Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want
a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the
door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from
the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that
is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the
hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks.
Against the cool glass, set into block, the
mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch.
I will rub my hand against it before I enter
the room, think of the times we went
waterskiing or just bobbed around in the
muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading
a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord
wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit
in the water all winter long. The varnish
wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year
he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in
the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated
the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against
my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against
the boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white
light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of
factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I
will go inside, lock the door, and remove my
clothes. I will press myself up against the
glass. See if you can tell me what you are
looking at, my blurry image refracted in each
square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff
it out on the rounded wall, again and again.
You will see flesh, the death of ember, the
end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though
not in the way you would expect. It had
nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The
dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big
hole opened in his roof and the house filled
with rain. You want me to tell you about it,
to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his
boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down
the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think
about my cylindrical factory glass room. I
picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims
slipping off his nose, one hand marking his
place in the book. I mystify him and he likes
that.
Image by
Vinje.
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.
Prognostication
In my dreams, the dead are silent. I’ve never
had a good conversation with a single one of
them, just offer my apologies, bake the
bread, pour the coffee. What is the guilt
about? The dead no longer care about my
transgressions. Isn’t it enough that I hold
them here in my subconscious, treat them as
gently as I would a freshly-laid egg?
But this dream was different. We were going
to visit Kevin, who has been gone for over
seven years now. As in real life, I was
nervous: would I react properly to him? Would
he toss the verbal slings, so subtle and
cutting, if I didn’t pick up on something, if
I reacted too slowly? Or would he sit there,
blue eyes glowing, as my mother and I circled
him like butterflies, flitting here and there
in our attempts to placate?
Kevin spoke. He used the ethereal language of
dreams, of those who are now ashes and light,
but in that nasal New Jersey accent that I
haven’t been able to replicate in my mind for
years. And he was funny, so funny, because
Kevin was
bitingly funny.
I laughed and realized how much I missed him,
how much time had gone by and then I woke up,
not remembering a word of his complicated
meta-joke.
Time flies on and I die a little every day,
lose another connection, feel the pull of a
long-ago past. Yet my grandfather still shows
up at the old house. I smell his cigarettes,
breathe in sawdust, too-sweet coffee and
turpentine. He waits in his cell of a room, a
voiceless old man in a flannel robe, unshaven
and glassy eyed. I rush past the sink filled
with dirty dishes, walk a path of slate to
get to a mailbox that hasn't been opened in
years. Sometimes we take his car for a
complicated drive to Christiana. Maybe we are
heading to the hospital, waiting for someone
to hand me a small bundle, something I've
forgotten.
The dead appear without explanation or
warning. Carolin greets me in a too-bright
dorm basement, fixes me with intense eyes.
David Anderson sits in a classroom, shoeless,
staring at the algebra equation on the board.
Frank the cat meows for food that I don't
have. And my grandmother, the one I ache to
see, is sick of my inattention and has
stopped showing up at all.
Someday, no one will know that I was sixteen
and angry once. They will remember an old
woman deeply lined, forgetful, with
clouded-over eyes, demanding and harmless.
Inconsequential. As though I had been born
without desire, without the power to wound.
Image: Postcard, date
unknown.
The factoid with legs
At my grandparent's house during the John The
Murderer era.
It was a dark place, with a
cavernous bathroom, small squares of
mint-green tile above the white, a pedestal
sink, the tall window adjacent to the toilet
covered by a pullcord shade. Outside of the
bathroom, the rest of the old Wilmington
rowhouse loomed: shadowy rooms; marked-up
walls in need of paint; hardwood floors
scratched and worn from decades of footsteps,
the worst places covered by faded area rugs;
a raggedy couch there, a threadbare recliner
here; the folding tables with chipped veneer.
Because the windows were painted shut, the
air was stuffy, smelling of overcooked food.
I don’t remember other kids. I don’t remember
playing. I do remember lying on the floor (or
was that a cot?) for my nap, but not
sleeping. Maybe that’s why the bathroom is so
solid in this elusive memory – those that
don’t nap are made to stand in the bathroom.
Bad girl.
Tears and stubbornness. It wasn’t fair. No
one could make me sleep in this place.
The woman who ran the home-based daycare
knew John
the Murderer (click
here for more on him), my
mother’s ex-boyfriend. So when he showed up
after the breakup, after we moved out, when
he came by to pick me up during naptime, she
let me go. I was quiet and polite – this was
important, to go along, to not make him
angry, to stay safe. He took me to a store,
had me pick out a huge stuffed animal to take
home, and returned me without harm. It was a
somewhat threatening attempt to get back into
my mother’s good graces. When that didn’t
work, he pursued us to my grandparent’s
place, "kidnapped" my mother for a brief
time, another sketchy story of violence that
isn’t mine to tell.
Recently, when my little one, my sweet,
sometimes maddening almost-three-and-a-half
year old was behaving just like a preschooler
should, testing boundaries, being
frustrating, I felt the anger flame up inside
of me, the low boil going immediately to
steam. After calming down, I thought about my
life at his age and how small and defenseless
and maddening I must have been myself, a
little person in the midst of some very bad
things, trying to protect her mother, to keep
it together. The past was reaching out to
slap me in the face again, the suppressed
anger of long-ago, the abuse I both witnessed
and experienced.
I’ve asked my mother to tell me what happened
while we were living with John. Some of it I
vaguely remember (or know from past
conversations)– being made to stand at the
table for meals, his physical abuse of my
mother, his tendency to drink – but there are
gaps in my knowledge. I need to know, to
confront it, to feel the suppressed feelings.
It will be another step toward emotional
wholeness, a step toward being an aware
parent.
My mother has agreed, apologetically, guilty,
worried that I will be angry with her. There
is no cause for worry. I just need to know.
It's the next hurdle.
Not fade away
Mick Jagger, circa 1969, from Rolling
Stone.
The centerpiece of
Thanksgiving dinner was a rockfish one year.
Kevin had caught it himself, straight from
the Chesapeake Bay. Mom stuffed it with
breadcrumbs spiked with chopped fennel and
onion, and there were mashed potatoes,
cranberries, and a nod to green, string beans
on the side.
We ate by candlelight, as usual, talked about
politics as usual. I wish I could go back and
capture those conversations, remember the
deep level jokes and high level discussions.
Almost any dinner with my mother and Kevin
was devoted to real conversation and humor,
sometimes dipping into reminiscence. It was
the closest we ever came to feeling like a
family.
Like the night a couple of years before Kevin
got sick, when he was just starting his PhD
program at Penn, and Augie the collie was a
puppy. I had taken the train from DC to
Wilmington to visit and things were unusually
smooth, no arguments, very little baiting. We
ate sautéed chicken over vermicelli in the
candlelight. The entire dish was sprinkled
with breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil,
garlicky and herby and delicious.
The conversation turned to the sixties. Kevin
had taken a year off from college in 1966
after being busted for selling marijuana (a
setup, he claimed) and he headed off to
California, hitchhiked down the coast. He
talked about Dylan going electric, mentioned
the rivalry between the namby pamby Beatles
devotees and the rebellious Rolling Stones
fans. There was talk of high school dances,
the moves and the moments. The radio was
playing music from that era and he and Mom
started to slow dance as I watched from the
table.
What do you do when a
family culture dies? When a powerful
personality disappears? The center did not
hold. We’re still trying to create our own
gravity.
Crying the rodent death blues / The beast in me
Take the case of Happy.
Happy (short for Happy Easter) was a golden hamster my grandmother gave to me for Easter 1976. He came complete with a Habitrail, one of those cages with a main unit attached to smaller annexes via clear tubes. It was just like a wild hamster warren except translucent, plastic, and above ground. Watching Happy scurry through the tubes, from wheel to main cage to tiny den was amusing. He impressed me with his ability to get through tiny spaces. I would scoop him out of the cage and cup my hands around him, leaving an opening that got smaller and smaller over time. Happy was always able to make it through.
One winter morning, hamster feed in hand, I opened the Habitrail and discovered it empty. All of that time spent squeezing through my fingers had been training for Happy’s escape. His disappearance was upsetting, but even more devastating was the discovery a few days later of his tiny corpse in the basement. It was stiffened with rigor mortis, hamster toes stuck in a permanent curl. Happy’s last meal had been rat poison.
By the age of seven, I had lived through a few pet deaths, all of the feline variety. Sheba had been hit by a car, Amber was anemic, and Regis bothered his neutering stitches until infection creeped in. Each death brought tears, but with Happy it was different. For many months after the hamster’s untimely death, I rode a wave of grief. On long rides to my grandparents’ or on the walk to school, the loss would hit me.
Dinnertime was the toughest, with all that time to think under the monotony of adult conversation. My mother, her someday husband Jim and I would be sitting at the white picnic table in the kitchen and I would feel a pang. The spinach soufflé would grow cold on my fork as I stared past Mom and out the window into the backyard. Happy was buried back there, his corpse stuffed for one final time into a toilet paper tube. I imagined him in better days, pushing his way through my open-toed shoes, doing endless laps on the wheel, escaping from my fingers. I couldn’t contain my sigh, the big exhale of emotion.
“Do you know what I’m thinking about now?” Long silence, then another sigh, “I’m thinking about Happy.”
These words of grief, repeated many times over that year, were not taken seriously.
By age eleven I was ready to try rodent stewardship again, this time with a gerbil. Perhaps it is a sign of Happy’s hold on my heart that I no longer remember the gerbil’s name. He (or she) was also cut down in the prime of life, a victim of illness. He had been listless all day, sitting in a corner of his cage, not touching his food. The gerbil refused to open his mouth whenever I presented an eyedropper full of restorative honey water. I hovered over the sickbed into evening. As night came, a summer storm rolled in. The sky flashed with lightning and my gerbil took his final breaths in an echo of thunder. After it was over, I reached out and stroked his still-warm body with an index finger. And then – an indication of my future impulses? – I immediately wrote my version of the night’s events: “Death of a Gerbil.”
My mother and Jim teased me for what they interpreted as my overemotional response to almost everything. Jim also thought I was too serious and would describe the child me as being like a 42-year-old woman (as I approach the last year of my 30s, his description makes even less sense). The labels were applied with a grain of contemptuous truth to everything from my asthmatic coughing fits that led to vomiting as well as my often-expressed desire in sixth-grade to kill myself.
Over the years I’ve learned how to regulate my external emotional responses, but I still have a flair for the melodramatic that usually comes out in my writing. For example, I started this post with some ideas about the loop of deep self-doubt that occasionally runs through my mind. The initial paragraph read very differently:
I am afraid to see a psychic, for what she may tell me about what she sees in my soul. Will she feel the energy, the darkness that is eating me from within? One look in my eyes, a quick riffling through my internal dialog, and the extent of the rottenness at my core will be clear. She’ll have to make something up, be polite, get me out of there.
This is grown-up melodrama. Like my grief for Happy, when these feelings hit, they are genuine. I acknowledge that there are times when I feel rotten and hollow. This doesn’t mean I am rotten and hollow – my feelings are not objective reality, but to deny them and their origins would be denying part of myself, part of my internal life.
I fight these moments of darkness. But I am convinced they are part of being human and will never fully go away. We don’t want to acknowledge feelings of deep inadequacy, so most of us go around trying to pep-talk ourselves into feeling better. We don’t want to face the beast within.
The good in us, the light, is powerful. It can lift us above the void. But if you feel pangs of self-doubt, why not acknowledge the reality of the feeling, trace it as far back as you can, and move on? Don’t underestimate your ability to confront the beast.
The darkness within doesn’t define us. We are far more complex than that.
For readers who are now thinking of the Nick Lowe song, here it is, as sung live by Johnny Cash, a man whose life was defined in some part by his attempts to push through the darkness. Next post: blog of the month.
I slip into the night
My first memory of the house is from the summer of 1972. I am three, walking the 20 feet from the cottage to my grandparent’s place, planting my sturdy feet in thick grass and clover. I take off in a run when the ball of my right foot meets something small and sharp. It burns. I begin to cry. Someone – my aunt? my grandmother? – whisks me into the main house, probes tender flesh with pointed tweezers to remove the bee’s stinger. Afterwards, I lie on the family room sofa in cool air conditioning, injured foot propped on a pillow, a thick paste of soothing baking soda drawing out the pain. I watch cartoons, sucking on a straw to get at the last of Coca-Cola over ice.
That was over thirteen years ago. My grandmother has been dead since 1979 and the Little House is now my home. I spend my days waiting for darkness to fall. Bring on the night, I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.
Inside the main house at 9:30 p.m. sharp, my grandfather takes out his hearing aids and removes his prosthetic foot, trapping himself in bed for another night of muffled sleep. Four houses down the street my mother, blinded by man and money troubles, sleeps in a cocoon of sadness. My father is sixty miles away, a prisoner of debilitating depression; his kindly wife is totally focused on his well-being. Unheard, unseen, and seemingly unimportant, I slip into the night or let the night slip into me.
This is where my power of
description seizes up.
Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I
don’t want to rehash the past in angry
diatribes here.
But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst
of the never-ending stillbirth story,
attempting to write about my time in the
Little House, a companion piece to my
biological grandmother’s experiences and as I
try to get my mind around it I find myself
asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS
THINKING?
When reality broke through, when my pregnancy
became apparent and ended a month later in a
stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in
the Little House, when it became clear that I
needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?
These are not new thoughts, but the
underlying feelings have changed. My anger
before was mainly self-directed, anger at my
family turned inward: what evil in me brought
on their rejection? But now I am reaching a
different conclusion: my mother and father
had so little respect for themselves, for
their power as parents, that they gave up,
figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even
assumed that they would only make things
worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father
never even started. They deserve my
compassion. It's no use getting angry at
those who don't see their own worth.
Now I have to work through the feelings,
unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense
with suppressed emotion, so much a part of
who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out
of most other versions of the stillbirth
story because it feels like an emotional
bomb. As I try to get back into that time of
isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger,
my self-protection (or something) kicks in.
It is time to control the explosion through
language, to capture the shards of the
experience on the page.
I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the
experience controls me.
Jailbreak
It was the end of an incredible, challenging half-year. I’d spent June through October in New York, studying culinary arts at the Natural Gourmet Institute, living in a studio sublet in Chelsea. By day I’d take notes on “health supportive” food and create vegetarian gourmet fare with my fellow classmates. Evenings were for wandering Manhattan. The Hudson River was a few blocks away from my apartment, and the West Village was an easy, entertaining stroll. Sometimes I’d go the distance to Midtown where the streets were hopping with humanity and the buildings were a mix of architecture spanning three centuries, old brick storefronts intermingling with structures of concrete and glass.
The streets of Manhattan were overwhelming to me: too much stimulation, every block packed with shops and restaurants, with signs and graffiti (“Mama Loves Neckface”?), every address crying out for attention. Night subdued the signs, softened the calls. So I walked and watched, sometimes talked on the phone with my husband, who was back in DC. We’d go over the days humiliations and occasional triumphs. A few late nights in Brooklyn with my friend Jules – drinking, talking, attempting karaoke (never, never again) -- sealed the New York experience.
I went back to DC for six weeks before my internship at Greens Restaurant and spent the time preparing to start a personal chef business. During this break I appeared on a local television news program cooking contest, which led to a later on-air meeting with Anthony Bourdain. My world was opening up into something completely new. It was shiny and scary, anxiety-producing and freeing, a chance to create a business and change my life.
So. November 29, 2004. I was in my favorite city, San Francisco, about to work at Greens, my favorite restaurant. But something was distracting me from restaurant job panic. The day I started my internship, I also had to track down a drugstore. No matter how many tests I tried, the results were always the same. I was pregnant.
One new world slipped away as another one appeared. This was an alien planet created with an equal mix of worry, sacrifice and love. What would it be like to have a little creature totally dependent upon me? Was I up for the task? Was the pain I carried around hereditary, something involuntarily slipped in through the genes, a burden to be shared? I was terrified.
The 80-hour internship went by in a blur. I was a solitary, preoccupied figure, standing in place at the salad and dessert station as other employees, efficient in their clogs and hats, sharpened knives prepared for work, zipped around me. I would look at my slow, inexperienced hands as they grasped the serving spoon and tipped that night’s curry onto a plate. I methodically patted out tart dough as dinners were plated around me, carefully removed the skin and pith from scores of oranges in a haze of prep staff conversation, inexpertly mixed the ingredients for the filo pastry of the day in the cold of the isolated back kitchen.
It wasn’t enough time to even get my feet wet. My inexperience would never get the opportunity to disappear. I was going to be permanently interrupted.
But was I?
Since my son was born, I’ve been living as though all that was ever going to happen to me already had. I’ve let the experience of being a mother stop me from participating in the larger world. The stories I write here are about the past, about the life I had when I had a life outside of my house.
On the other hand, by writing these stories I am reentering the world, slowly emerging from my own head. And I find that my dreams have changed. That shiny new world of four years ago is no longer relevant.
I can’t wait to find out what happens next.
From the inside
Part of what unsettled me was the link back to my own words (which I’ve changed to better reflect my feelings). The “why” of writing to survive was initially a rather bleak description of what life was like for me for the first two years of my son’s existence. This was a difficult time with many struggles to maintain eveness. I lost a lot of myself, my marriage changed, and I’d have to say there was some depression tossed into the mix, too, though I was never treated.
So. I love my son. I am lucky to stay home with him. He makes me laugh. We dance and sing and talk and read together. He has also been an impetus for change, a reminder to slow down and enjoy. With him I am able to remake my own childhood, borrowing the good bits and discarding the bad. I am lucky to be able to do this AND write.
Which brings me to my husband, an amazing man who is my biggest supporter. When I need reassuring about my parenting skills, he is quick to soothe. He loves to read my work. He gets take-out when I am tired of cooking. He understands when I use naptime (when naptime happens) to write instead of clean. We are truly a team. I love you, H.
There are nuances to this angst, and as I’ve been writing here and privately, the angst shifts and dissipates. The words have saved me.
This is writing to survive.
The dammed
And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?
I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.
But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.
If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?
One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.
Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.
I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.
My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.
As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.
I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.
The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.
The feelings need time. They will out.
The harvest
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.
A talisman against loss
Some children sleep though high fevers, resting up as their bodies fight off the germs. Not our little one. The heat disturbs his sleep. For several nights he woke up in the 2 - 3 a.m. time slot, asking "Is it wake-up time?" Well, no, but we didn't have much say in the matter. Time for a drink of water, maybe for another dose of Motrin, and then we'd settle in for cuddling and long attempts at getting back to sleep. Two hours later, once he was out, I would be able to sleep myself.
The combination of being sick and not getting enough sleep put me in a strange frame of mind. Everything seemed fraught with premature nostalgia. The Duplo block set he got for his birthday, with a castle and the toy knights? A relic of a childhood soon to be over, the toys destined to languish in an attic. The recent photographs of our growing boy? Documentation of a time we won't be be able to remember a year from now. My cuddly 3-year-old will change into a different person, perhaps several times over, and each stage will be as fuzzy in my mind as his first weeks of life. It cut, this realization of the slipperiness of time and memory.
Along with an ache for what has not yet passed, I started to see danger in almost every moment, as though I was preparing myself for an inevitable loss. The bee I saw crawling on our grass -- would it deliver a fatal sting to my son, sink its poison into his chubby bare foot? (Never mind that we have no idea if he is allergic. It is a genetic possiblity). Would this be the dog walk where I would lose my balance and fall backwards, landing on my son, strapped to my back in an Ergo carrier? (Oh, for those days when he insisted on wearing his bike helmet at all times!)
And what about me? Was I paying enough attention to the dangers that I faced? Is the morning coming when, groggy and uncaffeinated, I will accidentally dip my low-hanging robe sleeve into the burner flame, stare in shock as the sleeve is consumed? Would I finally miss that step and go tumbling into a crumpled heap of bone and flesh on the floor below?
Maybe if I tried to keep the dangers in mind, tried to remind myself that what we love can be taken away, that no moment is innocent, I would have a mental talisman against loss.
That was a few days ago. Sleep is improving and my outlook is returning to normal. Neurotic worrying is not what protects us from danger. I am lucky to live in an incredibly safe part of the world, with access to clean water, plentiful food, and good medical care. I don't have to dodge bombs or gunfire. I don't need a talisman.
But I am going to watch my step when I go down the stairs.
So. What would I write if ...
This has been a hard week of slog and attempts to think my way through a muddled, sad brain.
There could be at least one reason I am struggling -- the end of July marks an anniversary of sorts (some might call it an antiversary). This, coupled with an overnight work retreat for my husband next week, a true triggering event, is bringing me down. These dates will lose their meaning over time, but the first go-round stinks.
So. Maybe that's it.
(Ever since my mother sent me this quote from Seamus Heaney on the use of 'So.' as prelude, a call for attention, I've been using it as a sentence all on its own. The quote is below, Famous Seamus on translating Beowulf and using the term 'So.'
There you have it -- a little esoterica to balance out the angst, to confuse the crowd. Oh, for courage and greatness.)
"And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of [my big-voiced Scullion] relatives, [who had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. ] I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:
Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
peod-cyninga prym gefrunon,
Conventional renderings of "hwaet," the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with "lo" and "hark" and "behold" and "attend" and—more colloquially—"listen" being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle "so" came naturally to the rescue because in that idiom "so" operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, "so" it was:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness."
Crushed
For a long time I thought the dreams were messages from my subconscious, a sign of our untapped connection. But they were always full of anxiety, missed moments, twisting city streets, long distances traveled for dissatisfying conversations. The longing was mine alone.
In one dream, my mind created a labyrinthine mental institution for our encounters. We were both inmates, living in separate dormitories. The buildings were part of a Victorian-era hospital, dark and complex with hidden meanings, completely separate from the external world. We would meet and part, meet and part, sometimes with a glance, sometimes managing a quick kiss, always with that awful ache for what could never be. I woke up wondering: Do you care for me? Do I exist for you?
That was the hold he had on me: the pursuit of acknowledgment, the desire to be seen for who I was, while he existed as pure symbol, out of reach and impossible to know.
Last fall, when my marriage was going through a rough patch, we started e-mailing more frequently. I liked the exchange, felt my latent crush expand, fill the spaces I thought were empty. It was innocent fun – no lines were crossed. Then, without explanation, he stopped responding.
Over time the dreams went on hiatus. Until last night. I’m not going to get sucked into this game with my subconscious again.
I don’t need his acknowledgement to know I exist.
Existential angst, Part 2
I had some doubts about whether I should post this -- nothing about writing here, nothing positive and chirrupy either.
Well, this is me. I can't make up what I am not. When I'm feeling better, it will be about writing. When life feels like a cruel joke to be endured until my extinction via death, that's what I'll write about. At least I'm still writing.
So, today: The dream hangover -- usually a nap thing, or middle of the night phenomenon for me. I don't always remember the dream, but I wake up with a sense of dread, or a feeling of failure that cannot be recovered from, or with the gnawing ache of permanent loss. Today I had a napless nap attempt in an empty house ideal for sweet sleep. I emerged from bed still tired, thoughts tangled and knotted.
I felt old and sad and crazy for thinking I could transcend anything with writing or thinking or interacting with others.
Life is a blind march towards death. When I emerged from bed, I knew my life was irrationally -- crazily -- lucky, and undeserved. I was sure my feeling of dread was because H and C must have been in a fatal car accident while I was not sleeping. The cheese stands alone.
They came home untouched, alive.
No K & Mom story writing today. Definitely tomorrow, though. I'm not that bad off.