wish I had been there earlier for the really crazy family parties, when all the kids were living at home and the mom (a young mom, she started at 18) was flush with alcohol and a bit of anger, just enough to make it interesting.
But it was not meant to be. Here I am with the one kid and I love the one kid and I am trying my best to do my best. But I worry about family, about the comforting (and sometimes manipulative) group, the acceptance (or sometimes rejection) of many, the safety in numbers. When I was younger, I was willing to take on someone else’s family, at least for a time, but my own? No way. Kindly people, yes, but with weak arms, weak constitutions, so that when I needed them they couldn’t hold me up or they didn’t even see that I needed holding. Who wants to be supported by that, by nothingness? So I withdrew, from them, from the larger world.
This is not what I want for the boy, whose extended family is even smaller than mine was. In the therapist’s office yesterday, I talked about that a bit, about friends that become family, about my own connection reticence. I don’t want the boy to learn to be afraid. I don’t want him to make his slow to warmness into a fetish. I want his family, his small family, to be a comfort no matter how we arrange our lives.
Part of this is just being there for him, being supportive and firm, with boundaries and warmth and connection. OK. I can do that. I am, and the therapy is helping. The other part is living the sort of life that I would like him to live, to being an example of living life in the world. With other people. This is much, much harder, but it is doable, right?
I enter the world with my pained heart, with my eyes open. I don’t have to hand over my heart, but I do have to risk it sometimes, or understand that the risks are small, that I am me and no one can take that away, that my heart is mine no matter what. It’s been with me through the worst. It comforts me when it can, purrs to me at night and tells me that despite all my flaws, the occasional awkwardness, the generosity that I need to regain, the messes I’ve made, despite all of it, I am ok. I’ve got something to offer, just like the boy, and I can stand on my own two feet.
From the prompt "Motherhood."
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 D Sharon Pruitt.
Telling the truth
I don’t know how we got on the subject of adoption. Maybe it came from his questions about my first marriage, though there were no babies, adopted or otherwise, from that union and about whether I had another child. From that point, we traveled to my mother’s adoption and her biological mother’s second rejection years later, her denial of contact and details.
And then I blurted it out. I want to write about it this morning, but it is one of those things that just can’t flow easily from my fingertips, so bear with me.
He was curious about babies. About whether I had any more out there. About adoption (the fact that my mother never knew her “first parents” made him cry and he resolved that we should find these people, and not just contact them, but meet them). I knew I had to tell him someday about my own experience, but I thought it would be later, much later, when it seemed more age-appropriate, but at the same time I didn’t want to keep it a secret, something dark and heavy.
So I told him my story, minus much of the emotional pain, of the stillborn baby I had when I was sixteen. I was expecting curiosity or perhaps disbelief, like the “you’re kidding!” response I got when I explained sex to him a couple of months ago. I wasn’t expecting tears, tears at the fact of the baby’s death, at the fact that he had a brother.
A brother. Tears. It was the first unfiltered response to my story that I have ever gotten. He wanted to know if he had a name. He wanted me to write it down so that he wouldn’t forget it. He wanted to know what he would have looked like. I had to explain that the baby would be almost 26 years old by now, a grownup, and he wished that if the brother did still exist, he would be still be a kid and be around to play with.
How did I know he was dead? Where did I have him? I told the story without blame. I tried to explain how someone might not be ready to raise a baby. I told him that no one knows why the baby died and that when I was pregnant with him, the still-living boy, I was closely monitored, just in case.
Oh, the depths of this conversation, of feeling, of connection, the tangibility of what went before. It makes my heart ache. It returns me to the world, and I mourn again for what we lost.
The prompt for this was "At the grocery store," which obviously has nothing to do with what I wrote. To really write about this will take some time. It was a striking conversation and healing and very sad all at once. I realized that at least I could talk about it without being so focused on me and without maligning my own parents. For once the focus was on that baby and the sadness of his death, the feeling of mourning that I still stuff down.
Photo of the boy at Point Reyes by his father.
No place like home
In my sleep last night, I created new homes, new spaces where we tried to fit in old furniture. Some rooms were filled, others empty, and we hadn’t gotten it down yet, how to fit it all in or talk about how to do it, and I fumed, looking at where he put everything, without consulting me and where was he, anyway?
Before sleep, as we hurtled here and there and looked at the view, after we pushed through sand (the finds! a pale sea star, tiny, near death, that slowly caressed my hand; a mussel covered in purple barnacles, exotic ladies with their fans that my mother tossed back into the ocean) and then went up and down the steps to the lighthouse, I thought: I miss home. Not my home –- though I miss that, too, the stately townhouses of DC and the fields and water of the Eastern Shore – but a sense of home.
I am disconnected, floating along, detached, and a person can’t live like this, in the emptiness. In my mind, a home, a personal culture, is often a shared thing, and I don’t know how to do it anymore. Is it fear? Is it something else? What am I looking for? We are cowards. We are delicate, easily bruised. We are all wrong.
This is what I grew up with: me and her, me and her, my mother, my grandmother. The men were interlopers and the best times were when we were alone. The last man was bad and also good. We shared something, the three of us. But he’s dead now and that life has been gone for ten years. Then it was me and my man and then me, my man, and the boy, and I realized: I don’t know how to do this. To make the world larger. To contain a family. I flirt with it. I want it, this sense of shared self, but it is as dangerous as a riptide, and unfamiliar.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re getting somewhere. But I feel like I am treading water and I am alone and I can’t do it alone but I can’t do it together either.
Yesterday we stood in line as a foursome, waiting to get a peek at the lighthouse lamp. My legs trembled like they never have before. They were tired. They needed more fuel, more food. We watched my knees shake and felt the tremors in my thighs. But I kept going. I waited. I stood. And when the ranger's talk was over, my mother and I tackled the stairs, walked thirty stories up without stopping, barely looking behind us, knowing the man and the boy were somewhere down below. Five minutes later, there they were, fifty pounds of boy on his father's shoulders, clinging against the wind.
Together we started the long walk back to the car, the tired stumble, preparing for a quiet ride against the earth's contours, the long ride home.
From the prompt "Undeniable."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit, though it feels unfinished. Funny how groggy I can be when I sleep in until 5:30. Groggy but slightly more refreshed.
Image: The boy and his father at the Point Reyes National Seashore. Hipstamatic by me.
Indulging the fear
The popular girls didn’t wear primary colors, but they were bright, the Esprit t-shirts and the jeans in shades that never occurred in nature. That was how we measured value, in the clothes, the labels, the human search for approval and status in the most base of ways. You needed money, you needed to be an extrovert, you needed connection and cotillion tickets and a house with a yard. Your family needed a new car, or at the very least a car, and maybe even two parents, two parents who were supportive and together, with an entire ensemble of family behind them, too. You needed a group to support you, to ride along until you were able to swim by yourself, to be on your own.
I don’t want to come across as bitter – no, I’m not bitter – but I am close to the edge this morning, thinking about how we measure our value and the value of other people. It’s a strange way to think about humanity, to think in terms of how much a person is worth, not in dollars, but in the right to take up space, to demand attention and love. Aren’t we all worth the same -- that is, aren't we inherently valuable? We may be, but that’s not how it works practically speaking.
My fear is that I will die alone. We all die alone, of course, unless perhaps we take someone down with us, or go out in a jetliner crash or a conflagration at a packed hotel or train car or apartment complex, but I mean alone. The family that buffeted me when I was small has died and dispersed. The people I trust are few, and my own little family may not be enough. I can be brave, I can, I try, but sometimes it just hits me, the fear, the paralyzing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I may not be capable of creating the connections I need and crave, my self-protective shield is already in place, and I am not of enough value for people to reach out for me.
Yes, I am getting better, I am healing and I am brave and strong and capable, but this feeling of not mattering, of being existentially alone, is overwhelming right now. Maybe it was the continuation of our home reorganization, the weekend spent emptying a closet that has been packed with boxes since we moved here, the dismantling of the antique armoire we bought a decade ago to make room for a new configuration in the back room, this rifling through a recent past, through days of connection that feel very far away. Maybe it’s the process of making the room into something else, a physical acknowledgment of change. At any rate, I’m drowning, the whirlpool is pulling me underwater, my lungs are filling up, and I don’t know who to reach for. I feel like an item on discount at the dollar store, unwanted and cheap. Disposable. I am on my own.
Dying alone, living alone. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don’t see how I can get out of it at the moment. Surely I’ll feel better tomorrow or the next day or next week. For now I’m just going to indulge this feeling, tinged with fear and self-pity, for a few more minutes before I put it away, box it up until I am ready to feel it again.
From the prompt "Very popular."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one took a bit of editing for clarity.
Image by Sebastian Fritzon.
A loaded term
I had a dream about them last night, about visiting New Jersey. We arrived in the early morning and my stepmother offered us wine from the half-empty bottle we had brought with us. I accepted and then felt embarrassed to be drinking before the sun came up and made excuses, asked for coffee. Their house was huge, more huge than in real life, with a mezzanine balcony that hung over the kitchen. It had a public bathroom and a group of school kids was visiting (dreams and their strange shifts of time, place, perspective) and I watched the kids swing from one part of a low-hanging chandelier to another as I yelled for them to stop.
Before that, I cried in the kitchen, apologizing for my sadness while hoping my stepmother, who was prepping food, would notice and ask me more. She had cut and colored her hair, was honey-blonde now with eyes to match. They were cold, nothing reflected back. What had happened over the last year to change her very being?
But back to the children who didn’t listen to me, who dangled and laughed and moved with supple limbs. I wanted to protect them. I want to protect my son. I want to go back and retroactively protect myself, an impossible task.
I have a family of my own now, a triad, a threatening triad, with the man present for the child and me off in the corner, remembering, remembering. Kindness leaves and men do too, even the women walk off eventually. The child grows up, the cats die, no one lives forever, and the memories become sweeter and more aching than the reality. I don’t fight it anymore, I am one with it, noticing the feelings, giving them their due, knowing that I survived by a certain sort of soul detachment, connected at the head, connected by jokes and fights, by tossed wine glasses and shouts. Love was worry, worry that the object would go up in a poof of smoke, would leave for a pack of cigarettes and never return.
And yet I cling to the idea of magic, to the man returning from the long journey, returning for me. There is no room for anybody else. I am a valuable object. It works for a while, his love holds me together. Time, proximity, life: they weaken the bond. Eventually I look for another to play the chase and catch game.
From the prompt "Family," a word laden with meaning for most of us. Edited for clarity and grammatical correctness and then edited again. Too loaded of a topic.
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.I spent some extra time on this one. It's still raw and unstudied and I don't know how I feel about it.
Image: Me and my mother at my grandparent's house, sometime in the late 70s
The big reveal
The Nana my son knows is a patient and kind 60-year-old. This was not the mother I grew up with. It usually works this way, thank goodness. Grandparents do not often revisit their parenting crimes on their grandchildren. The stakes are lower. The grandparents are older. They’ve let go a bit.
Still. I have the stories. When I tell them, I do it with as little anger as possible, though sometimes they come out in a you-have-no-idea-how-lucky-you-are-kid mode and afterwards I feel cheap, like I’ve used my history the wrong way. Not surprisingly, given my dinner table memories, these conversations come up most often at mealtimes, treacherous territory for me. You are unhappy with the food I prepare: well, when I was a kid, mealtimes were horrible. First we lived with a guy who made me stand at the table. Later I had a stepfather who berated me or simply refused to talk until I left the table. Then Kevin came along and my mother stopped eating with me altogether, left me food on a plate while she went down the street to his house. We’re not even getting into the spinach soufflés, the bitter mugs of hot carob, the flattened, honey-sweetened cookies, the sugarless world my mother left behind when Kevin appeared. No, we’re not talking about food. We’re talking about family and how children learn to feel comfortable in the world.
Two nights ago, after we had successfully and calmly pushed through a dinner of whiny petulance, the boy and I started talking about fights. For him, fights are an ugly thing, to be avoided. Sure. I understand this, especially because fights with angry grownups can be frightening to the little guy. But, as I explained, fights are often necessary and there are ways of fighting that are more productive than others. People have disagreements. We get angry because we are human, because we can’t always get what we want, but if we learn to fight productively, we . . . get what we need? Well, not exactly. But there are definitely ways to disagree that are more functional than others.
At some point in this discussion, I got teary, because I remembered the childhood fights with my mother. They were frightening. Nasty. My mother threw food, glasses, a honey jar. I threw things back. We were cruel. There were no apologies when things calmed down. I’m glad not to remember too many specific details about those fights, so long ago, though I remember their later incarnations, the bad years when I was in Ohio and my mother was under great stress. Our phone conversations (always when I was at work) were so nasty that I would have to go to the ladies room afterwards to press away the tears and splash water on my face. It took me years (and a patient husband) to learn how to fight calmly, to try and trace my anger back to the source and understand that my point of view wasn’t the only one, that I didn't have to rip into someone when I was angry.
I told the kid about some of those early days, about how scary Nana was, because I can’t imagine hiding it. I wanted him to know parts of my story, in addition to explaining why I occasionally lose it, why the old ways return to me, though they return less and less. We talked about how Nana is a different person now. The woman he sees in pictures, with the long, straight seventies hair and bellbottoms, or in those wedding photos where she and my dad, nineteen and eighteen, look like embryonic versions of themselves, doesn’t exist anymore.
As he gets older, I’ll have to deal with the other stuff, too, the more complex issues of my later childhood. I recently found myself thinking that I didn’t matter as a parent, that whether I was here or someplace else would make no difference to him. The source of this thought is unclear. He and his dad have a wonderful, playful relationship that I am not totally a part of, but I understand that. What really struck me as I analyzed the thought was that at some point both of my parents must have been operating under the (unacknowledged) assumption that they did not matter to me.
They were wrong.
The idea that I would think the same thing about my own importance to my son was frightening, for what it says about my current state of mind and for what it would make me capable of. Clearly I have more to work out, for his sake and for mine.
So I'll keep on writing, put "find a new therapist" on my to-do list, and remind myself that I am important, in small and big ways, in my son's life. I'll keep on telling him the truth about my life, when it seems appropriate, while letting him know that people change and grow, that nothing is static.
I've been a writing fiend. Why? I don't know. I can't help myself. If you are still reading this blog, thank you. If you've been reading for a long time, then some of this may be familiar, a return to deep themes.
Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose
It’s a sweet manufactured memory, though when I hear the songs I feel an ache, a knowledge that it happened. I have no recollection of my father's early presence. I don't even remember my parents' marriage. From the way my mother tells it, that's probably a good thing. My father experienced one of his first major depressive episodes shortly after I was born and the picture she paints of the situation isn't an attractive one. From her description of the time, I imagine a small, dusty apartment. The blinds are down, the floor and coffee table are junked with papers and books, the cats have been using the plant pots as litter boxes. My father lies on the couch, motionless, a sad lump. In the galley kitchen, Mom, still in her work minidress, scours the grease off a pan and grumbles to herself.
It wasn't as if either of them knew what was going on, what the gulf between them was about. It just was and it went beyond the relationship disillusionment that often comes with having a baby.
My father tells me that they were in love, and the concept is foreign to me, almost subversive. Love? I (silently) refused to believe it. All I remember is the aftermath, and part of that aftermath was my father’s sudden absence, his early unreliability, his later cluelessness. I know what my mother went through and what I went through with her and some of those early years after their divorce were bad. Where was he?
It was almost easier for me to think I came from indifference or from teenage hormones and a lack of birth control than from love. The idea that I was the product of two people who loved each other made the bad years worse somehow, unsettling, just like my recent revelation that those bad years didn’t have to happen. Better that I take the responsibility, say that I deserved the bad, that it was under my control, my fault. My conception set it into motion. At least that's how I felt initially: why give in to love, to my own blamelessness? It opens up a whole new category of pain.
Maybe this is why, when I picture my father holding me, singing softly in the fading daylight, I often start to cry. It was the closest we’ve ever been and I don’t remember it and I don’t want to believe it. He was there. The world was fresh. Then he left. It was right before everything got fucked up.
The scene in the rocking chair, our eyes meeting until mine slowly closed in sleep, feels theoretical. Still, I can picture it. But that dusty apartment, my parents’ marriage falling apart? I can’t even imagine myself into it, the toddling towhead stomping across the floor or sleeping in a crib like the little angel I apparently was. It is incongruous enough to imagine my parents living together, let alone living together with me. The three of us as a unit? It isn't a fantasy I indulge in. I used to think this was because I was a realist who lived without (much) regret, but now I know it is because the thought of it, the idea that we were once a family, that I came from love, actually hurts. I have never wished my parents back together. It wouldn't work. They are totally incompatible. But that feeling . . .
When my son was a baby, I focused only on him, the feeding, the sleeping or not-sleeping, the always being there. It was all-encompassing. We swayed to a mellow soundtrack -- early k.d. lang, Bill Withers, Elizabeth Mitchell. In the black night, the muddy twilight, the too-early dawn, when he was awake and should have been sleeping, I soothed him with songs. Some of them I made up on the fly, personalized for him. I also sang other peoples' songs, ones that sounded beautiful but with dark lyrics. They reflected my mindset at the time, so sleep- and self-deprived and scared. I may be the only mother in the world who sang The Old Main Drag by the Pogues to her infant, but it's a pretty tune with the weight of the world behind it. And though the song was dark and some of those early times were, too, I never left my son. He has always known that I love him no matter what.
Of course, my father loves me, too. I’ve never doubted that, not on a rational level. But those early, iffy years when he was absent, struggling with depression and learning how to be a grown up, the years when I was in desperate need of stability and safety and, later, my desolate adolescence, have always been between us. My anger became part of the barrier, prickly and electric, older than words. Lately, however, things have been changing. He makes a point of calling more often. I make a point of calling him back. We talk like family. The barrier is disappearing, my feelings softening.
I see his sadness, feel his need for connection, the pain of the distance between us. I think about the good times, the steady years. They always involved music. Our weekends together came with a soundtrack.
He turns sixty this month and I want to write for him, something about music and memory. Something about songs, for my father, about how they connect us. But first I wade through the ambiguity. I press gently on the painful places, dim the light to obscure our weaknesses. I keep on moving, my eyes closed. Love is like that, blind and brave and senseless.
Image: Dad, Mom, & me, Easter 1971. I've used this image before, one of two I have of me with my parents (not counting my college graduation pictures).
Thanks to Lydia, for planting the seeds for this post.
The real thing
My grandmother kept a bowl of plastic fruit in the center of her dining room table. Heavy grapes the color of lime sherbet clustered next to just-so pears and hard-as-Tupperware bananas, bright and artfully speckled. The bowl rested on top of a frilly doily, next to the lazy susan that held salt, pepper and condiments. We removed the fruit when we actually wanted to eat, put it aside during big family meals when my aunt and mother put the table leaf in and camouflaged the maple top with a pad and a heavy vinyl cloth, its plastic disguise.
Fake fruit was an adult conceit that fascinated me, the effort involved to make something look real, down to a sprinkling of brown on a banana or a jaunty fabric leaf still attached to an apple stem. It was a testament to the illusory power of plastic. As a grownup, I wonder what sort of thinking (if any) is behind fruit as decoration versus fruit as actual food. Why not mix the two and put out stuff you can eat? I don’t remember biting into many fresh grapes or bananas or pears at my grandmother's house. Instead there were syrupy fruit cups, ice cream Dixie cups with wooden paddles for spoons, greasy Cheez-Its straight from the box. Lunches materialized out of powder, water, and starch. Dinner fell from a box or the freezer or was handed to us via the drive-thru window at Big Elk Mall McDonald's. My order never wavered: hamburger, French fries, Coca Cola.
Two years after my grandmother's death, there were still TV dinners in the old utility room freezer. When I missed her I craved salisbury steak in a thick mushroom gravy or fried chicken with crisp battered skin, wrinkled peas, potatoes whipped into paste and crumbly apple cobbler for desert. In her life, we celebrated modern technology, the power of the deep freeze, the effects of dehydration on vegetables. After her death, I was subjected more often to my mother's diet regime, which was all about freshness and sauteing in olive oil or real butter, about the taste of a peach.
Over time, I moved closer to my mother's approach to food. In 1995, I gave up most meat (though I still eat fish). Almost ten years later, I attended a cooking school where we cooked with whole grains and natural sweetners. Though my son does occasionally eat macaroni and cheese from a box, he has never tasted McDonald's french fries. I make almost everything from scratch. The freezer in our house contains blueberries, veggie sausages, loaves of bread, and ice cube trays. We have two bowls of real, edible fruit within easy kid reach. Apples, pomegranates, and persimmons intermingle with cooking ingredients, onions, shallots, garlic, with the odd squash or two. The kid may only eat pasta with butter and cheese for dinner, but he also loves fruit, thank goodness.
My grandmother died of a heart attack when I was nine, probably in part because of her chemical, salt and fat consumption, though the smoking didn't help. I wonder how she would interpret my adult self, my diet, my liberal ways. We were so close (I lived with her on an off until her death and she took care of me during school and summer vacations) – would my rebellious teenage years and outsider adulthood have turned her away? If she lived would I never have gone pescetarian? Would I still be ordering hamburgers and French fries crisp with fat?
And if not, would she have loved me anyway?
From a photo prompt.
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 we 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
My husband 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 my husband 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. My husband 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:
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.
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
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.
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.
