Act I

Something is going on with me. I’m sleeping terribly, cry at nothing. Last night at dinner my son asked for another Dress Me Monkey story: “What else would Dress Me Monkey do?” This is our cue to come up with some fantastical new tale about how the toy would spend the proceeds from treasure he never manages to steal. I said the first thing that came to my mind, that Dress Me Monkey wishes he could go back in time to the nights when he ate with his mother and father and they told Dress Me Human stories. "His parents are far away now, and Dress Me Monkey misses those days. He would like to go back for a meal or two."

The dinner had been a difficult one, with the kid complaining about his food and telling me how the refried beans on his homemade nachos looked like dirt, like something worms would eat. I'd spent a lot of the day fighting my initial crabby responses to his normal kid behavior. I was tired. My past has been coming back and poking me lately, spilling out, and meals are one of those difficult times for me. So I came up with a Dress Me Monkey story that fit my mood, inappropriate though the story might have been.

"Why did Dress Me Monkey want to have dinner with his parents again, like he was a little monkey?" the boy asked.

“Because everybody wants that,” my husband said and started to cry. The boy was concerned and snuggled up close to his dad. We explained that Daddy was crying partially because he misses his mother, who has been dead for twelve years, but that also sometimes adults miss the past, the sweet simplicity of the family table. Then it was my turn to cry, because my childhood mealtimes were mainly horrible. The emotional tenor of my those dinners depended on my mother's mood and the man she was dating. She had only three boyfriends over the course of my childhood, but each of them had their own issues, would make me stand at the table or wouldn't talk when I was there or would pull me apart, show my every flaw. When the last one, Kevin, came along I ended up eating dinner alone most of the time.

So. I want my family meals to be happy. Full of love. The food I prepare is part of that love and I try hard not to force the boy to eat things he doesn't like, which is why he eats macaroni and cheese almost every night. Last night the meal was something he has eaten before, but it didn't appeal to him and the whole situation got to me.

I know that his rejection of my food is not a rejection of me, but sometimes I still have that visceral reaction, that and "You have no idea how good you have it, little boy." And I get angry at myself for thinking such a thing. He doesn't "need" to know that. He needs to grow up secure and happy and loved, without the burdens of my childhood thrust upon him. But right now the past is spilling out of me, surprising me with its emotional abundance. It can be overwhelming.

Last night, as I was getting him to sleep, he asked about our day. This rundown of our daily activities is a bedtime ritual. Sometimes I learn more about what happened at school or we go deeper an earlier discussion. When I got to the dinner portion of my synopsis, I apologized for the weirdness of it and asked if he had any questions. "Why did you tell a sad Dress Me Monkey story?" was the first.

The real answer was because I am sad right now. I am processing something deep and fetid, airing out emotions that don’t easily surface. I’m not sure why it's happening and while I don’t like the effects – waking up in the middle of the night or too damn early, occasionally scaring my child, being cranky and sleepy all day – I think what I’m going through is necessary. What I told him was that when I was little mealtimes weren't always happy times and I was feeling sad about it during dinner. And then we moved on to why Daddy cried at the dinner table.

Act II

It happened again last night, the two a.m. alarm clock. I woke up sad, obsessed with an aborted friendship. After a good cry -- quiet, intense -- into my pillow, I went into the boy's room to read and hopefully return to sleep. (He had already migrated into our bed.) When sleep finally snuck up on me, I had a complicated dream. In it, my husband's family was visiting (though, in typical dream style, an old boyfriend of mine showed up, too, looking very much like a middle-aged Eastern Shore type, with a baseball cap, greying beard, and a beer belly). It was a surprise visit. I hadn't had a chance to clean and I was ashamed at how the house looked and angry with my husband for springing them on me.

My dream self went stomping off into the night. Our oldest cat, Zoe, fifteen years old now and a sack of bones, dotty, constantly hungry, followed me. We wandered frenetic city streets, joined the rush of humanity. In one square, mimes performed acrobatic feats and played with fire. The glow of a neon sign drew me into a murky bar. The next thing I remember, Zoe and I were walking home. A rainstorm had blasted through the city and scrubbed away the people, leaving behind damp sidewalks and oil-slick puddles that reflected the shimmer of streetlights. It was spooky, the kind of emptiness where you expect to hear an echo of footsteps behind you. Zoe, frightened by a stray cat, fell behind.

One minute I could see her, the next she was gone. I screamed her name over and over again. I used the dinnertime call: Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo. And then I opened my eyes, totally awake, feeling the responsibility, feeling the loss.

But at least I was feeling something.



Image: Asher with Nick's shadow. Zoe has asked not to be photographed for the blog. She's an old-fashioned sort who values her privacy, though her name actually is Zoe. She also agreed that this photo was the best fit for the post.

Does it seem like my past is always spilling out? Maybe here. This is different though, like I'm working through something big. I sometimes discount the effects of my childhood and often think I should be over it by now. But it's not so simple, is it?

Tags: dreams, what my son will talk about in therapy someday, think it's time to finally find a therapist again, dress-me monkey, storytelling, cats, Pets, guilt, grief, meals, the family table

The sky is already darkening, the blue is slowly being blotted out by thick cotton batting, grey and getting greyer. I haven’t written much in the last two weeks and I don’t know where my head is, so I am writing to figure it out, waiting for the rain to fall again and for the words to flow.

In the midst of our trip to New Jersey to visit my father and stepmother (the long flights, the Christmas presents, the one-sided conversations), I realized that I was no longer angry with them. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, a kind of lightness or a shifting of a burden. Of course, this new feeling didn’t save me from the usual visit hangover, a subtle thwack to my equilibrium. My emotions always need time to settle after these visits, though I've gotten better at recognizing that over the years.

It is possible to let go of anger without shedding sadness and guilt and that's where I am today, a little sad and perpetually guilty, replaying conversations from the trip and wondering what to make of them, how to fit them into my new vantage. My stepmother told a story of a breakfast in Bryn Mawr when I was nine or so, a scene at the diner with gleaming chrome and murals of 1940s college scenes on the walls. Apparently I had cut into my waffle with too much force and my plate flew onto the floor. As it shattered, so I did I, started to cry while they tried to comfort me. I didn't remember a thing about it, but I do remember being constantly on edge during my visits with my father, on alert, my guard up. It took very little to shake up my practiced calm.

So what can you do? For the first nine years of my life, my father wasn’t always reliable. He was intermittently present (despite some rosy memories on my stepmother’s part; she’s an optimist and my father’s protector and she wasn't around then anyway). His child support payments were regular, his love was constant, though often from a distance. Everything else shifted around. And then, in adolescence, he failed me. They failed me. How can you tell someone that they can’t make up for the first nine years? Or that maybe they aren’t as safe as they think they are?

You don’t. So I won’t. All I can do is approach them warily, be mindful of the gaps in our experiences, acknowledge their efforts and their love, see how blind the compassionate can be and hope to keep my own sight.

But the guilt, the uncontainable guilt. It's about not being good enough, ever, then and now, and it carries over in ways that can be paralyzing. Once again I'm left with the idea that I still have a lot of work to do before I forgive myself. How do you let go of the feeling of being wrong-hearted from birth?

I have no idea how to go about it. I am open to ideas, though. Suggestions are welcome.





Image: My father, mother, and me, Easter 1971. I know that by writing this, putting it out there on the Internet, I take risks. So they might read it. If it would make a difference in what we talk about, wonderful. If not, well, at least they are reading. And I'm sure they have their own ideas about the past. Perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps.

As for the song, it's going through my mind and feels appropriate in some way.

Tags: guilt, childhood, forgiveness, self-blame, love, parental guilt

My mother sometimes dabbles in jewelry making, takes broken glass from the street or from her experiments with wine bottles dropped against the concrete in her city backyard and makes earrings and pendants with the results. As she’s gotten deeper into it, she has acquired a love of gold, of the supple softness of the metal. It surprises me that the woman who takes the broken, the rusty, the discarded, would flirt with the element of royalty. But lately she’s moved back to pottery, to earth, water, and fire. I know she will return to metal someday.

People tell me that they would like to know more about my mother. Yes, she really wanted to be a horse when she grew up. She writes poetry, makes pots, gathers detritus for ornament. She put herself through school when I was small, owned a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay, was involved with men who were interesting in divergent ways. In a neighborhood of tight short grass, she let her front yard become a meadow and spent one carless year getting around on a moped. She has always been left-leaning, was even briefly a Communist in the early 1970s. When I was a teenager we would remove real estate signs from former corn and soybean fields in a vain protest against development, would fishtail down country roads with these huge signs sticking out of the back of her battered 1973 Corolla station wagon. Other times, I would roll my eyes when she pulled over at the sight of mayapples in the woods. Fuming in the passenger seat, worried that someone I knew might see us, I would wait for her to dig up a few plants for her shady backyard. After my stepfather moved out of the house, Mom and I traced the outlines of our celebratory forms on the walls of his workout room, poses of joy and freedom, and shared a laugh at imagining how the drawings would mystify him. He wouldn't have known happiness even if he was bench-pressing it, but we understood: happiness was being on the run.

She was an unconventional parent, loving when she wasn't blinded by circumstance or her own sadness, and supportive when she wasn't worried that I would disappear into an unsuitable life. But she also had a fiery temper and a tendency to neglect. Our past together comes in shades of grey, from the light mist of early morning fog to the dark moment before your eyes adjust to the blackout. Would I have chosen a stable, boring parent instead of her? No. After being out of her house for twenty-five years, long independent from her moods and moves, it's easier to say that. I've written through most of the pain, have decided to show the scars of my childhood to the light.

Without those experiences, without my mother, would I be writing today? Is there value in being scarred, in the bittersweet ache of having survived relatively intact? I have forgiven my mother. I still work on forgiving my father. But the largest task is grappling with the effects of their behavior. Sometimes that old pain of abandonment feels a part of me, impossible to escape, something that flows through my veins and arteries and regenerates in my marrow, the cell memory of neglect.

I'm working on it, I'm writing it out. I'm giving it a voice. And slowly, slowly, it's working.

The scars sparkle like broken glass. The light makes them golden, supple, gives them a hue that I never appreciated in the dark. These are who I am, who my mother and I were, what we were capable of, and I’m here, I’m here, I float above the earth. I’ve known life and death. I carry the guilt, I carry the heavy water. I shine with the brilliance of knowledge of the grave.



Image: My mother and me, December 1982. Isn't being thirteen with braces just wonderful?
Most of this is from a recent prompt, Gold.

Tags: forgiveness, self-blame, guilt, child neglect, childhood

To scrape your memory clean, you need only a handful of pills washed down with gin. You need a good wallop to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp granite. You need to take the prescribed dose of anti-malarial medication before the trip to the tropics. The combination of drug and sun and strange circumstance will have the desired effect, the wake-up in a stranger’s room, the philosophical conversation in a bar strangely devoid of smoke, you speaking in tongues, memory gone.

But without my memory I am nothing. There is no story, no me. You could tell me about my life and I would smile and nod, sometimes gasp. Maybe I wouldn’t believe parts of it, just like I don’t believe the stories you tell about yourself, about first grade and that teacher with the wheedling fingers. He cornered you in the empty classroom and you knew something was wrong and then you let it happen again and again. OK. I can believe it. Maybe it happened; you wouldn't be the first. But the one about your mother, her fingertips coated in lotion, rubbing your bare chest as she tried to erase your budding breasts? The chair was cold, her hands were warm. You were obedient, pulled between pleasure and confusion.

Are you sure that you're not confused now?

I don’t need my memory to tell me that I am a skeptic. It's built-in, a defense mechanism, maybe, or just hardwired into me. So you could tell me about my life, the room done up in pale pink, my chenille bedspread soft against my cheek. You say he came in through the window after I went to sleep and the image is so surreal it could be fantasy, the fluttering curtains, the dark shadow of stubble on his familiar cheeks. And then, seven months later, in the same room, the push and shove of labor and my mother screaming. The silent bloody bundle that neither of us knew what to do with.

Or you could lean across the table and tell me my secret, say that I let him in, did nothing to prevent it. The curtains didn't billow: the windows were closed. I unlocked the door and held out my hand for his. You could cup your hands and whisper, "Some girls get the ending they deserve."

No.

You could tell me and I would be polite about it, would raise my eyebrows in mock surprise, but inside I would fold your stories on top of themselves, like the handkerchiefs I wash and fold for my husband. I would make them smaller and smaller. I would compress them and leave them on the table for someone else to put away.



Prompt: In the blink of an eye (heavily edited from the original and then avoided for a few weeks).

Image: Chair outside the Little House, Fall 1986.

Tags: memory block, guilt, child abuse, self-blame, child neglect, suppressed memories

Over the past few months, I've been going through old pictures to scan and put on Facebook, shots of old friends and increasingly long-ago events. I have avoided lingering over photos of old boyfriends (I actually only have pictures of one of my old boyfriends; there is no photographic record of my relationship with J.), though I like to remind myself of those times occasionally. They make for good writing fodder. In the process of sorting and scanning, I've come upon stacks of pictures from my first marriage, beginning with the time my then-boyfriend and I moved together from Illinois to Ohio up through our wedding almost two years later.

This is a record of young love and wobbly stability. There's Mr. X in male cheesecake pose, lying in front of the newly-planted impatiens in the backyard of our first Columbus apartment. Here's Loudon the sheltie-dog, a ball of fluff, on his first day home. Sidney and Zoe appear as young kittens, playful, flexible, and sleek. In one set of pictures, Mr. X and I pose separately, each of us holding a champagne glass and wearing the dark-lensed glasses that came with my grandmother's 50s-era sunlamp. We look like goons, but that was the point. And then there are the shots of our wedding, that great party we gave, where his relatives filled the space and made it joyous while mine were reserved and inward, quiet in their happiness. These photos are relics of another time, part of my life but outside of it, too.

As time went on, Mr. X and I took fewer pictures. Fifteen months after we were married, we both got jobs in Washington, DC and life got much more stressful. Mr. X clashed terribly with his incompetent boss. Our living situation wasn't comfortable. The basement tenant in the house we rented, a man named Dewey Wayne (I've since forgotten his last name), had an intense personality. Dewey Wayne had sold his house in Raleigh and put all his money into a move to DC, which included paying a year's rent in advance. He had a habit of leaving his front door open while he took his dog on walks, which was his business, except that his place was connected to ours by a door that we couldn't lock and our neighborhood wasn't a good place to leave doors open. The washer and dryer for the building were in his apartment and he freaked out (rightfully) once or twice when we walked in on him, unannounced, to do our laundry.

Then there were the rats. The backyard, a rectangle of bare dirt dotted with ratholes, held a thriving rodent commune. We had a parking space out by the trash cans and the rats began to use our car as storage space, something we discovered on our way to the grocery store one weekend. As Mr. X pulled out onto 15th Street, the engine began to smoke. Over the course of our ten-minute ride, the car slowly filled with the odor of roasted, rotten meat. We rolled all the windows down and covered our noses with tissues to filter out the smell. When we pulled into the parking lot, Mr. X popped open the hood: two smoldering pork rib bones had adhered to the carburetor. The car stank for weeks. Later a rat actually chewed its way into Dewey Wayne's apartment ("I came in and there he was on top of the refrigerator, munching on a bagel. Like Mighty Mouse," he told us).

Mr. X and I finally fled the rental after five months and bought a house in Takoma Park, Maryland. The night before the house inspection, our car was stolen from our street, though it was recovered somewhat unscathed a week later. In the meantime, Mr. X's job had gone from horrible to intolerable. His old position in Columbus was still open and they were happy to take him back. On the weekend of our second anniversary, only eight months after we had arrived in DC, he returned to Ohio. There were solid reasons for him to leave that had nothing to do with our marriage, but it was the beginning of the end, or at least I can mark the final slide with this event. We were doomed from the beginning.

Mr. X is remarried now. He and his wife have a child on the way. We haven't spoken in a couple of years, though we are Facebook friends. And while the past is always present for me in some way, I don't think much about that time when I was young and in love and it was all fresh and new, when I was with someone who was my loyal protector, when I was learning to be an adult without drama. I wasn't good at living without drama and still courted it with alcohol and arguments, with cruel remarks and coldness, but there was an underlying sweetness to the relationship. Mr. X helped pull me out of my childhood, was the first person to hold out his hand.

The only evidence I have of that time is some paperwork and photographs. We had no children and the last living pet we shared is fading fast. There are no friends in common with which to reminisce, to verify that it all happened. But I'm still not sure what to do with the artifacts, the pictures that show the world that we created for a brief moment, now submerged in memory.

Image: Champagne on our first anniversary, Columbus, November 1996. I still have the glasses and -- strangely, but coincidentally -- my son just fished them out of a toy box this morning and put them on, even though he hadn't worn them for months.

Tags: exhusbands, Columbus, OH, guilt, love, Nostalgia, divorce, photographic evidence of the past

The margaritas at Fonda have always been a little too strong – and a little too tart and tasty to stop at just one. That's where Mr. Trinkle and I were for dinner last Saturday night, eating grilled calamari, quesadillas, and guacamole, washing it all down with margaritas on the rocks, no salt. My in-laws had gone home earlier in the day and my mother was babysitting the kid, who was in bed for the night. Getting out was our opportunity to reconnect after almost a week of Christmas and visitor preparation, after almost six months of dissertation completion. The plan was to talk without interruption, to have tequila-smoothed conversation, to just be for few hours. Free babysitting, flavorful food, and a margarita or two: Conditions were perfect.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really am lucky.

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


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

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

Kevin, summer of 1984.

Enter spring–let's say April–1984, West Street, Wilmington, Delaware.

Birds are singing. The tulips and pansies in our raised beds are starting to bloom. Recent March winds have deposited the remnants of chaos, muddied papers, dead leaves and tree limbs, in the alleyway. The winds lifted deck chairs against back fences, turned over plastic flower pots, battered pedestrians. They blew Kevin the poet-carpenter, intellectual powerhouse and gin guzzler, in down the street, saluted him with a flurry of cherry blossoms.

My mother invites the new neighbor over for dinner. He seems strange, a little awkward in his old-fashioned glasses, his blue eyes intense and clear through Coke bottle lenses. Kevin speaks with a touch of New Jersey nasal and renovates and flips houses for a living. He arrives lean and tanned, armed with words of sharpened steel and a large bottle of Gordon’s, his old blue merle collie Barney by his side.

What could I do? I was fourteen. The last guy in our house didn’t even speak when I was at the table.

Here’s what I didn’t do: talk. Smile. Instead I just sat and shoveled in the food, exuded resentment, made infrequent eye contact. Maybe I smirked. And Kevin, a man I had just met, called me on it.

“What’s your problem? You’re just sitting there, sucking all the air out of the room.”

I have no memory of my response.

It wasn’t until yesterday, as I was attempting to capture this pivotal moment yet again, looking over what I’d written almost a year ago on that same dinner, that I realized: I blame myself. Reading over my early attempts is somewhat painful. I was straining to describe that night, to explain Kevin’s poetic rockstar persona and my mother’s deadly attraction to him, to explain my role in my own rejection. The end of parenting, my premature emancipation, the series of adult situations I got into before my time? Culpa. Mea culpa. I should have put on the charm, talked, given a little bit that night. I should have been someone else.

If I had won Kevin over that evening, maybe my mother would have stayed engaged in my life. She might never have started bringing dinner to him, eating in his dusty dining room every night while I ate alone. I wouldn’t have begun wandering the Wilmington streets after dark, wobbly with purloined gin, smoking unfiltered cloves and blasting the Dead Kennedys from my Walkman. The Little House would have stayed empty. The end of innocence could have been put off for another couple of years. If I were a better person, a different person, no one would have told me that I was evil, the root cause of family turmoil.

I know. I know. My brain tells my heart that it would have made absolutely no difference in the outcome if I had smiled or curtseyed or made insightful conversation about Nietzsche and Wordsworth. To be honest, until yesterday, I didn't know I felt this way. I blame myself.

Why do children take responsibility for things over which they have no control? Why do adults shift the blame to the helpless? And why, when we molt and grow and leave our child forms behind, does this sense of responsibility for our own small fates, this idea of being the masters of our abuse (if only I were nicer or less shy or stronger ...) carry on into our adult life?

The child decides that she is the cause of her mistreatment. The adult lets those early experiences dictate her behavior. We find ourselves recreating situations again and again, little kids in the guise of adulthood, sifting our lives through the rusty emotional sieve of the formerly helpless. We choose partners who fit into old scenarios, make decisions based on faulty data, try to get it right this time. With our motives hidden and our reasons obscured, the do-overs usually fail. Then? Familiar pain and reinforcement of our feelings of worthlessness.

Or maybe it's just me who's felt this way. Yes, I've done this, set up the scene, chosen guys who reject who I am, who blame me for their own shortcomings. I've blundered my way through friendships, the sullen fourteen year old in a thirty-year-old's clothing. And although I have stopped replaying the same scenes over and over again, I still have an overarching sense of responsibility for the trajectory of my childhood. My invisible scars feel completely self-imposed, my exposure of them a shameful confession. I feel rotten from the inside, capable of destroying entire worlds. Run from me before I drag you into the muck!

But I'm not that way. I'm not.

So I'm writing my path to self-acceptance, still trying to forgive myself and my family, to look at the world through clean eyes. I don't want to shift blame. I want to let go of the entire concept of it. After all, I'm here, alive, doing so much better than I ever thought I would be. It's time to let go, to untie my hands and live fully.

I figure I'm about 20% there. Maybe more. And if I can do it, you can too.

Coming up: February's blog, a return to the Maureen story (we'll skip over the guess who's coming to dinner segment), and some awards. Not necessarily in that order.

Tags: Kevin, guilt, forgiveness, child neglect

Image from Hope4Survivors

You want instant writer's block?

Try to write about your own shame.

That's not how today started. I wanted to write a story about a boyfriend I had in college, the tale of my second long term relationship. Our innocent beginnings. He was a teller in my bank, we shared smiles and pleasantries. Then one evening, when I was leaving the local watering hole with one of my male floozies, J approached me and said “I know you’re leaving with this guy, but can I call you sometime?” I gave him my number.

There was the little detail of my real boyfriend and our slowly dying couplehood. I had to put that out of its misery. It wasn’t a clean death. And when J went on a white water rafting trip with his family a month into our serious dating, I might have had a bar hookup or two. In between his return and our demise, we shared a period of sweet intense love. I loved him. I really did.

I was kind of crazy then. Angry. Pathologically needy. J was sarcastic and cruel, bitingly funny with a mean streak brought on by his quietly twisted childhood. After six months of total absorption, our relationship stalled and then limped along for another two years, with sporadic weekend visits (the margarita-inspired sex in a sprawling azalea near the Capitol grounds; the drunken knock on my door after a Redskins Super Bowl victory; my leap into the pool with the band, fully clothed, after I secretly followed J and Frieda back to his bedroom). I had a few mini-boyfriends on the sly, including one fellow philosophy major who totally trampled my heart and a graduate student who was a Jew posing as an Italian-American. Nervous about how he would be perceived in a Catholic-tinged philosophy program, the graduate student exploited his olive-toned skin and love of opera to go undercover, lived an odd temporary lie.

Still, J and I continued in our half-love without discussing the side relationships. The week I headed for graduate school, he left me a message, sang “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane,” to my answering machine, funny and bittersweet as ever. In November of that year, 1992, I found out that he’d gotten a new, serious girlfriend. After a tearful, confessional conversation, I mailed him a copy of the credit card receipt for my abortion. I’d been holding on to it for five months, waiting for the right moment to tell him.

Shame.

Ashamed of who I was and what I did. Ashamed of the abortion – the abortion. You think you can wash away shame or pain by showing it to the world, or to a limited subset of the sympathetic. Sorry, my good religious friends, my lovers of life. I let one baby happen by accident and took care of the next by violence.

By the end of my first semester in library school, I was in crisis, totally falling apart. Enter my first real attempt at therapy and my future first husband, the slow process of life rebuilding. If you are reading this, thank you future first husband, future ex-husband, for being so totally solid. I don't think I've given you enough credit for that. There is absolution in unconditional love.

I am starting to sift through the decade after the stillbirth, shining light on a dark time, preparing myself to come clean. I have wondered if the blog, my self-made public confessional, is the best way to expurgate shame. Wouldn't it be simpler to say nothing at all? Maybe finally get around to locating another trusted therapist, go the traditional recovery route? Or, if I must expose the ugliness, couldn't I just make it quick, compile a list, invite brief flagellation or accolades for my honesty and then move quickly on to self-forgiveness?

No, no, I have to transform the shame into a narrative, examine it inside and out. I need to dust if off, shine it up, put it in the shop window. Later, I'll pass it along to my fictional characters. They are waiting backstage, eager to take on the burden, ready to be set into motion. But before all that, before I can pass the torch in good conscience, I'll occasionally be picking apart my mistakes here, aiming for tricky self-forgiveness.

I hope you can stay with me for the ride, can keep an open mind and an empathetic heart. Oh, the places we’ll go!

Tags: shame, guilt, the stillbirth, secrets, College, boyfriends, love, emotional striptease

(Let's call this faction.)

The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.

Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends:  we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.

Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.

He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.

The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.

By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.

Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko Zivkovic)

The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good sign.

You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape with its violence and violations and death threats and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's right.)

Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now there was something between us. Another lie. I already had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a series of flirtations and one night stands that I excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?

Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.

I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast enough.

Tags: writing prompt, College, roommates, alcohol, smells, faction, date rape, Joy Division, guilt, lies, secrets

It all ended twenty-three years ago today.

And the story is just about really, finally, complete. The final excerpt (still in draft mode) is below. For other excerpts from the work in progress as well as posts on the topic, follow the stillbirth tag.

I'm putting this experience to bed now.

Photo by PhineasX.

Gusts of words swirl around me that week. I walk right through them. Who needs to talk? Dad is explaining the baby’s name to his father: “She said it was the first thing that popped into her head.” “Jennifer didn’t know what was going on,” my stepmother tells the phone receiver. At an aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, we sit and hide behind the blast of televised football and the scraping of forks, my paternal grandfather’s frequent throat-clearing sounding a note of general disapproval. Six days after the birth I try the nightgown trick again, tighten it over my empty abdomen. Flat as a pancake.

On an unseasonably warm December day, wisps of clouds pulled across a cerulean sky, Dad drives me back to Maryland. There is clean-up to be done. He drags the stained twin mattress to the end of the driveway, props it against the fence, bloodied side in. (“Very tasteful of your father,” Mom tells me later, with more than a hint of sarcasm.) My parents share a laugh at the ancient pack of pilfered Pall-Malls I’d jammed underneath it – if they only knew about the empty beer bottles hidden in the box spring of the other mattress. Dad gives me an awkward hug, waves goodbye from the car. I open the door to the Little House.

Smells become part of the background of a place, as invisible as the color of the ceiling or the punctuation of electrical outlets against wallboard. You forget how a house smells, forget it practically the moment you close the door. The stale air of the Little House hits me like a slap in the face. It is the scent of bottled-up mildew, of pressed wood and formaldehyde, the smell of isolation. I take a canister of Lysol and scour the room with an antiseptic rain, spray the walls and floor until they are damp. Over the afternoon I slowly change the feel of the place, moving furniture and taking down photographs.

When the familiar urge hits, I walk quietly into the main house. From my grandfather’s room comes the sound of MacGuyver, then the jingle of a commercial. An ice-cream scoop sits in the sink beside a spoon and scraped bowl. Grabbing a large tumbler from the dishwasher, I kneel to open the china cabinet, reach for the Johnny Walker Red on the bottom shelf. I walk back to the Little House clutching my glass of whiskey and Coke between both hands, taking careful, deliberate steps on every slate stepping stone, as though one misstep onto grass means bad luck. After locking the door behind me, I take a sip. The drink is strong and bitter, cold and soothing. Humanizing. Some drink to numb the pain. I drink to feel it. I begin to cry.

On Monday morning, puffy-eyed and stoic, I walk to my mother’s for our ride to school and work. She is cranking up the ancient, oil crunch era Toyota with the nonworking gas gauge. An egg and scrapple sandwich lies on the passenger seat, on top of the paper. I hop in, open the Wilmington News-Journal, take a bite of food. Mom puts the car into gear and backs out of the driveway.

Everything around me remains the same.

Tags: the stillbirth, guilt, teen pregnancy, The Little House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So many questions. Does anyone have answers?

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

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

I got out the autopsy and hospital records again recently, a way to remind myself of the sequence of events, background for the next version of my stillbirth story. In a thick stack of photocopies from microfiche, I can read about my hospital stay, see the medical advice they gave me about postpartum care. There is a "Certificate of Emergency Baptism," which seems especially antiquated and a little presumptuous, especially when I've never been baptized myself. I probably ok'ed it, though. It wasn't my soul who was being saved.

There on the fading photocopy of an autopsy authorization form is my signature. It's the writing of a teenager, rounded and totally legible, unlike the scrawled signature I have today. Then, the autopsy. They cut him open, weighed and measured his organs. Everything was for the most part normal, or "unremarkable" in autopsy parlance, with the critical exceptions of his lungs. The causes of death are listed as prematurity and bilateral pulmonary atelectasis.

Even now when I read it I feel a moment of panic: was he born alive? It did seem to me like he was moving initially, but my mother says otherwise. If we had been at a hospital or closer to emergency care, would he have lived? But the record is titled "Record of Fetal Death (Stillbirth)."

Does that leave me off the hook?

About two months after his death, I got a call from a parent running a bereavement group. The hospital had passed on my number and he was inviting me to their next meeting. As we talked, he mentioned that his stillborn child was a Christmas baby.

"That must have been so hard for you, right around Christmas," I said stupidly.

"Well, it's hard no matter what the season."

He was so kind, as if we were in this together.

I gave him my address and got off the phone as quickly as I could. What right did I have to grieve? The child I never wanted, who I was going to give up for adoption, was dead. Perhaps I even willed it, or brought it on with dark feelings and too many Budweisers. I wasn't a parent. I didn't deserve to feel anything.

For many years, I had a recurring dream. The baby had arrived. I wasn't prepared: no clothes, no diapers, no place to sleep. And somehow, the infant would slip my mind. He languished in a cold room, too weak to cry, his stomach knotted with hunger, a soaking diaper clinging to his skin.

By the time I remembered, it was too late.

Tags: teen pregnancy, guilt, secrets, the stillbirth

It was just before nine p.m. on a warm June night in 1966. He was working the 3-11 shift at a paint plant in Newport when the ping of a hammer, a timid tap in a room stinking of kerosene, sparked a fire. Flash of flame, no time to escape: my grandfather and two other men were adjacent to the vat.

As the story goes, he stepped outside, lit a Pall Mall, and popped the huge blister on his stomach. "I think you better call an ambulance."

80% of his body was covered in third-degree burns. He spent nine months in the hospital, nine months at home with a full-time nurse. He suffered through over 26 skin grafts. His hearing was ruined from massive doses of powerful antibiotics. When his right foot was giving up the ghost, its blood vessels cauterized by fire, surgeons took a couple timid swipes, lopping off one toe, then a couple more. It took a third operation to amputate it just below the ankle.

Years later, a doctor told him, "I've seen skin like that on a dead man."

When I knew him, he was demanding and unhappy, a man with a limp and two hearing aids. I learned to hate his call: "Jenny, got a minute?" I was definitely not a Jenny and what if I didn't have a minute? It was the typical stupidity of youth. I wish I could go back and treat him with kindness and empathy, to understand what was destroyed in the fire.

In my dreams he's back in the old house, living off hot dogs and root beer, not yet clued in to his own death. He tries to call me, jamming his thick, arthritic fingers into the phone's dial. No luck.

Tags: grandfather, guilt, dreams, fire