Retrospective revisited — B*stard children

I’ve reached 1982, and that’s the year I graduated from high school, and so, I suppose, that will have to be my focus. But it leaves out some things that I fear need to be spoken. If I leave them out, I have left out half of what I am, what I remember. I have left out, too, those things that shaped Leah and Rachel, Ruth May, my mother too.

My cousin has been in touch with me through Facebook, another strange synchronicity, because it is his mother who triggered a dark time in our lives. Not her fault, certainly. She was only speaking what she saw, what was suspected.

“You’re really Nathan’s daughter,” she told Rachel. “It’s pretty obvious. He just won’t admit it.”

She had been married to and was now divorced from Dad’s brother. She and her two children had made a life for themselves in a country house owned by a retired doctor who was quite a bit older than she was. She started off as his housekeeper, and later married him. I remember spending summers there, in the oversized house, in the scattered outbuildings, in the sloping fields where it never rained. (This is Ireland. It always rains. Not there. Not in Shillelagh in the summer that Elvis Presley died.) My cousin saw a ghost on the lane when we were fetching in the post. He was a farmer. He was there and he was gone. “I saw him,” she said. Where was her brother, who today sends me Facebook messages from Taiwan?

In my memory, everything is sun and dappled shadow and puffs of dust and the smell of hay. Maureen was my fun aunt, younger than the others. She liked us, and came outside to sit on the river wall with us. It must have been Sunday, one of those Sunday visits that punctuated those years. Maybe we were playing hide-and-seek, and had taken a break. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m sure you figured it out. Sure, you’re the spitting image of each other.”

What is is like to be 12 or 13 and to be told as Rachel was that the man you have thought is your stepfather is actually your father, but won’t acknowledge it? She had no reason, as I did, to be grateful that Dad wasn’t her father. He liked underdogs, and as a small child she had been somewhat of an underdog. Anyway, Maureen’s secret-spilling explained why he was more tolerant of her than of me. She was his blood, after all, as I was not.

Shortly afterwards, we found the letters. They were hidden in the guest room, in a closet with a secret compartment. They documented Mum’s relationship with Dad. They were love letters that smelled of dust and chagrin. How fanciful of me to say so; after all, they were just dry, fading pages in a manila envelope, artifacts that map a time that is swathed in mystery. I was already born then, a babe in arms, but there was no mention of Mum being pregnant with Rachel. That strange lacuna lent Maureen’s terrible confession a truth that we could not deny. And if that confession was true, then surely her contention that Mum and Dad were not married, that they had never been married, must also be true. We were bastards.

To be continued…

Four crows

I saw them this morning as I looked out past the deck of my father’s house to the water beyond, as I admired the filtered light of early morning, the faint mist obscuring the far shore. I was washing dishes, and the crows landed on Dad’s boat, which was on the deck right outside the wall of windows fronting the main room. There they stood, quarreling, on the boat cover, and then they flew about, two up to the trellis on the side of the deck to stand side-by-side and squawk at one which finally flew down to the deck. The fourth, with blowsy, ragged feathers, stood droop-headed on the boat, looking back and forth between the two scolding birds and the one on the deck, and then flew to the deck railing. The two on the trellis flew after it, dancing and jigging, ruffling feathers as though to make themselves look bigger. There was a scuffle. The bird on the deck joined in. They scolded and leapt back and forth, and whatever they were saying to each other was hardly affectionate. I wish I understood Crow.

After a while the three sleek crows came together, rounding on the ragged one, and the ragged one hopped back and forth from foot to foot, cawing rapidly, before launching itself up into the air and flying off. The three sleek crows talked amongst themselves for a moment, and then flew up, one by one, in the opposite direction from the ragged crow, until the deck was deserted once more.

How did they know, these four crows, to act out their little drama on my father’s deck, in front of me, who would see, of course, the four girls in the family and their eternal family roles?

Morning Ritual

Up, take shower, dress, come downstairs for breakfast. Often the dogs linger, sleeping in while I eat. Later they wander downstairs, go outside with me as I water the plants. After I come inside, I wait till they’re curled up on the couch before I creep upstairs to make the bed, which is still warm from their fuzzy little bodies. Carefully and slowly I pull the covers up. I’m never quiet enough. Sadie always hears the sound of sheets sliding over each other, and I hear the jingle of her tags as she bounds up the stairs and leaps onto the bed, ready for DOG WRESTLING. And then it’s a wild five minutes of her growling and snarling at me, baring her substantial Jack Russell fangs, as I try to wrap her in the bedclothes. She sounds fierce, but with an undertone of laughter. Yes, dogs laugh. It’s buried in the tone of their play growling. You just have to listen for the nuances. When her teeth connect with my hands, they do so with a gentleness that wouldn’t bruise a flower. She lunges for me with her mouth wide open and her lips drawn back, and right before the fatal, piercing bite, pulls back just enough that she doesn’t hurt me, her bite as gentle as if she were play biting a tiny puppy. No. Gentler. I’ve seen her play with tiny puppies.

Finally I get her wrapped up, and she fights with all her muscular terrier self to escape, and I pretend I just can’t hold her, and she gets a paw free, a muzzle, her head, her fierce biting bangs,and then all of her, and I roll her around on the bed till she grows floppy and lets me rub her belly, her eyes all crinkled with happiness.

Can you imagine she almost died 10 months ago?

Finally we’re both ready to start our morning.

Courage and love

For B —

I’ve been thinking about family. I’ve been thinking about what happens when family members turn on you in unforgivable ways. I’ve been thinking about the worlds I see through my students’ eyes, through the papers they write.

I learn from my students. I learn how to appreciate what I have now, and the privilege that was my childhood. When I’m tempted to whine about whatever indignity I might have suffered once or might be suffering now, I remember the paper written by a student a couple of quarters ago. He was a gang member, and his family’s house was burned down by a rival gang. He left the gang then, thankful that nobody in his family had died in the fire.

I remember the student who wrote about the scar in his leg, a gunshot memento from running drugs and a gang skirmish. I remember the woman with the three little dots on her cheek, a tattoo that centered her in the sub-culture that was her world. There are men and women here who are recovering from addictions: alcohol, crack, meth. So many meth addicts, trying day-by-day to turn their lives around.

There are stories from girls who cut themselves because that’s the only power they know. There was the student who was molested by his babysitter for years as a prepubescent boy. And every quarter, somehow, someway, there are the stories of girls who have been raped, or sexually abused, or beaten by controlling boyfriends. There are those who were molested once, and who told parents who believed them, and who saw justice done. And there are those whose parents either were the molesters, or who allowed the molestation to happen.

I can’t imagine it. Can’t imagine standing by and letting anyone hurt Zeke. I can’t imagine not believing her, or seeing abuse and turning away. I can’t imagine how a mother could do that to a kid, what kind of dark and twisted world that mother grew up in to think it’s OK to turn her back on abuse to a child.

I think of the extraordinary courage of students who stand up in the face of family hostility and say, “This isn’t right” about the years they withstood abuse that went unchallenged. We’re not “supposed” to be molested by close relatives, but if we are, we’re not “supposed” to send those relatives to jail. Charging a father or a brother or a mother or a sister goes against some terrible instinct that says family cohesion is more important than individual rights. And yet some people have the courage to walk away from family, to recognize that family cycles can’t continue. They break away, at terrible cost to themselves, for something that is ultimately for the greater good.

A few of those brave women (and sometimes men), are able to do so and yet somehow maintain their ability to love, to hold compassion in mind with every action. They love those who have hurt them, and while they take the brave and isolated stance that destroys the family cycle of hate and destruction, they never lose sight of love.

For those rare and precious people, for those few I know personally and others all around the world who also walk such lonely paths, I pray.

Encouraged

Can’t say it. Don’t know how. Ghosts float about the room, not dead yet. I imagine them, my readers, what they might look like, how they might sit beside me and reach out to touch me. They might stand back, and purse their lips. They might turn away. I want to bat them off, chase them out. I want to open the windows and send them off to mingle with the clouds. Here it is again, that embroilment, that fear of being seen.

Push-pull. To expose. Not to expose. I could tell you that making l*v* hurts, that it always has, that there is a physiological reason for it, that if I can hold tight and let it happen, then let go, relax into the pain, let it fill me, there’s a place beyond it where bliss waits. Pain and ecstasy are inextricably entwined.

I can tell you that my life is mostly mundane, and it’s OK. I wake and eat breakfast and let out the dogs while I water my flowers and my lone yellow plum tomato plant, and then I go to work and teach for three and a half hours, and spent some time prepping for the next day’s class and reading papers (I say “reading,” not “grading,” for a reason). And I come home and eat lunch with Nada, and sometimes we play chess. And I drive Zeke here and there (or rather she drives me, because she’s in driver’s ed and has a permit, so I sit in luxury while she finds ways to go the long way to her friends’ houses, gas prices be damned). And when it cools down I go to Nada’s and we kick a soccer ball around for a while because he quite smoking eight weeks ago and he needs something to distract him when the cravings hit. I thought, at first, I was doing it for him, that I would hate kicking a soccer ball around because I’m ball-challenged, with no coordination, but actually it’s fun. I bought soccer shoes, and he’s showing me some tricks and drills, and I can’t do any of it well, but we laugh a lot, and sweat drips into my eyes and I run under the sprinklers to rescue the ball when I send it sideways into his brother’s yard, and the cool water challenges the heat, sends it away into the rich blue dome above, and I feel like a kid again, as if I’ve found something I knew once but forgot — or maybe I never really knew it.

When we’re tired we go inside and read. He reads cognitive psychology books, his current intellectual interest, and I read papers for work or scribble all over a manuscript for a future developmental writing book that I’m reviewing. Sometimes, if there’s time, we’ll read together for a few minutes, these days from Chuang Tzu’s Inner Chapters, and he’ll be happy. So will I. I don’t mean to exclude myself. I was going to write “we,” but I realized that he in particular loves being read to, and I love to read aloud — but it gets tiring, and there’s never enough time. So we read a little from the Inner Chapters, and then I have to rush out to pick up Zeke, and cook her and her friends something. There are always kids sleeping here: right now her friend J is in her room with her, and B is on the couch downstairs, so I’m writing in my bedroom, with Sadie and Bridji snuggled up against me.

And then, finally, it’s night. I open the windows and the wind blows through, carrying cool from the mountains. I water the plants on the patio again, beneath stars, and listen to the world hum. The ghosts gather again, and they don’t purse lips or turn away. They are friends. I can write to them.

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Retrospective 18: 1980 — Adah Did It

“Adah did it!”

I stood frozen in shock. I can recall the moment perfectly, the tableau in the kitchen, my mother by the Aga, holding the broken kettle, my father in the doorway, my sister sitting at the table. And I stood by the sink, far from the stove. Far from the kettle.

My father had just walked in. “What happened to the kettle?” he asked, when he saw my mother holding the handle in one hand and the dented body in the other. And my mother said, “Adah did it.”

Leah looked up in surprise. “Mummy,” she said. “Adah wasn’t anywhere near the kettle.”

My mother had turned, not paying attention, and knocked the kettle off the stove. It had hit the hard tile floor and the handle had split off. My mother had bent and picked it up. She was examining it when my father entered and asked his question.

“Adah did it.” I was used to those words. The dynamic in my family had been set for years now. Rachel was the responsible one, in a way. She was more developed than me, and beautiful in a taunting, sexy kind of way even though she was barely in her teens. She was also directive and strong. She and Leah, only a year apart, were the closest. When we fought, she and Leah always sided together, usually against little Ruth May who was the constant butt of Leah’s disdain. I almost always stood up for Ruth May, having a thing for underdogs, but invariably Leah’s and Rachel’s concentrated venom would wear Ruth May and me down. Then Ruth May, who had a strong instinct for self-preservation, would switch sides abruptly to the winning team, and it would be the three of them against me. When Mum or Dad came to investigate, the chorus would begin: “It’s Adah’s fault.” “Adah did it.” “Don’t look at us. It was Adah.”

And then I’d storm out to my pony, usually crying, which earned me the name “Crybaby” in my family. Mum called me melodramatic and over-reactive. I grew more and more morose and sullen, withdrawing into myself and turning more and more to my pony, who didn’t judge or blame me.

Finally, that day with the kettle, even Mum blamed me for something that wasn’t my fault. For a long moment I stood, unsure of how to react. And then I just walked out, past Dad and Leah, and went to my room. Even now something freezes in me when I think of that day.

It is a small thing, really, compared to what others endure. I was not beaten. Dad hit me once, and grabbed me roughly enough to leave a bruise on my arm another time. The time he hit me he threw me into the wall, and somehow I ended up with a black eye. It was actually an advantage at school, but I am talking ahead of myself. My point is that I didn’t endure physical violence time after time, as others do. I was not s*xually abused. I had a good life, with ponies and later a horse, with four meals a day laid on, and my own bedroom. With four acres on a lovely little river, and apple trees and gooseberry bushes and bushels of fresh fruit and vegetables in the summer, and canned and frozen ones in the winter, all from our garden. We had donkeys and chicken and geese and goats, dogs and cats, guinea pigs and my ponies. We had fresh honey and golden dripping honeycomb from our own bee hives. When Dad wasn’t home, Mum would sit with us in the kitchen and we’d drink tea and eat biscuits and talk with her best friend and her best friend’s kids, a pack of us, laughing for hours. We had wonderful lavish sit-down Sunday dinners with my grandparents and my aunt and my two cousins, and we played hide-n-go-seek in the garden at dusk, and the midges chased us, and the smell of fresh-mowed grass followed us to sleep at night.

Beautiful, all of it. Just — here and there — the odd dark moment. And that day was one of them.

Mum came after me. I don’t know what she said. “Adah broke it,” she said to Dad as she walked out of the kitchen. Why was she so afraid of him, that she had to blame me for what she had done? That she had to insist, despite Leah’s assertion of the truth, that I had broken the kettle? I heard her, and something boiled in me. I turned, there in the long hallway, at the door to my room.

“Why is everything always my fault?” I yelled. Is that is? Is that what I said? I was blind with rage, blind with the injustice of it all, and strengthened because Leah — at least — had spoken the truth. Mum screamed back. We were like that, short-fused and fiery in our rage — all of it useless and wearing.

I don’t remember resolution. I want to say she apologized, that we hugged. But we never hugged. Years later, she did explain it — that her anger at me always calmed Dad down in some way, pleased him. She could change his moods by punishing me. But I don’t think she thought it through back then. I don’t think she could. She just acted out of her own fear — that Dad would leave her, that he would disapprove of her, and grow ice-cold for weeks, and fill the house with silence. Over the years, the pattern was established. Leah was brutal to Ruth May. Rachel ordered people around. Ruth May played the clown, and when that didn’t work, she turned on me. And I was the sullen, angry scapegoat who carried the sins of the family.

“Adah did it.”

Why not? If it made it better for everyone else — why not?

Vacancies and Writing and Buddhism and my favorite Sister

“What are your vacancies?” Bethany wrote in her blog, after writing about the voids she feels in her life sometimes. I don’t like thinking about mine. Most of the time I ignore them. If I’m to be honest, I realize my actions have disqualified me from karmic goodness. I abandoned my horse, essentially. Something has shifted in me, over the years, to feel a personal distaste at the idea of buying and selling horses. They connect with us humans, and then we sell them. They move into a life absent from us, and they could be abused or neglected, starved or overworked, and we don’t know.

Sometimes I wake to find I have been dreaming of my horse, and I wonder if he ever misses me. Does he wonder why I just disappeared? I know where he is, but I can’t bear to go visit him, although I know he is well treated. I didn’t sell him, either, though perhaps I could have made some money doing so. I just couldn’t do it. I gave him away to someone who loved him, and then turned away.

Another absence: I shared some writing with a writer friend who has been increasingly successful over the years. She gave me excellent advice, the kind that is at once helpful but also leaves one feeling somewhat down: “Why didn’t I see that? I should have known that.” But the advice was doable, reasonable, well framed. What silenced me was her comment about not really liking my style, although I have suspected for years that she would not choose to read anything I write if we weren’t friends. She has encouraged me as a writer, but she and I write differently. She doesn’t like my “Latinate” word choices, prefers simplicity and straightforward sentences composed with Orwellian transparency.

After her review, I couldn’t write. I sat down to do so and found myself silenced. No matter how much I understand intellectually that writers differ in their styles, and that one can appreciate a writer’s ability without particularly liking the style, I can’t emotionally move past the disappointment of my friend’s comment. And I can’t help but think of my mother, who didn’t like my style either. “It’s too flowery,” she said, every time she read something I wrote, and then inevitably turned to grammar. “You’ve ended this sentence with a preposition. You can’t do that.” Grammar and style. I could never get either one of them right.

I suppose there are other absences, but right now I don’t have time to think of them. I’ve been trying to write this for three days. Every time I start, someone interrupts me. It’s summer. I should have time, but I realize I’m busier than ever. I’m teaching two classes, and Zeke has driver’s ed, and her friends spend as much time here as at their houses, and the dogs need walking, and no matter how much I want to write, something holds me back.

And now, hours later, I return from an evening at Sister A’s house, where we talked about “I am the way and the truth and the light” and about Buddhism and Hinduism and her neighbors in the shelter house next door who bring her the raspberries they grow in their garden between bouts with alcohol. A homeless man stopped by for a sandwich, and the breeze blew the heat of the day away. “OK, I’m going to do my Buddha thing,” I said once, to prepare her and the others for another off-the-wall connection with Eastern religion — Buddha nature in this case. And she laughed and recommended a book by Diana Eck, and said, “You’ll like her, Adah.” This Saturday is her 60th Jubilee, and I’m going.

Right now, right this moment–long may it last–I feel no absence at all.

Her name is Lloyza

She is seven, will be eight on the 16th. She stands against a stone wall, in a pale pink top, hot pink jeans and matching pink flipflops. Her black hair is pulled back into two pony tails on either side of her head, and a few stray hairs fall over her forehead, wispy dark. She looks directly at the camera, not smiling, a probing, serious look.

I saw her photograph as soon as I walked through the main doors of the cathedral. A priest I didn’t know stood behind a table on which stacks of folders bearing colorful pictures waited. I scanned the pictures, and stopped on Lloyza’s. I reached out my hand, touched the folder, and heard the cantor name the opening hymn. No time. I turned to enter the nave and find my spot in the pew, leaving the folder behind with all the others.

The homily, given by the visiting priest, reminded us of our responsibilities to others less well off. He was speaking on behalf of poor children and aging people worldwide. “Sponsor a child or an aging person,” he encouraged us. “For $1 a day, you can make a huge difference in the life of an individual who is barely surviving. That person will receive health and dental care, food and clothing, an education.” The association he was speaking for, The Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, spends more than 94% of the money it raises on the people designated to receive it. Less than 6% goes towards administration and fund raising. I listened harder. For years I had wanted to sponsor a child somewhere in the world, but had always hesitated, afraid that the money would go to some millionaire CEO and to glossy advertisements and solicitations. No. Not according to Father D. The foundation has received an A+ from one charity regulating board, four of four stars from another. He speaks of the seven children he has sponsored and watched grow up. “I can’t have my own children,” he says, “So I made a family for myself.” He names them, their ages, what they are doing. He has visited them. The foundation arranges trips to the countries where they provide sponsorships. I imagine visiting the little girl in pink, wherever she lives. I’ll look at her folder after Mass, I think.

But after Mass, Father D asks the servers to bring in packets to hand out to interested people. I raise my hand. A man walks over and hands me a folder. It’s the girl in pink.

I sponsor her. Her name is Lloyza and she lives outside Manila, in a small village, in a hut with a sheet metal roof. She sleeps on the floor, and cooks on a charcoal fire. She has two little brothers, and she helps clean the house and wash the dishes. She is “diligent in schooling.” Her favorite subject is Filipino. I wonder if she’s like me, an English-speaker whose favorite subject was English. She loves to sing.

Soon I’ll get an address for her and I’ll be able to write to her and send her a photograph or two. I hope she writes back soon.

Writing in a Hurry

Summer invited me over for paella and sangria tonight and I went gladly. A few days ago she sent me a link for a couple of requests for submissions that she thought would interest me. She does so periodically. Once, a year or so ago, I actually sent off a piece and it was accepted and published. Remembering that, I decided to try it again. In the space between reading student papers and waiting for my daughter to wake up, I wrote a query and emailed it off. In the bio, I wrote that I was an “occasional writer,” and explained myself away by saying that I am the single mother of a teenage daughter. Single mothers will understand — single fathers too.

But is that really my excuse? I always have an excuse for not writing. I’m a single mother. I’m working full-time. I have other things going on. Right now it’s summer. I should have time to write. I teach two classes instead of three, four days a week instead of five. Why is it hard to drum up 500 words for my blog during a time that should be more expansive? Today I plunged back into my retrospective, was interrupted three times, and realized that if I wanted to publish it, I needed to hit publish. So I did.

Tonight, slightly buzzed on sangria after a brisk walk home from Summer’s house in perfect night-time weather (finally the evenings have cooled down after last night’s dramatic thunderstorm), I rearead today’s blog entry. Typos, awkward sentences, moments when I could have said what I wanted to say more subtly, or more clearly. I berated myself, and then gave up. I recognize the cycle. I get good about writing regularly, get on a roll, and then get pulled aside. Then I beat myself up, and try again, and fail again.

Summer has nine months off — a time of bliss, I think. She has the summer, right now, and then a quarter’s sabbatical, and then a quarter of unpaid leave subsidized by a large artist’s award she won last year. She has been going to writer’s retreat after writer’s retreat, and last week, she received two acceptance notices for pieces she has written.

“Do I dare tell you?” she speculated, when she was over for an afternoon with her writing. She had a “piece-within-a-piece” she was contemplating for publication. I’d offered to help her read it and make suggestions about cutting. She’d taken me up on the offer.

“Tell me,” I said.

“OK.” She thrust her glass at me. “Promise you won’t be mad?”

“Why would I be?” I pour her wine. I know what she’s going to tell me, that she’s been accepted again.

“Will you be happy for me? Or jealous?” she asks.

“You know I don’t get jealous.”

She tsks and shakes her heads and sips her wine. “OK,” she says and she tells me.

I’m happy for her. I tell her congratulations. I don’t tell her that I appreciate the way she sends me links of places she thinks might like my writing. I know she knows I appreciate her thinking of me, and that she doesn’t like flattery/praise. It does make me happy to know that even though I write only rarely, in bursts here on this blog, and almost never in any other capacity, that she believes in me somehow, enought to send me a link here and a link there, to say, on occasion, “You really just need to send your writing out over and over again. Just get into the routine. Just do it.”

So today I wrote a query letter, and cut-and-pasted an old entry to it, and sent it out. If Summer says, “Do it,” I might as well try.

And I think of how lucky I am. I have several friends who encourage me. My blog friends, and two real-life friends, R.C. and Summer. If I don’t send writing out, it’s my fault. Mostly I don’t have time to write, let alone revise and edit and polish. Today’s ham-fisted attempt at an unfinished retrospective, published in the split-second before Zeke came downstairs in a grumpy mood — “Mooooooommmmm,” she wailed from upstairs, and I finished my sentence and hit publish before she rounded the corner because I knew I was in for a long conversation — is an example of why I rarely fully finish anything I write.

“In a couple of years,” I tell Summer, “she’ll be in college, and I’ll have a lot more time. In the meantime, I don’t mind being available. Those years go fast.”

Summer, childless, nods. She never protests or condemns. She has her own challenges when it comes to writing. And I have mine. Zeke, 15, sensitive and kind and sweet. Happy in general, but tormented at times by the frustrations of being a teenager in a world of doubt and difficulty. We argue sometimes, but mostly we just live in a kind of gentle, easy orbit. Her friends come in and out, in and out, and hang out and leave and come back, and I’d rather have them here than elsewhere, so my computer is commandered for MySpace sessions, and I cook baked potatoes and pasta, and I don’t write.

Still, Summer’s links, today’s writing sessions, the cool night air blowing throw the house after last night’s dramatic thunderstorm — all these feel like nods from the fates. I’ll try to write, when I can, and if I can’t find the time, I’ll try to just accept it.