#memory – eeo

I smelled fear.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

—James Baldwin

I was struck this morning by the feelings that came up in a fastwrite about childhood. After reading it over, then turning to a review of recent news, I felt the endless echo of bullying and othering playing out in rallies and in life.

I often wonder where our deepest fear are born; they seem part of us, inescapable. The fears that make us hard-shelled and defensive. The fears that make us withdraw and give up, and/or also make us into playground bullies, ugly-spirited and hurtful, or into the bullies’ sidekicks. It is the sidekicks who truly make this bullying possible.

No bully acts alone.

The chants of recent rallies are primal, terrifying, and I feel them deep in my heart. They are not the healing chants of love and truth.

“Send her back.”

It’s a chant of othering, of ostracizing. It is racist, it is damaging. The enabling of this damage is as bad as the chant itself. Fear-driven, it can feel like your choice is either to join the bullies or be a victim, like a cruel playground game played out forever. Social ostracism is a painful tool of control. Enabling—being the sidekicks, looking the other way, feeling disempowered to speak out—is how it becomes systemic. Hungering to be accepted, we might compromise our values. Do we value love? Equality? Inclusiveness? Or are those things just fantasies to make us feel better as we choose to enable and/or behave in ways that are not loving at all.

We contain our selves at all our ages, but we are not controlled and powerless like little children, unless we permit it. Unless we haven’t faced the fears that drive us.

There is a third way. You can face your enabling behavior. You can rise above your fears, and the people I am most talking to here right now are people who are white, and looking away from blatant racist behavior, hoping to avoid having to choose.

Choose. Choose to be the grownup on the playground, and speak for fairness, for equality, for justice, for humanity. Speak against racism and xenophobia. Do not let the blanket of powerlessness put you to sleep. The world depends on you to be awake. It is not nap time.

The prompt I used was “I smelled fear.” and as always, I wrote from memory and imagination. Maybe you could try a fastwrite on this, too? Or on “Send her back.” Do it as a wake up call, looking at your fear instead of being driven to unforgivable enabling.

For what it’s worth, the fastwrite:

I smelled fear, and I think it was my own fear. It smelled like bazooka bubblegum mixed with Love’s Baby Soft lotion with a cloud of chalk dust mixed in, from the erasers that Angie—dull, backward, awkward Angie—was pounding together. If I didn’t move away from her soon, I’d be branded a social outcast, like she was. Why did she have to come over here, anyway.

I was in grade three, I was new, I said “soda” when everyone else said “pop”—I kept forgetting to say “pop”—and yet even I knew I needed to step away from the sidelines, where Angie liked to hide. I needed to try. Just enough to be marginally accepted.

We were on the playground outside the low-slung flat-roofed elementary school, by the big windowless brick wall where games of Dodgeball raged. Groups of kids were forming; the game was about to commence. At least in gym class I’d be chosen, maybe almost last, right before Angie and Karen and Bob—almost last but not dead last. But on the playground, you could be not chosen. Angie chose erasers, Karen sat reading a book next to Mrs. Schultz, the playground monitor who never looked up from her romance novels, their covers hidden behind ugly floral quilted covers, but once I’d seen a nearly naked lady, swooning backward onto a nearly naked pirate, when the cover slipped. Mrs. Schultz had a whistle around her neck but she was afraid of the boys, and never blew the whistle on them.

Waiting to be chosen, and dreading it, too, I tried to look busy, to look cool. I studied the ants crawling in the cracks of the asphalt by the jungle jim, then worried I’d be branded as the ground-staring-girl. I looked up at the cloudy October sky and worried that I’d never find a friend.

Postcard to myself

Attachment-1(40) Dear 19-year-old Me,

You were SO excited, do you remember? I mean, you were on the move and it wasn’t New York, or even Chicago—but it was somewhere—another state, albeit in the absolute wrong direction, away from the coast, even further from the Atlantic you dreamed of living near one fine day.

I’m writing to remind you of the sheer newness, the joy of that. Do you remember? Learning a new city, by getting lost in its flat expanses, gridded broad streets radiating out from a center point, the grand procession of green-lawned parks marching up Meridian Avenue, dotted with statues, obelisks, monuments of wars long past…one-way streets and diagonals and even a traffic circle!

Remember cruising the city in Georgia McGuire’s shiny red Mercedes Benz—parking with flashers on in truck zones or in alleys to run contact sheets into Ad agencies and design studios? You pretended the car was yours, and Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” played in the sound track in your bubbly young mind.

Back then, it seemed money and a fancy foreign car might add up to happiness, or something like it.

At the end of the work day it was back to your old wood-grained Chrysler wagon, drinking 3-for-$1 beers with Jane and her friend—was it Amy? Angie?—who were in their late twenties, and regulars, so no one carded you even though you looked about fourteen, so fresh-faced, even with makeup on.

There was an air of possibility surrounding you like a bubble that humid Indianapolis summer. Even though nothing really happened—well, there was that brief crush on Georgia’s handsome young son (whose name has vanished now into the summer haze). He was tall and dark-haired and had a sweet slow Alabama drawl and the careless manners of someone born with money. The tobacco-chewing habit—the way he spit the chaw into a coke bottle like that was normal—was a crush-breaker. But still. For a few heart-thumping flirtatious days, you’d dipped into fantasy the way he dipped into Skoal. Imagined being part of the family, rich, unconcerned about the price of a Mercedes or a mansion. Because back then, happiness seemed like something you could maybe buy, if you were lucky. Something you could purchase and keep, like a trinket from some far-off hotel gift shop. Something just out of reach for a girl like you.

If I could really send you a postcard now, I’d tell you to sit and feel the pain of what you were running from, because happiness was folded underneath all along. You just needed to take your foot off that accelerator. Slow down. Unpack.

Love from your future self,

Note: this was written from a prompt where each person chose (at random) a postcard, and wrote a “postcard” to an earlier version of themselves; we wrote for 10 minutes, and the above is a quick polishing of the fastwrite back to the past.

My mother never called anyone an asshole

crayon drawing of a smiling purple-haired woman, with "MOM" written above it. — A picture of me from some years ago, by my oldest child.
It reminds me of my mother.

Today in workshop: coloring back in time

In today’s Amherst Artists & Writers workshop, we finished with a prompt rooted in mindfulness and childhood memory. Here’s how it goes: you choose a few crayons from a big bowl, make sure everyone has drawing paper, and together we all breathe in the smell of the crayolas.

Now imagine you are sinking back in time, drawing with crayons, when someone’s told you to go color. You have nothing else to do, and busily you begin to draw what you would have drawn then. We have twelve minutes. Draw until you feel moved to begin writing, just noticing the feel of the crayon as you make lines and scribble—as long as you want to, you can skip writing entirely—and then write until the time is up.

…What came up for my workshoppers was wonderfully diverse in tone, ranging from wry to meditative to inspiring. I’m always blown away by how writers can take risks and write from the heart when we relax and get in front of that internal critic. Try it yourself sometime! Playing is fun, and brings out creative ideas.

Here’s what came up for me:

My mother never called anyone an asshole

Orange, I thought it was orange but the name on the label said “scarlet.”

I remember the fatter crayons they gave us in kindergarten, fat like our fingers were. I remember the way the color flowed out onto paper and everyone noticed I could draw what I saw, a gift, they said, pointing. But I just wanted to be small and unseen.

Seen, I blushed like the red crayon and inside turned cyan and chilly like the car on winter mornings on the way to school.

Seen, they said, “Oh, look how cute, she’s so shy!” And how my mother never told them to “stop talking about her as if she’s not here. She’s listening, assholes.”

(My mother never called anyone an asshole, but if she were alive now, I think she would.)

Mama got feistier and feistier as she grew older. But back when I was in Kindergarten, she was shrinking pale blue and gray and lots of black skies. There were no petal or dandelion-colored flowers blooming in her smiles. I drew her tulips and daisies and roses. I used all the crayons in the big box, sharpening them with the little sharpener to make the flowers as real as I could make them, but they were never real enough for her to feel them in her heart, it seemed.

She was blue and alone but much later, when I was all grown up and she was dying, she was brave and alone, instead. She would have called an asshole an asshole, I’m sure of it—if only she’d lived a little longer.

She was blooming like a warm summer day, right as she died back.
(I just wish she could come back.)

waiting for the sunshine

Waiting for the sunshine

You stood in the kitchen, waiting for the sunshine.

Oh, Mama. You waited.
You waited while the tickle in your throat rattled and rattled. Every phone call, eruptions of coughing. I listened, there was nothing else I could do—and sometimes I’d cut in, “hey, I’ll call you back, how about, when you’re feeling better.”

Now I see it through a backwards lens, time is funny like that, now I’m about how old YOU were then and my daughters are the ages I was then; I was your little last bird flown. Now I know the feeling of that emptiness, that new empty-nest, and how precious those calls become. Now I can feel, all these years later, how alone you must have sometimes felt, in your small kitchen, especially that last winter, coughing, insisting, talking, waiting, insisting that you were just fine.

You couldn’t really talk, but you didn’t want to hang up. It was a tickle, the end of a long lingering cold, a cold-on-top-of-a-cold, it was nothing.

Now I see you, frozen in the amber of that long-ago cold alone kitchen. Me not so far away in miles, but twenty-something me. So busy, busy, busy. A budding Bokonist, junior capitalist, believing that being an adult meant staying on the spinning hamster wheel. And also believing that you were going to be around for years and years, Mama. You were my mother. Life without you wasn’t comprehensible, and I didn’t imagine it, wouldn’t even try.

So I believed you, about the cough being nothing.

And still you coughed. I began to notice the unendingness of it. Worry crept in. I insisted you go to the doctor, but not soon enough. You locked my worries out and I let you. I locked them up, I guess. They were scary. Where did I learn to lock up so well? From you, Mama, you who waited in your small kitchen, vinyl-tiled, traces of avocado green barely visible in the corner, a little spot you missed when you carefully painted over with eggshell cream.

The wall phone is still avocado green in the mists of my memory. The round orb of the pendulum lamp casts a golden glow over the Formica table of the past, littered with bridge hands and newspapers and you, sitting there, smiling. So warm. I wish I could climb back into that kitchen, climb back to you.

I went to a movie with a friend the other day, an art film. Over ice cream afterwards he asked me, wonderingly, did I think the movie meant that all a man really wanted was a mother? I looked into his slate-gray eyes, and I thought of you, Mama.

No, I thought. It’s not just men who want that.

I thought of that horrible Psychology textbook photo, of the poor little monkey in the experiment who could choose, while starving, between a wire-framed “mother” equipped with milk and a nipple, or a fur-covered “mother” to cling to.

The little monkey always chose gnawing hunger and the fuzzy mama.

My friend’s sad eyes after the movie made me slide backwards through all the years. His eyes made me want to find you again, find you and fold you in my arms, to mother you, Mama. Because that is what you must’ve most wanted.

Because sometimes, life is scary, and you just want your mother.

But life is a funny circle, too. Scary and funny. In seeing how I failed you, I found you once again.

You’re here, waiting in the sunshine. Sometimes the darkness covers your shine, like a cloud. But you’re always there.

(Fastwrite from a prompt on regret).

in this one, you’re…

In this one, you are standing by the old canal at Holcolm Gardens. The sun has made your hair catch fire, the sun is coating your tanned legs and long arms with a honeyed light, and for some silly reason lost to me now, you are holding up a big red box of Cheetos, holding it proudly, as if you are Carol Merrill and the box of snacks is a glistening prize that a nervous contestant is pondering.

In this one, you’ve driven back east to visit me, with a loaded Magnum 357 tucked under the front seat for company. It was the last time I would ever see you, but I didn’t know that then.

I guess you never really do know?

In this one, you are as I imagine you still are — slender and strong, tough and flexible as a zip tie. I was sure, in the way only a young person can hope to be, that somehow we’d stay best friends forever. That some how the trauma-bond of our shared childhoods and barbed wire moments of our teen years would bridge the miles, bridge the chasm growing between us, already as deep as a Colorado ravine.

In this one, I was laughing and my boyfriend was squirting lighter fluid on the grill and you were smiling, that sharp sickle-shaped smile of yours. Behind your mirrored aviators, your sky-blue eyes must have been smiling too.

In this one, I already missed you, even though your were still right there, holding the Cheetos.

(This was a fastwrite from a prompt: imagine a photograph that you have in an album or on your phone; get a picture of it in your mind, and begin with “In this one, you’re…” Write for 10 minutes.)

born into twilight

Today is my birthday. So much has happened since I exited my mother’s womb those many years ago. The story of my birth and my mother’s labor are lost forever. All I have are a few hazy details.

“Oh I had twilight sleep,” my mother told me. “No memory of any of it,” she said, shaking her head each time she mentioned it, as if trying, again, to summon the experience that her body had, to shake it out somehow. “They told me I said really awful things,” she confided once. “The drugs make you crazy.” She also said it was good thing, of course. She’d felt the pain of childbirth before; I’m not sure how many of her births were “twilight” but I’m pretty sure at least one of her preceding birth experiences had happened too fast for many interventions. Maybe she really chose twilight sleep, willingly. I don’t know, and I cannot ask her. Why give birth with pain? Twilight sleep was the modern way. Like formula was modern, better than anything a woman’s breast might produce. I can see how she would choose that, or maybe feel there were no other options.

I read up on twilight sleep. From the distance of the years (it was abandoned in the late 60s/early 70s) it sounds like the stuff of nightmares, like some kind of awful date-rape drug, a mixture of Morphine and Scopolamine. It erased any memory of labor and birth, but did not eliminate pain. Often women became panicked, or even psychotic, and attempted self-harm. They were routinely restrained to their beds with lambskin-lined straps, to prevent bruising as they thrashed, a common thing when the dose was wrong.

But the body remembers even when the mind forgets, and a shadow always crossed my mama’s face when she talked about my birth, about the twilight sleep.

“It was the strangest thing,” she said. She seemed to disappear as she said it. Her face misted over, like a mirror fogged.

“In twilight sleep, sensation is still present though in diminished degree; the patient feels the pains of uterine contractions, frequently she moans, draws up her legs, and in other ways shows that she is suffering, but these painful sensations are not recorded in the memory cells… if asked a question, she will answer often in a dazed and confused fashion.”1

Today, on the anniversary of my birth, I’m thinking about pain, about the necessity of feeling what you feel—emotionally and physically—in order to move toward wholeness and health. Of course, seeking pain relief is not a bad thing. But there’s the issue of agency. Who is deciding that this is the best thing? (The same people who decided midwives and unmedicated births were a menace, that’s who.) Even if it was what Mama chose, I struggle with the issue of awareness, and the idea of not having a loving advocate while in a state where you will not remember what is done to you. (Remember, husbands paced in the waiting room back then, banished). I imagine having twilight sleep presented as the only ‘sane’ option available. Of being railroaded and gas-lighted.

While my own birth-giving experiences were not without interventions, I remember them all and I consented to each one. I felt tremendous pain, which I lived through and processed. No shadows cross my face when I remember the births of my children. I’d do things differently now, given the chance, but I made my own decisions, and had my then-husband with me the whole time.

Reading about trauma taught me that what is not processed, felt and released properly becomes trapped. I think of the trauma of being split from your body as you give birth. Far from being forgotten, unprocessed trauma lies in wait. Perhaps it was the cause of my mother’s battles with depression. Perhaps it was the cause of mine, too?

Suppression of feelings is what leads to deep despair. But I’m not depressed anymore.

Now I hunger to feel what I feel, in real time. Still, I find myself retreating into old patterns of escape. Patterns so fine I cannot even see them. Perhaps they were died into the wool of me, during my twilight birth? Knitted in during childhood experiences that divided my mind from my body? Unraveling takes time.

Last summer, I worked with a life-coach in her final months of training, as her test-client. The coach asked me lots of hard questions. Questions like: “and how do you feel, right now?”

I often answered in meandering, rambling ways, embroidering. She’d cut me off. “Where are you? I’ve lost you,” she’d say. “Just tell me how you feel, and where you feel it.”

Often, I didn’t know. This stunned me. Really? I didn’t know? How could I not know?

“Say you don’t know,” she coached. “Say you feel confused.”

Slowly I wake. Reams of paper, hours of walking and thousands of sun salutations later, that “where do you feel it?” question still often makes a shadow pass over my face, still frequently dazes and confuses me, still makes me shake my head as if that will help the right answer emerge from the fog of disconnection.

With another birthday comes new threads of silver hair and some bit of wisdom. I see one thing, anyway: the heart of anxiety, or my anxiety, anyway, is avoidance of feeling what I am feeling.

Or maybe: the heart of anxiety is not feeling safe in your own body.

Or maybe: the heart of anxiety is being told how to feel, to having your lived experiences denied.

Or maybe: the heart of anxiety is feeling your body is not yours to control. To have men in power who want to take away your birth control, free your rapist/harasser (if you dare to speak up at all). On a day when we have an overt misogynist in the White House and many, many other such men leadership positions, when social media is filled with #metoo hashtags denoting individuals who have been sexually assaulted or harassed, I think of the assault of not remembering the day you gave birth. Of the men that decided that was a good idea, and the women who really didn’t get a lot of choice about their birth experiences, as men made those decisions for them.

“Even if I had been asked what I wanted during childbirth,” one woman who was given twilight sleep shared, “I wouldn’t have known what to say.”2

I think of the islands of memory that were considered a ‘side effect’ of twilight sleep. Of the women I read about, laboring alone for hours in a drugged haze, feeling the pain with their bodies, who afterwards could only recall being shouted at to be quiet. Of women with eyes bandaged shut, ears stopped up, so as not to have ‘sensory memories’ to latch onto. Of the fear their bodies surely remembered, while their mental memories were magic-erased by scopolamine, a drug made from deadly nightshade. I think of the breach of trust inherent in this treatment. Birth? Oh, who’d want to remember THAT? I read about a woman, surely not the only one—who didn’t believe the baby given to her was her own, and subsequently had no attachment to her baby. I read of children born as perhaps I was, struggling to breathe (a side effect of twilight sleep), whisked away from their mothers for hours because the mothers were under the influence of dangerous drugs that made their behavior unstable, and robbed them of memories of their own experiences. Of the fathers who were also robbed of the experience of being there during birth. Of the way misogyny wounds women, and also men.

I think of my mother’s obstetrician, the same one who told her twilight sleep was the way to go, the man who weighed her at each visit, insisting she keep her weight gain under 25 pounds, and berated her when she gained too much. Because he was watching out for her, so she could “regain her figure.”

That’s a whole other layer of #metoo.

How am I feeling? Grateful for my mother’s incredible strength. Wistful that I can’t ask her more questions about how she felt. Angry at the continued denial of cultural misogyny by so many. Happy for another year of feeling what I feel, and saying what’s on my mind, what’s in my heart—or doing my best to learn how, anyway.

Better late than never.

1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2066377/?page=3

2 From “A reclamation of childbirth” by Barbara L. Behrmann, PhD

heartshaped

(short fiction)

Heartshaped

Vaguely heartshaped, that’s how you described her face, and I always imagined her—with my child’s-eye, literal imagining—as having a face the color of a pink valentine’s candy heart, a face with a pointy chin and also big eyes made of chocolate, because you said hers were brown and melty.

That’s how I saw her, my grandmother I never knew.

The photos were all lost in the legendary house fire, so I never got to see her, how she really looked. I used to long to be able to visit her, like my friend Annie did her Nana. I thought that the first thing I’d do was crawl in her lap and tell her how much you missed her and how much you talked about her. It seemed that would please her, and the way your face looked when your talked about how her singing made the moon rise, how she played a mean game of cribbage and could bait a hook with one hand made me want to know her, and please her.

Later, when I was near-grown, everyone began to remark how like her I was. I used to pull my dark curls away from my face and look for signs of the tell-tale sweetness emerging, but to me, the eyes reflecting back in the mirror were cold as the glass itself, cold as any Canadian January. My face itself was more of a pillow shape. I began to wonder what sort of sieve memories run through, to sugar them so.

Much later still, describing you to my own children, I honeyed your brown hair, I made your eyes the color of the ice on a bright day in March, that fresh slate color, and I made your hugs as warm as raisin-oatmeal cookies fresh from the oven. I waited for them to pepper me with the questions I once would have asked.

My children were raised on your photographs, though. Raised, too, on reality TV and iPods and textbooks, not fed random poetry and left to wander woods and libraries alone, the way I was.

I thought I was doing the right thing, educating them, drilling them with the math facts that I myself could never pin down, the after-school tutoring, summer enrichment programs, sending them to the Catholic school for good discipline and rigor.

But I think I made them blind.

This short piece was written from a prompt in workshop, using the Amherst Writer’s and Artists method.

I am from

I, too, am from a sift of lost faces
from patterns I can’t untangle
from an endless string of cats purring
from tall pines and the hum of box fans in the window
from Carolina humidity and red dirt
and Spanish moss dripping everywhere
like paint from my sloppy brush, messy

And now, I am from here.

(snippet from a writing prompt using the classic George Ella Lyon poem, Where I’m from, a poem that has inspired many, many poems, and is one of my favorites.)

quasimodo and the trash girl

photo of white woman in chair. 1960s. — My mom.

It’s been twenty-five years since my mom died. Of course I always wished I had been able to compare notes on motherhood with her (she died just weeks after my firstborn came into the world). But now what strikes me is how much I’d like to be able to talk with her about roles. About how they define you and sometimes trap you, and how you must grow past them. And why that seems so hard!

I want to know how she grew past her roles of wife and daily-mom and daughter, all in a few short years. How dizzying that must have been. I wouldn’t know, because for the most part, she didn’t tell me. Always said she was “fine,” and diverted conversation back to me, and my life. And then, suddenly, she was sick. I’ve learned not to wait on having conversations with people I care about. Or at least, I’d like to say I try to do that. I don’t always succeed. It can hurt, for one thing, and what is more human than avoiding pain? Plus I still get trapped in roles.

(And where exactly does a role end and a boundary begin, anyway? Life is so tricky.)

I’m no one’s daughter, no one’s daily-mom, no one’s wife, no one’s most-beloved. I’m just: me. Of course I still play roles—writing coach, yoga teacher, design consultant—but those roles are not cemented to relationships with specific and dear people. They are more like the roles in a play, I suppose.

A couple weeks ago, I saw a live-theater performance of the Hunchback of Notre Dame in Indianapolis, and spent the night afterwards with extended (and very dear) family. The next morning was unseasonably cool. I snuggled up on their deck and thought about the play. The day was bright with birdsong and the chatter of neighbor children. I couldn’t make out what the children were saying, exactly, but it was clear as the blue sky above that they were working out the rules of a game.

YOU will be THIS, I will be THAT.

We don our costumes early in life. Even after we grow into adults, we are, inside, run by the rules of childhood. By the labels we and others stamp on ourselves. The artistic one, the troublemaker, the bully, the little mother, the Daddy’s girl. On and on. Some of us shake them off for who we are meant to be. Others bloom into their labels, and transcend them. And I would once have denied the past ran me at all.

In the dark theater, I watched Quasimodo sing his pain and longing. Watched him be labeled at birth as monster. I think we are all “half-formed,” and destined to stay that way, unless we unearth the past and question it a little. I was the baby, the cry baby, the gullible one, the artist, the poet, the one you could trick and tease and scare easily. The one who would finally, inevitably, cry. And be told, again and again, that my tears were wrong, I was wrong, I was “too sensitive.” I learned it better not to ask for understanding; that I was making something out of nothing. I could not be trusted, and so I did not trust myself, or what I felt or even reality. It was all my artist’s imagination, my poet’s drama. Better not to cry, or, if I did cry, better not to say why. I was the unstable one, the emotional one. My mother, at her wit’s end, used to threaten, “I’m gonna give you to the trash man, if you don’t hush up.”

Now, my mother was not a monster. No, she was flesh and blood and bone and beautiful. She folded me in hugs I still feel. She was human, and struggling. I love her with all my heart. Still, she could not handle my tears, which, looking back, I think may have mainly, early on, belonged to HER, tears she could not cry lest she never stop. Mothers of four have no time to cry.

I can see her, hands on hips, pointing out the window at the trash truck, I remember her saying it—and not just once—forgetting or not caring (I think forgetting) that a little girl who still believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny would never question that the trash men could take her away. I was terrified that the dark men with menacing white smiles and sooty coveralls were indeed going to lift me up like I was a clangy garbage can and roar me away in that smelly loud truck, and I’d never see my Mama again.

And so crying began to terrify me. But tears bubbled and burst out periodically. (Still do). It’s how I’m made.

Recently I had a revelation. A friend was laughing about how she thought of crying as an “emotional enema,” because she always felt so much better once all the tears came out; she felt clean and light, ready to face life again. Until the next time. Sometimes, she said, you just need a good cry. But right then it stuck me.

Crying always—with a few notable exceptions—made me feel worse. The tears bring up shame, brackish and foul, from the dark channels of early childhood. From roles I am still acting out, unconsciously?

The half-formed girl—Quasimodo girl—keeper of secrets in the attic, sleeping terrified clutching a crucifix, the voiceless one, the broken one, the trash-can girl—all my past roles lurked in the recesses of my grown self. They burrowed in deep, and curled hidden inside me for decades, only coming out at the most stressful times, sleeping and waking restlessly, pulling my strings.

On a sunny morning in Indiana, thinking about the past, memories of marriage and motherhood surged in this place of some of the best days of both those roles. Stretched out with my journal, watching the bees buzz in their hives, I felt a new me emerging, ready to really listen at last to all the hushed-up stories of trash girl’s pain, ready to watch it flame up and burn off and billow like the charcoal smoke rising up from the barbecue.

For this moment on this deck in this place, I felt at home with myself. Home is now, I thought. That is the feeling. Of being home in your body. I learned that term from a friend who held me while the hardest pieces of my childhood surfaced, jaggy, tearing me open. Held safe, I learned I could cry and feel better, instead of worse.

Now I am learning to do that alone, as I sort and grow. I’m learning to cry and sometimes actually feel better, lighter, clearer.

Quasimodo no more, maybe?
“What is ‘whole’ in Latin,” I asked my brother-in-law, who had come out to put brisket on the barbecue.

“Plenus?” he ventured.

Plenusmodo. Full-formed. Whole.

Mom knew Latin. I wish I could call Mom now and talk. About the roles she was saddled with by her childhood, about the things she locked away. About why she hid her tears and pain and struggles. Maybe we could let go of our roles, drop our masks, and just listen to each other? That’s all anyone really wants, I think.

To be seen beyond their roles in life. To be held, and heard, and loved for who they are, at the beating heart of their being.

window seat warm up

picture of my window seat Warm up! Write eleven three-line poems about things you see right where you are, right now.

Eleven Miniature Poems, March 25, 2017

1 |Roots
The cutting in the windowsill vase
is shooting out roots
but it cannot grow there forever

2 | Fur
Cordelia is striped, like a tyger burning bright
descendant of some fierce African wildcat
trapped now in domesticity

3 | iPhone
Black glass gleams like your eyes did
if I touch the screen it will light up with worlds and words and wayz
I think of the mirages on hot highways in summer

4 | Coffee
Bittering now, sitting alone on the ledge
waiting to be held again in my hands
longing to be swallowed in my mouth

5 | Highlighter
Neon-yellow, it seeks and finds what
should be remembered, the important bits
is the rest really forgettable? Unimportant?

6 | Quilt
Grape jelly purple, my round babies once
sighed and slept beneath you
Sometimes I see you breathe

7 | Berry
Stray, lost, dried-up scarlet berry
remnant of Christmas past
(it’s almost April)

8 | Postcard
Dear Mama, it begins
I’m feeling excited, it continues
I see it tremble in the window breeze

9 | Clothespin
Tiny clothespin, tiny strung line
I have hung memories on you
they shine on me every day

10 | Sketch
She’s playing the sonata forever
her left foot pedals, her fingers fly
I can still hear the music

11 | Lintbrush
Lurking like an aunt before the funeral
descending to pick away any flaws
I feel judged

	Jane Hattemer-String… on Dear Judge McKeon
	Consider the Rosemal… on A poem for my neighbor’s …
	Ellen Austin-Li on Power Outage
	Elaine Olund on May 16, 2196
	Bev Bowers on May 16, 2196