I feel it. I name it. I let it go.
So it might surprise you that one quarter through that first margarita we started fighting. We don't fight often these days, and when we do it's usually quite civil. This was an old-style fight with incredulous looks and just-caught nastiness. Each of us thought the other was clueless, wasn't listening, was going off on some crazy tangent. Ultimately, we pulled it back together, reached a deeper understanding, but for fifteen tense minutes, I fought the urge to run out of the restaurant into the cold rain. I fought the urge to be by myself and pretend that it was better this way, to live without risk, to be warmed only by my own intellect and senses.
Yes, here they are again. My
parents after their wedding, June 1969, staring off
into the misty future. It's too late now ...
Earlier that day, my mother and I
had been talking about trust and infidelity. I
explained how how I learned some time ago that to
trust in others blindly is foolish because no one is
perfect. Other people can let you down, not out of
cruelty, but because they are human and bound to make
mistakes. If you expect perfection or total fidelity,
you may end up very disappointed, so why not keep an
open mind about it? Not to expect to be let down, but
to not let yourself get crushed if it happens?
The words had come out with more vitriol and less
clarity than I felt. I sounded angry, specifically
with my husband, and Mom asked me if he knew I was so
angry. Strange. I didn't feel angry. But there 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.
Making it (slightly less) funky
I was tentative at first, hid myself behind veils and
a false
name.
Over time, the veils slipped away, I walked out
from behind the curtain, showed my face to the
light, revealed my name and purpose. And being
seen is ok. It's good. I want people to know me
for who I am, for who I was, to keep the secrets
from defining me.
Because the secrets don't define me. Even better,
after seeing the light of day, after being
transformed into stories, they have become
almost
irrelevant, forming and
transforming experiences, important ones, but not the
core of who I am.
Visitors to this Web page, however, may have a
different impression. In the interest of
shaping writing to survive
to better reflect
reality and also to bring a more professional feel to
the page, I have made a few changes. They're subtle —
a new tag line, slightly different selections
in Excerpts from
Life, a
more complete look to the food writing page, which
I've renamed Kitchen
Detour.
Most of the old stuff is still here, stories of
angst, secrets revealed, but you have to dig a
little deeper to find it.
Next post: Crumbling beneath the Formstone. Or
something along those lines, with a departure from
post titles derived from pop music.
(Image: Mirror, Little House by Jennifer
Trinkle, 1986.)
Catch up and a writing prompt
So I barely dropped an Entrecard, didn't even go downstairs for two days, just sat in bed, didn't eat, and spend a lot of cuddling time with my son while my wonderful (and healthy!) husband took care of us and everything else.
But that's not why I'm posting. My writing class has started up again. Back to the daily prompts, thank goodness, which provides a break from harrowing memoir, gives me something else to post. Today's selection is White. The prompt is first draft, untouched, warts and all. It seemed like an especially appropriate choice for this blog, which operates in shades of grey and distrusts attempts to whitewash the past. And for another blogger's approach on colors as prompts, check out the most recent stuff at Yoga For Cynics. He's always worth a visit, no matter the topic.
White
Can you think of anything more
bland? White bread, white rice, white collar.
Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment,
of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of
purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in
her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the
petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s
a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the
background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa.
Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words
or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s
sully the white.
Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.
White is too much pressure. Don’t
you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The
white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and
go back into the closet at the conclusion of the
summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes
I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s
fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet
into submission. How long were they white? By the
time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey.
They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my
heel and toes.
“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we
really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white
shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white
things, can see how writing about something muddies
the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained
with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons
of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.
I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets,
the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden
world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is
afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I
say show it to the world, let go of your lily white
fantasies.
They are totally unrealistic.
Shameless
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!
Shadowplay
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.
The end of anonymity
In the beginning, there was Anonmomous.
Then it was simply Jennifer. But there were slip-ups.
The PublicLiterature.Org stories with my full name.
The e-mails I sent to others from my personal gmail
account. The few blogging awards that went to
Jennifer Fullname instead of to just Jennifer.
My father found the blog. I accidentally sent an
e-mail to my ex-husband from the writing to survive
account and I'm pretty sure he's been here. I have a
sneaking suspicion that my brother-in-law has visited
at least once. A friend from elementary school found
me here. For a while the first hit on a Google search
of my name (yeah, I google my own name. I'm not the
only one, right?) was the blog, for reasons that are
somewhat mysterious. Until today, the two weren't
directly connected.
It's one thing to write to complete strangers. It's
quite another to realize that people who may be a
part of my story are reading. Or that casual friends
might come upon this and find out more than they ever
wanted to know about me. But as I kept on leaving the
door ajar, I realized that I want to be open, needed
it. What's there to hide? Just me.
So.
Here I am.
Jennifer Trinkle.
All other names have been changed
to protect the innocent. In most cases.
"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.
The pain that is invisible
In a conversation last night, she casually tossed out a line that I had to follow up with, because it indicated how bad things were for her at a couple points in my childhood. I’m sure she’s dropped this line with insouciance before, and I’ve just followed her laid-back lead. But it’s deadly serious. And frightening. And sad.
Of course, my mind is buzzing with thoughts, about secrets, about forgiveness and the pain that is invisible when you are growing up, the pain of the depressed, hopeless parent. Maybe not totally invisible. I was a sensitive kid, the little mother, always worried. Part of the worry, however, was about me: what was going to happen to me if something happened to her? Today I feel mainly empathy for her pain and sad that she’s felt so hopeless.
I’m sure she’s awake downstairs, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times. So, off I go to start the day ...
In the beginning ...
When I started this blog in late December of last year, I wasn't in a good place. All the things I've been writing about since then were burbling just below the surface, barely suppressed, waiting to be given form and shaped into a story. I used a pseudonym -- Anonmomous -- and wrote pretty freely about my angst at the time, my desperation, the stifled creativity that I blamed on my daily mundane existence mixed in with a childhood hangover.
I had no creative outlet, but a strong desire to write and figured that starting a blog would force me to do it on a regular basis. Maybe I would find others out there like me, or attract an audience (even an audience of one would have been wonderful). But nobody reads a blog if they don't know about it. I started using my real first name, joined blogcatalog, and things started to look up.
Most of my early posts are gone, but I recently found an interesting one from right before I "came out." I've reproduced it below.
Thanks to Geoffrey for asking some questions that got me thinking about the early days and how the process of self-expression has actually changed the story I've created for myself.
I also have to thank The Fearless Blog for her kind profile of writing to survive, and her words of encouragement. As usual, she got me thinking about how a positive attitude can change the equation entirely.
Manufacturing interest
18 February 2008
As I was thinking about whether I would post tonight, not sure if I had anything to say, I decided I would manufacture something of interest to write about: the manufacturing of interest in what I am writing here.
I have no idea how you arrived at this blog, whether you find it entertaining, or relevant, or worth five minutes of your time. I could probably come out of the closet, quit being anonymous, and invite people I know to read it, or at the very least passively put up the address in my facebook profile and e-mail signature. Perhaps then the blog would spread like a benevolent virus across cyberspace, e-mailed here and there: you simply HAVE to read this.
Would more people read? Maybe. Would it affect what I write here? Most definitely. In a good way? I am not sure. Currently, I can write corny or stupid or revealing stuff here without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings or worrying about looking corny or stupid. I would probably remove anything non-writing related, which may be the cleaner and kinder way to go. I still have much mulling to do on the topic.
H and I took advantage of our holiday Monday babysitter to go into the city. We wandered around North Beach, did some vintage shopping, had lunch. We ended up at City Lights and I was suddenly overwhelmed by all that fiction, non-fiction, poetry, ecology, etc etc, titles and authors I have never heard of and will probably never read.
What a crazy idea it is to write when there are so many talented people out there who can barely sell a book.
But I can't worry about that now, can I?
Dead on arrival
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.
The Girls Who Went Away
I wanted to read it for insight into my biological grandmother's experience, the teenager who gave birth to my mother in a Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in 1950. What was it like for her? How did she get there? Why did she keep my mother's existence a lifelong secret, never telling her later husband or subsequent children? What about the birth father? Or the more intriguing question: do secrets have their own genetic legacy? Is it any coincidence that her daughter got pregnant at 19 and had a shotgun wedding and that her granddaughter had her own troubles?
So I picked up this excellent book, with sad stories of a time before easily available birth control (or abortion) and sex education. And I found a part of my own story: isolation, secrecy, and shame. I am not alone.
Yes, it may seem from my current blah blah blah on the topic that I've spent the past 22 years chatting openly about my first pregnancy, telling my unlucky seatmates on long airplane rides, droning on at playgroups about the sad outcome. But it's been a big secret. Huge. Even now, as I write on a blog whose url I have in my e-mail signature, I am completely terrified of what my friends and passing acquaintances will think. But I want them to find out. I'm tired of the secrets. And I think they will be kind to me in their hearts, even if the whole thing may freak them out a bit.
Right??