Image courtesy of In Praise of Sardines

Last year this night bled into Sunday afternoon. Following a trail of crushed blackberries, I traced the stains with my fingers and watched as we went from mud to cracked glass to bruise. Late night notes, an errant bike ride, “drama at Inspiration Point.”

In a year, total turnaround, but, as always, I focus on dates.

Tonight’s bad mood explained.

Tags: forgiveness

Late on Friday night, my mother arrived in town. We’re having a great time – when it’s good, it really is wonderful. She’s smart, funny, and well-read, a person who is always thinking and analyzing. My husband has always gotten along with her and C is enjoying having her around, too.

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 ...

Tags: secrets, forgiveness, Mom, family, depression

Skipped my Sunday morning run. I’ve been snapping at my family. My mood is foul and it’s best to stay away from me (thank you, H, for taking C to the birthday party). I’m trying to stop my snarls, but my emotions are simmering, close to the boil.

And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?

I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.

But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.

If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?

One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.

Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.

I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.

My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.

As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.

I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.

The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.

The feelings need time. They will out.

Tags: existential angst, storytelling, teen pregnancy, forgiveness, writing

no one read this blog. If I was still Anonmomous?

This has been a hard week of slog and attempts to think my way through a muddled, sad brain.

There could be at least one reason I am struggling -- the end of July marks an anniversary of sorts (some might call it an antiversary). This, coupled with an overnight work retreat for my husband next week, a true triggering event, is bringing me down. These dates will lose their meaning over time, but the first go-round stinks.

So. Maybe that's it.

(Ever since my mother sent me this quote from Seamus Heaney on the use of 'So.' as prelude, a call for attention, I've been using it as a sentence all on its own. The quote is below, Famous Seamus on translating Beowulf and using the term 'So.'

There you have it -- a little esoterica to balance out the angst, to confuse the crowd. Oh, for courage and greatness.)

"And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of [my big-voiced Scullion] relatives, [who had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. ] I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:

Hwaet we Gar-Dena    in gear-dagum
peod-cyninga      prym gefrunon,

Conventional renderings of "hwaet," the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with "lo" and "hark" and "behold" and "attend" and—more colloquially—"listen" being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle "so" came naturally to the rescue because in that idiom "so" operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, "so" it was:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness."

Tags: existential angst, forgiveness, Poetry, writing

Oh, worn out and shriveled brain, can you transmit organized thoughts to my fingers, please?

We saw my mother today, and will be heading to Baltimore to see her again on Saturday. There she was in solid form, no ghost. C was immediately comfortable with her. We had a good time. I was loyal for many years, keeping things hidden, trying to protect my mother and defend her. Now I feel like I have betrayed her here by writing these things in public, painting her with such a broad brush. It's complicated. She's complicated. And my feelings are all twisted up.

Can I have it both ways? Protect her and save myself? Probably not. But I can acknowledge the shades of gray.

Tags: Mom, forgiveness

I'm gripping the past with both hands now, pulling it into the present for a final showdown.

Or is it gripping me, pulling me under the water's surface?

The past may threaten, may flash a set of phantom fangs when I tell it to go away but it isn't really coming back. Time goes forward, never back.

But sometimes the past is as present as my own mind, and it is up to its same old tricks. Sleights of hand and feats of illusion.

Why do I still talk to you almost every day? Why can't I just accept you for who you are and get over it already? And then I get out the family pictures and realize how young you were. I'm sorry.

Tags: Mom, forgiveness

If you've read the West Street Sequence (so far) of A Prolonged Illness, you will know about Jim, my mother's ex-husband. Jim, the Philadelphia Flyers lover. Jim, the man who wouldn't talk when I was at the dinner table, unless it was to harangue me. Jim, the Big Mean Step-Father.

After Mom kicked him out and life became simultaneously freer and crazier, Jim did some soul-searching. Went to therapy. Joined a church. Eventually remarried. And would take me out to dinner about once a year. The last time I saw him also was the most bizarre. Jim, his wife, and his sister (Gail), came to DC to have dinner with me before I left for graduate school. I hadn't seem Gail in almost ten years. She just couldn't stop with the remarks: "You talk just like Carol [my mother]! You have mannerisms just like Carol! You move your hands just like Carol! That's exactly what Carol would do!" Since she hated Carol for hurting "Jimmy," these comments were not meant kindly. I eventually burst into tears. Gail gave a petulant apology. I swear she even stuck out her lower lip.

These dinners were never comfortable for me. What was his agenda? Did he feel guilty? Did he want to make it right? Who knows, maybe he was fond of me. Hewas in our lives for 7-8 years, for a large chunk of my childhood.

We lost touch after he and family moved to Idaho, about a decade ago. I tracked him down late last year (yeah, I know, I know) and he's been sending cards and presents for C for holidays ever since. So here I am in the middle of a Jim flashback, hating the man for being a prick, when we get this Easter package from him with toys for C.

I'm feeling a bizarre mix of feelings right now, mainly anger and guilt, the usual partners in crime, though there has to be some sadness, too. Do I have to forgive everyone, see the human in every single fucked up bastard I've come across?

Tags: step-father, forgiveness