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

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

J. had a freezer full of goose breasts riddled with shot. His family owned property on Broad Creek with a duck blind right against the water, where the menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed me the blind that first summer, took my hand and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks gone brown. We sat close on the austere bench, hidden behind grass that had become hoarse with whispering over the years. I am sure he kissed me in that humid July air because we did a lot of that then, sweet lingering kisses in between fights and sarcasm.

He’d told me that a former tenant of the Sugar Shack, the house he and his brother were renting from their grandmother on the far side of the property, had keeled over one afternoon in the back bedroom, dead from a heart attack. By the time they found the body, the man’s faithful dog had chewed off half of his face. It probably started with wake-up licks that progressed to nips and then frantic biting. But J. was often full of shit, and I’m not sure if he was just trying to scare me. If so, it worked. I’d spend the night there holding it, too nervous to walk the ten feet to the bathroom, picturing the gory scene, the spiritual remains of this lonely person floating over the room.

One muddy November night, when lingering kisses had turned into the fire of post-fight sex, I realized I was on the edge. J. and I had gone from chemical intensity to a kind of in-between thing that wasn’t satisfying but was just enough to keep me hooked. We’d spent the evening at the bar, drinking and picking at each other. By the time we shoveled into the Sugar Shack driveway, my brain was crackling. We had a fight about something ridiculous or something deep-seated and heavy, it doesn't really matter, and at some point I grabbed a shotgun from the gun cabinet.

As I write this, I can’t believe that I did such a thing, so dramatic, so serious. Could I be making this up? No. I was drunk and sad and teetering on the edge of the abyss, so I grabbed one of his (unloaded) shotguns and pointed at my face. Maybe we struggled. All I can remember is me stumbling in the shabby living room of the Sugar Shack where it was cold and damp. J. was lit from behind so that his face was cragged in shadow. I was hysterical with pent-up emotion, struggling to keep hold of this unwieldy gun. Eventually J. took it away and returned it to the cabinet. We went to sleep. I woke up the next morning barely able to move, felt around for his sleeping form and remembered that he was probably hunkered down in the duck blind with his cousins.

I’m sure he chalked the night up to my overgrown sense of drama, another mark against me to go with my unfaithfulness and love of alcohol. Thank god I've tossed aside those crutches for the most part, though I miss the drama sometimes. Drama sparks up the night, shines a little light into the abyss. Without it, you have only darkness, have to bravely perch on the edge until the abyss slowly creeps away. And that's where I seem to be right now for reasons that are unclear to me, dirging it out until the fog lifts.

"Shoot him 'fore he run now," is a lyric to the song "Shotgun," originally by Jr. Walker and the All Stars. Click here for a danceable, levity-producing version from the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It features some of the original Motown sessions musicians and the late Gerald Levert as singer.

Image from the Washington College magazine.

Tags: love, writing prompt, Round Robin, College, hunting

Dirk was the outlier. We hooked up on a sticky summer night, an inauspicious, fumbling beginning to a relationship that didn’t really take off for another two years. After that, love came on schedule, always in spring, with the first signs of life and greenery. It came with the tulips and the flaming branches of forsythia.

The daffodils were just starting to droop, to turn brown along the edges, when J, my second serious boyfriend, the one who still shows up in cruel attempts at seduction in my dreams, for whom no pseudonym works, asked me out. That first April date kicked off a sweet season of mixed drinks with cute but somewhat foreboding names – Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies – as well as watery draft beer. Sex took on a religious quality, became a sacrament. The chemistry kept us limping along as summer eroded into fall and the relationship thinned at the edges.

Impatiens on the front steps.

Then there was Mr. X, my future ex-husband, another April romance. After his estranged wife finally agreed to a divorce, we leapt into commitment. Mr. X brought me a bouquet of stolen lilacs, fragrant and in full bloom, along with a homemade tape of the band Squeeze. We ate thick chunks of asparagus over al dente pasta, moved on in summer to goat cheese, basil, and sundried tomatoes on seeded bread from Strawberry Fields. Those first six months were a bacchanalia of Berghoff bock and bacon, of homemade hollandaise, of chorizo burritos as big as our heads. Because he was not yet divorced, we tried to hide our relationship, played footsie under the table at the weekly library school happy hour. It only added to the excitement, to the feeling of being so lucky and in love. Chosen.

Mr. X is to blame for my love of gardening. After we moved to Ohio, he introduced me to seedlings and compost, to the pleasures of growing our own food. Our second spring together we planted a garden in the shared backyard of our downtown Columbus duplex. I couldn’t get enough of it, kept on putting flowers in here and there, wanted to grow eight different kinds of tomatoes. Unfortunately, our shaky relationship didn't survive past the fourth spring. After we moved to DC and his new job turned out to be untenable, he returned to Ohio State. He left six months after we moved, coincidentally on the weekend of our second anniversary, though it was not intended to be a separation. Distance brought perspective. One cold March day, I decided on divorce.

With that April came ... love. I'd been friends with D (now Mr. Writing to Survive), a coworker, for months, but suddenly our relationship shifted. It was a mixed-up, uncertain time. I was suspended between two lives. Mr. X and I had to come to an agreement over the house, divvy up our possessions, and fight over the dog and cats. D's mother, thousands of miles away in Southern California, was dying of cancer. My own mother, having left Kevin temporarily, was living with me.

But D and I were deep in the process of discovery, our minds tousled with passion. There were memorable evenings, late night dinners at Lebanese Taverna, sitting by the Lincoln Memorial in the pale pink of sunset watching the cherry trees turn into blurs of white, nights spent just hanging out talking, developing our shared sense of surreal humor. My mother liked him, too, and would smile when he told her "Goodbye, Mrs. Casey!" upon leaving the house. He was like the polite high school boyfriend I never had. One wind-whipped day, the weather damp and cold, D and I drove to Ocean City. We couldn't stop laughing, in part at ourselves for taking a beach trip on a day that was a holdover from winter.

It was the spring we started building the foundation for our lives. It was also a spring without a garden, when I let the lawn dry out and the dirt harden. Without water, the young azalea bushes that bordered the house died. I could barely cook a potato, let alone take care of plants.

Basil plants.

Spring returns, and with it the renewal of lust, the desire to stroke new greenery, run my fingers through the dirt. It is the beginning of love all over again, to join with my husband and make things anew.

It takes over everything, this garden lust, takes over my brain and my time, pushing everything else out. My writing has gone to seed and I haven't been visiting my blogging friends, choosing instead to sink my hands into the soil, to fill up pots with new seedlings, to transplant root-bound herbs. At my last count, we had over thirty pots filled with vegetables, herbs, and flowers. One plant remains, a sugar pumpkin that will go by the back fence, will eventually wrap its tendrils around a trellis, and that's that.

It is about time that I resisted temptation, maintained fidelity to the plants already in my life. I must avert my eyes from seductive seedlings.

Tags: gardening, optimism, spring, love, weeding, metaphor

Last week one of my writing prompts was "start with a question," and I ended up with the beginnings of this little bit of silliness. At the moment writing fiction, making an attempt to tell an interesting story, to tell it well and with grace, feels like practice for me. I need a lot of practice. The beginnings of the next great American novel this ain't, but that's OK.

Next post: what I did on my winter blogcation.

And by the way, I have nothing against chihuahuas.

chihuahua skull image from Skulls Unlimited.

Take John and Elise. John was in love with her, but clueless about the ways of women. Not as taciturn as his father, a slab of a man, thick and slow, who tended to talk only after having a few, John had learned little of relationships or communication. He tried, though, bought Elise a toaster oven. He researched and did price comparisons and found one that would fit over the counter. He matched it to her appliances, black and sleek, made sure Elise could cook those frozen tater tots that she loved so much in it.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!”

Elise was expecting flowers, maybe even a dozen red roses or some sort of singing Valentine. She wanted the cliché, craved it after seven arid manless years. There was so much expectation that when she unwrapped the box (how many roses could be in such a huge box? And so heavy?) she burst into tears. What in the hell was this? John, bless his naïve heart, thought she was crying with joy, until Elise ran out of the living room, opened her kitchen window and flung the toaster oven, still in its box, out into the warm California air.

Start with a question. Focus on intent. For John, love. For Elise, unmet expectation, a dry spell Hallmarked to death, broken by this practical, this unromantic man. But intent no longer mattered to Gary Flanagan, whose chihuahua was crushed under a toaster oven flung from a third story window. As soon as Elise heard Taquito’s truncated yelp and Gary’s shouts, she knew something bad had happened. She looked at John, still in shock himself at the strange turn the afternoon had taken, through the kitchen doorway and held a finger up to her lips, her bloodshot eyes widening in warning.

And then, she didn’t know why, she felt a surge of lust. Elise marched over to the couch and starting ripping John’s clothes off, pinned him against the flowery cushions. Caution be damned, they consummated their two-week relationship right then and there without saying a word.

In the confusion of expedited passion, her underwear went missing. Afterwards, John went on a hunt, made a big show of it, checked behind the huge ficus in the corner, rifled through the china cabinet, lifted Elise's hair and brushed the nape of her neck with his chapped lips. “Nope. No underwear there, either. Guess you’re just going to have to go commando,” he told her and she laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. Like it was the first time she heard that one.

Elise picked up a takeout menu from the coffee table. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Chinese?” she asked, waggling a flyer from Mr. Chen’s Vegan Delites. “Chinese!” John responded with a jocular wink as he tossed her bra across the room, just missing the trash can.

Below, on Broome Street, a crowd had gathered. Tacquito’s hind quarters were barely visible under the box and a trickle of blood from his mouth had formed a dark comma on the sidewalk. Laura Falcon from Apartment 16 had heard the impact. She had poked her head out of her window and called the police right away. After putting down the phone, she went out to comfort the victim, that sweet and single Gary Flanagan from the sixth floor, handed him a huge mug of coffee and some chocolate chip cookies. Together they waited, stared up at the bank of windows, row after row of shiny glass with ominous gaps, windows cranked out to catch the breeze. Curtains flapped, blinds shuddered. Potted plants teetering on windowsills had taken on a dangerous quality. "Rows of terrabombs," thought Gary, newly enlightened about the pitfalls of gravity.

There were too many possibilities. “Not a peep from up there. Not a peep.” Gary kept repeating, and Laura would give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. To Gary it felt creepy, like she was enjoying this chance to make herself useful. Indispensible. After the police took a report, took little Taquito away, she invited Gary into her apartment. He refused. Fred, the condo building's maintenance man, sprayed down the sidewalk as Gary watched, still holding on to the chihuahua's six-foot black leather leash. The comma of blood turned into a rusty cloud and slowly dissipated, washed into the gutter. Gary went back to his one-bedroom, determined to get totally drunk.

John and Elise have never told John, Jr. about the night he was conceived. They’ve grown quite comfortable with each other’s foibles over the last twelve years. He’s better about flowers, and she understands that you show your love in the best way you can. Sometimes she wonders what would have happened if John had brought flowers. How long it would have taken them to get beyond their assumptions? They couldn't stop talking that night, about the past, about how childhood confusion solidifies into adult surety. Elise is glad he gave her the toaster oven. She wouldn't change what she did that afternoon, wouldn't even alter it even by one second. Without the toss, the truncated yelp, the immediate intimacy of being partners in a crime of happenstance, she and John would never have gotten this far. There would be no John, Jr. It was fate, all around.

The day after the toaster oven incident, John left Gary Flanagan an anonymous apology note stuffed with twenties. The police said it was no use dusting for prints, and it was true, John had worn gloves just in case. Couldn't they have at least tried? Was Taquito's life worth so little? Gary has another dog now, a minuscule mutt from the SPCA who trembles in cold weather, whose barks sound like an infant with whooping cough. Nowadays, he tends to leave the building by the back door, shuffles Pepin past the dumpster and parked cars. He avoids the scene of the crime.

Tags: fiction, writing prompt, Chihuahuas, love, Valentine's Day

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

Still August night. I’m sitting on the hood of his car, clinging to the edge of the broad expanse of white-coated metal, watching him walk to me. I can’t see his eyes in the dim light of the street lamp. His expression is obscure as he lifts my chin.

Now we’re clutched close, lost in a kiss, tender lip to darting tongue. His calloused carpenter’s hands stroke my hair, wrap me tighter. I think over and over: “This is what is happening right now, this is what is happening right now.”

Then, a fast drive through shuddering cornfields, car windows open, my hair whipping around in a pre-knot frenzy. The stalks are taller than I am, still green, with the threat of decay around the edges.

One morning, the fields will be brown. The next week, empty.

I won’t be seventeen forever.

Tags: existential angst, wasting time, love, Eastern Shore