Who owns the past?

In the foreground of the photo my mother recently sent were clumps of basil, summer’s last contribution. The basil, brown-edged in places, was on her counter awaiting freezing. In the background was a dish drain with a yellow Fiesta dinnerware salad plate sitting to dry. Suddenly I was thrust into the summer of 1976, my plastic tumbler filled with ice and chamomile tea leaving circles of condensation on the table as I read in a shade-darkened room, more tea steeping in the Fiesta ware pitcher on the counter, yellow Italian cherry tomatoes and basil in the garden out back.

Across state lines, my father was starting graduate school. I visited sometimes, overnights in the dorm, breakfast with the gang, powdered eggs and orange juice from concentrate, a 7-year old in a room of 20-somethings. Later he rented a room with other graduate students in one of those mansions the locals donated to the university after its occupant died by suicide (or that’s the story I remember being told, anyway). There was a dining room with fox and hound wallpaper, the scene of the hunt. The place gave me the creeps.

These were young people doing young person things. I sometimes wonder who owns the stories? Who gets to decide what our shared reality was? It’s no longer so clear to me. I was willful and stubborn, a tough kid to raise. My parents were depressed in their own ways. One was present and quick to anger, the other hard to reach. Who can I talk to frankly about these times? My father, now dead, has a hagiographer. My mother, more open to my experiences, has her guilt. I am left with an ache, a desire to know those young people, to reach out and reassure them, to ask that I be allowed my own version of events, to let our stories mingle and create a shared history, craggy with details, imbued with emotions, held with love and respect for each other.

We're not going to take it

Here’s what I remember, out of a time often blurred by alcohol and lived in the aftermath of trauma:

I remember feeling like I didn’t have a choice, that I had to do what he wanted me to do.

I remember enduring it when my boyfriends–one when I was in high school, the other when I was in college, both of whom were five+ years older then me–decided it was time to have anal sex without consultation or discussion. I endured the searing pain and the humiliation because that was what I, as a woman, did.

I remember the college athlete fucking me in a professor’s basement as I lay still as a corpse, George Michael’s Faith playing on the radio.

I remember the stories about that girl at the first college I attended, the one who was so drunk that the Sigs tied her up and had sex with her, one by one. I was embarrassed for her, ashamed for her, without thinking too deeply about what it said about those “boys” and the twisted privilege of being young white men.

In the instances above, all of which took place before I turned 21, I was (to the best of my recollection) sober. But there were times when I wasn’t, times when I was sloppy, sometimes blackout drunk. Times when my behavior might have been considered promiscuous (let us consider childhood trauma, dear reader, and what it told me about my value). In general, however, I was a passive vessel. I believe I learned early in life that I had no right to control what happened to my body, that what I was worth was dependent on the attention I got, that a man’s desire could trump my own. These were lessons that took a long time to unlearn.

There have always been consequences for women in these cases. We hold the physical memory. We hold the shame. We get attacked for telling the truth. It’s about time the men involved experienced consequences. A little truth telling is balm for the soul. Face the past, make amends, and take responsibility. This is the path to changing yourselves and our culture.

If not, it’s going to get ugly for you.

Known unknown

I am home, alone, slightly under the weather, sitting between two twitching dog dreamers, self-satisfied with myself and this solitary Sunday’s slightly melancholy pull. I don’t know when I crossed the line from youthful-ish to the August of middle age (the necessity of reading glasses, the shock at realizing my birth year is almost as long ago as the Summer of Love, and that the Summer of Love happened 51 years ago). The ride across the age meridian was turbulent, but I made it. Yes, I made it through the disbelief and discontent of the early and mid-forties and, with the support of my family, created a different professional persona.

I keep that persona and whoever it is I am in this space separate, for a variety of reasons, preferring to be a woman of mystery to the people in my professional life. There I am also someone of little to no past. I am an unlined page, a screen to be projected upon. And, to be honest, lately I have been feeling like my past has been well-digested and incorporated somehow into this person currently typing on the couch in this sunlit room, a dog to the left, a dog the right, three cats within eyeshot, and a husband and son currently slipping their paddles into the saline waters of Tomales Bay.

My job? I love it. My current setup, which allows for independence as well as research and writing (perhaps eventually of the paid variety) fits me well. I am, at the moment, a lucky person. After posting this I will return to reading the book about how to treat adolescents who self harm. I will fold the next load of laundry, water the plants in the backyard, start thinking about dinner. Most of it is mundane and kind of beautiful in its simplicity. I hope that recognizing it, making it solid in public words, doesn’t somehow cause the blocks to come tumbling around me. If that should happen, well, it would give me something else to write about, though I would probably write about it differently than I would have five years ago.

It’s still a bit unfamiliar, this sort of contentment, this emotional calm. Perhaps the persona and the person are joining forces, teaming up to be used as a space to be filled and refilled with the feelings and thoughts of other people, keeping my own thoughts and feelings quietly under the radar.

The internal litany

There are any number of things I should be doing right now. Closing out client files. Creating new paperwork. Scheduling doctors’ appointments. Writing goodbyes to folks I’ve worked with. Changing my way of being in the world. Working on my web page. Reducing my carbon footprint. Shedding my guilt. Improving my skills. Accepting who I am at this very moment, flaws and all. Updating my resume. Deciding whether I want that second job. Networking. Thinking about my dad, who is hovering around the edges of my consciousness. I wish I could talk to him about these shifts in my professional life.  I wish I could show him how far I’ve come in such a short period of time.

But I seem to have gotten stuck today. It could be the insomnia. I’ve routinely been waking up between 3:30 and 4:30 am, with the occasionally lucky sleep-in until 5:30. It could be that the stress of finding appropriate office space(s) with less than three weeks to go until I set up my own shop has finally pushed me over the edge. It could be the weird emotional math of saying goodbye to a few clients this week. I do not do well at goodbyes. I’ve also been nursing a bit of sadness over the recent death of the man who trained me on the crisis line. He was so kind and calm and, at 30, too young to die.

It could be all of it, every drop. Some days, you just need to step back, cry, and mourn. Tomorrow will come regardless. And one thing I must give myself credit for -- today marks four months without alcohol (even during our 15th anniversary dinner, quarter-full glasses of champagne plopped in front of us with no explanation. Dear reader, I did not even sip. This was not easy.). Despite it all, I'm keeping dry. Just not dry-eyed.

My strange summer

I was fired today. Well, really, I was let go, given my walking papers, politely told to hit the highway. It was a relief actually, though I couldn't say that in the moment. And it wasn't my regular job, which I am leaving in a few weeks anyway. It was an extremely part-time, somewhat nebulous gig where I spent time with a physically incapacitated person as a kind of friendly companion, someone to talk with and maybe browse the Internet and YouTube with for things of interest. 

This person lived in a facility where most of the other residents were mentally incapacitated, absented by dementias of various types. It was a sobering proposition to be there in the midst of human frailty, to see the unraveling that might well await me or the people I love. I was at a loss at this job. I was more like a stressful obligation than a friendly companion, someone for my client, my employer, to entertain or humor. As I attempted to fill the time in interesting, but not pushy, ways, I also did this distancing philosophical dance, an attempt to come to terms with the erosion of memory, skills, and self that happens with dementia, to accept how a body can turn on itself. It was in the air in this place, in the people and the smells and sounds and confusion of minds.

So the job is done. I do not have to think about these things any more. I can focus on the future, building a business, carrying the weight of people I can help and connect with, and tell myself I have years to go, years, before I am a lost soul unable to even sort through the crumbling bins in my head. 

I hope.