When the pep talk mantra doesn't work
It was a day of little triumphs, like the amazing feeling of getting a fidgeting, recalcitrant first grader to push through words she thought she couldn’t read. Every time she did it and I told her see, I knew you could do it, she giggled with surprise (at her abilities? at my goofiness?). We ended the session with a high five and I thought: this is the kind of stuff that makes me feel good.
It was a day of strangeness. I had my monthly medication check-in with the psychiatrist. We made Mad Men psychiatry jokes and talked about the good parts of being an introvert, and then my worries about my son’s social contentment, which are all mixed up with feelings about my social issues as a kid. It’s waking me up at 1:00 a.m., these worries, despite my constant pep talks to myself: he’s fine, there is nothing wrong with him, there was nothing wrong with you, think of all the support he has that you didn’t, he will get through childhood relatively unscathed, he’s only six, etc. etc. I was clearly fighting back tears when we spoke, which is when she asked me the salient questions. Have I been crying a lot lately? (Kind of, but for what feels like good reasons.) Any suicidal thoughts? (Absolutely not.) Usually she asks me what I think we should do with my medication. This time she made the decision to stick with my usual dosage.
There was money stress, figuring out how we were going to pay our property tax and its surprise supplementals, making sure our monthly bills were paid, doing the accounting for the next six months, complete with emergency savings plan.
Then there was the regular Thursday play date with the boy’s good friend, except something is happening to their friendship and I don’t know what to do about it. Actually, I know I can’t do anything about it. I can see what was once close fading in front of me and again my insides stir up, they tighten. It’s like I have tangled wires in my gut. They fight about everything, these two opinionated personalities that want to control the agenda in different ways. I intervene because I have to. I play monster to make them laugh and keep the peace. I want it to be easy, or at least I want to know that when this ends (if this ends) that my boy has someone else he can be comfortable with and I worry again that his social life will never be easy. How can I give him the tools to make it better for himself?
Finally, at dinnertime, with the takeout from Gregoire, my post-5:00 p.m. beer making me groggy, my everything is fine/don’t want to wallow in worry attitude not working very well, I told my son about my first grade best friend and our huge fights, the way I was jealous of her closeness with the neighbor girl, and how it got better as we got older. There was a Halloween tie-in, the story about her Halloween visit to our apartment in fourth grade when my mother followed trick-or-treating with an ill-advised reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders at the Rue Morgue.
Do you have any more stories about Halloween to tell me, he asked. He’s heard them all before, but I told them again with more detail. Halloween 1976, second grade, was where my mother wanted me to wear a mask and I didn’t, because I was dressed up as a Colonial girl and Colonial girls didn’t wear masks. She refused to let me trick-or-treat without one, so I sat at home and watched the kids in their costumes, my chest tight and the streaks of dried tears still on my unmasked face (Nana was very stressed back then, the explanation always goes, and it is absolutely true). Halloween 1980, sixth grade, was where my best friend and I wandered along a windy unlit country road to get to another neighborhood and I worried about deer stampeding when I should have worried more about being hit by a car.
I don’t know how it happened, but the boy started getting teary and then I did, too, and when I walked over to hug him, I knocked my knee into his chair in a very painful way. After that, I put on pajamas and took to my bed. My husband kindly did the rest of the evening routine while I read magazines and stared at my computer.
And at 1:00 a.m., the worries spilled out again. They woke me up with their relentless whining. I concentrated on my breathing. I let thoughts of the closeness of others comfort me, and, eventually, I fell back asleep.
Image: The boy this summer.
All meringue
I've made a resolution to keep this space happy and deceptively light, like freshly whipped cream, like chocolate souffle or mousse, like flaky layers of puff pastry. The blog will be fluffy. All meringue.
OK.
Maybe this resolution is what is keeping me from being able to think, it's keeping my brain tied in knots and my fingers from the keyboard. Maybe what I want to write about can't possibly be lightened.
My trip to Seattle was fabulous, full of good food and good company, lots of walking, and an appropriately scary (and sometimes sad) ghost tour, but there was an undercurrent of tension that was based on an old and tiresome narrative. And, frustratingly, it's something that I don't feel comfortable writing about here, for various reasons, one of which is I don't want to indulge myself, would rather just give it up because resolving it by writing about its manifestation is impossible and complicated. At one point, this would have been perfect blog fodder, but I have no desire to go there any more. How much public kvetching and self-analysis can one person do?
The kid's first day of school was also fabulous. We hung out with him while the classes lined up, even got to accompany the kids to the classroom (parental paparazzi, with our cameras and our shout-outs to the stars), and then off we went. There was no trauma. He emerged at the end of the day unscathed. He was ready for it, to be with kids his own age, learning and playing.
There he is, a normal little kid doing normal little kid things. I've been holding memories of my own early childhood at a distance, the multiple moves and mid-year school changes and how they affected me. I am not him. His father and I are giving him things that my parents weren't capable of giving me. I've even been coming around to the idea that I might be a good mother, not a perfect one, but a good-enough one, that maybe he really can grow up like a normal, well-adjusted kid.
So, here the words are, light, but not overly airy, with a touch of sugar, yeah. The struggle will be what to work on if I'm not going to go heavy, dark, and bitter. How do I frame my writing life again after a month or more off, after years of indulging my dark predilections? I have stories in progress. I can always turn to memoir as long as I give it a happy twist. Otherwise, I'm out of ideas, feel like my imagination is stuck, stuck on me-me-me. I worry that I will never transcend the mundane.
I am so tired of me. I want to write about you, your quirks and funny ways, they mystery of how you make decisions, the way you exist in the world.
I guess we should start hanging out more, me and you, meeting in the coffee shops, skimming the whipped cream off our café mochas, burning our tongues on chai. We'll speak low over glasses of wine, bump into each other on the BART train, in the library, at the dry cleaners, while walking down the street. I'm certainly not going to find you in the guest room, standing by my desk. It's time to get off my ass and walk out the door.
I'll meet you at Caffe Trieste tomorrow at nine.
Image by Kristin A of the Meringue Bake Shop.
Tell your story walking
It was May and the sun was shining bright. A row of cars sat by the creek, stereos blasting as other people enjoyed the sun. Monkey Hill, a steep road paved in cobblestones, rose above the park. I took off my strappy sandles, so grown-up, by the old fountain. And then I stepped on a bee. As my foot swelled, I hopped the half mile home, dragged myself past the Brandywine Zoo, stopped briefly under the dramatic arches of the Washington Street Bridge. At home, I made a paste with baking soda to soothe away the sting.
I walked home from 213 the morning my mother and I had a fight and she told me to get out of the car, just get out. We were living in Maryland by then and it must have been early spring, because the ground was thawing, had gone from rock-hard to mud, yielding and thick. She couldn't back out of the driveway. Her tires made deep ditches in the mud, but the car stayed in place. We emptied bags of kitty litter underneath the rear wheels; I pushed against the hood while she revved the engine. In the end, we borrowed my grandfather's car, but I had already convinced myself that school was out of the question. We fought. I obnoxioused myself out of it pretty early, right after we made the turn onto 213 from Town Point. Still, it was about three and a half miles back to the Little House, past cornfields on a road with no real shoulder. I remember a couple of neighbors driving by and waving as I picked my way back home, walking in between the road and the gully.
What did I do when I got to the woods? The road there was dark and curvy and any semblance of a shoulder disappeared. Maybe my mother changed her mind and returned to pick me up. Or more likely I clung to the side of the road, walked against traffic. I kept on going.
I have a recurring dream, about once a month, where I must walk from Elkton to Hollywood Beach. I march past traffic, climb up and down the bridge over the C&D canal, stop by the small shopping center closest to home. In dreamland, the store where I used to work is still there, in expanded form, all florescent lights and earnest employees in dark blue cotton uniforms. No one there can help me. I walk out into the dusty afternoon, plodding across brown cornfields where the remains of last year's crop still poke out of the ground and the footing is uneven. At the edge of the woods I discover a path off the road. And that's where I get stuck. I run into D. or I am so scared that I just stop, or sometimes I don't want to walk forward. The trees reach into the sky and it's so quiet that I want to stay forever.
Until now I've never tied the dream to the morning my mother kicked me out of the car, the forgotten fight, the abandonment of those years again, again. It always seemed like a not-driving dream or a stress dream, but now I wonder if it all started in that walk during that terrible time. I wonder what it means, how it ties who I was then to who I am now, whether I should start to peek under the surface of its meaning.
From a writing prompt, a song this time, Tell Your Story Walking by Deb Talan (video above). I spoke to my mother after writing this and she told me that she thinks about our fight, me getting out of the car and walking home, often. She thinks a neighbor gave me a ride home. I think she's right.
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.
The slog and drag of the humdrum
Here are the things I don't write about here:
My son's colds and coughs
Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans
The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)
The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging
Cooking dinner whether I want to or not
How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall
Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old
Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips
My political views
Natural disasters
The pros and cons of having another child
The perhaps impossibility of having another child
My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice
RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.
It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.
So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.
Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.
The low spark of a high-heeled boy
Every day at preschool, my son dresses up in costume. It might be as basic as a police officer hat. Sometimes he adds bat wings or an elephant nose. At home he puts on his batboy costume and flaps his wings as he takes flight in the living room. Playing with the concept of name and identity, he uses aliases at our Music Together classes. The alias used to change weekly depending on his book-obsession of the moment -- Art Dog, Mrs. Grizzle, etc. -- but now his chosen identity lasts for months. After weeks of singing "Hello to Chipmunk" one of the summer session parents had assumed that was his name. "You know, Berkeley," she said with a shrug after I set her straight. "You never can tell here." Last week he went to class in full pirate regalia, from scarlett hat to skull-and-crossbones vest to sword. "Nobody will know who I am," he told me with a sly smile.
Part of his dressing up and taking on identities, his love of costume, has something to do with shyness. These are ways to be in public with being totally seen. But I also think he has a bit of the dramatic in him. Like all children, he has a rich imaginative life. He makes a set of bike wrenches into a train, builds a boat out of a pile of sticks, creates robots out of spare toys and junk. My son truly believes that if he runs and jumps fast enough, he can fly. I remember flying, too, that heady moment of lift as I raced across my grandparents' family room and landed in the dark green chair in the corner. It happened. I can't deny it.
I worry about the future of his imagination, about the coming imposition of what it means to be a boy. When he goes to school full-time next year he will be immersed in the culture of the group, where rule-happy children and adults start forcing kids into slots. I remember school as a place where creativity isn't valued and anything different is quashed. I want to protect him, to take his imagination and cover it in gleaming armor, to let him know that flying will always be possible.
The change will happen. It is inevitable. But I hope that he will hold tight to his creativity, protect himself when he needs to without smothering his imagination. The further he gets out in the world, the less control I will have. All I can offer is my love and support.
Image: The high-heeled boy at home, October 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
New selections from the back catalog of the blog in Best and Rarest!
"When are you due?"
I was not going to be that girl. I was not that girl, marked by pregnancy, announcing my mistake and stupidity to everyone. Most of my friends didn’t know about it. Even my new boyfriend was clueless, in more ways than one: all that direct contact with my ever-rounding form and he never asked a question. I was going to spend my last trimester in hiding, living with my father and stepmother. Everyone swallowed the story, my need for a little time away.
It seemed to be working, the baggy clothes campaign, the stony denial, but one incident brought doubt. A friend, Lynne, and I were out skipping school at the usual place, a shopping mall near school. We stopped in a boutique where Lynne bought a pair of earrings. As she was ringing up the sale, the salesclerk gave me a friendly glance.
“When are you due?” she asked.
I blushed. She blushed. We were both briefly, awkwardly silent, before the clerk quickly covered for me. “Oh, no! You’re too young! I’m so sorry!”
Thank you, lady.
Later, at the food court, I asked Lynne “Am I getting fat? Do I look pregnant to you?” gently patting my belly, camouflaged by loose-fitting clothing. Lynne dipped a French fry in ketchup, gave me a quick once over. “You look fine,” she said, and shoved the fry in her mouth. That was that.
People stop and stare
Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster
I had a nickname name for him, a code word really, so that I could write it in my notebooks without fear of discovery. Bertie Wooster. It’s embarrassing, but 100% true: I was a 12-year-old P.G. Wodehouse fan, with a huge crush on my ash-blond, hazel-eyed classmate. Even in high school, after the thrill was gone, after Bertie had metamorphosized into a six-foot tall pothead, after I fell hard for a senior basketball player (another unrequited love), I would blush when we passed in the hall.
Crushes, I’ve had a few. They have ranged from the silly (the hot dog stand guy, summer of 1984) to intense (first husband, early days). These infatuations have been distracting, fun even. Nothing, however, has persisted like my 14-year obsession with Mr. H.
We met at work, my first week at my first real job. Mr. H. was cute and asked a coworker if I was attached. And so the internal churning began. I was attached – soon to be married, actually – but I couldn’t shake the butterflies, the deep blushes, whenever Mr. H would show up in the library. There he’d stand, feet away, hovering over the fax machine (the only one in the office); or he’d actually stop by to (gasp) ask me a question. My heart would race: it races now, as I remember those chance moments. Knowing he spent time in our neighborhood, I would survey the sidewalks evenings and weekends, on the lookout. The soundtrack for that year was a strange mix of Morphine and Holly Cole. Her version of On the Street Where You Live, with its stalkeresque undertones stirred up the ironic obsessive in me.
Today I am a happily married woman. Over the years, the crush has been mainly dormant, with a few volcanic moments. At this point, it’s academic – what meaning does this person hold for me? why do I continue to have those frustrating dreams? – but I am tired of it. And so, today, needing a new writing project to fixate on, I thought: why don’t I write a letter to Mr. H? You know, lay out my feelings in a literary sort of way, show them the harsh light of reality; get them out of my system. Maybe I send it, maybe I don’t. If I don’t, maybe I get it published. Everyone’s into reading about other peoples’ sick love obsessions! I can take this useless, ridiculous feeling and parlay it into art.
Yeah. I’ve been working on it for much of the morning, and I find that the writing process doesn’t purge the feelings: it makes them more intense.
My crush has morphed into a middle-aged thing, a yearning for escape from quotidian existence. I am ensconced in my (relatively) safe life, a housewife wannabe writer, parent to one tiring preschooler. Not much excitement here, though things are quite comfortable and loving at home. Maybe I need to take up bungee jumping or fencing, something to liven up the system.
So: Jennifer, let sleeping crushes lie. Oh, and Mr. H, if you are reading this (do you read this blog? I doubt it.), write me back, OK?
Only joking.
It's not easy being green
Elk River, Winter of 1977-78
The year before, my mother had decided to go back to college. In order to save money, she moved in with Jim, her future former husband, while I went to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. It was a year scented by cigarette smoke and coffee fumes. Mornings were my favorite time of day, sitting in the warm kitchen, a tray of food prepared for me by my grandmother, usually Eggo waffles dabbed with Parkay squeezable margarine and dripping with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, cartoon-character shot glass of orange juice on the side. That winter the snow kept coming. It piled up and formed five-foot drifts in the driveway, places to dig out forts and make snowmen. Snuggling in my grandmother’s bed as we listened to the radio school closing announcements became an almost-regular ritual.
Mom scored a one-bedroom apartment in student family housing in the summer of ’78 and I moved back in with her. She took the couch in the living room while I slept on a full-size mattress on the floor in the bedroom, a wooden orange crate for a bedside table topped with a flowery ceramic lamp, a clock radio, and an “I Love You This Much” figurine -- a robed, potbellied man, arms outstretched – that she had given to me in first grade.
1978-79 was the first year of court-mandated school desegregation for the Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly white, middle class community at the time, to an elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It was the fourth school I had attended since kindergarten.
The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.
After lunch, students were herded over crumbling asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of black history covered the exterior walls. At night the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit (worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become accustomed to choosing my clothes.
The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike from mid-October through most of November. Much of that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a day or two; I read a lot of books from the small children’s section at the University of Delaware library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre, images of children lying on the ground beside their parents, as still and peaceful as if they were asleep.
April 1979
By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch over my grandfather.
Our grand experiment was over.