Retrospective 16: 1978 — Scapegoat skinhead

My mother bent over me, pulling my hair straight, pushing the scissors in, and cutting. Locks of red-brown hair fell to the floor, fell to my lap. I looked down at the growing pile. My hair had been long and thick. I had kept it pulled back by barrettes, and was used to the feel of it against my neck. Now it was gone. My head felt light and strange.

I don’t remember if I cried. Perhaps by then the tears were gone. The haircut was a punishment for lying, but I hadn’t lied. I was the scapegoat. When my sisters had done something for which they got in trouble, they pointed at me. My mother told me years later that when she punished me, it lightened the tension between her and Dad, which by then was considerable. I suppose that’s why she always believed them. Over and over again I was accused of lying for some infraction that had nothing to do with me. This time my sister had forgotten to feed her fish, and they had died, and she told my mother I had put the soap dish in the tank, thus killing them.

My mother was logical and careful. The previous timed I’d denied wrongdoing (“lied”), she had warned me. “Next time this happens, I’m cutting off your hair. You have to learn to take responsibility for your actions.” And she did.

My hair, because it was thick and somewhat fuzzy, didn’t take well to the new haircut. It frizzed out all over my head, dense as an Afro. I had never been popular in school, but the new haircut triggered new, vicious and unmitigated attacks on me. I would walk into class and see “Adah is a fuzzpot, Adah is a nut,” written on the board. The kids followed me, chanting their song. I was awkward and gawky anyway, and somehow the new haircut only emphasized my social outcast standing.

I had had one out-of-school friend, a social outcast too, a boy. We used to run in the hills around his house, climb through the forests to the rocky outcroppings at the top of the Wicklow hills. We used to play in the abandoned machinery at a stone quarry, and go swimming in a river pool a half hour walk from his house. I spent the night at his place, in a narrow cot set up in his tiny room. He asked me to marry him. I remember laughing and laughing when I was with him, filled with a wild, joyous sense of freedom.

He didn’t tease me about my hair. I think he hardly noticed it — or maybe he was just kind. But when my sisters’ friends found out about our friendship, they organized a possey of mean little girls to follow me about the school. “Adah and Peter up a tree, k.i.s.s.i.n.g….First come loves, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby-carriage,” they howled as I walked between classes or headed towards the lunch room. The pressure, combined with the already unbearable tension regarding my hair, sent me over the edge. I stopped calling him. I stopped returning his phone calls. And I think I stopped laughing, for years.

As my hair grew out, it grew increasingly fuzzy. One day, driven mad by it, I grabbed a pair of scissors and began cutting. I grabbed the wildest hair, at the top of my head, which WOULD NOT lie down smoothly and tamely, and I hacked away. I cut a spot on my head back to almost-baldness. When my mother saw it, all she could do was take me to the hairdressers and get my head shaved.

Then I was “Skinhead” at school. The teasing intensified. I could go nowhere without hearing the whispers. We all knew skinheads were bad people, hurtful evil people whom we had to avoid if we saw one on the street. They listened to punk rock and ate kittens. And now I was one of them.

I was also a late bloomer, and being lean and shapeless, was taken for a boy so many times that Mum finally got my ears pierced so people could see I was a girl after all. But that didn’t work either. “That boy’s got earrings,” I heard on the bus once.

It took years to get my hair past the fuzzy stage. In fact, it never really came back the way it had been before it was cut. Something changed in it, and changed in me, too. I have a driving desire for honesty that I have to curb sometimes. I know kids tend to lie sometimes, yet I want to believe everything Zeke says. I have to believe it. I will NEVER accuse her of lying — even if all the evidence is there.

What surprises me is how honest she is, how “good.” I see me in her. I don’t know how she got there. She is so kind, so sensitive, so well-intentioned. I was all those things. I didn’t lie. I cried in my room at night because I didn’t seem able to convince people — my family — that I wasn’t bad. Something pushed me to do the right thing, to love, to listen and care. Zeke is that way too. I hope she knows I see it.

Retrospective 15: 1977 — Bastard child

I was 12 when I finally asked Mum why Dad hated me so much. I remember every moment of that conversation. We were in the drawing room of our Georgian home, a room with heavy red velvet curtains, a marble mantelpiece over the fireplace, dark leather sofas. The wooden floor gleamed, and the area rug that is now at the beach was still somewhat plush back then. My mother’s desk graced the bowed window at the end of the room. The other window, the one that looked out to the front, let in the green light of sunshine filtered through a dense curtain of wisteria.

I was polishing the mantelpiece. Mum was paying bills. I hesitated, then dived in, taking a risk. We weren’t allowed to interrupt her when she paid bills.

“Why does Daddy hate me?” I asked.

“He doesn’t hate you.” Her voice was absent-minded. She flipped over a piece of paper.

“He treats me differently than the others.”

“What makes you say that?”

“People notice. People from school.” In fact, I had stopped trying to invite friends over. It was just too embarrassing. But I remembered the comments from the few aborted overnighters friends would attempt.

She stopped. She put down her pen, a fountain pen, very carefully. She turned in her chair, red leather, with a high, scrolled back. She sighed.

“He’s not your real father,” she said.

I don’t remember being shocked. I don’t remember anything much emotionally, except perhaps a small, trickle of relief. Something settled in me, like sand shifting.

“Not my father?”

“No. You and Rachel have an American father. His name is JD. Daddy treats you differently because you’re not his child.”

“But he doesn’t treat Rachel like he treats me.”

She sighed again, a soft exasperated sound.

“Rachel was sick when she was a baby. Do you remember? She had diarrhea and exzema. He’s always liked underdogs. I would get impatient, and he wanted to champion her.”

I remembered Rachel’s explosive diarrhea. I remembered helping Mum change Rachel’s nappies in the apartment in Switzerland. It didn’t quite line up, but I accepted it.

“What did he look like?”

She stood up, drew a box out from underneath the desk, and pulled out a small album. A handful of thick black pages held glossy photographs. My mother, arms around a stranger, a dark-haired man. A baby on his shoulders. Me.

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. We lost touch.”

“Why did you leave him?”

“We just weren’t made for each other.”

She was careful in her answers, guarded, kind. In the end I knew nothing more than that he was not right for her. He had vanished. She had simply taken up life with Dad as though we had always been together. By the time we came to Ireland, we had become one family, with no subversive, difficult, damning history.

Did she warn me not to tell anyone that Dad was not my father? Or did I just know, because I was living in Ireland in the 70s, that my state was sinful in some way? That I was a bastard child? That if anyone knew, we’d never be accepted? It’s hard for me to imagine, from this angle here in the U.S. where I’m divorced and most of Zeke’s friends’ parents are divorced, how I just knew, at the age of 12, that I couldn’t tell anyone. I understood why Mum had kept it a secret.

That night, when I went to bed, I didn’t cry for the sense of family I had lost, or rail against injustice. I just breathed a little deeper, relieved that there was a reason for my Dad’s treatment of me. He didn’t just hate me because I was unlovable. He hated me because I wasn’t his.

Somehow, that made it better.

Retrospective 14: 1976 — Half Wit

Continued from here:

Half wit.

I told you she was stupid.

That girl’s crazy.

These days I find myself wondering if he really said those things about me. I can’t imagine it. I don’t know why those memories are so strong. They infuse my past, and sometimes I hear them again, echoing down the years, when I’ve made a mistake, when I haven’t been quick enough in picking up the joke at the party, when I’ve forgotten something at work. I push them aside, tell myself I’m imagining them, but that’s worse than listening and acknowledging them. It makes a lie out of my past.

I don’t remember. I don’t know why I hear them. He doesn’t say those things any more. The closest he’s come is the inevitable dig at English majors: “The soft option. Anyone can do it.” Or the way he ignores me when I ask a question sometimes. He’s hard of hearing; it’s easy to imagine that he simply didn’t hear me, until my sister asks him something quietly, and he answers.

In the end, whether he used those exact words or not, I know that in some ways he treated me differently. My friends saw.

“He’s your own flesh and blood,” my friend Sara said one day. “How can he treat you that way?”

But that was later, after I knew. When I was 10 and 11, I didn’t know anything at all other than that he was my father and the father of the four of us. We had come from Switzerland to Ireland. We lived in the country, in a big house on four acres, a long way from school. We rarely had friends over, but when we did, they always commented on how he treated me. “Why is your father so mean to you?” they asked. I didn’t know what they meant. It was the way he had always been towards me. “Why doesn’t your father like you?” they asked. I didn’t know how to answer. I was inarticulate in those days. I couldn’t speak right. I was teased because I lisped and stuttered and couldn’t say my “R’s” right. That year I ended up in the Irish equivalent of speech therapy — elocution class.

Is that why he thought I was stupid? Because I couldn’t speak right? I had to memorize long poems and speak them clearly. The elocution teacher coached me through them. She was also the drama teacher, and she loved to gossip with her students. I remember sitting in the small, gray-carpeted drama room upstairs in the art building. We used lighters to shrink crisp (potato chip) bags. The heat from the lighter flame did something to the plastic. We would end up with tiny bags, an inch or so square, the colors heightened, the picture and the brand name, Tayto, tiny replicas of what they had been. She let us bitch about the head mistress, and she asked us questions about boys (strange, foreign creatures that they were to us, in our all-girls’ school). But that was later. When I first knew her, I took lessons alone, and recited poetry that I have willfully forgotten, and learned to speak in a way that could be understood.

Still, he thought I was stupid. And crazy too. A half wit. Did he say it? Perhaps I am crazy to think he did. Perhaps he was right and I am deficient in some way. Perhaps I made it up. But a memory stirs. I wrote about this once, a long time ago, triggered by something he wrote to me. I go looking on my computer. I find it, an essay called “Recreating Reality.” Maybe I will post it some day. I was 29, and I wrote it 14 years ago.

Lee, Dee and TK

Imagine three women, all bloggers, living in different parts of the U.S. We are all college level teachers: One teaches at a major state university, one at a private Catholic college, and one at a community college. We are all Catholic, in some ways: one is a cradle Catholic who has walked away, one is Catholic by way of husband and daughter, and one is converted after a lifetime of walking the fringes. We all three have just one daughter, and all three live in very different relationships. The first woman has a college-aged daughter and lives in a long distance relationship with her husband, who works in a different state than the one in which she teaches. The second has a an elementary aged daughter and maintains a conventional marriage. The third has a high-school aged daughter and maintains a close friendship with a man, but they do not live together.

They all blog. The first woman, I shall call her Lee, blogs occasionally but regularly: long, carefully described entries that read like detailed essays. She is erudite and likes to write about how place shapes identity. Her voice is careful and professional. She weaves in allusions to poets and literary theories, to nature and art. An artist and photographer as well as dressmaker and writer, a cook and backwoods hiker, a humorous and loving wife and mother, she seems able to do everything. I envy her the order of her life, the way it swells and glows. She travels to England for research, meets well-known academics. She is genuinely kind. There was a time when I knew her, back when we were in graduate school together. Her daughter was three. We swapped dreams and stories of weddings, but she was always looking ahead, looking to rise. She is published, an expert in her field, leaves behind a wake of those who stand in awe of her. Her blog gives glimpses of her, but I never really know what hides below. Occasionally she writes about her daughter, and I love these small openings into a part of her life that I can understand. We walked in the sunlight across campus 18 years ago, and my memory of that day rises when she mentions her daughter. It is what I hold onto about her.

The second woman, I shall call her Dee, writes prolifically. She writes in fragmented images, skipping from one idea to the next, careless about traditional transitions. I see her eating at her computer, her daughter playing videos beside her. She weaves long, graceful narratives of her past with staccato visions of her present; a childhood trip to Mexico is part reflection, part juxtaposition against the exact moment of writing. She hints at darkness, steps back, plunges forward. Her entries often seems to be addressed to her creative writing students; she mentions them by name, describes them vividly. She writes with humor and matter-of-fact persistence about her hemorrhoids and her crazed dog. Uninhibited, spontaneous, intimate at times, her writing draws me in. She is one of the first people I visit when I see she has added a new post on bloglines.

I envy them both their ability, although from a personal perspective I prefer Dee’s writing. Lee’s writing — so professional and polished — keeps me at a distance. I admire it for what it says about her as a professional. But I don’t always feel like reading it. I don’t get lost in it. I see why she has risen so high in her career, why she is so admired. But I’m not compelled by her in the same way I’m compelled by Dee’s wild perambulations.

And then there’s me. TK. I’m torn always, between wanting to present the beautifully polished, allusive, professional essay-like entries that are Lee’s specialty, and the paralysis my desire causes. And then I remember that I only like to read Lee’s writing when I’ve got time and energy, and sometimes I am bored by it. So I think about Dee’s writing, about how it pulls me in when I need to be doing something else, how it remains with me after I walk away from my computer. I like her, not because she is kind in a distant way that is undergirded by professional grace, but because she is both flawed and immensely alive. Lee’s writing doesn’t admit to flaws. Dee’s is raw and beautiful with them.

I incline to the personal myself. I want to write what I want to read. But that simplifies it too much. It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading Lee’s entries. I do. She reminds me of some other bloggers I read, who form a tight-knit community of shared interests, diverse in style, yes, but also polished and careful in their writing. I never see typos, or awkward sentences, the kinds of things that creep into my writing so often because I always seem too much in a hurry.

So to return to the question that prompted this entry in the first place: How do I reconcile my desire to be somehow professional and polished in my writing (So that others might say, “Oh, how polished and lovely her writing is”) with my desire to read — and therefore to write — lovely, wild, intimate pieces?

I won’t. I suppose I’ll swing between wanting to maintain a cool and mysterious distance from my audience, and yet also wanting to close the gap between me and my readers. I want to pretend there are no readers out there, so I never have to backspace again. And yet I want readers to comment, so that I don’t feel I’m shouting down into an empty canyon, waiting for an echo.

The tension between the two desires drives me to write, then slams me against an invisible wall of worry. My drafts pile up: I have entries from more than a year ago, about Easter, about choosing my patron saint, about a particular lovely walk in the canyon. There are occasional darker ones too, attempts at continuing my retrospective that get pulled sideways, that expose what I don’t want exposed. I put them away, mull over them, and then bury them.

I wish not to bury my writing again, but I suppose the cycle will continue. I suppose I am self-medicating. I suppose my fear of overdosing keeps me cautious. I suppose I will continue seeking a balance, and accumulating drafts, and promising myself to finish my retrospective. In the meantime, I read Lee and Dee, and seek TK’s way, a balance between the two that more and more often swings towards Dee’s way.

It’s been raining, but the sun is out now. I have papers to read, bills to pay, a house to clean, and a memo to write for work. Thank God for Memorial Day, a time to let me catch up. Somewhere in there, I’ll squeeze in a walk for the dogs, and whether it’s raining or sunny, I’ll write as I walk.

Rain

I wrote the following about a month ago, and for some reason never published it. The landscape is different now, after our sudden emergence from winter into 100-degree days, but the feelings are the same.

The light drains away. The patio is wet; the flowers bedraggled. Small, scattered forsythia blooms and pink flowering plum buds spring open but remain muted in this growing dusk. The geraniums are leached, frost-bitten, and the tulips wait on the edge of opening, afraid perhaps they’ll be etched in ice by morning. Only the pansies look joyful, their petals bright enough they seem to give out light, so that my eyes are drawn to them as I type, those spots of yellow-gold waiting so stillcalm in the gloaming.

I want to explain something, but I hesitate. Sometimes it’s hard to write, even at times I’m not so busy, like now. Since Sadie lived; since Zeke is maturing so steadily into a daughter I can barely believe is mine, so wise is she, and mostly happy; since my asthma seems under control, no longer the exhausting battle against a constant cough and short-of-breathness that shadowed me for several years, I dare to think that life might settle down to calm. But this is dangerous thinking, illusionary. I can hold the moment for a split second, turn it over in my hand like a handful of ocean, but then it is gone. I know it will vanish, and another moment come, and it too slip away, and there will be turbulence once more. All I can do now is smile and be glad for the peace, and sit in quiet, not writing, and simply breathe, and that is enough.

Sunshine and sky

The dark-haired girl stood on the edge of the path, holding up two cell phones and lining them up in front of her. At first I couldn’t see what she was doing, and then I saw the second girl down the bank a little, between the trees, the stream flashing behind her. The dark-haired girl was taking pictures, smiling, and the girl on the bank stood with her arms out, smiling too, in the dappled sunlight.

I walked past them, tempted for a moment to offer to take pictures of both of them, together. But I prefer to be alone, not to interfere, so I waved and went on by, and they waved back.

I walked on for a while, and then turned back, and saw them coming towards me, walking out of the low evening light, with the wind blowing a dusty haze up behind them so they were outlined and illuminated. They walked so close together their arm hairs must have tingled, but they maintained the tiniest, most delicate distance between them.

They squealed when they saw the dogs, and bent to pet them. Plump white flesh swelled over the top of the light-haired girl’s shirt. Her arms were round and dimpled and the flesh pressed secretively together when she bent her arms. I wanted to touch her, to slip my fingers between the curve of her shoulder and her bent head. I wanted to feel the moist warmth of her skin. It sounds creepy, s*exual, but it wasn’t. It was the same urge I feel with mounds of cool sand, or with rich, dark dirt under shady trees in the hot summer, or with crumpled leaves. I always want to run my fingers along the trails of blazing light outlining blades of grass in the late summer evening. I want to touch the dew drops on spiderwebs, to feel them burst and diffuse over my skin. There is something so alive in dirt and sand and the roughened pads of dog paws, in the night blowing in with the late evening wind, in the laughter of a girl and her best friend leaning over to pet a dog.

“What’s their names?” the dark-haired girl asked. I told her. The light-haired girl giggled. “Wait till I tell my friend Bridget I’ve found a dog called Bridget,” she said. She cooed at my littlest dog and reached out to rub her ears. “Did you see a big group of people down the path?” she asked.

“Around the corner,” I said. The girls smiled and said goodbye and walked on. “See,” the light-haired girl told her friend. “I told you we’re not too far behind.”

I watched them pass into the shadow of the canyon. The light caught the dark-haired girl’s hair and gave it a patent leather sheen, but it was lovelier than that because it was free and loose.

I thought of how young they were, and how unselfconscious, and how the plump girl was beautiful in the way she swung her arms, in the way she held two yellow flowers in her left hand, so that they brushed by her faded jeans as she walked. Sunshine and sky, those flowers against the blue jeans. How long before she became self-conscious, before she looked at herself and saw fat instead of curves, felt shame instead of raw giddy happiness at her place here on earth? They were so fully present in the moment, those girls, so freely happy in each other’s company, taking pictures, picking flowers, giggling at cute dogs.

They passed around the corner, and I looked at the space where they had been, at the imprint they left right there, at the edge of the towering rock, that memory of blue and yellow, of laughter and uncomplicated pleasure. And then the canyon was quiet and still, just me and the dogs, and the overarching sky, and the late evening light, dusty gold against blue.

Molly, tears and being a mom

This made me cry. It reminded me of what I would could confess right now, were confession possible at this hour. I miss my horse. More than that, I cannot face my own culpability in the way my life changed, in the way I had to give him up in order to help Zeke. Was it worth it? Absolutely. The divorce destroyed something in her — her trust, her faith that things would turn out all right. They always had before, but when she was 10 — almost 11 — they didn’t. By the time she had turned 13, she was struggling. Adolescence stretched before her — before me — and I dreaded what was happening. I was struggling to keep my horse, and working off his board, and rarely home, and she said, one day, “You love that horse more than me.” And I said, “It’s not true.” And she didn’t believe me.

My friend, who was letting me keep my horse at her place, said she was being manipulative, that she was being spoilt. She might have been, I suppose, but still, I couldn’t sleep for worry about her. Another horse friend said I needed to assert my authority. “I would never have been able to treat my parents the way she treats you,” she said. “You need to teach her who’s boss.”

But my heart said something else. Zeke is sensitive, extremely so. I knew it. Whatever was happening was a response to pain, not misbehavior. So I gave away my horse. I couldn’t sell him, although he had cost me a lot. I just couldn’t sell him. It was like taking money to sell a friend.

Zeke got better, though not totally. “What do you need from us?” I asked her one day, meaning “from your father and me.”

“I want to live with you,” she said. “All the time. I don’t want to have to go to Dad’s house.” I had full custody at the time, but she had been staying with him on a three or four school nights a week because her school was in his town, not mine, and she didn’t want to change schools. I would pick her up from school and bring her home with me, and she’d stay with me till he picked her up on the way home from work. I saw her every day that way, but didn’t have to get up an hour earlier to take her to school. It seemed ideal, except that she was struggling.

It’s not that she doesn’t love her dad. She just didn’t click with his wife (and there are good reasons, I would say). So I talked to her father. We worked something out. She has been with me full time for two years, and I drive her to and from school every day. Two days a week he’s supposed to pick her up from school, but he’s busy, and doesn’t always have time. It’s OK. She is far happier now.

In the end, listening to her worked. Giving up my horse was what she needed. Getting up an hour earlier every day to get her to school so she didn’t have to stay with her dad made the difference. Her grades are good. She is popular and happy. She stands up for what matters to her — a day of silence in support of her gay and lesbian friends, choosing to sit at the lunch table with the overweight new  girl, resisting the tremendous peer pressure to smoke cigarettes and the omnipresent we*d, to have s*x, to drink and party hard.

On Mother’s Day she and a friend made me dinner, baked me a cake. We sat down together and ate and talked and laughed. That night, at 1:00 a.m., she came into my room and lay down beside me (as she sometimes does; she’s been a lifelong light sleeper, starting before birth!). “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I’m lucky to have you as a mother. I can tell you anything, and you listen to me.” We talked for a while, and then she hugged me and went back to bed.

I’m proud of her, proud to bursting. She’s funny and strong and sweet. She’s beautiful and smart too. I think of Molly, and my own horse, whom I gave up and miss terribly at times. I think of Zeke. I wish it could have been different, but I think it was right not to teach her “who’s boss.”

It’s the human conundrum. I did what I must confess, failed to love my horse enough in order to love my daughter the way I think she needed to be loved. One wrong to try to make a bigger right. Is it bigger? People who don’t love horses the way I do would probably say yes, but horse lovers would probably disagree. My horse friends would. Childless themselves, they don’t understand. Their horses are their children. They see me as having given up my child.

Conner. I’m sorry.

Protected: Decisions

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Protected: My folly, not theirs

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Protected: Unforgiveable

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