The weight of it
If you tell, everyone will know how bad you are. And stupid. And worthless. They will reject you.
Tired of the weight, you tell anyway. No one thinks you are bad. Or stupid. Or worthless. Sometimes they treat you with empathy. Others ignore what you tell them, but you come to understand that they don't know what to do with it, that it's their problem, not yours.
You start to feel better, like maybe you didn't cause your abandonment by being bad or being too smart-assed or being too you. Your abandonment was your parent's problem and not yours, even though now you are left to deal with the lifelong aftermath.
You think of her, the other girl, your biological grandmother, sixteen and pregnant in New Castle, Delaware in 1950, how she carried also carried a baby -- your mother -- probably in secret until almost the end. You think of her secret pregnancy, the secret father, the secret baby going off to live with a new family. Your birth grandmother grew up, got married and had two additional children. She held fast to the secrets.
You are angry with her for keeping these secrets, for denying information and empathy. You identify with her, remembering what it was like to be young, alone, and terrified. You want to tell her "I understand" (as much as you can). You want to punch her in the face. The legacy of suppression is a foul one and you need to blame someone for what happened to you. Someone distant and easy. But you can't. The people to blame, your mother, your father, other adults in your life at the time . . . oh, you're afraid of the mess your anger would make and you know now how hopeless they were.
You try to write about secrets, but it just feels like an emotional morass.
That's the problem with secrets.
Image: My mother, summer 1952.
And in the room locked up inside me
I remember what it was like to care about fashion and boys and what the other girls thought, all the other girls with their money and their bright sweaters in primary colors and their designer clothes. When you’re a teenager you think everyone else is better off than you, except for S. whose brother would beat her up or F. whose father didn't know he existed or N., who lied about her address, too, and had an alcoholic dad. My friends were the exceptions, but the rest of them, the money flowed like water from a tap and their parents, they might have been strict, but it was in good ways that showed they cared instead of being random like my mother. The other kids had stable parents who drove newer cars. They lived in the suburbs, not the middle of the city where the houses slammed against each other, where you knew everyone's secrets, could smell the neighbor's dinner burning.
It was a time when I joined the consumer world with its fashion and makeup and music to buy (Def Leppard morphed to Wham! and Duran Duran bled into the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, Echo and the Bunnymen) and then retreated from it. In the Little House I was stuck with the dull depression of being fifteen and separated from the world, first alone, then alone and pregnant, and then the survivor of both, still alone, and with life experiences that made me feel so, so old.
But there was beer to drink and a guy who bought it for me. He eventually came around more often, was there for real, for love. D. still lived at home, was the youngest of four in a tight family. They got together for big extended family dinners, would greet me with a hug, kiss my cheek when it was time to say goodbye. The womenfolk prepared delicious food and it always seemed like there were at least twenty people at the table, with toasts ("Proost!") and heated conversation and endless bottles of Grolsch.
I loved that family, their sheer number, their passion and personality, the safety net of so many people. In the photographs, however, I look small. Contained. A little scared, like I knew a secret that could destroy me.
Image: Me, late December 1984, in my grandfather's yard. This was before I moved to the Little House, but I still spent most weekends and school vacations visiting. I remember this day very well, the abnormally warm temperatures, the feeling of anticipation that D. might show up that night, that he actually did show. Ah, redemption, brief and sweet.
The original prompt was a photo. You can look at it here.
The post title is a line from a Yaz song that I listened to a lot in the Little House: In My Room.
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??