On Writing My Memoir

I am finding that some truly beautiful experiences are coming back to me, the more I write.  I find that my mother's sweetness knows no bounds, now that I remember the rest. That is such a gift, but I realize it is a gift I will need in order to address the worst of her. It was not liquor. It was psychotic breaks. And I am at a loss as to how to write of them, yet I will have to.

Writing ugly is not easy when you lived a life of oh-so-lovely denial. When I was in college I painted a picture of beauty about my home life, except for the fact that my mother drank. I did not speak of any dark times in childhood, however. My story with her always began in high school, out of thin air. All was beauty and magic, if you listened to me talk about my childhood. The only horrors were at school.

We do that. I also spoke of my relationship with my older brother as special and tragic. He was the whipping boy, the innocent too often blamed for everything. I was his defender. And I was, as it happens. Again, this is so often the case. I tutored him in French for all his high school years. He was fifteen and I was ten! It was after the rape, after he tried to sell me so he could by some "buck" shoes, like Pat Boone's. I had no memory of that. After all, by the time I was fifteen myself, I had turned instant burial into an artform. If the memory was not to my liking I simply denied its existence, like some reject factory part on an old-time conveyor belt.  I was afraid for him, and bought into the family line when the New York police were looking for him on drug charges. He was framed, my parents said. They got him to hide out in New Hampshire.

Every holiday season for three or four years, the police would stop by. It got so I would be the one to answer the door and invite them in for coffee or cookies. A standing "joke." Finally, when my brother as married and wanted to come out of hiding, my parents took him with their lawyer to New York and the charges were dropped. He was terrific at posing as a good, reformed family man.

Only he was guilty. And years later, I found out that Jim's discharge from the army was dishonorable. All those bouts of illness when we had not heard from him? The brink. He was court-martialed for bribing an officer.

My family, like so many others, simply acted on the premise that if you say everything is perfect often enough, then everyone will believe it to be so. This was never clearer than the years I tried to tell the truth about my mother, during high school. She primed the school with the "fact" that I was a liar, prone to fantasy. While that was not entirely false, it was not the truth when I tried to get help to deal with Mom. By then her bouts were every morning, before I went to school, and by the time I got home, she was often so drunk that she was barely conscious. Then she would, for no apparent reason, have several months of sobriety, just long enough for me to hope, but short enough for me to be wary at the same time.

I could not begin to look at the whole truth as I knew it, until it impacted my own children. Until I had to, to keep from repeating the tale in my own life's story, too.

Ugliness and great pain is an underpinning for our love story that has to run through the whole. I have spent a great deal of time writing of the many gifts she gave me, and that's the truth. And you know she drank, but sometimes we have to show not tell, as the cliché goes. I know that, too. The funny thing about moving beyond the pain to the beauty is that sometimes I just do not WANT to remember what happened! While this is not a bad thing at ALL in how I lead my life, it's not as good for the writing of the tale.

Mom wouldn't want me to leave it out. I know that for sure. In my core. In my soul. How do you tell the story of a small child, too young to bathe on her own? How do I relate the moving blur of the NOT Mommy face as she tipped my head beneath the surface to  rinse the shampoo out? I see her eyes go dead and cold just as the water closed over my own entirely. I see the moving glare of the light and feel myself struggle beneath her hands. I can feel the pain on my heel as I kicked and connected with porcelain, and feel the struggle not to breathe, feel the pain as the light grew dim.

Suddenly I am sitting and I hear the sucking as she pulls me out too quickly and  she misjudges and my head just catches the faucet. I see the pink creep through the water as I cough and cough forever, and I hear my mother. "Oh, my GOD, oh NO, oh, NO! Oh, GOD. My Jetty, oh, NO! I'm so sorry!"

She is crying and pulls me to her, but I pull back just a little, to see her eyes, but she is there. Her sweet sky eyes full of tears and she holds me and we cry.

And later she is in her chair, unable to speak, the bottle of amber on her table. Jean Ellen puts me to bed. Mother will not rise until too late for church on Sunday. Daddy is away on a "quick business trip." I remember Jean Ellen tucks me in and she has her worried puppy face. Her brow would pucker instead of wrinkle. She reads a long story and already the horror has dimmed, and all I know is my mother's eyes when she held me close to her.

***
That is the story, too. And it is every bit as much our story as the elves and the drinking and the summers and Christmases of joy. It is my story with her, and my ultimate joy that we had our truths with one another at the end.

And so I write it all for the first time. As I remember it. My truth, which I know was hers. Ironically, alcohol numbed her in a way that did not allow the psychotic breaks. She never raised a finger to us when she drank. She said most of her pain left her when she drank.

And what I feel at last is the pain I know as a mother myself, and how it must have felt when she snapped out of the break and saw what she had done. No one loved a daughter more than she loved me. She hated the monster she could not name, this illness no one could name back then. I know how hard she tried to fight it, to fight an illness over which she had no control at all. I know how much she hated herself.

As I move forward with the book, it is so hard to find the balance in the work. It hurts to write her dramatic and sometimes horrific failures. Yet without them, her magnificence and her strength are lessened. She succeeded more often than she failed, and I cannot under-value the strength she had, nor the toll her tortured life took on her most of all. So I try on the pain again, now strong enough so that it cannot stick any more. It cannot offer more pain, though it can scratch an old wound to discomfort.  I hold all her beauty on the other scale, and its weight is ten times the pain. The wound will not open; only the love.

How I miss her still.


***** DIFFERENT Note, for now: Please check out Waystation One, for 1/23/20122's poem

The Existence of elves, Revisited (July, 2009)

My family life was pretty much about living in a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between. I've said that on many occasions. Lately, I've been writing about the hard stuff, and I know that both Robin Hood, from yesterday, and When I Awoke to the Notion of Being a Writer from a couple of weeks ago are two such entries. I have been given so much support for them, that it has renewed the impetus as I move forward with my book.

However, I wanted to revisit an early entry here. I had a whole lot of magic in my early life, and when I started writing the blog I began with some of them. I had almost no followers. Not that it's a crowd now, but quantity hasn't been my goal. I simply wanted to work on my writing--the craft, the art, and the notion that one can convey pain without graphically sticking to horrifying detail!  However, more people have decided to stay and perhaps you might be getting a skewed view of what my childhood was!

One commenter felt he could not live my life with all I have gone through.  I put this little piece in here once more, for those who have never read it, to remind you that I LOVE my mom. And that Jack and I had some magical times. That our world held every single color imaginable, and, yes, to lighten up.

NOTE: I have scattered a few Garth Williams illustrations because THIS is the image of elves I had as a child, from the book Elves and Fairies.  I just thought it might evoke memories for boomers, and give others a feel for the fifties, when my memories were the living events.  At one time I asked my mom whether I could grow up to be Garth Williams and she told me that I would have to work on growing up to be Jetty.  I sulked for easily a whole fifteen minutes.

Enough intro  ... Onward... From July, 2009--moved to today

... [There] were moments of pure joy and absolute beauty in my childhood. In fact, they took up more time and space, and as I explore this art form of memoir in my blog, I think I would rather start here. I would rather begin with the magic that was my mom, Jean Margaret. We'll leave the darkness for other times...
***

Me, around 2
in ecstasy over a feather

Flying Lessons: Proof of the Existence of Elves

Spirituality is a strange thing in the heart of a child. It has wings sometimes; it flies up from the leaves, the grass, through water, from everywhere at once. More than half a century later, I feel it and taste it, hear the echoes of that day. Grown ups call what children feel so deeply “magic,” then try to teach them it’s God. They don’t seem to ever get it; children need no teaching. We know it is all the same, whatever name we give It. The Keeper of all Magic is God.

On the other hand, when I was not yet four and my brother was already six, for us, the Keeper of the Magic was Mommy.

Especially on sunny mornings, when the light threw rainbows all over the kitchen, and she'd wipe her hands on her apron, not even finishing the breakfast dishes, turn to us and whisper, "picnic!" Out would come the hard-boiled eggs ever-ready in the fridge, for deviling. Jacky would make the chocolate milk. I would rinse the grapes. Before you knew it, Jack's enormous red wagon appeared, the thermos was full, picnic packed, and we were gone.

This particular day, Mommy had said to me, "Always remember, Jetty, there is always something more compelling in life than housework."

***

We always stopped on the dirt road beside the hole in the bridge. She’d let us look down at the water rushing miles below. It was on our picnic that particular day that we learned about elves.

“Lie on your backs and don’t make a sound,” said Mommy, doing this herself. “Just look at the clouds and listen.”

At first I didn’t hear much, but gradually I heard it. Soft rustlings, small feet, rushing sounds that had no familiarity.

“Now look at where you hear the sounds,” she said. “You can’t see anything, can you, except a few ants. They are much too small to make such sounds.”

We were stumped. We waited, looking at our mother with full confidence that some new axiom was about to be shared.

“Elves,” she said. “Well, and fairies, too, but primarily elves because fairies tend to fly. It’s the only explanation. They are invisible to us, but they make sounds. What else could it be? If it were birds or animals, we’d have seen them. We have them all around here.” She waved her arms, encompassing the whole woods, it seemed. “And we have them outside the kitchen window, too. Jean Ellen saw them yesterday. We decided you two should know about it, because we want you to help us make them some furniture.”

“In the window box, Mom?” asked Jacky.

“Precisely.”

We sat up and opened our sandwich cookies in solemn wonder. Elves. At our house. First a picnic, now this. Lunchtime drifted lazily into early afternoon, as we named cloud shapes, studied three ants trying to move one large crumb to their home. Mommy wouldn’t let us squash it.

“Only in the house. Outside, this is their spot and we’re guests.”

And so it came to pass that Daddy came home for dinner to find four of his family painting folded paper furniture, and stringing twig bows for a family of window box-elves with whom he wasn’t even formally acquainted. My older brother Jim was watching T.V. He was nine and too old for this “junk.” Jean Ellen was twelve and it didn’t phase her in the least. It was all right, though, because Jim wasn’t much into anything Jacky and I cared about.

Daddy said, “Elves. I see. I’ll go read the paper for a while.” He didn’t even grump about dinner. Just got a beer from the fridge and wandered, chuckling, into the living room. We put the furniture and three bows into the window box and tried not to look for signs of life more than ten times before bed.

I was in the kitchen by 6:00 the next morning, when Mom was putting the water on for hers and Daddy’s tea. I dragged a chair to the window, knocking into washing machine and the mop bucket.

“Hold your horses, Jetty, just hold your horses,” Daddy’s voice was his laughing voice as his hands lifted me onto the chair.

The furniture had been moved and the bows were gone.

“Jacky!” I shrieked. Fortunately, he was on his way down the stairs.

A small, bumpy blue bag was on the edge of the box by the house, in the left corner, the spot most accessible from the kitchen. I let Jacky pick it up and he let me unfold the small note inside, as he emptied out a small mound of marbles of every description. In the tiniest printing that ever was, Daddy read, 'Thank you for the furniture. It’s very comfortable. And the bows work great. Yours truly, the window box elves.'

Later that summer, when I was four, Mommy said we were moving to a new house in someplace called Manchester a whole twenty minutes away. I started crying because there would be no elves.

The very first thing she did, when she got me out of the car at the new house, was take me to our side yard. There was a tree with twisty branches and giant leaves, as big as plates.

“This is a catalpa tree, Jetty. I prefer to call it an elf’s tree.”

I looked hard at the tree, expecting to see a tiny pair of eyes look back.

“Elves use these leaves for clothing, for their bows and arrows, to make their homes, and they use the catalpa beans for food and the pods for boats. It’s the perfect tree for them. Just last week, I believe your father saw an elf or two right on our back porch. Next week, we’ll have to make some gifts as a sort of housewarming, okay?”

Years later, I found her talking to my soon-to-be stepdaughter at the picnic table beneath that tree. All I heard were the words “What else could those sounds be? Catalpa trees are elf trees, actually…” and I went back into the house. Jessie started calling my mother grandma that very day.

***

That was one type of punctuation to bracket regular life. Most days we told her we were bored and had nothing to do, to which she would absently pat our heads, kiss us, and say, “That’s too bad. I’m not.” And she’d leave us to find something to do, not knowing how to be mad at her exactly. She yelled at us when we were bad, shooed us when she was busy, was impatient more than was probably right at times. She was the rule-maker and the sun at the center of our lives, like most Moms. She also held a terrible darkness that could block out the brightest day.

Most of our days, though, as small children, were the stuff of everyone’s childhood in the 1950s and early 60s. The difference was the magic of a Mom who would drop everything to give us pure joy, to find the adventure in an ordinary moment. We had elves. We had rainbows. And we had lazy, deviled-egg picnics that supplanted housework on the priority list for living.

This morning I saw a dust rhino gallop across the living room floor. I thought I'd best vacuum. The sun hit the prism in my window and I went out into the garden instead. I am not sure, but I may have seen an elf leap off the six foot tall lily by my front door.

Small Addendum

How many people got a mom like that? Or ever really KNEW about elves and fairies? Or knew there was something more important, more compelling than housework. Like blogging, for instance?  I miss my mom. On the other hand, I DID teach Claire and Adam all about Santa Claus and how I knew about him through my dad. Yes, and of course, they did not have an elf TREE, but they had a birdhouse with a magic garden around it, and ultimately the elves found that... There is no garden or catalpa tree. I guess next spring, I'll have to make an elf planter because I am really  not sure I want to live somewhere they cannot be, you know?

White Icing

Today I drove to PT in a snow storm, not thinking about the fact that I had to WALK from the car into the building. But never mind, I made it. Sort of. I went because my therapist had never seen me "fully compromised," which means I am  walking like one of the astronauts fully geared... flat-footed and VERY SLOWLY. It's as if my legs are always a beat behind my brain, and every step requires my WILLING the legs to move.

It seems that way because, on days like this, it IS that way. I am glad I went. I accomplished something with this day and did not allow the pain to interfere with that part.

My reward? Right now, as the sun is lowering toward sleep, the horizon is glowing peach to rose, slanting bright, pastel light across new snow. And there is white icing on all the tree limbs, so they glow as well.  There should be a shade of paint called  "afternoon snow blue."  I can simply swivel in my chair here, on the second floor, to face the setting sun and simply watch the slow dance as night rises with the sun's fall.

At no time of the year, and no other sort of day, do I get this feeling as the day closes.  This fall into February holds the pain of too many losses, but sometimes the intensity of loss simply highlights how much I had to feel such loss. The love of so many. The flipside of loss is fullness.

But this beauty. How did I come to feel it like a pulsing through my whole body, almost pain? And aching of the heart, this stillness.

Not often do we have the pristine of new snow for more than two hours, or the icing on the trees for much more--to have them both at once at this time of day? There is no wind. Just now there are no cars. No squirrel tracks on this new three inches. This silence is rare as well, because it is not the season of mowing and whacking and sawing, of children playing outdoors.

Just the silence only snow-muffled evenings know. I've opened the window, cold or no, to let it fill me for these moments. I skate in my mind, tracing the fine, even curve between the yin and the yang, and I let the tears fall freely.

***
I love chocolate. MY mom always asked me why it was I wanted white icing on chocolate cake for my birthday, instead of chocolate. My birthday is in late June, when all is at its most lush and hottest, and the days are long. There was no air conditioning then for us.

"It reminds me of when the trees have frosting, Mom. And the cold. I get Winter in Summer, and I like that, Mom."

She would simply shake her head, kiss me on my nose as was her custom and say, "Me, too. Winter in Summer cake it is. White icing for my Jetty."

***
I love my  mom.

I'll close the window for now, though.